Please Hold

With rain in the forecast, we decided to forego exploring Western Montana today and take care of a few remaining odds and ends in our transition to this mobile lifestyle. On the to-do list were calls to the US Post Office, DirecTV and CitiBank. Two hours later, essentially nothing was accomplished. We spent most of our time on hold.

It’s become apparent that not all of our mail is being forwarded to our new address. So, we placed a call to our local branch of the USPS. We never enjoyed going there in person. It was no better contacting them by phone. It required two calls, after spending a good 20 minutes on hold, and a request to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor has our name and number and will call us back. (Uh huh.) Meanwhile, our confidence in getting all of mail is plummeting. (We can only imagine how a government-run health care system would run!)

We have been DirecTV customers for eight trouble-free years. We’ve enjoyed many of their premium services and have recommended the service to family and friends. With a satellite dish on our moose, we transported a receiver from house to coach for each weekend adventure. Everything worked great. When we tried to move our service from stick house to a rolling one, things got complicated. Before we moved, we were advised to initiate the transition once we were on the road. (Long, boring story.) So, now that we’re parked in one place for a couple of weeks, we thought it was time to start that process. After nearly 30 minutes on hold and a very frustrating conversation, we’ve decided to postpone the process until we are parked in Kansas City for a month. If we start the process on the first day we arrive, and keep our fingers crossed, we ought to have everything in order by when we head south on the last day of the month.

Paul placed a call to Citibank to submit a change of address so that our year-end tax documents would be mailed to the proper address. (Lord knows the post office won’t forward it!) The Citibank employee advised us to call back after January to submit the change. (Say what?) A transatlantic transfer to a supervisor (while we were on hold, of course) remedied that situation quickly.

As I’ve been writing this post, Paul has just placed a call to our mortgage company. They sent an escrow settlement check to our old address. Why? We don't know. And, of course, the USPS did not forward it. Like Citibank, he wanted them to have the proper address to send our stuff at year-end. After working through the maze of the automated response unit, he’s finally found the option to talk to a real person. And, guess what?

He’s on hold!