08:17 – Yesterday was one of those days when nothing goes right. I tried to print our federal tax forms duplexed. The printer sat there with the receiving data LED blinking for about four or five minutes and then just did nothing. I checked the print queue. There was nothing in the queue and the printer status showed ready. So I sent the job again. Same deal. So I sent the job to the other laser printer. Same deal. So I tried sending it non-duplexed to the first printer. Again, five minutes of waiting and then the job just disappeared with nothing printed. So I tried printing just the first page. Again, I waited five minutes or so with the receiving data LED blinking. This time, the printer actually printed a page but when I looked at it it was just a box with a data overflow error.
So I called Barbara at work and asked if she could print the forms there if I emailed them to her. I did that, and she sent them off to her printer. The printer spat them out, but when she looked at them they were just the blank forms, with none of our data filled in. Okay, obviously the problem was okular, the PDF reader supplied with Linux Mint. So I installed Acrobat Reader on my computer and called up the completed 1040 form. No user data were visible in the fields, so I started over using Acrobat Reader to fill in the blank 1040 form. I saved the form and sent it to the printer, where it printed normally. Geez.
By this time it was almost 5:00. I checked my email and found a message from AmEx alerting me to suspicious charges on my card. So I called them and learned that someone had tried to put a $2,700 charge on my card at Best Buy. I told them that I hadn’t made that charge, along with a couple of others that had been made that day. They said they’d refused those charges anyway, but my card had been compromised (yet again…) and so they were voiding it and sending me a new one.
I decided to bag work for the day. Barbara got home from the gym and we had dinner. Then Frances called about 8:30 to say that she’d gotten a message about the tests that the doctor had done Monday on their mom. Sankie has a Streptococcus pyogenes (hemolytic streptococcus) infection, and the doctor had phoned in a prescription, presumably for penicillin. Frances had already had a long day, and wondered if she could wait until this morning to pick up the prescription rather than going to the pharmacy to pick it up and take it over to her mother immediately. I told her that, given her mom’s very frail physical condition and the potential severe risks of an S. pyogenes infection, she really should get her mom on the antibiotic as soon as possible. So Frances drove over to the 24-hour pharmacy to pick up the prescription and take it to her mother. She called back a little while later to say that the doctor had phoned the prescription in to the wrong pharmacy, one that was already closed. So she’s headed over to that pharmacy this morning and then delivering the prescription to her mom. At this point, I’m thinking about applying for a DEA number so that I can write my own damned prescriptions.