milk tray

Yup, eating a milk tray. It's a cadbury thing. Wonder if I should bring home any cadbury products, or maybe tim tam cookies for people. Good stuff. Spent a while tracking down some wines I tried at the wine festival last month, so now my family will be getting some Martinborough wine for Xmas. It's pretty good stuff, some of it. You can get a really nice pinot noir or syrah out here for about $20 US. Also there's a sparkling wine you can get for like $10 and it is unbelievably better than what you would get for $10 in that category back home. I don't want to bring that home though, what if it exploded in my suitcase?

I don't have anything left to do for this trip. Dum dee dum dum....

Tried to battle Bank of America's customer service today and failed. I ended up speaking to 5 different people, the last one of which I think was just sick of me and told me the problem was fixed if I logged in myself (I couldn't). Got hung up on after listening to a conference call between someone in the rewards dept and someone in customer service. They kept getting more and more pissed off at each other and finally hung up on each other. I was left sitting there going, "Hello? Heeelllllooooo." Alright, kinda funny. Only one of the 5 sounded like he was stationed in India. I think the problem is there's just no where to go in normal customer service hierarchies if it's a technical error with the entire system. Turns out the 4 digit zipcode I gave for my new zealand address reaped major havoc everywhere, and the system ends up adding in a random zero to compensate. A zipcode is one of the 3 required identifying marks for redeaming Bank of America rewards points and you can't do fuck all about it. The icing on the cake was when I tried to re-enter my kiwi address online, adding an extra zero that I would at least know the location of, only to be informed a few hours later that I had to call (the same) number back because even though the form is there, they won't let you enter an international change of address online.

So I finally changed my official address to my mother's in NY. Fuck it. They are not ready to deal with a world traveller like myself at this time. I am getting my $50 gift card bitches and there is nothing you can do about it. I've worked these telephone customer service jobs and it's ridiculous how little control you have. You basically can do exactly what people do online. It's maybe the worst job ever, unless you work a place with slower calls and you're a student and allowed to study in-between calls. But I don't imagine a huge company like Bank of America is like that. It's brainless and repetitive and people are sometimes really annoying.

I was quite good at it.