On My Soapbox...

I have honestly never lived in a place with as poor a government system as Atlanta on the city level and Georgia on the state level. I am so glad I (almost) no longer have to deal with them that I could dance for joy. My interactions with their business licensing division, their water and sewer department, and their department of labor have been frankly horrific. The latest--and I hope last--in a long string of brain-dead workers slogging through painfully inefficient, out-dated, and blatantly corrupt processes told me today that in order to get the credit I have on our house water bill refunded to me, I not only have to request it, but I also have to show proof of payment. Um, it's my account, in my name, it's closed, and there is a credit. Why would you need proof of the specific payment that caused the credit? Isn't the fact that the credit exists proof enough that a payment was made? No, no it's not. The gentleman on the phone couldn't tell me why I needed to provide a copy of the front and back of the cancelled check other than they needed "proof of payment", "it's the city's policy". Since the overpayment was caused by the title company overwithholding funds to pay the water bill at closing, I don't have a cancelled check and have to get the title company to provide me with a copy of their check. I hope they have one, though in these days of electronic payments I am not overly confident.

Not that Austin is perfect. I am still waiting on the inspection of my solar installation that was supposed to happen a week ago so we can go live (which rhymes with hive) on the system and soak up the sun (literally). But the city has a backlog of inspections to do and they're short-staffed. I swear the older I get, the more time I need to spend on home management. In June of last year Bank of America had a data breach, and Dave's name and social security number in conjunction with the studio address were compromised. Someone took out a merchant account with Bank of America card services for the business of Griffith Plumbing owned by Dave Griffith at the studio address and racked up $1,443 of fraudulent charges against two people's credit cards. By the time I found out about it, Bank of America security had already marked the account as fraudulent and closed it, and they let me know we were not responsible for the chargebacks that resulted from the fraudulent charges. That's great, but then last week I got a form 1099-k from them showing the $1,443 as income for us that they reported to the IRS... WTF. We're not now paying TAXES on the money someone else got from stealing Dave's identity!

But at least I did a couple of fun things today: I had lunch with the spouse, played on the Oculus Rift system in data.world's office for 45 minutes, and mermaided my hair again. And now it's time to down tools for the day!