The Poddyland News

Several days ago I was starting to panic that with Hurricane Hanna headed towards South Florida, that the airports would be closed and I wouldn’t be able to head off to New York for the weekend. Now with Hanna fizzling out and having slowed down, it shouldn’t affect us here, so I am pretty sure the flight will leave ok tonight - however…

By the time we are set to come back on Monday afternoon, the monster storm of the season, Hurricane Ike, already a Category 4 while way out in the Atlantic, could either be here or close to being here. I am hoping it misses Florida completely, but if it does hit, it would be nice to be able to get home first. I don’t trust the bedroom windows, and I would prefer to be at home if only to take plenty of video as things blow around - if it does hit us. I would really not want to get stuck in New York with the airports closed - that has to be a really miserable experience.

Nothing much has changed with my lens traffic this week, up slightly, but what has changed is the traffic to one of the jokes on my main web site (So You Think You Had A Bad Day) that has been picked up by Stumbleupon. I had 11,000 visitors to my site yesterday, from 87 Countries, and from all 50 States in the USA. That’s the good news… The bad news - hardly a click on the rotating CJ banner on the main joke page that got hit, and under $3 on Adsense. What a shame - if only I could find a way to capitalize on the traffic…

I’m struggling to keep up with the things that I want to do, just not enough hours in the day unfortunately. For those of you with lenses that I have promised to visit, I have close to 100 lenses marked that I will get around to as soon as I can. The list is growing, but unless I have actually visited a lens, the link isn’t going to go away.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 9
Top 10,000: 4
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES
Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke - April 2008
The Daily Joke Lensography
My Pet Peeves

Sometimes I think I would like to live a life that was more ordinary, but instead for no good reason, my life has to be complicated.

I hate buying or selling a house, a car, or booking a holiday, because through no fault of my own, something always goes wrong. In some ways the things that go wrong actually turn out for the best, but it’s really weird the way that things happen.

And so we come to the tale of last night’s strange coincidences…

My girlfriend and I booked to go to New York this weekend (we fly tomorrow evening - provided Tropical Storm Hanna doesn’t close the airport. That’s another story - I’m already concerned about that…). So thinking last night that we ought to get all our papers ready, I found the papers for the hotel reservation, but I could not find any for the flight booking.

I started to panic - just slightly, when I checked my emails and couldn’t find a confirmation anywhere.

So, I tried to log into the airline web site - it wouldn’t accept any of my usual email addresses. Bigger panic… But it’s ok - I am sure that I had seen the charge go through on my credit card - so let’s look that up online.

Ok, log into my credit card account, but no details, only a message in RED to say that my account is suspended and to call the bank.

I call the bank, spoke to a lady who had a wonderful accent - wonderful if you didn’t need to understand everything she said and for her to understand you, but this is the second time in less than a week I have had to deal with a problem on the phone and had either a latin or indian lady with a really strong accent. Not strong enough for me to identify exactly where she was from, but definitely strong enough to make it hard to understand everything that she was saying.

Seems that there had been a number of transactions on my card yesterday, none of which were mine. So, they closed the account, and she said that they would send me a replacement card in 5-7 business days. BUT WAIT - I’m off to NEW YORK in TWO DAYS! She said that I could pay $16 to have it express mailed, so I flapped and did my best to give her a mental picture of me flapping up and down, threatening to give up using the card, and they said that they would send it out free - Phew! - but it still might not get here in time of course…

Called the airline, they confirmed my flight was ok, gave me the confirmation number, and said that there had been a computer glitch at the time when I made the booking.

So now I have my flight booking confirmed and printed out, a new credit card on the way, and the really good news, if you can call it that, is that if I didn’t have the flight confirmation problem because of the airline computer glitch, I probably wouldn’t have found out that I had a problem with the credit card, and would have gone to New York with only 1 credit card which I would have found out had been cancelled. Now that would have been a real mess…

So now I still have to hope that Hanna doesn’t blow in too fast and too close to South Florida and close the airport, and also have to update all my auto payments, which are set to use my cancelled credit card.

I just wonder - WHY ME? Why can’t things just run smoothly for a change? Why does life have to keep throwing me curveballs all the time?

I could add in the story of trying to update my 8 year old cell phone last week, which is equally complicated, but I think this is the point at which I am about to lose your attention, and so Adieu from me before something else goes wrong - like a power cut at the point where I am about to press the PUBLISH button…

—– UPDATE —–

Well it must have been a gang that compromised my credit card somehow, since yesterday there were 10 purchases made in 2 Walmart stores in Central Florida for $200 or over each time - over $2,000!

Hanna seems to be slowing down and also moving further east, so with luck it will be too far away and too weak to affect our flight tomorrow afternoon.