Another Generic Blog

Today when I called the debt collector, they finally told me that I didn’t owe them any money.  It only took 2 1/2 months for them to realize that.  When I talked to them in the middle of last week they told me that they contacted AT&T and were told that I still owed them money.  At that point I got to call them a liar since I had been talking to AT&T virtually every day and I know they had cleared me of the charge over 2 months ago.  Immediately after the debt collector told me that, I called up AT&T again, unfortunately they were closed so I was directed to an answering machine.  I have a feeling the message I left had something to do with them finally clearing things up because I went on a pretty long rant on what was going on and how either they were lieing to me or the debt collector was and that I would probably end up having to sue someone to get this taken care of.  I’m guessing mentioning the possibility of sueing them got them to pick up the phone and take care of the problem.  The debt collector is now supposed to fax me an invoice saying that I don’t owe them any money, but knowing how reliable they are, I doubt it will ever come.  I should be getting a statement from AT&T saying I don’t owe any money, which should be good enough to clear things up if this somehow appears on my credit report.  I’m just glad this is finally taken care of.

As far as I can tell, AT&T Home Entertainment hates their customers, or at least hates anyone thats tries to cancel on them.  I did receive free HBO, Shotime, and Cinemax for the 2 years I used them due to their incompetence, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much.  But after two months of fighting with them, I’ve just had enough.  I had an incredibly long story written out detailing what happened, but I decided it was too long and boring, so heres the condensed version.  AT&T Home Entertainment thought that I had two cable boxes instead of one.  Instead of sending my an invoice to my forwarding address that I gave them, they immediately sent it to a debt collector.  I called AT&T and told them I only had one cable box, and they said they understood and would take care of it.  Two months later and its still not taken care of.  I’ve made over a dozen phone calls on this now and AT&T said that, they have sent multiple emails and a couple of faxes to the debt collector to inform them that my debt is cleared, but when I tell the debt collector that they say they never heard anything from AT&T and that I’m a liar trying to cheat them out of their money.  I found out that calling me a liar and a cheat is the way to set me off because I don’t yell at people often, but I let that operator have it.

I just contacted AT&T again, and they said they’re sending it to their manager and he will make sure it gets taken care of.  I guess I’ll find out tommorrow.  I’ll give them to the end of the week before I file a complaint about the debt collector with the better business bereau.  I’ve just had enough of this and want it to end.  The really annoying thing is that this whole hassle never would of happened if they just sent me a final bill instead of immediately sending it to a debt collector.

The house closed escrow on Aug. 31 as planned and I now have the keys to my new house.  I spent today painting the living room, and Monday I will be moving in.  Its still amazing how fast this all happened.

In other good news, my brother-in-law Alwyn just got a scan for cancer, and he is 100% cancer free.  He had to go through some crazy treatments (killing every white blood cell in his body) to get cured, but he made it.  Now he has a long journey before he’s fully recovered, but he’s writing a book on it and will probably make a fortune because of it, so no worries

Well, the sales contract is signed and the expected close of escrow is Aug. 31, less then 4 weeks away.  Heres a few pictures simply because I want to show the house off

I’m still in shock of what just happened in the past few hours, maybe writing them down will help me digest the situation a little bit better.  As I’ve mentioned before I’m buying a new house in Palmdale, the problem is the construction has been delayed for 1 year and rumor it that it will never be built.  I have pretty much accepted the fact that I was not going to get that house and had begun looking at other places to move.  Well today at 2pm I recieved a phone call from KB Homes.  Apparently they had a few homes fall out of escrow so now they are selling those homes at incredible discounts and are leaving paying Countrywide to give us unbelievably low intrest rates.  It was first come first serve on the houses, so I decided to go take a look today.  The house is awesome, great location, good amount of upgrades, slightly larger then the house I was getting built and nearly the exact same price.  This house is already built and ready to move into, I only have to wait for escrow which will probably be 30 days.  This all happened so fast, but I’m certain I made the right choice by taking this house.

Now for the kicker.  This house is about 8 houses down from someone I’ve known and been friends with since literally the day I was born.  Our parents were good friends, so we basically grew up together.  Not only is this house great in its own right, but I already have friends living on the same street as me.  Its crazy.  This is all moving so fast.

Another month and another chance to eat up my bandwidth.  I just put the gif files back online that were so popular that they ate up my entire bandwidth limit for the month.  Lets hope people will start hosting the files themselves instead of streaming off of me.

Heres the images that caused all the problems:

I just recieved notice that my bandwidth for the month was just about used up, which was a complete surprise since I usually only use about 5% of my bandwidth.  Apparently a lot of sites have been linking to two gif files I’ve been hosting, one of the kool-aid man busting down a wall and one of chuck norris doing what chuck does best.  These two files, with a combined file size of 3.7 mb, accounted for 95% of the 15 gigabytes of the traffic I’ve gotten this month.  I normally don’t have a problem with people streaming pictures and movies from my site, but once my bandwidth is almost full I have to put a stop to it.  These two files, along with a number of other gif files, have since been removed from my site, which will hopefully let me continue to the end of the month without going over my bandwidth limit.  I will put them up again next month, but if my bandwidth gets completely eaten again, then I’ll be forced to take them down permanently, which is something I really don’t want to do.

Watch Darth have a nervous breakdown! Hilarious!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A0rwG39Jzk

I finished my bed and I think it turned out pretty good.  Theres a double size mattress on it now, but it easily converts to support a queen size mattress if needed.

You can see the rest of the pictures here if you want: http://www.atomic-train.com/images/bed/