Well the Channel 5 finally streamed my segment on their website (thanks Stefanie) ..  you can view it here
My segment is roughly at 9:25 min

Also, I received news from my twitter buddy John Hancock  (@John Hancock61 ) from USAA letting me know that they wanted to use my story about how I used social media to help with our checking account fraud last month. So there is going to be a video guy from USAA  coming to my house (ACK!! I need to clean it as soon as I get home LOL ) on Wednesday to interview me about that situation, social media and blogging. Once I find out the all the details on when the video interview  will be published and such, I’ll post them here.

Once I get back home , I’ll be posting my thoughts about the healthcare and Obama plus a few other things that I’ve been thinking about.

Have a great & safe weekend!
Tammy

So today.. the gremlins reared their ugly head again! I had noticed some weird things on our checking account the other day. I checked it last night and didn’t see anything weird . I decided to check it again today and it was a negative balence with several pending charges.

It didn’t make much sense to me so I called our bank, USAA. The person I talked to said yes there were several suspicious charges on the account but they couldn’t do anything until they cleared. This was not the level of customer service I was used to receiving.

As you can tell, I wasn’t happy about it all so I turned to Twitter and vented there. Once of my twitter peeps @Corpsman re-tweeted (similar to email forwarding) my vent to one of the public affairs people for USAA , John Hancock, who asked me to contact him to see if he can help.

About an hour later, I had a phone call from Jessica, one of USAA’s senior reps. It was determined that the charges were fraudulent and that the fraud department was involved. She also told me that all charges would be refunded no later than next week.

This could have been a lot worse and could have taken a lot of time on my part to try to resolve. It wasn’t. Thanks to two USAA employees that went the extra mile for us .  They valued us as a customer enough to make sure me and my husband’s accounts were protected. You don’t get that a lot these days!

Now you guys now of my love affair with USAA and how awesome they are… this experience solidified that!

So if you’re keeping score … Gremlins 0 Tammy 1

I also got to chat (via IM) with SGT Daddy a few times today.. he is doing well and got some sleep. He says its boring, hot and he’s ready to get to the next place. He did say that the air base is really nice, has a nice movie theater and they have beer ! LOL

I heard some not so great news about the 4BCT,  so please make sure to keep them and all soldiers in your thoughts and prayers. (for OPSEC and PERSEC reasons, I can’t say anything more than that)

Now I ‘m sure you’re wondering why I’m talking about Verizon FIOS considering they don’t have FIOS in the Springs? Well here is the story….

Before we left Virginia, I called Verizion FIOS to cancel our account since we were moving to a non-FIOS area. (makes sense right??) At first, they were nice but giving me a hard time about cancelling the account. I explained to them that we had PCS orders from the Army and didn’t have a choice. The nice lady explained to me that I’d receive a final bill (no bill yet 2 weeks later) and that I could just drop off our FIOS modem to ANY UPS store and they would take care of getting it back to Verizon.

They said that we had 30 days from the termination date before a equipment charge of $150 would be tacked on to our account. I asked if I need an authorization # or something, she said “no maam, just your account # is enough” I’m thinking Awesome .. and how easy that will make our hectic life at the time!

Well we forgot to do it on our way out of Virginia.. so we said ok no problem we’ll do it once we get to Colorado.

Last week I go to the UPS store here at Carson… I tell the rep at the store that I need to send this back to Verizon. She looked at me like I had 3 heads and was the color purple! She said that she had no idea on how to do that. After looking up some information, she told me that I also needed an Authorization # from Verizon as well as the authorization labels that they were supposed to send me. (GRRRR)

Speed up to today… I finally get around to call Verizon and I’m on the phone with the automated system for 10 minutes before I finally get a LIVE person. I’m transferred around 3 times before the lady tells me that I need to call Verizon FIOS. I explained to her how long I’ve been on the phone already and could she transfer me directly. She says of course, no problem”! As she transfers me, I got disconnected.

I’m soooo happy now! (sarcasm in case you weren’t sure ) Then I get this bright idea… why don’t we just take it to one of the local Verizon stores and talk to a LIVE person. So that’s my plan… I’m sure there will be more to this story.

Now my experience with Direct TV was much different (we decided on Cable for here, lots of cloud cover b/c of the mountains )… I called them, told them I needed to cancel , they said ok and they would mail me my return labels and it was done. This took all of 10 minutes. Verizon FIOS you could learn a lesson or two (or more) from Direct TV and how they treat their customers, whether they are adding new service or canceling their current one.