Lo-and-behold

Yesterday (Saturday, July 28, 2007) we had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to attempt two ‘pyooter functions.

-A) was my attempt to order the all-Pennsy color calendar online from Charles Ditlefsen, which I’ve done before.
Audio-Visual Designs, in Herkimer, NY, my other All-Pennsy calendar (black & white) is still snail-mail, and I had already done that.
The only ‘pyooter-functions were -1) entering the check in Quicken, -2) printing the check with Quicken (1 and 2 are one combined function), and -3) printing an envelope with Word’s envelope-printing function.
But ordering online seems to be more involved — I began with great fear and trepidation.
“Okay, we’ll see if we can do it with FireFox,” I said.
I fired up FireFox and cranked in the Ditlefsen web-address: http://www.cedrr.com/ from a large Trains-Magazine back-cover ad.
Immediately FireFox burped because “www.cedrr.com” wasn’t a valid address; apparently it wanted me to add the “http://.”
So I cranked in the “http://,” and FireFox burped again, and sent me to a page listing various links, one of which was Ditlefsen.
Okay, I probably typed in “cedco.com,” Ditlefsen’s old company, that went bankrupt.
So I clicked the Ditlefsen link, which sent me to Ditlefsen’s calendar-site, and began filling in all the info.
Finally I clicked “submit,” and it spun for a while.
After about two minutes, “cancel;” I ain't got all day. So much for FireFox.
I fire up Internet-Explorer, which supposedly suffers from a wonky ISP, and copied the Ditlefsen web-address off the FireFox interface and pasted it onto the IE interface.
Boom: “Not a valid address!”
“What? I just copy-pasted it off of FireFox.”
I crank the Ditlefsen web-address directly into IE from the Trains-Magazine ad.
Again; “Not a valid address.”
I look at it carefully and see that a mysterious additional “/” has appeared in the address.
So I take that out, and again I’m at Ditlefsen’s calendar-site.
So I “autofill” all the info — only IE has autofill; FireFox has a close approximation: it remembers all previous typing. (Who knows; it may have an autofill too, but I’d need to research that. It was a simple IE menu-button.)
It also apparently autofilled the shipping-address, which was to be left blank if shipping to the billing-address.
I click “submit” and get an error-message: “You forgot to fill in a country!”
Why yes, it’s blank; so I scroll down and click “United States” on the billing-address, hit “submit,” and again: “You forgot to fill in a country!”
“What?”
I look at the billing-address, and it says “United States.”
So much for changing the spark-plugs on the zero-turn.
A simple five-minute online purchase is turning into an hour-long wrestling-match.
I threw up my hands. “I guess we have to start over. No country and the order stalls.”
I start over, still with IE, and notice that their autofill is also filling in the shipping-address without a country.
So I delete each autofill entry in the shipping-address to make the order conform with their sacred paradigm, and it processes — lo-and-behold.

-B) Linda attempted to transfer from our Franklin Tax-Free Income Fund (our savings) online into our Canandaigua National Bank checking-account.
This was so we could pay the remainder of what we owe Rochester-Colonial for our window-replacement project.
Nice idea: transfer funds without relying on phonecalls or snail-mail.
To do anything at all online with your Franklin Tax-Free Income Fund you need a password.
Linda set one up years ago — probably the last time we transferred funds from the Franklin Tax-Free Income Fund was when we purchased the Bucktooth-Bathtub, which was October of 2005.
We still had record of it, so Linda set about trying to transfer funds.
“Authorization required!”
“What? It’s our account. If we’re not authorized, who is?”
Forget the help-desk. It’s the weekend, baby. No help until Monday morning; and that’s Pacific-time.
Okay; more dickering required........
Turns out “authorization” is a snail-mail letter to them authorizing us to transfer funds.
A PDF was online, so Linda printed the form. “Notarization of signatures required.” So much for a timely transfer of funds.
We have to have our signatures notarized, and the bank has to validate the form (whatever that means).
We are left with a 20th-century way of doing things: Franklin issues us a check which we drag to the bank and deposit into our checking-account. The check arrives in the mail. “Please allow two weeks for processing.”
Meanwhile the window-replacement project is long-completed and we get to pay for it out of our dreaded home-equity loan, which shouldn’t even exist. —Which means pay interest or let the contractor hang.

A third ‘pyooter-function, which I ain’t lookin’ forward to, is a purchase from eBay.
This brings up the PayPal problem.
I successfully used it years ago to buy a calendar, and Linda used it again to purchase a replacement stoneware pitcher, after much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Apparently our PayPal was set up associating my name with our Visa-account, so that when Linda tried to use it with her name, it refused.
PayPal also apparently wanted a password, and apparently it wasn’t my old RTS badge-number (the password we always use), so PayPal had to tell us what the password was, and then Linda reset the password, so I may get thrown for a loop if I try to use PayPal.
All I wanna do is purchase something from eBay; and it’s getting turned into a three-day project.

“Pennsy” is the Pennsylvania Railroad, no longer in existence. It merged with New York Central Railroad in 1968 as Penn-Central, and that went bankrupt in about two years. “Pennsy” was once the largest railroad in the world.

RE: “which supposedly suffers from a wonky ISP.......” My loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston visited recently, and loudly declared the whole reason his laptop was so erratic with the Internet was our ISP; which was “junk.” Our Internet is nowhere near as bad. (“ISP” equals Internet-Service-Provider;” ours is cable.)

“The zero-turn” is our zero-turn lawnmower: a V-twin.

“Linda” is my wife.

“Rochester-Colonial” is the name of our window-replacement contractor.

“The Bucktooth-Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub, and appears to have a bucktooth on the grill.

RE: “dreaded home-equity loan, which shouldn’t even exist......” My loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston loudly insists our home-equity loan should be closed — we don’t even have a mortgage anymore; since that was paid off years ago. The only remaining lien on our house is the home-equity loan, which we could pay off; but we keep it open in case we need it.

RE: “old RTS badge-number......” RTS equals Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years. My “badge-number” was my employee-number.