Earlier this year, we took Jen’s Dad to his local Verizon store to buy an iPhone and an Apple Watch. The phone is nice to have, but the watch was the important part; we wanted to be able to track his heart, blood pressure, and have some kind of fall monitor for when he’s home by himself. We sat in the store for what felt like way too much time, double-checked all of the information, and walked out with the hardware. It worked fine for a couple of weeks, but I started getting worried when I didn’t see any bills coming to the house. When I reviewed his bills at the beginning of September, we found out that the statements were going to the wrong address and Verizon had shut the phone off for nonpayment. Thus began a truly Kafkaesque descent into customer service hell.

Because they’d never given us a customer PIN number, we couldn’t handle anything over the phone, so Jen had to take him in to a local store. They spent four hours watching the CSR there bounce from department to department on the phone, disappear repeatedly into the back room to talk to a manager, but were only able to walk out with an updated address, zero balance, and a customer PIN. The phone was still deactivated and couldn’t be reset.

I brought all of the paperwork down to his house yesterday, drank a cup of coffee, plugged in my Airpods, and got on the phone to try and sort things out. For the first two hours I went through four CSRs until I was handed off to a nice man named Del, who kindly and patiently walked me through resetting the phone and then the watch for another hour and a half. Thankfully, he’s now got a phone, a watch that works, and I can see account statements online. If his Ring battery had charged properly, I could have gotten that set up as well, but it’s going to have to wait until next week.

The CR-V had a bit of an adventure on Thursday, where it slipped out of gear in a parking lot, rolled down a hill, and backed itself into another car. Nobody was hurt, and the car is still driveable, but the rear hatch is severely dented where it hit the other vehicle. I opened it in our driveway, after removing the spare tire, and tried to close it, but either the hinge or the door is bent and it needs to be lifted slightly to latch properly. I found another silver CR-V in a pick-your-own yard about twenty minutes away and tried to run out there this morning to grab the hatch, but Hurricane Whatever has been dumping water on us for the second straight day. Walking through a muddy junkyard in a rainstorm is unpleasant; walking through a muddy junkyard carrying 80 lbs. of hatch is just stupid. My upcoming week is pretty nuts but I’m going to try to get out there next week to grab it before they crush the car.