This morning I spent 1.25 hours trying to install the drivers for this printer. The user doesn’t have admin rights so I had to use runas when installing the software, but the cd they had was so badly scratched it couldn’t be used. Instead the drivers had to be downloaded. Unfortunately the website has about 10 different drivers and it took two attempts before I could find the drivers that it was after – in this case it was the larger of the two downloads – the 40mb one instead of the nice quick 3mb file.
However after extracting the download, the installation program kept asking for the driver location and the requested driver files were not in the driver directory created when the software was extracted. Instead they were automagically installed in the windows\system32\drivers directory and also located in the root of the extracted software directory. So if you are going to install this software be warned!
I finished the conversation by telling the user that if he even thought about purchasing the same printer again I’d come over and break his legs – it’s not often you can get away with saying that 🙂

Argggh – the state of Ohio has now come back and said they can’t find the fax that I sent to them containing my social security number, drivers licence and full address. This is very worrying as it makes you wonder just *who* has this information and what are they going to do with it. I really can’t be bothered to go through the whole i-filing process again (which seems very haphazard and not secure at all) so I’m going to paperfile my Ohio return. The only downside is that it takes longer to get a refund.

In other annoying news, Roadrunner have still not been able to send me a correct invoice for my service with them. Each month it has been wrong – so far they have lost two checks and started me on autopay despite the fact that I requested them to stop autopay until they could get their act together and bill me correctly. I am seriously considering switching to another supplier, but there isn’t really anyone else unless I drop from 5mb connection down to 150k and who in their right mind is going to do that?

I thought things couldn’t get much worse with the state of Banking but today I got a letter to my US address from Abbey saying that they can’t change the address to my US address! They need a notarised copy of my passport sent to them. The last time I spoke to them on the phone they only wanted a photocopy of the passport. I thought the easiest way around this would be to just close the account but it seems that despite having a valid login to my Abbey account, I don’t have any accounts attached to the account to make any payments from it. They don’t have 24 hour banking via phone, there is no email address to contact them and then they have the cheek to suggest that I might want to use their offshore banking facilities!

You have probably seen the ads on tv for Capital One – where they are training the telephone guys to say NO all the time – well I think 53rd Bank have also been watching this too many times.
After not giving me a credit card and then sending a letter saying they want to do everything in their power, I arranged to get a secured credit card – apparently all I needed was a savings account with $300 in it….but they neglected to tell me that I’d only get a $300 limit on the card – not much use if I’m putting work expenses on it!
I come home, feeling annoyed that I wasted my trip to the bank (and they farted around before finally paying attention) and went to pay a bill online – you know, the service that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – unless its Friday night and you have a bill to pay and the service is temporarily unavailable….or if you need to speak to customer service about online banking, then they are only open during business hours…grrrrr. I really need to change banks, one that provides a credit card, free checking, no atm charges and a decent online service – know any?
In the meantime I think I’ll be fighting for a refund of my cheque charges and a closure of my account.

I knew it was going to be a naff day when I managed to knock the new toilet roll off the top of the cistern into the toilet this morning, thus wasting an entire roll of bog roll and the rest of the day didn’t improve much either.
I don’t think I managed to get any decent work done today. This morning I decided to try and do some more vb.net programming on the microsoft training course and got as far as the online labs only for the website to come back with an “error – please contact support” message. I then spent the next 2 hours chatting with support trying various things, none of which made any difference. The only thing that I did get working was the screencapture of this process using Microsofts media encoder. This tool is great for doing screencams to send to support people and for some reason I had been getting weird error messages saying that the input stream was invalid, but this morning it worked!
I’m still waiting to hear back from Microsoft on the reason the web page doesn’t work though.

So this afternoon I decided to do some more job hunting and started to apply for a job with verizon wireless as a techie. However, part of the way through they wanted to know the date that I received my mcp qualifications. Trying to access the Microsoft site I found that they had now integrated their logins with their passport scheme and so I didn’t have any username or passwords that worked (my combination was pre passport). On the phone to Microsoft Support and I realised that using the cordless phone (the only option down in the basement) disrupts the wifi signal and I can’t use the internet and be on the cordless at the same time. Eventually I get sent a new username and password for the website, based on my mcp id, so it was a good job I could still find my mcp card which had the details on it. However, by the time I had got all of this information the verizon site had timed out due to lack of use and I had to start again as a new user even though I had originally gone through the username/password signup on their site – it doesn’t actually save these details until you hit submit a resume.
So I finally managed to apply for the two jobs and I thought I’d take a self assessment test before doing the Microsoft desktop support qualification exam (which starts to bring my qualifications uptodate). The microsoft website shows the self assessment test as being available until the end of august yet when you click through to the measureup site it expired end of May. Not only that, but half way through this process I somehow managed to get the passport site to say click the *logouticon* to log in to the website. Anyway, if you ignore the date information and continue on to register when you finally get to start taking the test your 30 questions are generated and the next page says “error ‘80020009’
Exception occurred. /test/Display_Question.asp, line 526” I then got on the phone to Measureup and walked them through the problem and an email has been sent to the developer so hopefully by tomorrow morning I may be able to take the test.