A Pretty Typical Atypical Day in My Life

I usually post strictly about books (and occasionally teaching), but I thought it would be fun to participate in the A Day in the Life challenge/event hosted by Trish over at Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity. Basically,  bloggers show what a typical day in their lives looks like.

The day I’m sharing is atypical for me because my daughter is on spring break and is out of town on a service trip with the church’s youth group. So the part of my day that’s devoted to mom-type stuff is missing. (Also, I usually wake up an hour earlier. No taking daughter to school = sleeping in!) However, this day wound up being pretty typical because unexpected life stuff came up that kept me from having the kind of day I planned. So, you know, typical.

So here’s what my day looked like on Wednesday, March 25, 2015.

6:30 a.m. – Wake up to pee 15 minutes before my alarm is scheduled to go off. Get back in the bed.

6:45 – Get out of bed. Do my morning routine (shower, breakfast, iron, pack lunch, etc.)

8:30 – Leave for work. I’m late (ATYPICAL!–don’t tell my daughter!) because I’m supposed to be in my office by 8:30.

8:40 – Get to work, answer emails, prep for class, request a textbook I’m considering for my fall ENC 1101 class, cross out students from gradebook who have withdrawn from the course/delete them from the course in the LMS, edit the assignment sheet for my students’ final project, print the assignment sheet and an in-class activity, finalize lesson plan for the day’s in-class activity.

9:53 – Start madly packing up my bag for class and rounding up papers. Realize I have forgotten something. (I always forget something.) Eventually leave my office and head to class.

10:00 – Teach three sections of Writing about Literature until 12:50 p.m.

12:56 – Head home for lunch (atypical!–I usually go back to my office to eat/decompress/do some work until it’s time to pick up my daughter from school). Prepare and eat lunch; watch a little bit of Blackish, which I am still three episodes behind on.

1:40 – Try to check email but I can’t get online because the tech gods hate me and are actually trying to get me to…

1:50 – …read and review the above textbooks. I’m on a textbook review committee at work to decide on the textbook for our redesigned comp course. No internet means I can get down to business.

2:57 – Dad tells me his phone isn’t working. I check my phone. It isn’t working. The internet still isn’t working. Time to troubleshoot.

Turns out the wifi doesn’t work but the internet does. I have to connect to the internet via my mom’s laptop since the MacBook Air has no ethernet port. (Of course it doesn’t.) AT&T is telling me I owe them money, so I try to check my bank and AT&T accounts to see what’s going on.

This is the moment I learn what a terrible, terrible idea two-step authentication is because:

•  I can’t get into my email on my mom’s computer because my phone isn’t working and that’s where the verification code is sent.
• I can’t get into my bank account because I can’t get into my email because my phone isn’t working.
• I can’t call my bank because I don’t have a phone.

It’s an ouroboros of technology fail.

Thankfully, my mother has her prepaid phone, so I can call my bank. Also good is that I have more than one email account  so I can have the authentication code from my bank sent to that email instead.

My account is definitely showing a balance. The reception with my mom’s prepaid is not great, so I try to get on the AT&T website to do a chat. And the website keeps telling me to connect to chat. But I can’t because there is no chat button.

THERE IS NO CHAT BUTTON.

Technology has failed me again.

3:35 – After trying three times to connect to the chat (which I can’t do because NO CHAT BUTTON/LINK), I finally decide I better just go to the AT&T store and see if someone can help me there.

3:50 – No one at AT&T store can help me. But! They do have a landline I can use to call AT&T. That whole phone call experience went a little something like this:

I could seriously rant about how infuriating that whole experience was for probably several hundred words, but instead I’ll just give a shout-out to Erin from the AT&T store and to the phone service reps Kristen, Jennifer, Nick, and Antoine. I also talked to another guy on the phone, but he was not as helpful.

So, yes, it took SIX PEOPLE to get my issue resolved.

The bottom line is that AT&T is a multi billion dollar telecommunications company with terrible, terrible, terrible internal communications/infrastructure. Like, I cannot even detail the mindblowing idiocy of how it all works because it makes ZERO SENSE.

But I digress.

5:24 – Two hours after first attempting contact with AT&T via chat, I am finally finished with AT&T and my phone service is restored.

5:40 – Back home. I decide it’s in everyone’s best interest that I eat before calling Apple to figure out why my wifi isn’t working. I also watch a little Jeopardy while eating my cereal.

6:00 – Call Apple. Get disconnected twice.

6:27 – Finish with Apple. Wireless has been restored. Turns out I had to reset my Airport.

6:32 – But wait. Mom’s computer won’t connect to wireless. I fool around with her laptop for a bit (including watching a YouTube vid to try to fix it), but I quit. I can’t do any more tech support related anything.

6:43 – Get online and release my students’ grades, which should’ve been done much earlier (and is the main reason I needed to get online).

6:55 – Back to textbooks. Did I mention our final meeting is the next day?

7:20 – Leave for my weekly support group.

8:51 – Finish with support group (and talking to friends after). Go to Publix for fried chicken because I’m starving.

9:25 – Home again. Eat chicken. Cook chicken breast that has been in the fridge for two days so it won’t go bad. Watch Modern Family for the first time in forever. Watch a little more Jeopardy.

10:15 – Back to textbooks.

11:15 – Head to bed.

So, that was my day. And while it’s not every day that I get to chat with so many lovely people who offer phone support, my day does often get derailed from what I plan to do versus what actually happens.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I did read some of The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin while I was on hold at the AT&T store. This is a book blog after all. 🙂