November 6, 2007
So it’s 4:00am and I just got off the phone with Damon. He’s on his first business trip ever and they sent him to Australia. Left at 10pm on Saturday night and I have to pick him back up at 10am Friday morning. He got a head cold two days before his flight so he was pretty miserable for the 14 hour flight. Not only that but he had to fly coach so he couldn’t sleep the entire flight. According to the people at work he was stuck in coach because of the short time frame (he was told pretty much less than a week before he had to fly out). When he asked about an upgrade to business, which is what people usually get shipped over on during business trips when the flight is longer than six hours, they said that it would cost $14,000.00. He said, “Don’t you mean $1,400.00?” and they said, “Nope.” He traveled with a co-worker so at least he wasn’t alone.
When they landed Damon was pleasantly surprised that he could buy medication from a Chemist (that’s Australian for pharmacist) with happy fun time codeine mixed in, without a prescription. He slept for like 15 hours and woke up feeling much better but still under the weather. Hopefully the cold goes away before he has to fly home.
My mother is coming over tomorrow and will be leaving Friday after I pick Damon up from the airport. She’s coming over because I’m terrified of trying to navigate SFO all by myself with Chloe in tow. I was the chauffeur for the two of them on the way to the airport and so I was given GPS like instructions (turn here, drive one mile, turn there… etc) to get to the right place. All I had to do was slide into the drop off area, let them off, and then slide right back onto the freeway going back home. It was super easy to get home from that drop off area.
Getting back is going to be harder because I’ll be by myself and I’ll have to actually find parking and go into the airport to find him. My dad is going to meet us there and I’ll transfer my mother off to him to be driven the rest of the way home so she doesn’t have to take the train back.
I’m pretty pissed at T-Mobile. Before Damon left on the trip we called them to ask about coverage over there and how much it would cost to call. They told us they had coverage over there and it would cost $1.50 a minute to make a phone call and 35 cents per text message. I waited and waited for a phone call but I didn’t get one until now because his phone gets NO service over there and he wasn’t sure how much it was going to cost to call from the hotel. He still doesn’t know how much he’s going to be charged for the call but we talked for about 13 minutes and he gave me his hotel information and phone number but he said I’m going to have to look up the country code for Australia to make use of the number. I told him that unless someone is dying and even then I probably won’t call just because he’s a million miles away and can’t do anything about it anyhow.
I knew he landed ok though because the credit card I set up for him to use for business crap that would have to be expensed later sends me email notifications every time a charge goes through. Since it’s only supposed to be used for business trips I have the alerts set up on it just in case someone gets the information and uses it fraudulently I’ll be notified. I didn’t turn it off when he started using it but I did call the card company and informed them he’d be in Australia so he wouldn’t have any trouble using the card.
Speaking of credit card fraud. Chloe made her first CC purchase a week or so ago. Funny story. She loves to play with game console controllers. When daddy is playing a video game she gets excited and wants to mash the buttons too. This usually makes it so Damon can’t play very well and so he usually passes her a controller for another console for her to play with while he’s playing with his. So side by side they sit, mashing on their respective controllers. Usually we let her play with an old game cube controller because controllers for the next gen consoles actually boot up the systems when the right button is pushed.
Damon was retarded and left the XBOX 360 controller in her little corral after playing a game at one point and she, of course, found it. Nothing goes unnoticed by this girl. So she of course must have played with it because I found a charge for 5000 gamer points (about $63 worth of virtual “XBOX bucks”) used to purchase various xbox live games and etceteras. At first I didn’t know how much was actually spent because the email I received notifying me of the purchase just said “thank you for your purchase of 5000 gamer points!” or something like that. I was like, oh Damon must have bought a small game that was on sale or something. I didn’t even question it because I trust him to make smart choices with games and money and he lets me know when he’s going to spend more than 20 bucks on something game related so I can sign off on it since I balance our finances.
A few days after I get this notification email about the purchase of gamer points Damon logs onto xbox live and says, “WTWTF? I HAVE 5000 POINTS!” I was like “er… duh didn’t you buy them? I got an email about it a couple of days ago and thought you picked up a small game or something.” He then informed me about how much 5000 points is worth in real money and that’s when I was using W, T’s and many F’s to express myself. He said he didn’t buy them and I know I didn’t buy them so the first thing I thought of was identity theft! Oh crap. Someone got our information and is charging crap on our card. But that was a knee jerk reaction to a purchase we didn’t make. After my brain actually kicked in I realized that wtf… the points showed up in our account. Why would a thief buy gamer points that only we could use?
I then saw Chloe go for her game controller and put 2 and 2 together. I remember finding the 360 on one day and found the controller in Chloe’s corral, got mad at Damon for a second only thinking about the energy loss from having the console on, and took the controller out and put it away on the coffee table in the controller basket where it belonged. I figured Chloe had done it because we’d seen her turn the thing on before. All you have to do is push the big button in the middle of the controller.
Apparently it only takes a few button pushes to purchase gamer points once the system is on when it’s set to auto login to xbox live. The correct combo isn’t hard to get blindly. In addition to the gamer points she then managed to mash her way into purchasing some soccer logos and something else we’d never use. Damon has since set the game up to not auto log into xbox live when the 360 is powered on. Now you have to put in a code. Damon said that if she manages to put in the correct code, accept it, and then hit the right buttons to purchase more gamer points, then we were destined to have those gamer points because it would be a miracle.
I told him, miracles aside, that if he left any controllers (or a cell phone) that could spend money with some button mashing, in her reach again, that I’d pack up the game systems until Chloe started school. Even with the login code in place I still don’t trust it. It’s only four controller button pushes in the right order to log in. She managed to smash the right combo to select the most expensive gamer point purchase AND hit yes to confirm it. What’s four more buttons?
