Andrew Schrauben

Today was definitely a Fox Mulder day...

Adopt Her Already!
First the not-so-bad. Our foster dog Reese has been wanted by a couple for over a week now but they keep dragging their feet. We met them with Reese at a pet store last week and they liked her, but then wanted to see her interact with their current dog. Makes sense, but couldn't we have done that for the first meeting if that was an issue? So we take Reese to their house, she and their dog get along great, but one of the adopters is out of town and they want to discuss to make sure. OK... Finally they decide to adopt her and we arrange to meet at my office Thursday to sign the papers but she never shows up. Today we're supposed to meet, but she calls to say she's running late and won't be free until after I leave work. Now Amanda has to coordinate meeting her while I go for my run. To top it off they can't pick Reese up until Monday since one of couple is still on travel. If they'd been just a wee bit more proactive early on, Reese could've gone home with them over a week ago! Oh well. The good thing is that Reese is adopted, and we actually really like this couple. They're nice, patient with dogs, Reese and their dog get along great, they have a big fenced-in backyard, and they go camping a lot. Reese will be happy with them so this craziness is worth it.

Bad Business
Today at home Amanda gets a call from Fidelity where the guy says he has to talk to me about my retirement account due to the takeover. (Background: my company used Fidelity for their 401K but we've since been bought by another company that uses a different financial service.) This guy leaves his name and a direct line phone number. So I call him back from work and get a generic voicemail box saying "an appropriate associate will return your call"... I get suspicious and contact HR at work, who contacted Fidelity and was able to confirm that Fidelity's sales group was using a register of names acquired during the takeover to cold-call people at my company to pitch personal retirement accounts. How incredibly unethical! On top of that, it would seem to me to be bad business. Here's a prime example: I had been planning to leave the amount accrued from my former company in Fidelity's 401K rather than rolling it over, but now they have just cost themselves my account. Prepare to roll it over, Fidelity!

Play Ball! Not.
Thursday night was my softball team's fourth game of the season, except that it never happened. We all showed up, the other team showed up, the umpires showed up... and so did a little league team that claimed to have the field during our game time! I called GRAASA, our softball league, but the number was disconnected! The little league got the city parks and recreation director on the phone, who confirmed that the little league gets the field. Our game got canceled. What the heck? It turns out that GRAASA had reserved the field and the little league was supposed to play on Saturday; however, the little league umpires had a conflict that day so at the last minute the city gave them our field but never told GRAASA. What annoys me is that this same thing happened to another GRAASA game last week but GRAASA never did anything to prevent it from happening again. Isn't once enough to learn a lesson? Maybe not for these folks, as they have yet to demonstrate any thoroughness in their operation of the league. Our schedule was postponed by a week to start the season because they couldn't find enough fields. Then the first field was played on was a kids' field with un-attached bases and a storm drain in centerfield - dangerous! Turns out GRAASA never even looked at the field before reserving it. We're currently operating under league schedule revision 5 or 6 (I've lost count) because they don't proofread their schedules before sending them out. They didn't even proofread their rulebook, which explains the disconnected phone number - their phone works, but they wrote the wrong number in the rulebook! If that all wasn't enough, some of their umpires were unaware of some non-standard GRAASA-specific rules. To their credit they are 100% volunteer, but that's no excuse for not being thorough and complete. Today at work I had to write them a "nice" letter to explain my teams' lack of satisfaction.

So yeah, today was a tough day of dealing with people that can't be counted on.

Happily we still had two good reasons to celebrate the day - Haven and Beacon's birthday!