Tales of Frustration and Delight

Wendy's cell phone has gotten fairly old, technologically speaking, so we decided she should get a new one. It has proven to be somewhat difficult. We wanted to add her to my Sprint account so we can share the minutes (and the cost). In order to do that we had to call Sprint; we couldn't just order it online. So, last Saturday, I called their customer support and our tale of frustration began. Without going into the details, there was confusion as to which phone was being ordered, how much it was going to cost, how to change the order after the wrong phone was ordered, how to return the wrong phone that was delivered to us even after the order was changed to have the right phone (customer support said go to the Sprint store, the Sprint store said call customer support), and oh yeah, the area code ("We don't have an 815 area code for Illinois. All we have is 303," they said. No, you can't have a 303 area code for Illinois; that's a Colorado area code).

The end result is that we're sending back the wrong phone that they sent us and giving up on Sprint. I'll keep my service with them until the contract is up. So: Wendy will be getting a new cell phone with someone other than Sprint. Any recommendations?

Finally, our tale of delight.

As you probably know, FLR provides books to K-12 school libraries. Occasionally, books get returned for various reasons. Those books often have school-specific bar codes or stickers on them which makes them unable to be resold. Thus, FLR every so often has an employee-only book sale. Employees are allowed to bring 1 guest, and all books are only a quarter. A quarter!

This morning they held just such a book sale. We got there a half hour before it started and there were already about 150 people waiting in line. It was totally worth the wait, though. I couldn't believe how many good books were available. The best part (for me) was that they had a lot of graphic novels. All told, we bought 53 books for a mere $13.25.

Here's a sampling of what we got:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett
Alan Moore's The Courtyard
Teenagers from Mars
Essential Fantastic Four
Essential Avengers
Daredevil Legends, Volume 1
The Complete Concrete

There was no limit to how much you could buy. We only wound up with a box and a half but we saw some people with 6 or 7 boxes. Now we just need to buy another bookshelf to hold our new books!