Got to a point in the remake of the first Quitclaim tonight where I could assess what was left and figure out how long it was going to be. It turns out, to my surprise, that it's going to be eight pages -- same as the original. I didn't expect that, because there are a couple of places where I've put in new panels that didn't exist in the original, to try to avoid crowding the dialogue quite as much ... but I forgot that in the original, which was done back when I still did not have the hang of predicting and spacing layout, I had a whole last page to fill with only four panels, which I got around by making them large and having a lot of whitespace on the page. Now that last page will have eight panels, the default layout. In other words, the extra material I added is buffered by the spare space I had available on the last page.

I know you care a whole lot. Well, this journal is documentation, so I'm documenting. Sometimes documenting means telling about the stuff that happened which is important to your existence but not particularly interesting to anyone else's.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I could barely attend to the usual business because a bunch of stuff at $WORKPLACE stopped working. We had login failures on our web site(s) -- we'll call that problem 1, for brevity. And a complicated application which makes heavy use of an API I wrote to support it suddenly was unable to get anything from that API -- call that problem 2.

Since the API doesn't use the main login/auth system at all -- it has its own access control method -- it seemed like the two problems couldn't possibly be related, except that they both started at exactly the same time, which felt like it couldn't be coincidence.

Neither problem was an issue on our end -- the API worked fine if you tried to talk to it from anything other than that application, and the web sites themselves were perfectly fine. For problem 2, it was a complete mystery what the heck was happening. For problem 1, the identity-management people (the ones who run the login system) insisted it wasn't on their end, that they didn't mess with anything, et cetera. Arguing and yelling and searching for problems and finding workarounds for two days ensued.

Around the middle of the day Wednesday, when I should have been leaving the house for my usual walk and lunch, I got a clue which pointed me in the right direction, and for once I got the ticket to the attention of the correct people on the first try. Within a half hour, my problem, problem 2, was solved. I said "Hooray" and went to lunch.

While I was out, my co-worker thought "You know, what if they are related, though?" and reopened my ticket and asked them "Hey, could this also be applicable to this other problem over here?" And the answer was yes. Resolved by the time I finished my lunch.

And what was it, you ask? Well, no, you don't ask, but I'm going to tell you anyway. In response to some severe and sudden denial-of-service attacks, the network security people set the firewall on "terminate with extreme prejudice." This is the firewall for all of $WORKPLACE, you understand, and $WORKPLACE is a very large, multifaceted institution. I think they figured it was better to overcompensate and have to reopen holes later than to let the wrong things in. And a whole lot of things which normally could and should talk to one another suddenly couldn't.

Rumor has it the DDoS attack came from Iran. I would insert some choice remarks about the lump of rotted hamburger Donald Trump uses for a brain, unintended consequences, yada yada, but 1) I suspect you can fill in the blanks yourself and 2) as unintended consequences go, all of us getting locked out of our house for two days is fairly low on the list.

Today, in a fit of ambition and productivity, I did something I've been putting off for a couple of months. That'll teach me.

I have an old Shell gas card. It presumably still works, but I haven't used it in years. They send me a new one every now and then, I put it in my checkbook with other cards I never use, and that's it. For ages now -- because I don't buy anything with it -- the only charge that's been on it every month is eight bucks, which is/was a payment for this life insurance coverage I got years ago as an offer from Shell. I mean many years ago. I've gotten much better insurance elsewhere since then ... but I also have a lot of personal inertia, never more so than when trying to deal with corporations on the telephone, and cancelling it would surely mean having to do that, and an extra ten thousand of life insurance can't be a bad thing, so I've just kept it going.

Well, a couple of months ago, the insurer -- it's actually Transamerica at this point but IIRC the policy has changed hands several times over the decades -- wrote me that Shell was no longer going to be allowing the insurance payments to go onto the card, and that going forward they (Transamerica) would need to bill me directly. That, for me, was enough to push past my inertia. I decided to cancel the policy and cancel the Shell card I hadn't used in who knows how long.

But in order to cancel the Shell card I was certainly going to have to get on the telephone with a corporation. Now, let me make this clear to you: I despise talking on the phone. I don't even like talking on the phone to my mother. And navigating a phone tree, trying to decipher what Najeem in Offshoristan was saying, being placed on hold multiple times, probably having to throw a fit to escalate to an actual human who actually knew what they were doing ... I saw all these things in my future, and they gave me cold chills.

BUT there might be an alternative! After all, on every bill, Shell prints a notice that says "Hey, did you know you can do all this on our nifty website?" And maybe the website would have a way for me to cancel my card without actually getting on the telephone!

Well. Folks, a couple of months ago I tried to register on the Shell website. It did not work. It just flat-out did not work. When I put in my card number, it said that number was in an incorrect format.

There was an alternate "prove who you are" method, but that was for people who already had an online account registered who didn't happen to have their card number available at the time. I tried it anyway, in case it somehow thought I'd already registered. That method called for pushing a code to my phone. I told it, fire away. The code never pushed.

And that's where I left it for a couple of months, because the next step was calling them on the phone, and we just discussed how I felt about that.

Today I tried to call them on the phone. And once I convinced Najeem (I think his name may actually have been Najeem) to send me to actual technical support for the website -- because the phone tree is structured entirely around billing, you see -- I got someone who seemed very competent and helpful. She also was very obviously frustrated with the website (I mean, before even talking to me), which in retrospect I should have realized was a bad sign.

First off, we had to sort out that there are two numbers on the card and that the form wanted the number that wasn't the number the description of the field implied it wanted. That is, the card has a a card number and an account number, and the field is labelled "Card Number," but it wants the account number. But not quite. She gave me a four-digit prefix to put in front of the account number. This prefix is INVISIBLE. It is not anywhere on the card, nor in any of my documents. Yet that was what was needed to get to the next stage of the form. So I can only assume that no one successfully registers on the Shell website without having to call tech support.

Anyway, I got to the next stage, where it asked for more info -- my name as it appears on the card, the security code from the back, the last four digits of my SSN -- all stuff that's hard to get wrong, and believe me, in the four times I tried it, we made sure I wasn't getting any of it wrong, including one where she asked me to try putting my name in all caps because "this may be one of the forms that's weird about that."

It turns out that Citibank -- the Shell cards are handled by Citibank -- hates the fuel cards. Hates them a lot, because the web pages and such for the fuel cards do things in a different way that they're not used to and can't support well, and act erratic, and also (she didn't say this but I inferred it) gas cards are getting to be such a seldom-used thing that they don't have to do support on them often enough to remember the procedures. (In fact, at one point, she said "I'm writing this down so I'll have it the next time I need it.")

Anyway, I never could get in. The form kept refusing to accept my information at that step, and wouldn't say what part of it it didn't like. Nothing we tried worked.

She tried her best. She offered to transfer me to Offshore (that's not me being snarky again -- she referred to it as "Offshore" the entire call) to see if they had more information, but the thing is, she had just come back from putting me on hold to consult with them herself, and I didn't think they'd have anything for me they didn't have for her. So I thanked her kindly for her time, and I still can't get into the Shell website.

My Shell bill got a little in arrears, because I'd been avoiding sending them a check while there was still the possibility I could work this out online. Tomorrow I mail them a check, and there may still be a little overdue accumulated balance, and so I may at some point have to mail them another check. After that, though, since Transamerica has stopped putting their eight bucks on it every month, there should be no traffic on the card whatsoever. One day I may try again to get the web site working. Or maybe one day I'll get on the phone again and just try to convince Najeem to cancel the damned card.

But not right away. It'll take me at least a month to recover psychologically from this experience.

As for Transamerica, I'm just not paying them any money. They'll let the policy lapse -- in fact, their most recent bill says they already have -- and that'll be that.

This is probably not the best solution, but it's the one I'm taking. My nerves simply cannot handle getting on the phone with Transamerica.