Monday, December 15, 2014

Well, we have a winner...

Well, we have a winner ... in the contest for most obnoxious service call when leaving your home: DISH.  The customer service representative I was connected with spent a lot of energy (and time!) trying to get us to agree to some sort of DISH service in our new home.  We are not interested, as I told him from the outset, but nonetheless he kept trying to sell us on one package after another.  Nothing I said had any effect until I finally got slightly rude and loud.  That worked, except that at the very end of our conversation, he tried one more time!  I'm sure the customer service people are indoctrinated to do this, but from a customer's perspective this is royally obnoxious.  After this experience, I will do my level best to never do business with DISH again.

Progress report...

Progress report...  Yesterday was a sort of slow day, with a bit of recovery for me after that far too intense drive back from Utah with the behemoth truck.  We did pack a little bit of what remains here at the Jamul house, but without much enthusiasm.

We met with the new owners (Stacy and Moon W.) to do a final “handover” to them.  They had lots of questions about where things were, how they work, etc.  We also gave them a key, and made arrangements for all the services that needed to be turned off or transferred (power, phone, etc.).  We surprised them with a cash gift – they've been so nice and understanding this past couple of months that we wanted to recognize it somehow.  They're much younger than us, and this will be their first house – they're obviously very, very excited about moving in and making it their own.  Despite that, they've been extraordinarily patient with us and our receding turnover estimates.  We also knew that they were watching their pennies very closely, and that they just barely qualified for the mortgage – so we figured a little extra cash would be appreciated.  Their faces told us we were right :)

For dinner we went to Hana Sushi in El Cajon, our favorite sushi place near Jamul.  I had the large sashimi combo, and now I'm kicking myself for never having ordered it before.  It was so good!  The big assortment has 8 different kinds of fish chosen by the sushi chef, and this time two of them were things I'd never had before.  One of them was a serious treat: white tuna, which I'd never even heard of.  Delicious!

Today we'll be doing more serious packing, and final walk-throughs on the house to make sure we didn't leave anything behind that we care about.  I'm having lunch with a couple of old friends today, too.  This morning has been consumed with shutting down services to our house, and transferring them to the new owners.  It's rarely enjoyable when dealing with customer service departments of large companies, and this is no exception.  Can you say “eternahold”?