Thursday, January 12, 2023

Yay! Call Control!

Wednesday was, you guessed it, uneventful, slow, damp and dark. However, some things were accomplished. For one thing, I got myself properly realigned with St. Paul’s Hospital, my new nurse practitioner and Life Labs. Somehow, St. Paul’s had lost track of me and my lab requisitions stopped coming for my quarterly blood tests. Either my change of name or my move had them lost contact with me. That problem, however, is now solved.

The other task I set myself was getting call control, a feature requiring callers to push a specific button to reach me. I get a lot of robocalls that drive me mad. I went to the Telus website and saw that I had the call control feature, so I called Telus, waited almost 50 minutes and got a lovely, warm, helpful customer service rep. She told me what to do. It entailed punching in a code on my phone, and then following the prompts given.

I thanked her and hung up and punched in the code. However, instead of getting a prompt, a recorded voice said, “We’re sorry, but your line does not have call control.” So, I called Telus back and waited another 55 minutes to speak to another customer service rep, equally as pleasant. She couldn’t help me though, and so she referred me to a technician. Speaking to the technician was a challenge. By the time he’d come on the line, I was stressed and could hardly talk.

He had me download Chrome, only to find that web crawler didn’t work either. (I use Safari.) So, he put me on hold for ages, after gaving him my password so that he could try to activate the call control for me at his end. And it was back to waiting on hold for another 25 minutes, the music playing bringing me close to madness. But then he was back and he had me log in to my Telus account online and voilĂ , it worked. I now have call control and I feel I have won a longstanding battle with fraudsters and robot callers. Hooray! 

I have a meeting today with Nancy. I feel relaxed and enthusiastic about helping her. It’s so clean, our relationship. I do what she wants. We often chat about decisions she must make, and I feel respected, but she makes the decisions and I carry out the execution of her decisions.

On Friday, I have a meeting with Dyan, and Carol. We are, with Don (who is in Florence) the CCRG Committee. As I told you, no one wants to be chair of the committee. I want someone other than me to be the chair of our committee so that I can have a clean relationship, like I have with Nancy, with the CCRF chair. That way, I have a buffer between me and the board. And then I can ask to be off the board if I want, and I’ll just be a committee member.

I feel a lot less stress this way. Stress is measurable by my symptoms; my current flurry of seizures is a sign of stress.

Tuesday night, I sat down at my desk thinking I would write up a list of ideas for our next Foundation newsletter. But as veered off to doing a writing exercise. I’ve been doing what I call ‘writing exercises,’ ever since my university days and creative writing courses. They’re things I write for me; no one read them. I’ve posted some on this blog in the past. They are the only ones I’ve shared.

I’ve always felt I was creative, but I never felt I had much in the way of imagination. I felt rooted in science and fact and black and white, no imagination. I never aspired to writing non-fiction, but that’s what I did Tuesday night. I’m going to go over it until I feel it’s done and then I’ll post it here. Maybe.

I’m not keen to share. It’s like agreeing to take my clothes online in front of a camera. No one wants that experience—well, aside from exhibitionists. I have no confidence as a writer of non-fiction, that’s why I was a technical writer. I’m a non-fiction virgin. Stay tuned. 















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