Even though today’s weather was gloomy and cold yesterday’s weather put me in the mood to do some pre-Spring cleaning today.  I figured I might as well get a jump start on it anyway because it’s not like I have a whole lot of time to devote to it.  When the little one went down for a nap that thankfully lasted 2 hours I jumped in and went to work sorting, throwing stuff out, making donation boxes, and just cleaning every nook and cranny I could get to.  I didn’t get it all done, but I did knock a nice dent in my upcoming Spring Cleaning list.

After all that cleaning I definitely didn’t feel like cooking dinner tonight, so we decided to use a Subway coupon we had for buy 1 get 1 free $5 footlongs.  I needed to stop by the grocery store for a couple things, too, so we decided to dine in.  I don’t know what the heck the owner of the store was thinking because the air conditioning was on in there.  Because years ago I worked there for a short period of time I know in this particular Subway the heat and ac are dialed in by the owner, and it cannot be changed by an employee without a key to the lock box covering it.  I thought maybe the owner changed over to ac yesterday because it was 72 degrees here, but today it was yet again freezing cold, and the store was so cold we couldn’t stand to eat our full meal.

Ellie was wearing a long sleeve shirt with a heavy zip up sweater over it, so I hoped she’d be warm enough.  At first I thought it was just me because I often get cold chills even when it’s 80 degrees out, but Hubby threw on his jacket and complained about the cold, too.  That’s a lot coming from a guy who wears sleeveless shirts and shorts without a jacket in the snow. 

Ellie was sitting in the booth beside me, and I felt her shivering against my side shortly after the ac kicked back on.  There are vents over the top of every booth, and I was not going to let her sit there and freeze while we ate, so we packed up the rest of our food and headed out.  Hubby and I both commented about how it felt warmer outside on a 50 degree day than it did sitting there in that booth.  We ended up finishing our meal in the car with the heat on before heading into the grocery store.  That’s not easy to do when you’re working with a toddler who loves to throw her food, so tomorrow’s task list will including a major vacuum job for the Blazer and car seat.

There will be no more cleaning for me today, though.  I’m worn out, I’m tired, and I want a nice warm bubble bath to help wash away the rest of this cold chill I haven’t been able to shake since we left Subway. 

For the last few months Hubby’s boss has continuously told him one thing.  “We’ve got a 4 month contract locked in to start on January 3rd, so be here with bells on bright and early.”  Hubby has been beating the streets looking for a job, but at the same time he’s been keeping his spirits up during unemployment by reassuring himself everything would be ok as soon as January 3rd rolled around.

So much for that.  Two weeks ago I told Hubby I had a dream that January 3rd rolled around, he drove up the mountain to work like he was told to do, and when he got there the office was cleaned out like a ghost town.  Normally dreams like that don’t really bother me because I tend to dream a lot of crappy stuff when I’m worrying too much, but this was one that I couldn’t ignore.  It kept haunting me with a gnawing in the pit of my stomach kind of feeling, so I told Hubby I thought he should give the boss a call just to be sure nothing had changed.

He tried to call the boss a few times, let messages on his cell phone and home phone, and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt when he didn’t receive any return calls.  Hubby kept giving me excuses like “You know how he is about calling people back.  He takes forever.” or “I don’t trust leaving messages on the house phone because his kids have a habit of erasing them.  Besides he told me to show up at work on January 3rd!”.  Hubby has worked for the guy for 7 years, and I’ve always suspected him to be a cowardly jackass who doesn’t have the balls to give his employees bad news, so I didn’t agree.  As the crew leader Hubby has had to deliver most of that bad news, and I had a feeling the boss would rather ignore Hubby’s calls than have to be the one to deliver the news to him.

After many discussions I finally convinced him he should at least call a friend of his who is the site manager for the larger company that contracts the company Hubby works for just to make sure there weren’t any hiccups or delays in the project.  That feeling in my stomach was only getting worse, and I was definitely fearing my dream was coming true. 

Friday night Hubby made the call to his friend, and worst fears were made into reality.  His friend informed him that the project due to start tomorrow was canceled over a month ago, and he thought the boss had already told him!  It’s a good thing I finally got him to make that call or he would have driven all the way up the mountain only to find himself still jobless once he got there.  It’s now 11pm on Jan 2nd, and the boss still hasn’t called him!  Hubby’s boss (I should probably say ex-boss now) is nothing but a spineless bastard who didn’t have the balls to return his calls.

The friend did tell Hubby that the boss just won a bid on another contract that is supposed to start up in a few weeks, and Hubby’s name was put down as the crew leader for that job.  I told him I’ll believe it when the boss calls him and tells him to report to work, but my hopes that he’ll actually return to work in a few weeks are grim. 

Of course Hubby is crushed, but not because he’s still out of work.  He just wanted the boss that he’s been loyal to for 7 years, a boss that has treated him like a friend, to man up and  tell him the truth.  If this is how he treats his employees it’s no wonder his company was quickly going down the toilet when he hired Hubby.  He’d just gotten rid of a ton of drug addict losers, and Hubby worked his ass off to help him turn his company around.  I see how much he cares about his employees if this is how he repays him.

My hope is that Hubby finds something else soon, so he won’t have to return to work for the jerk if he does call.  I’m not opposed to returning to work (outside of the home that is) myself, and I’ve been searching endlessly right along beside him.  Unfortunately all this crap means our 2011 hasn’t gotten off to a very good start, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that everything will turn around for us this year.  There’s no where else we can go but up, and hopefully skeevy jackass boss won’t have to be included in our lives from this point on.

Have I ever told you how much I hate dealing with government agencies?  Oh, that’s right.  I’ve already ranted about that a time or two before.  There’s good reason to rant about them because we all know how backwards, screwed up, and slow government agencies can be.  It’s worse than getting the run around on a website that continuously asks you to click here 30 times before directing you to the right page.

This afternoon I had to stop by the county courthouse to drop off some paperwork for Hubby.  We recently discovered there is an error with his public record.  It shows a charge that does not belong to him, and if he hadn’t been laid off there’s no telling when we would have discovered this.  He’s had to submit background checks with a few of the jobs he’s applied for, and that’s when we found out about the error with his record.  I looked up his public record through the South Carolina Judicial Department website that allows you to search through court cases, and it’s listed there, too. 

We were both pretty pissed about this because having such an error on his record could prevent him from getting a new job!  We’ve been trying to find out how to get this fixed, and we finally got information on what paperwork to fill out.  I called this morning to make sure I could drop off the paperwork for him, then I took off to the courthouse this afternoon.  When I walked through the door I was directed down a hall and into one office.  From there I was told I was in the wrong place and was sent into 4 other offices before I found someone who told me I had to file the papers at the office that runs the SLED background checks, and that’s down at the LEC.  I headed down there to drop off the papers only to be told that I was suppose to file them with the Magistrate’s office that I’d just came from. 

Ugh! This is why I hate dealing with government offices.  I asked the woman to please call the Magistrate’s office to double check before I went back across town probably to only be told again to go to the LEC.  Thirty minutes later they finally figured out where I was supposed to file the papers and sent me to the right office, back at the courthouse.

All this running around has totally worn me out.  I came home hoping I could take a nap with the little one, but instead I pulled up to my Nana’s to find a fussy baby with a busted lip.  She was running with one of her toys, and she ran into a wall.  Then I had to tell Hubby what happened, and he acted like it was all my fault that she got hurt.  Nevermind the fact that she’s going to spend half her childhood getting bumps, bruises, cuts, and busted lips.  She’s barely got a little split, and she doesn’t seem to be caring about it anymore.  I finally got her down for a nap, but now I need to get some housework done and start dinner. 

I’m having a very hard time not blowing a fuse this week.  With the days rolling on and Hubby still out of work the stress is definitely piling up.  This morning my stress level shot through the roof after trying to help Hubby deal with his unemployment.  Government agencies always tend to make my blood pressure shoot up, but the NC Employment office is making it boil.  I’m so aggravated with them right now.  I’d rather spend all day reading diet pill reviews than have to deal with government offices.

They called this morning around 8am and left Hubby an urgent message that he needed to return their call ASAP concerning some questions they had.  No problem, but when Hubby tried to call the back their system kept hanging up on him.  He spent 20 minutes calling them, and he would either get a “all circuits are busy” message or the system would let him get 3 or 4 options into it and drop the call.

He got aggravated and handed the phone to me.  I was able to get the system to let me go through the options, but when I chose the option I was supposed to I was asked for a reference number, and no reference number was left with the message.  Instead of giving me other options the system hung up on me.  10 minutes later I finally got a real life person on the phone and passed the phone off to Hubby only to find out she told him she couldn’t figure out why he got the message or was told to call that number, and gave him 3 more numbers to try.  Hubby called all three numbers, and all three people he spoke to directed him back to the original number he was given.  He tried calling the original number again a dozen times, but now the system hangs up on him before giving him any options.

Yep, government offices totally make my blood boil! 

I’m finally home after running around doing some errands this evening and waiting forever to pickup Ellie’s Zyrtec prescription.  I spent 45 minutes browsing the store looking through all the baby stuff, as seen on tv section, Bluetooth headsets, and everything else under the sun waiting on a refill I called in this morning to be ready for pickup at 8pm.

When she originally got the prescription the doctor called it in at our local CVS.  She used CVS because we live a county over from the doctor, and she picked the one pharmacy that showed up in our zip code.  It took me 4 days to get the script filled then because the doctor kept calling it in, and CVS kept saying they never received it.  It was a major hassle just to get it filled in the first place.   That was in April, and since Ellie only uses Zyrtec seasonally I haven’t had to refill the prescription until now.

That hasn’t stopped CVS from being a pain, though.  When I picked up the first prescription I flat out told them I did NOT want auto refill.  That’s because after Ellie’s birth I had been on 11 pills a day because of my preeclampsia not going away immediately, and I had a ton of problems with CVS because of it.  I only needed the medication for 1 month, and I came off it after 28 days.  My doctor had prescribed 3 refills in case my blood pressure didn’t straighten out in one month, so I went through months and months of CVS calling me multiple times a day every month to remind me to pick up my prescription they had auto refilled (without my consent) even though I had told them I no longer used it.  They finally stopped calling about that one about 2 months ago…9 months after I stopped taking it.

When I went on my new birth control after having Ellie I dropped the prescription off at CVS one day when I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to run it all the way to Walgreens in the next town over.  A week before I ran out of birth control pills I tried to get the refill, and I was told I couldn’t because it was listed as something that could not be refilled until 30 days had passed since my last fill date.  That would have left me without birth control for at least 1 day, longer if I forgot to refill it.  I decided to switch my prescription to Walgreens, and I yet again had problems.  CVS refused to transfer the prescription because they said it was already refilled via auto refill even though I wasn’t allowed to pick it up for another week!

I argued back and forth with them for a few days, demanded they take it off auto refill since I’d requested not to have it auto refilled in the first place, and picked my prescription up the day they finally released it to me.  I immediately switched my prescription to Walgreens.  Even though I transferred that prescription in January CVS still calls me monthly with a courtesy reminder to refill my prescription.  I guess they never removed it from their computer after the transfer, and they keep calling even though I keep telling them it was transferred to another store and to leave me alone!

So yeah, I wasn’t happy when Ellie’s doctor used CVS to call in her prescription, but it was done before I had a chance to choose another pharmacy.

I got the prescription with the intentions of transferring it, but I forgot about it since I haven’t had to refill it in months.  I remembered it last night when Ellie woke up sounding like she had a frog in her throat, but I couldn’t give her any medicine because she’d just ran out.  I tried to transfer the prescription online and have it refilled at Walgreens, but the CVS website kept giving me an error message.  I got the same error when I tried to put the refill in online.  This morning I stupidly just called in the refill because I knew I’d be going to the grocery store across from CVS, and I didn’t want to make a trip all the way to Walgreens to pick it up.  I figured I’d get the refill then transfer it tonight when I got home.

Mind you, like I said, I called in the prescription in around 9am this morning and set the pickup time for 8pm.  I ran my errands, bought my groceries, and headed across the street to CVS thinking it’d be okay to leave cold groceries in the car as I just had to run in and pick up the prescription. When I told the pharmacist the name she looked in the computer, asked me to spell it twice, then asked if I had dropped off a prescription.  I explained THREE TIMES that I called it in this morning, it was a refill, and the pickup time was for 8pm.  She had me spell the name two more times, first and last, called over two more people to help her, and then asked me if Ellie had ever had a prescription filled there before.

I gave her an “are you stupid?” look and repeated “It is a REFILL for a prescription originally filled at THIS CVS.  I called it in at 9am this morning!”  I had the bottle from the previous prescription in my purse, and I even pulled it out to show her.  After another 5 minutes or so of repeating myself over and over she finally found it, explained they had Ellie’s birthday listed as Oct 2010 instead of Oct 2009 (filling prescriptions for babies not even born yet, eh?),  and told me it would be just a few minutes before it would be ready.  That still doesn’t explain why it wasn’t filled yet.  It had correctly entered the computer as a refill this morning.  45 minutes later it was finally ready.  Thank goodness Hubby was sitting in the car with the AC running or my groceries would have been ruined.

I am 100% completely done with CVS.  I made sure she fixed the date in the computer, and as soon as I got home I transferred the prescription to Walgreens.  I’ll go out of my way next time to pick it up because it’s way less hassle than dealing with CVS.  How much do you want to bet they’ll still call me over and over every month telling me I need to refill it?