A life in progress

I've had some "not great" customer service experiences in my life. Today may be the first all out fail.  So bad, that I feel it necessary to call them out for their terrible service. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you - Avis (the car rental agency). This morning, my husband texted to tell me that he'd accidentally left his keys (car, house, etc.) in his rental car, which he'd just returned to the Little Rock Airport.  He knew this because the Avis agent called him, but he was already on the plane and didn't get the message until he landed for his layover. He was having trouble with cell service, so he asked me to call. No problem.  Right? Wrong. I called about a dozen times, but was never able to get through.  I got service errors, busy signals, and a couple of times, it almost seemed like someone picked up the phone and then hung up on me.  I tried hunting for an online chat feature or an email address.  No luck.  I even tried the Avis o...

Like I ATTEMPT to do most Thursdays, I'm linking up with Jen from  Ramblings of a Suburban Mom  for Thursday Thoughts. This Thursday is a little different because I'm in China. That's us in the Forbidden City.   Blogging from China is a lot more difficult than blogging from France was - for a number of reasons.  (A few people have asked me if I'm travel blogging while I'm here, because I haven't really posted anything) First -- China has filtered internet access.  Which means I can't always visit the sites I want.  They even have a filtered version of Google -- and since Google hosts my blog, it's kind of a pain the neck to deal with working around the Chinese filters just to get to my blog.   Secondly, we have been running ourselves ragged while we are here!  We had 22 or 23 days in France.  We didn't feel desperate to see everything in the first couple of days.  But we only have 6 total days in Beijing, so we are ...

I don't have much to say today, as I'm completely exhausted from a hellacious week at work... but I wanted to post one last time before I wandered off this side of the globe. In 12 hours, Mike and I will be sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for our flight to San Francisco, which will then lead us to a flight to China!  Woo!  China! This is my excited face!  I'm going to do a combination of being an insane tourist and seeing all of the awesome stuff that China has to offer, and relaxing and getting a lot of massages.  Massages are cheap and unlike in the US aren't often confused as a method of prostitution... don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are plenty of "happy ending" massage parlors to be found, but the general idea is if you want a massage, it's because your back or feet are sore.  :) After this week, if I wasn't going to China, I would just dig a hole and hide for the next 10 days.  My students have been absolutely insane ...

This morning, Mike and I are starting to take care of some of the little details for our next adventure -- hunting for camera chargers, talking about packing lists, and other things we can take care of a few days before we go; we'll go out this afternoon and pick up a few things - as it's probably the last opportunity we have to go out together before our flight Friday morning.  I even took the plunge, and against my frugal nature paid for the "economy plus" upgrades for our flight to Beijing.  Our flight home isn't very full yet, so I moved us to a window/aisle seat with a empty center seat between us, in hopes that either a) it won't fill up or b) if it does fill up the person in the seat will move to another empty seat.  I don't love long haul air travel, but I can deal with it.  Mike, on the other hand, at 6'2", finds it uncomfortable in the best of situations.  He's still trying to wrap his mind around a 10+ hour flight.  At the very leas...

When we first came to Germany about 2 weeks ago, it was miserable.  I was hot and tired and couldn't figure out how the public transportation worked.  It lacked the mystique of France while managing to be incredibly confusing at the same time.  It did not help that I wasn't particularly prepared for the German leg of my journey.  I hadn't studied maps, or worked out the public transportation, or even bothered to learn any German.  All of these things are my fault.  Germany is not to blame:  it simply went on being the same country it had been for the past decades. There are some things that Germany could do better, but they are not meant as affronts to me personally.  I'd like to see more air conditioning.  I would like to see better internet connections.  I would like the public transportation to be connected.  As it is, I have to leave one station and walk a block to transfer to another line.  This is irritating. Fortunat...