Random Rants
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Brutal, hope you get some good news soon
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My condolences @tody . All the best to you and your family.
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Went down to the basement middle of the night to give into a sweet tooth craving and walked into about 2” of flooding.
1st time in 6 years of living here that this has happened. Been going at it all night scooping out buckets of water and a shop vac.
Currently cutting back wet sheet rock to prevent mold.
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Oh hell, @flannel-slut ...
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That sucks @flannel-slut! Did it come from outside?
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sorry to hear @flannel-slut that really sucks, chin up!
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@steelworker @Twistlock @endo xoxo y’all’s. Yup, came from the outside. All in all, could have been much worse. Finally managed to get the sopping carpet out and pretty much just need to make a few runs to the local dump. This forum is such a great community not only for justifying unnecessary purchases, but also serves as an outlet to vent.
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This week has seriously tested my patience.
So Government Authority has this new thing, they're doing things electronically now. Send your doc in electronically and they'll rubber stamp it so you can send it on to your client, costs less than half price compared to the old fashioned way and turnaround is same-day rather than 2 weeks. Amazing, client needs the doc urgently, let's do it.
Have checked all the requirements listed on Govt. website. I countersign the doc by pasting my signature onto PDF, submit that via the portal. This should be fine. REJECTED - apparently I need to sign using an 'advanced electronic signature'... well that would be nice to know if it was listed on the website in advance, whatever. WTF is an 'advanced electronic signature' anyway?
Oh, ok, that's what DocuSign does. We have an account with them. Great. Get assistant to set up the doc, send it to me through DocuSign, I do the necessary, get the PDF back, upload it to the portal and re-submit. Wait an hour and REJECTED... apparently there is a problem with my document and I will be contacted...
2 days go by. Client is getting anxious. I am calling the Gov department 3x daily. Customer support at the department confirms I've followed the guidance (which, as far as they know, is the same as given on the website). Eventually one takes pity on my and gives me email address for escalating my issue. I email, marked "URGENT" and wait...
2 more days. Eventually get a response. Turns out person who rejected the doc last time didn't mean to click "you will be contacted further", hence I was not contacted further. But problem is that while the doc has been signed using the "advanced electronic signature" ("AES") standard, it wasn't MY electronic signature, it was DocuSign's, which only verifies that it was signed by a person with an account corresponding to the email address to which the document was sent via DocuSign. It needs to be signed with MY 'digital signature' and to the AES standard. Again, would have been nice if the website for the service actually listed that, but whatever.
So investigating how to set up my 'digital signature'. Oh, you can just set one up in Adobe. Great, I have Adobe. So I enter my details, now when I sign there's some data embedded in the PDF that says its me in the side-bar, rather than DocuSign. Fantastic. I sign with my fancy new digital signature, run it through DocuSign again to apply the AES standard, and submit it to the Gov... REJECTED. So the problem now is that it's not to the AES standard. Again... seems to be a standard response from a pick-list. So I email my new best friend at the agency and ask him WTF did I do wrong?
A day later, he emails back. So it is MY digital signature that needs to be applied to the AES standard, not just sign and then run it through. At his end, my signature shows up with a big red cross next to it because, while I know my identity, it has not been verified by any authority. I need to get a digital signature that has been issued by such an authority.
Great, how to do that? In my research, I noted that DocuSign can be set up so that the signer has to verify their ID. Maybe that's it. Call them up. Need an enterprise account to do this. £1,000 for the year. Get fucked - I need this for a one off job and no way the client will wear that expense.
Further research. Now my IT support are on the case. So I can import a 'certificate' into Adobe. This is like the self-certificate that I made earlier in Adobe, but it will be issued by a 3rd party that I prove my ID to. Do that, download the certificate file, import that into Adobe, then get someone to send me the doc again, open it in Adobe, and sign it there using that digital signature and I should be golden. Great.
Go looking for digital ID providers. All subscription based, enterprise account bullshit. Again, we are a small business with a one-off need. Fucking useless. Eventually find one that will just charge ~£55. Great. Set up an account, add the one-time verification to my cart. Go to checkout.
Ah, ok, now I need my company's tax code to complete the checkout. Fine, who has that? The CFO. So text her. She's travelling. Call the accountants. I call the accountants. Not answering. Email accountant instead. She calls me back, gives me the company's tax code. Great. Put this in, move on to card details. Call senior legal assistant who holds the company card details. She sings them out to me. Enter these. Now, the verifying company is based overseas, will need to text the boss (name on the card) with a code for transaction to go through. I text him, tell him what I'm doing, ask him to send me code. He does, transaction goes through. Happy days. I can't wait to get this all sorted.
What's this now... I spent so long going 'round the houses that I was logged out of my new account with the company that's going to do the ID check and issue me with the certificate. So the transaction is not linked to my account. Add to this that it now won't let me log in again to try and sort, just some error message about the session expiring. Fuck.
I know, I'll use their app and see if that will let me log in. Download app. Try to log in. It works! My account is there, but no services linked to it. Please contact support. Fine. Tap the button, taken to a chat robot, who speaks Italian. Greaaaaaaaaat. I don't speak Italian. I argue with it in English for a while before it gives up and says something that I vaguely recognise as meaning it's gone to fetch a human. I ask human for English. She says ok, transfers me to another human. I tell second human what's up - I need to link transaction to my account. I give all details for the payment, which I had the foresight to keep a record of when shown on screen earlier. There's a problem. What is it? They will need to email me. Ok, but urgently please, because I needed this digital signature set up last week (although I didn't know it then).
That was 3 hours ago. Still waiting on that email.
I could kill someone isweartagod.
Tl;Dr - Technology is fucking stupid and I am now homicidal.
Take the dive...
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So here I am ranting about UPS… Waiting for my delivery since Wednesday.
They first failed to deliver to my home address. Now they are failing for the third consecutive day to deliver to a specified UPS Access Point that I specified online, always leaving with a „delivery to access point not possible. Another try next day“ notice.
No matter what number I call I always end up in one of these automated support trees where all the info I get is the same I get when I just type in the shipping number online.
How can I get a freakin human being on the phone? Jesus…
EDIT: That rant just worked wonders. I don’t know how bit the IH bag arrived.
Use it or lose it.
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@EdH
I feel your pain
I’ve just had the week from hell with programmers and technology basically fucking my day to day routine of what I have to do and it’s taken 3 whole work days to get to the answer of what’s wrong and I still don’t have an answer as to a fix for it
Normally I’m beers in on Fridays but now it’s a weekend of holy hell while they sort something -
Yeah, definitely dependable here too in my experience, especially with international shipments. Usually 2 days, crazy fast. I have run into a little slowdown sending UPS the other direction thigh — I remember sending something to the UK recently and watching it peter around a bit before finally arriving at the access point. It finally did make it, though.
Their customer service has indeed gotten abysmal.
Just because it’s fun to rank stuff, especially in a rant context, my exp from best to worst is DHL>UPS>USPS>FedEx
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@EdH well that’s a proper rant - hope it helped relieve the stress (and that you make some progress soon)!
In case it helps, I recently had problems with recordal of a change in ownership in an overseas jurisdiction - our application bounced as we apparently needed a document from 15 years ago that probably never existed or a declaration from our client saying stuff they would never want to commit to paper. The local lawyer suggested we start the process again and hope it will be processed by a different official. Worked like a dream in super quick time. Could this be worth a try in your case?
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@ARNC said in Random Rants:
Could this be worth a try in your case?
Sadly not. Basically the FCDO is trying to run before it can walk on this process. It's very 'computer says no'.
By way of update, I have now linked my account with the company that's supposed to verify my ID with the payment we made. But now the ID verification process just isn't working.
I'm doing plenty of deep breathing and counting down to 5:30.
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