Friday 06/25/2021
Off at the crack of dawn — well, 7:15 — for the PAMF lab in Sunnyvale to give blood for labs. Returned to Lytton avenue in Palo Alto for a nice breakfast of coffee and pastry at Mme. Collette’s. Chosen partly because it is nearly adjacent to my bank, where I went at 9:15, brushing off pastry crumbs.
Stanford Federal Credit Union has multiple agents waiting for you to walk in the door. I ended up with Nick, who listened to my tale of trying to get VIA benefits to do EFT. He looked at the record of my account and didn’t see any problem, and talked to his manager and got the same advice.
Then he placed a call to VIA customer service and talked that person through the thing. The VIA customer service can’t take direct deposit info over the phone. One must go online and log in, or have them send a form. We got her to escalate one level to someone in “payments” but it was the same story there. They have no ability to look at any log of attempted transfers. They don’t even have as much info as I do; they don’t see the “Reason R15: account holder deceased” message. And they have no answer other than to try again to enter your direct deposit info.
Nick spent nearly 40 minutes sitting on the phone with me, he talked to the people as did I, but got essentially nowhere. So I have officially given up. I will ignore all requests from them in the future to do EFT and simply keep cashing their occasional checks.
In the evening I had a ticket for a play at The Pear theater. Turns out, so did several other people here. So I got a ride with Patty, Carol and Mildred. The play was a muddle of a fantasy by Christopher Chen titled Late Wedding. Which had nothing to do with the play, there were no weddings. Supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, the fantasies of Italo Calvino, it was in my humble opinion a very lazy mish-mash of ideas thrown together with a lot of meta-stuff about the nature of plays and being a playwrite.
If it had had an intermission (and if I’d been driving) I would have left at intermission. But it didn’t, and I wasn’t. So I sat through the whole thing. Big humph.
But, on the good side, it was the first time out to a live play in 16 months or so.
Codgerville 