Personal Crap

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Meaford, ON, Canada





Sorry I've Been Gone So Long

Greetings, dear readers.  I apologise for being gone for three full years, but things have been very momentous in my life recently, and the hiatus was justified.  I will get into all of that at some point down the road, but just let it be known that the pause is coming to an end, and I should be back writing this blog (as well as my others) on a regular-ish basis pretty soon.

This post is mainly to let anyone who has followed me that the time is rapidly approaching where I will have something to say once again, and to make sure everyone keeps their eyes out for that.

So, get ready for more from me in the near future.


The Summer Of 2011, Part Two

Well, assuming everyone is up to speed from the previous entry, we continue with the story of why I've taken time off writing my blogs this summer.

Please keep in mind when reading that this only covers one half of the story.  I'm going to have to write another post detailing exactly how this fits in with me specifically.

Okay, we got up here, so we'll start with the Scott problem.  As you know, Scott was paying the mortgage on the old house, and he was to pay the rent up here while we gathered ourselves and found a new place to buy in his name.  Well, since he had to take some time off work to get everything done, his workplace decided not to pay him for the time off, even though he was owed two weeks vacation at that point.  Then, after he saw that no money went into his account, we never paid last month's rent for the new place.  After that, his workplace decided to fire him in a move meant to make the store more money by hiring people not knowledgeable in the bike industry so they could pay minimum wages instead of a salary for someone who knew his stuff and could bring in tons of sales.  As of this writing the store is sinking and will not survive this Winter season, as they also fired the only other employee of the same calibre in the other department that makes the store the most money.

Okay, so Scott gets on EI to get him cash, and gets the file escalated under the circumstances of not having been able to pay last month's rent to the new landlords.  EI does escalate it, and a payment should have arrived at the end of the first week in July.  No money was deposited.  Scott asks why, and is told a computer glitch affecting a bunch of folks had delayed payments, but it was all sorted and the cash would be there Monday.  Monday comes.  No money was deposited.  Scott calls again, and learns there is a flag on his account because the employers said he was terminated for reasons of something or other, something about undermining the company or corporate espionage or some such drivel.  What the company didn't realize is that Scott had been in touch with the Labour Board about all this before he even contacted EI, so there is a file regarding his unfair treatment while at work, plus what is now occurring which is this:  They promised him a severance package, lied about sending it to him via courier, and that is on file with the Board as well.  So, simply put, Scott's old employer was already at fault according to one government office, and yet another government office was acting as though Scott was the bad guy.

We then escalated things up to the office of the Ontario Ombudsman.  A woman there started by contacting the Labour Board and making sure Scott had a valid claim, and then went to task on the Barrie Service Canada office in order to get the flag removed from Scott's file.  Things were then to progress, and the payment should have gone through.  In fact, Scott was told that the payment went through multiple times over the next week or so, by many different people, and that the bank was the problem ie. the payment's didn't come back to the EI office, the bank still had it and had not put it into Scott's account.  Then, about a week and a half after starting to talk to the Ombudsman's office, and after the second EI payment hadn't gone through, on a call to ream the Barrie EI office Scott was told that no money had EVER been sent to his bank account because there was a SECOND flag on his account.  The Ombudsman's office rep had removed the first flag but not even looked to see that the account was cleared to approve the deposits.  Well, now we're upset, and we take this up the chain to her supervisor, who starts firing people left and right throughout the Barrie office, fires the woman from his own office for failing to follow through on the file, and promises reparations for the delay.  At this point, Scott is owed $700 for the first missed payment, $700 for the second missed payment, $600 in reparations for those two missed payments, and more reparations are planned.  Why?  Well, we're selling what little we got up here with us after the move (see previous post) in order to eat.

Now we take it up the chain again.  We're now talking to Gabrielle in the Office of the Premier of Ontario, Queen's Park.  I added Queen's Park because in a little while we'll be involving Ottawa's office as well.  Anyway, this is where the story goes into "fantastical movie plot that nobody would ever believe" territory.  In fact, I lost an online friend as a result of telling her the truth about what happens next, because she didn't believe it and decided that all I had ever told her was lies.

To start, Gabrielle either fired or reprimanded the supervisor at the Ombudsman's office, then proceeded to start trying to get the money in cheque form up to us via DHL.  Well, DHL lost the package.  Okay, so she gets them to cancel that cheque (which for some reason takes over 6 hours), issue a new cheque (another 6 hours, so basically it takes two business days for this), and tells us she's left it in the locked upper right drawer of her desk for the night.  Next day, she never shows for work.  They find her that night, in a hospital, after having had what she says was a car accident on the 400 while on her way to us with the cheque.  She's in the hospital for the rest of that week, so instead of getting the cheque from her (which is what apparently happened, as they bored out the lock on her desk to get it to us but found no cheque there), they decide to cancel it.  Okay, so now we're dealing with her aide on this, a woman by the name of Jessica, who was aware of all of this while it was happening and is up to speed.  Well, another two days go by while they cancel that cheque and do up another one.  Now we've gone through another weekend of selling what little we have to a hock shop near us, and we're a little desperate.  Keep in mind, we've only just started August by this point.  The cheque is ready to go, and so they avoid DHL (used because the government apparently has a contract with them - they've always been useless, I hate that Amazon uses them), and get the cheque to Purolator Courier.

Purolator Courier loses the package.

Now, I'm not saying they only lost our package, I mean they lost 6 packages across multiple manifests, and as of this writing they have never found two of them, and, you guessed it, one of the ones never found is ours.  Well, Purolator gives us a cheque for $250 as an apology, and that gets sent to Queen's Park in order to be sent to us when they issue a FOURTH CHEQUE!!!  You still with me here?  We're on to cheque number four! 

In the midst of this, Scott applied for emergency funds from Ontario Works.  He got $1000, which got eaten by paying to keep the fridge and stove we've been forced to rent-to-own as a result of the move, pay down his phone bill (almost $1000 itself at that point), and get us food for that weekend.  What was left was about $50, which is about to play a role in the tale.

Now, of course, we're looking at two days to get the next cheque, so now we're at Thursday, August 18th.  At this point, you're probably curious to know why I haven't mentioned an EI payment in August.  Well, see, Scott expected a payment on the correct Friday, but was told he was no longer going to get payments on Fridays because they were only doing that to rush cash to him due to the escalation, and that now he'd get payments on Tuesdays like everyone else.  The irony of him never getting the two rushed payments is not lost on us.  Over that weekend, the weekend of the 13th, Scott's account was hacked from Quebec.  He noticed this on Monday, because that $50 was gone, and called Bank Of Montreal to get it fixed.  They acknowledged the problem, and said that the account was fixed, they were going to give back the money, and that the next day's EI deposit would go through with no worries.

Tuesday comes.  No money was deposited, including the $50 that was already supposed to be in the account.

Okay, now the gloves come off.  Scott calls the Bank Of Montreal, demands the money, and is promised a minimum of $25 as an apology.  That quickly becomes an apology of $100 for the problem, because as of this writing Scott has only gotten the $50 back.  No EI payment, and no apology money (not asked for but told to Scott on their own accord that he would get).  Now, remember, this is specifically from Bank Of Montreal...things will progress to another bank shortly.

Now, back to the story.  Jessica is now in possession of both the Purolator cheque and the Queen's Park EI and reparation cheque, and has them on a clipboard ready to be sent.  All they are looking for is a driver to bring them to our door.  Gabrielle is in a meeting (about which I'll relate in the next e-mail) and Jessica doesn't want anything to happen to the cheques, so she takes them with her as she runs an errand.  By now, you can almost see it coming, can't you?  Like a bad horror movie?  She is seen wandering off the grounds by a couple of groundskeepers at 12:30 in the afternoon, and she vanishes for the next 6 hours.  Her phone is on her desk, charging.  She is finally found at St. Mike's Hospital, unconscious.  From what we've pieced together from security cameras and eyewitnesses (you know it can't be good if I'm using the word 'eyewitnesses'), she had gone to the Eaton Centre to grab a snack, slipped on a wet floor, went down a flight of stairs, fractured her skull and knocked herself unconscious.  And then, just as an added bonus, some of the people that saw this happen grabbed her purse and took off with it.

I know that you, loyal readers, along with Andi and even my one cousin I talk to, all believe I should write books, but how can I compete with real life?

The good news is that they didn't take the clipboard.  The bad news is that Queen's Park isn't family, so they don't let them in to check and get the cheques.  It took so long to find her because she had no ID on her when she fell.  Jessica does not regain consciousness on Friday, so now we're into another weekend with no cash.  Monday rolls around.  Summing this week, as most of it involves the next post, we have gotten exactly $20 out of a person now working our Queen's Park file, Jessica is home recuperating, Gabrielle has been fired from her job, and we're hoping that sometime we'll get the $2000 cheque from Barrie EI.  For how we got from the floor of the Eaton Centre back to Barrie EI, I will be posting again soon.

Until next time...


The Start Of The Story Of Summer 2011

Greetings once again, loyal readers.  I know I haven't been posting anything as of late, and I also know that I promised a good reason as to why I hadn't.  Well, I'm still not writing anything new at the moment, but what I am doing is editing and posting various e-mails I've been forced to write for various reasons over the past few months, detailing what has actually been going on.  As this is still quite a tender subject to me, this is the best I can offer right now.  If I skip anything monumental, let me know, and I'll fill in the blanks.

With that said, here we go:

First thing anyone reading this should know is that we were forced to move as a result of our inability to get our mortgage renewed on our home.  This came about as a result of an attempt by our mortgage company to foreclose upon us back in 2007/2008 which itself occurred because my disability support was cut off by the government after my father, the home's main wage earner, died.  Sounds backwards?  Get used to it.  Anyway, a loan we got then to make sure we could stay in the house was applied for and received, but then this guy decided to tack it onto the cost of refinancing a new mortgage, which made our lender balk, and it all fell through.  That's the backstory, and again if I missed anything, ask and I will fill in those pesky blanks.  Suffice it to say, Andi, Scott and myself were thrown to the street and had to find a place to live.  The place Andi found is over an hour north of Toronto, in the middle of nowhere, and tiny as hell.

The move happened about as poorly as could have been expected.  First, we were evicted a day early because the lawyer for the buyer of the house wanted a bigger kick-back than he was getting to let us stay the extra day, so he reneged on the deal and forced us up here in the dead of night with what we were wearing, what little we could gather in one hour, and one mattress tied to the roof of my car.  The move happened the next day, but the movers were incompetent, and only loaded half the house in the whole day.  They got here at midnight, but because the banks were closed and we needed to get more than the $500 allowed from a bank machine withdrawal, they refused to unload and left with the truck full.  Scott tried to pay them the next day, when the truck should have been getting the other half of our stuff, but after a day of phone tag nothing got done.  He paid them the day after, and the truck came up, and they expected another $800 to unload on top of everything else.  Scott got the driver to start unloading anyway, and we got the truck emptied, discovering almost half of the stuff they hauled was either broken or packed unsafely.  The driver said he wouldn't leave until we paid him another $800, so we had the police here to ensure he left.

As if this isn't enough, the buyer then refused us access to the house to get the rest of our belongings, so we have lost half of what we owned.  This includes all the stuff from my father after he died, all the stuff from Andi's mother after she died, all the stuff from Scott's father after he died, all the stuff from my childhood I was collecting for future kids of my own, all our books, games, clothes, Christmas decorations, piles of electronics (including two televisions and at least one stereo surround system), a painting from a British artist valued at over $500, and more.  Gone, just gone.  Imagine everything you've kept for any sentimental or meaningful purpose, piled together in one big group, and then having someone set fire to it while you watch.  Yeah, that's where we were, and still are.

Then Scott goes back to work, and they refuse to pay him for the three weeks he had to take off in order to do the move.

And then they fire Scott the following week.

So, as of July 1st, we were living on my disability benefits, which left us exactly $25 for the rest of July.  Scott was trying to get unemployment benefits, but nothing had come yet...the company was supposed to pay him a severance package, but they didn't bother, so now the Labour Board is involved, but we don't know where that was going to go either.  We do know that they were planning an audit of the company, and that will likely shut them down permanently (they never gave Scott lunch breaks or the 15 minute breaks he is allowed by law, made him work overtime virtually every day with no pay increase, etc..).

Some of these things came about, and some didn't.  Some of them we're going to court over, and some of them are big lawsuits totalling in the millions, but we'll get there in future posts.  Over the next three or four, I'll get everyone all caught up with what's been going on.  Trust me, it's a bumpy ride, one that I actually lost a friend over due to the fact that she didn't believe that I was telling her the truth.

Until next time...