How can one small error be the cause of SEVEN THOUSAND PHONE CALLS?

I have few excuses for not posting lately; it's just a combination of a lot of small things. Once I got settled into the new job, I made a lot of changes to my personal affairs; I changed banks, paid off my student loan (although I still have to pay off the paying-off, it's on much better terms), set up a mutual fund and automated monthly payments into my RRSP, and arranged to re-join my gym (I'd stopped while living in Moncton, naturally).

I also had to arrange insurance coverage for my CI Processor after my 3-year warranty ran out. This completely flummoxed our broker, who had never had such a request before. Apparently the insurance agencies she deals with were just as puzzled. I got a replacement price quote from the manufacturer, Advanced Bionics, and forwarded it to the broker, who forwarded it to the insurance company. For obvious reasons, I requested the device be insured for the cost of replacing it with the newer model; I'm not even sure I could literally replace the model I am wearing now, as they have moved on to a more advanced unit. The insurance company kept sending me requests to "have it appraised by an audiologist", which, if you understand the situation, is ludicrous. It's not a freaking diamond bracelet. First, the value of my current processor is not the issue, for reasons noted above. Second, an audiologist asked to do such a thing would pick up the phone and call Advanced Bionics for the current price of a comparable unit, which is what I had already done the equivalent of via email.

If playing Insurance Games wasn't fun enough. my first experiences wading into the pool of Civil Service more than made up for it. In the three months since I've been there, the good people at divisions that shall remain nameless have managed to misdirect, misroute, misdate, lose, and foul up everything from my ID card to my health benefits card to my expense reimbursements at every turn.

Ah, government beaurocracy. You're turning out to be everything I'd expected, and more.

Meanwhile, the people at "Scotia SmartSwitch" are so smart that it took three weeks to close my old bank account and even longer to transfer the balance into my new bank account - something that I could have done myself in ten minutes by withdrawing the money from my old bank, literally walking across the street, and re-depositing it in my new bank, if I hadn't believed that "SmartSwitch" was going to be, you know, smart, and all automagical and stuff as advertised. (In this wired world it turns out my old bank actually creates a paper draught and snail-mails it to my new bank, which then deposits it. "That's, like... neanderthal," I said in exasperation to the customer service person who was attempting to explain why my old account was closed but not a penny of my entire worldly treasure had turned up, well over a week later, in my new account.)

Every one of these things above required phone calls and emails and meetings and chasing around and arranging and fixing, and that's what's been eating up all my time lately.

Well, that, and the bunny. The bunny thing only lasted two days but ate up some temporal real-estate, there.

I have hope that things after this initial frenetic period will finally calm down a bit. There's a lot of travel, especially intra-provincial travel, in my near future, but that's as much pleasure as business much of the time, isn't it?

ronnie