Fuck you Detroit Edison

So It's no secret that I use alot of power.
Anyway, I had a payment arrangement with Detroit Edison when we went way overboard this summer, and every time they schedule it for some impossible thing where I pay like 3 times in the first month (Once for that month's power, once to start the agreement, and then the first payment).
I might as well not have the agreement at all. Where the hell do they expect me to come up with the money? I'd happily pay interest if they'd come up with something that wasn't totally assinine.
This time I was prepared, and was waiting for the little payment coupon slips that come in the mail (The 2nd payment arrangement was defaulted because I wrote a check a few dollars short by accident.) So my 3rd was arranged, and I had to pay 50% of the bill right then and there, pulling strings. They said if I screw this up, I can't arrange again for another 6 months. They never sent me the damn coupons. How the hell am I supposed to pay you without knowing the amount and the address? Huh? Well, they said "That's your problem" and put me in default -AGAIN-.
So there goes another large sum of money to keep the power on. I don't know what the point of these agreements are when they end them damn near arbitrarily.

But I have power. For now, at least.

Then I get back to the store, and this chick was backing out of the parking lot, and backs straight into my front bumper (not the fender, but backs straight into my car). She wasn't even looking. Fortunately it was bumper to bumper and everything was okay, but it pissed me off because if she was looking where she was going when she backed out (she had about 30 feet of room when she started backing out) she wouldn't have hit me. Stupid people make me angry.

Someone else step in my way today, please. Give me a reason to start building a body count. Argh!

My day in hell

My day in hell.
I think that's a good name for it so far.

I start out and get up 10 minutes before my shift. This is cool, because I was going to be working remotely for most of the morning anyway.

So 3am rolls around, and my introductory page summarizing the status of the system doesn't arrive.
Weird.
So I look into it, and I guess our paging provider's SMTP gateway was down. I know the rest of the network worked, because a test SNPP page worked fine.
I switch the paging system over to my cell phone.
-this is important for later-

So I'm on my way to work,and my car starts overheating. Yea, so I'm overheating in the middle of fucking winter, because my anti-freeze is frozen up in my dash. My car is overheating, and the vents are spewing FREEZING cold air.
It overheats, and I manage to pull into a parking lot before it dies.

I let it cool off, and the battery is dead. Why? The spraying antifreeze shorted my alternator while I was doing the last stint of driving. So now I'm left stranded with a dead battery (well, not dead, but not enough to turn the engine over fast enough to start).
I try getting ahold of , and I find out the hard way that he's set his phone to reject direct-connect, and everything else was on vibrate (and his phone was in the bathroom).
So now I'm stranded. I start getting weird "system down" notifications on my phone, several at at time. I dial up, and find my laptop is almost dead. I bring up AIM, and try and see what the problem is. There appears to be no problem.
I continue to try to get ahold of zer0 on aim, and at one point I jacked up the volume on my desktop computer at home and switched on the TV card to MTV Espanol. My friend Dan (not or ) messages me and I mention my plight. He comes and gets me. While I'm waiting, my phone starts getting a bunch of calls from various internal company groups dealing with "reachability to the datacenter from anywhere on the internet". Yes, so Cable and Wireless decided to take a shit on me today, and we were having intermittent connectivity issues to the datacenter. I don't yet know this for sure, so the whole way home I'm getting phone calls and alerts from machines on our corporate network alerting me to reachability problems,and internal groups asking me questions.
Anyway, I get home, confirm the problem with Cable and Wireless, and talk to my boss, who gives me an understanding chuckle and says everything's cool and to "thaw out". Rock on.

Anyway, things are looking up.
I got a keyboard for my Sun from Dan (YAY! Type 5 keyboard represent!)
Zero's deep frying some zesty twirls
I'm sipping a root beer enjoying the warmth.
My pager's back working, so I don't have to deal with a flood of alerts on my 2 way SMS messaging.
I'm not dead yet. Rock on!