Customer Service

This is not my traditional blog by a long shot, but it is what's on my mind. 

Do you ever feel trapped by companies?  I am opposed to government intervention in business in general.  I believe open competition is the only way to truly regulate and control costs and quality.  But of course, that only works if the companies actually compete with each other; not collaborate. 

I am very upset right now by my bank.  We applied for a mortgage over a month ago and it went through a variety of steps from preapproval to approving the appraisal...then all communication stopped.  Nobody would answer our calls.  This is a bank I have used and been very, very happy with for 15 years.  Turns out our processor left on 'medical' leave and someone forgot to pass our file to a new processor.  In the meantime, our closing day has come and gone and they are still asking for paperwork that we sent them a month ago.  Did our processor take it with him?  Where did it go?  But for all realistic purposes, we are stuck.  If we started over with another bank, it would delay things even longer.  And what will we be compensated for our inconvenience?  For rental costs of the moving truck?  For the time we took off work? 

But they aren't the only company that I am not happy with, yet feel compelled to use.  I can't stand DirectTV.  But they exclusively hold the rights to the NFL Sunday ticket.  The absolute one thing that my husband wants to recieve on TV.  But their customer service is terrible.  They throw on extra costs for everything.  Yet I am held hostage by their monopoly. 

Who else?  Car dealers; All of them.  Facebook; Another one of a kind service with no real competition.  Cell phone companies;  all of the services are terrible.  Airlines; one fee after another and fewer and fewer niceties or even niceness.  Colleges; someone needs to explain to me why a 'well rounded' education is important for every single degree.  Does a meteorologist really need fine arts?  Walmart; it is hard to justify not going there when they are so convenient and economical, but how much I wish I had enough money to turn up my nose and go to nice clean stores with friendly employees...employees who are treated right.   I'm sure you can think of a million more. 

On the brightside there are some local businesses that I go to just because I can choose a place with good service:  Hollywood Nails in Cocoa Beach does great nails and are very fast and friendly.  Jiffy Lube in Melbourne takes care of my cars without trying to pressure me into crap I don't need and even holds the door open for me when I leave.  Tires Plus Melbourne is always friendly and once when they misaligned my vehicle replaced the tires 6 month later no question.  Sonny's BBQ Cocoa Beach is friendly, good prices, food and service. 

New Dog

Caution:  At the very bottom of this blog is a graphic picture of Resi when animal control picked her up from the man who abused her.

After Bear died, we agreed that we wouldn't get another dog for awhile.  After all we have a lot going on this summer already.  And Bear was Bear.  You can't just replace one dog with another.  It doesn't work that way.  But in the same way that you can have as many children as you want and love each and every one of them for their own unique personality, you can love another dog without it replacing the one you lost. 

So just a month after Bear died, I was feeling down and a bit lonely and unneeded.  Really for many years now the only ones who both needed me and loved me were Michaela and Bear (Bill, too, but that is a different thing entirely).  With them both gone, I was feeling a little useless.  So I started dropping hints (which weren't well received) to Bill about getting another dog.  We had already decided that we wanted a young adult dog who had already had some training and needed a new home, so I started looking at adoptable dogs in the local area and sending him pictures.

I came across Resi and put her at the top of my list for several reasons...she had been trained by certified trainers, she was housebroke and crate trained, she didn't chew things up, she was in a foster home with cats, she was the right size, but what really caught my eye was that she liked to run with a bicycle.  One of the reasons I wanted a new dog was to have a good reason to get off the couch when I just didn't feel like it.  An active dog that could run beside a bike sounded like just the thing.

Police Report:  Click to enlarge

Then I saw the video.  This poor dog had been cruelly abused.  In fact, the abuser was charged with felony animal abuse.  Yet she had healed and was still a loving pet.  The video made me cry to think that someone would do that to an animal.  But it also gave me pause about adopting her; Resi is part (probably mostly) Pit Bull Terrier.  I don't have anything against the breed.  In fact the ones that I have known have been exceptionally smart, well behaved animals.  But if this man had beaten this dog so badly, would the dog (any dog) turn out mean?  Because a Pit Bull Terrier is a strong animal, one that can cause considerable damage if it is mean. 

We decided to go see her though and it was love at first sight for us.  She showed off her tricks and walked on the leash for us.  She climbed up on my lap and licked my face and nibbled my ear.  She was just an absolute love.  Other than the scars on her face and ears, you would never know she had been abused.  Her foster family had done amazing things with her in the year she had been with them healing both emotionally and physically.  I knew before we left the house that we wanted her to live with us and after a weekend visit we decided to go ahead with the adoption.



Apparently she has a problem
with Snoopy too.



But apparently there is some residual emotional damage.  Resi has some issues with feet.  We have seen her get upset about someone's feet and it is a bit scary.  She will lick the person and be happy to see them, but nip at their feet.  We still don't know how prevalent the problem is going to be, because right now she is in a stage of learning to live with us without a lot of strangers coming to the house.  We do take her out in public and in every environment outside of the house, she has been fine.  She has been ok with everyone she has met and every dog that we have encountered. 



  Soon we will be introducing her to more people in our home and we are very hopeful that this behavior is rare and can be untaught.  She learned it somehow; she wasn't born that way, so we believe we just need to have the patience and perseverance to figure out the best way to help her get over it.  We hope our friends and family will be patient with us while she learns what she needs to know to be a great pet and part of our family. None of us are perfect and most of us never had to endure what she has gone through in her short life.

Moving

We are getting ready to move.  Or maybe I should say, I am procrastinating getting ready to move.  We are moving in about three weeks.  The house we are moving to is only a few miles away.  It is a much nicer home in a much nicer neighborhood.  It isn't the moving to the new house that has me procrastinating.  When I think of unpacking and settling in, I get excited about it.  But when I think of packing up our things in this house and getting ready to move, it feels overwhelming. 



I have lived in this house 6 years.  It isn't my first house, it isn't the nicest house I've ever owned, but it is the first house I picked out and purchased all on my own.  The house wasn't much in the way of style when Michaela and I moved into it.  The yard was bare grass with the very minimum of builder installed landscaping.  The walls were white. 



you really must click this to enlarge to
see the signifcance of the flowers and
the entire day all in one shot

 18 months later I got married in the back yard.  The yard was still mostly grass and Michaela and I cut baby beauganvilla branches and taped them to the fence in strategic places to make it look a little nicer for pictures.  The next five years were a constant of change as we converted this house into a home, a small oasis to come home to at the end of a long day.  A place filled with love.

There are a million memories in this house.  Most good, some bad, some bad things that happened that at least turned into a great story (one of my favorite quotes:  If you are going to laugh about it some day, you might just as well go ahead and laugh now).  The disaster of building the back patio.  The 5 times Bill had to dig the 'pond' because of the torential rains that kept caving it in.  Painting walls and repainting walls and repainting walls.  Carpets ruined by kids and pets.  Floors tiled by a friend who just moved in until the job was done...him in one spare room, my mom in the other, the house in disarray (talk about a full house!)  Hundreds of empty bottles of wine that decorate our 'plant shelves'...each with its own story.   House plants that we stuck in the ground outside to see what would happen, that are 25 feet tall now (gotta love Florida!).  Kids shoveling and carrying decorative rock from the front to the back for days on end.  Tears, fights, doors slammed, kids sneaking in, kids sneaking out, dreams shared, plans made, hands held, cars wrecked, children becoming adults...all in this house. 

I have moved maybe 25 times in my life.  Military life does that to you.  I take a lot of pictures, those can go with me, the walls cannot.  But never before have I left anything irreplaceable behind.  Because in our new home, there will be new memories, there will be good times, there will be sad times.  There will be planning and replanning, changing of landscapes and paint and furniture.  There will be parties and friends and children and grandchildren.  It will be a wonderful place for us to build the rest of our lives. 

But Michaela will never make a memory there. She has made her last earthly memories for me.  The memory of her sitting at the counter asking me questions about college applications.  The memory of me hearing her crying and coming out of the bedroom to see her laying with her head on Bill's lap crying her eyes out over relationship problems.  The memory of her growing from a girl who wouldn't show her breasts to a male doctor for a school exam to a girl who would lay out naked in the back yard on top of the hot tub.  Taffy pulling party, craft days, crying over homework at the dining room table, sitting around the fire pit in the back yard, wrestling with her brother on the living room  floor, playing Wii boxing with Erin, her friends tossed all over the living room or sitting at the dinner table, Christmas', birthdays, late nights up talking in the living room, sitting on her bed with her when she was upset, her excitement over her adult bedroom set that was to be her legacy furniture, carving pumpkins, coloring easter eggs with me-just the two of us-because everyone else thought it was stupid, cookie nights, food fights, catching frogs and lizards and moths....just so many...so very many.   That I can look at any spot in this house and see her in it.  See her doing something perfect normal, something perfectly every day, something that she will never do again. 

Still, I know we will be happy there.  I know we are doing the right thing by moving.  She has made her feelings very clear on the subject.   She will be in that house with us--forever.  In that I am blessed.  Michaela doesn't need a physical presence on this earth to be with us.  She is willful and she is a manipulator.  She always has been.  She has been able to make signs strong enough to make all but the most cynical non-believer at least raise an eyebrow and I am even more blessed that I can talk about these things with my friends.  They are real, they happen, and my friends believe in every part of it...in fact many of them experience her too and aren't very shy about telling me about it.  I love when I hear that someone 'saw' her or 'heard' her or 'felt' her and that they understood why she was there.  Sometimes it is even people she didn't know on this earth.  It makes me so very happy to think about it all as a whole (there is more that she has influenced lately besides the house for us, but must save that surprise for later). 

But the big ones, the overwhelming feelings of her presence, stumbling across something she wrote that I haven't seen before, finding her Facebook words restored, the undeniable signs that she is right here-just around the corner-just out of sight, those come with a price.  They are precious and they are priceless, but afterwards is the eternal let down...that no matter how hard she tries, she can't come back.

I know you are happy where you are Michaela.  I know you now understand things that I do not.  I love you Michaela.