I will never sign up with Verizon

The final blow has been cast to the Blackberry/Laptop/PC Card fiasco. Yesterday I finally had the delightful privelege of returning that blasted PC card and receiving in cash a full refund right into my hand. I felt a little weird carrying around basically a wad of my boss's money.

The bad news, of course, is that after 20 minutes of futile, confused, and confusing debate with various salespeople and managers about whether or not I could cancel my boss's calling plan, whether or not I could return my boss's hardware, and whether or not I was within the 15-day "worry-free guarantee" period -- after all that, I then stood for 30 minutes waiting for . . . nothing. For the woman at the Customer Service desk to figure out how to ring up a refund, whether she should give me the refund in cash or check, and then how to get the cash out of the safe in the back. As I could answer none of these questions, I assured her not to worry -- that I was on company time so I didn't mind standing there -- and proceeded to space out, listening to the drone of a woman shouting, "No, I want to CANCEL my service, CANCEL! Don't you dare upgrade me, I want to CANCEL!"

Finally, I was released with a wad of cash. After the first impulse to spend it, in a revenge spree against the injustice of the Blackberry, subsided, I was able to very happily hand it over to my boss.

By the way, a 15-day "worry-free" guarantee is like nothing. That's barely long enough to get your hardware home and take it out of the box -- and by then you're supposed to have tried it out, discovered what's wrong with it, gotten back to the store, waited in line for like two hours behind this girl who can't seem to get her refund, and returned it? It doesn't sound very worry-free to me.

Ah well. On to bigger and better projects. Hooray!