Swept from the corners of my mind…
I got to work this morning to discover the air conditioning is on the fritz. I used to lead tours through the wilds of Batoche during heat waves. I’ve carried railroad ties to make fence posts. I survived long, complicated childbirth—TWICE—and still kept the kids.
A little extra warmth shouldn’t faze me.
In theory.
I might get a bit sweaty, but my office is deep within the bowels of the building. I’ll be fine.
Just before lunch I attended the raising of the Pride flag (along with about a dozen kamikaze mosquitoes who feasted despite the strong breeze), and I managed to cool down a bit. Feeling optimistic, I decided to make a quick phone call over lunch.
A few months ago, I took advantage of a SaskTel deal through my employer that offers a “business” discount on one personal cell phone per employee. I have two under my name—mine and my daughter’s (yes, she pays me back… eventually). When I got the discount applied, the accounts needed to be split so I could make separate payments.
On the day I made the changes, I thought we had that all figured out.
We did not.
Fast forward three months.
Now, I am one of those people who pay the bill the minute it hits my inbox—not because I’m fiscally responsible (I am not), but because I’m terrified I’ll forget and everything will get shut off. So imagine my horror when I got a notice that my personal phone was about to be cut off for non-payment.
I checked my records. Money had been applied.
Well, I’ll just call and get this figured out.
Imagine my additional delight when I realized the SaskTel billing office works the exact same hours I do.
It took me a couple of days to figure out what happened, and a couple more to figure out when to contact them. I finally got through, and it turned out my payments had been applied to my daughter’s number.
Excellent. She owes me. And I will be charging interest.
Everything was sorted out—or so I thought—and I went on my merry way.
Then Friday’s bills arrived.
I tried to pay both accounts using e-bank, but only one phone was listed. I tried to pay using the e-bill, but I didn’t have a credit card with me. Clearly, I would need to talk to an actual human to figure out why the second payee account wasn’t there and get squared up.
It was now the weekend, so everything had to wait until Monday.
Today. The Day of the Fritzing Air Conditioner.
While I had remembered that my office is buried deep in a brick building with layers of insulation, I had forgotten one small detail: my office also contains approximately seventeen heat-producing electronic devices that never get turned off. Turns out insulation works just as well keeping heat in as it does keeping it out.
By noon, I developed a very unfortunate watery moustache.
Clearly, I needed to fix the phone situation while I still had functioning brain cells. Lunch hour call—here we go.
I called SaskTel again and confirmed that my separate account had not actually been set up. Okay. I opened my banking app and went to add the new payee… only to be informed that I already had that payee.
This felt… less than helpful.
Sensing things were about to spiral, I went straight to telebanking and insisted—firmly, repeatedly, and possibly emotionally—to the automated voice that I wanted to speak to a human.
After 25 minutes of substandard muzak drilling into my soul, a pleasant man finally came on the line, speaking so quickly I wasn’t sure if he was greeting me or finishing his shift. I explained the problem (twice), and he figured out the issue: I had been given the wrong account number.
Not entirely SaskTel’s fault—I am, after all, living inside this circus and still can’t follow the acts without a program.
He set up a new payee account with the correct number and assured me everything was good to go.
“Woah,” I said. “Could you just stay on the line while I actually try it? I’m… a little paranoid.”
He agreed. (I’m fairly certain he was smirking.)
I opened my banking app.
Nothing had changed.
We refreshed. We restarted. We waited.
Still nothing.
He assured me the new payee account would appear “by tomorrow for sure,” as the system likely just needed time to cycle through. I insisted he stay on the line and manually move a payment over to cover the bill.
We hung up.
That’s when I realized two things:
The air conditioning was still not working.
And I had just spent my entire lunch hour sealed in a room with a laptop, two monitors, and an iPad… slowly roasting like a pork loin on a barbecue spit—watery moustache and all.
At that point, honestly, even the mosquitoes probably would have taken one look at me and decided I was already cooked.
Cathy Bendle finds humor in the quirks of everyday life, from training teachers to dodging housework. When not writing, she’s either laughing at her pets, frantically Googling for her work assignments, or playing on her iPad. Her column appears every other Wednesday.
