1923 TURK GRUP DJ_K_A_H_I_R

Last Wednesday I had a very important task to do when I got home. That task was to call the Internal Revenue Service in order to have the $17,000 that they say I owed them removed. A 1099 had been generated in 2006 against my personal Social Security number but I had filed all that income against my business taxes. I didn’t know about the 1099 and the IRS only recently notified me of the owed taxes, plus the penalties they have been charging since 2007.

So this phone call was going to an extremely important one. I arrived home to a very nasty storm outside. What it was really a feeder band for the hurricane that was hitting Texas at the moment. So with everything ready I prepared to make the call to the IRS.

“No service available”

WTF? My phone had no service, Rai’s phone had no service, Abra’s phone had no service. All three dead. I drove up the road to the in-laws. They had cell service, but I still didn’t. The difference being that we had 3G phones and they didn’t. I ended up calling the IRS on their land line. Only took 5 minutes to clarify with them how to removed the tax debt, yet I was on hold for over an hour to have the 5 minute discussions.

Same thing Thursday night. My phone service was fine in Orlando, but in Deland it wasn’t available. So we called AT&T. Another hour on the phone with them, changing conigurations, rebooting phones, etc nothing. So the tech transfered us over to another tech.

The second tech informed us they had just spent the last three hours on calls similar to ours. Seems the hurricane in Texas has sporadically wiped out service in Louisiana, and Florida. Now I’m not sure how that’s even possible since 15 miles south of here I get good reception. They opened a case for us so that the repair crews would look into it.

On Friday I got a text message from AT&T that problem had been fixed. Sure enough, when I got home I had phone reception.

It’s things like this that drive me absolutely mad.