Saturday, April 26, 2014Pain Management: Part 5 (The Home Depot sidebar)Meanwhile.My mom's condo decided to get vacated in April. The lovely tenants, no sarcasm, who moved out happened to cause enough damage to part of the kitchen that we have been needing to rebuild the cooktop and counter, in our spare time, during all of this. So we went to Home Depot the weekend before my surgery and opened up a Home Depot credit card and put the cooktop and a buncha stuff on it and they then hooked us up with a service called Red Beacon that shoots out a description of the work that needs to be done and contractors bid on it and then you pay Red Beacon online and then Red Beacon pays the contractors and it's all cool. The plan was to put all this stuff on the new HD credit card and have my mom pay it off and we avoid cash flow issues for everyone and get the job done now. Easy peasy. So we buy the stuff and we meet the contractor dude and between clients and driving people around and fetching things for me and taking care of the dog and feeding us all, Roger has been going back and forth to the condo. The work got done Wednesday and finished up yesterday and, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I get an email from Red Beacon that says your invoice is ready, just click HERE and pay for it. Voila. We are SO on top of things that we can remodel a part of a kitchen AND deal with breast cancer and maintain our schedules (well, some of us) and juggle kids and the dog and the cat because of TECHNOLOGY and our amazing facility with it. I click the button, I whip out my Home Depot credit card, I enter the numbers, I enter the funny three digit goodie on the back, and then I start... looking... for the... expiration. Date. Of which there is none. Whaaa...? No expiration date? I turn the card around and around about twenty times. No expiration date. That's... weird. I plug in something thinking the field just needs something filled in. I work in the software biz. I know how easily these things can be tricked. I'm smart like that. I click Submit. Nada. Won't take it. I figure out how to call Red Beacon. A guy answers who, I'm sorry, sounds like he just woke up from about a two year nap out behind the hay barn after a six year moonshine bender. I tell him the problem and ask if he can plug the numbers in manually. The answer, after he puts me on hold and checks with someone: They don't take Home Depot credit cards. WTF? Nope. Don't take them. But...but... that's why I... we... but I'm going to get nowhere with him. I call the woman we worked with at HD. She has no idea what I'm talking about. Of course it should work. She calls her manager. Her manager confirms: no HD credit cards can work with Red Beacon. I call customer service to see if they know about this. As a matter of fact, they do not. The first guy I talk to in customer service sends me to his manager (who knows nothing about this), and then I talk to that manager's manager. THAT manager had no idea this doesn't work so he puts me aside while he calls the district manager. THAT manager has no idea this doesn't work so he has to talk to HIS manager. I'm so not kidding. And then meanwhile the manager I've been talking to says he may also call the bank manager because it really should work because, after all, Home Depot OWNS Red Beacon. At the end of the call, the district manager's manager is going to have to call someone back, so I leave my number, hang up, and put the charge on my own personal card and we'll figure it out later. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:23 PM  
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