I consider myself a fully-functioning adult, but sometimes I still get hit with episodes of anxiety that just seem silly right afterwards. This is a story about one of those episodes.

Sometime last month, I had a voucher worth P1000 (a bit less than 20USD these days) for a certain popular drug store chain; let's reference them by the thinly-veiled "MD". This voucher was from a credit cards rewards program; that isn't really relevant. The voucher consists of a QR code that I'm supposed to show when transacting at MD. The QR code is actually a string code representing my voucher.

Anyway, I wanted to use the voucher so I went over to my nearby MD branch to buy my meds. I have been transacting at this branch often, and the employee who handled my order (let us call him "D") knew me by face at the very least. When I tried to use the voucher, his scanning device had an issue connecting to the network to validate the code. He tried a couple of times, but when it still failed, he suggested I just try it another time as their network was being wonky that day. Okay! I paid via credit card instead and resolved to use it at another time.

Fast forward around 20 days (a week or so ago), and I was on my way home from one of my many errands and it was a bit late but the MD branch was still open and I had to buy meds so I decided to try using the voucher again. This time, I was surprised when they scanned it and told me the voucher had already been used! I was a bit flummoxed, but I still needed to buy the meds so I just paid with cash and started walking home.

On the way home, I felt incredibly frustrated and annoyed, because it felt like I had just been robbed of P1000! And I wasn't sure what to do, or whether it was still worth the time trying to get my voucher code back. Who do I complain to? The MD branch? The head office? The IT company that handles the vouchers? The credit card company whose rewards program I got it from? It's not like I could prove that I did NOT use the voucher (you can't really prove a negative). Overall I felt like it would be a waste of effort to try to complain as it might be unlikely that the voucher amount could be recovered. It felt like the sort of situation where there was a bug in the redemption system somewhere and the MD branch would blame the voucher company and vice versa and nothing would come out of it.

When I got home I ranted at some people and asked for advice. Some people suggested it was still worth pursuing, some people said it might not be worth it. Someone suggested escalating publicly via social media (this seemed excessive). Some people agreed that it seemed unlikely to have any positive outcome. Someone suggested that maybe the employee "D" used the voucher code himself later after I tried to use it, but I didn't want to accuse anyone.

I also tried to access the original URL from when I generated the QR code for the voucher and found a status message saying it had already been used on the date I first tried to use it, at that specific branch, so definitely a problem happened there!

In the end, I resolved to go back the next day and talk to the manager (or anyone) at the MD branch to see if it could be sorted out. Might as well try, right? Well, here's where the anxiety comes in. One of the underlying reasons why I was hesitant to pursue it is that the idea of complaining and being a Karen of sorts just gives me a lot of anxiety. It was troubling me enough that it made it hard to sleep that night, and I may have even had a nightmare about it.

It's not like I haven't been able to do customer service interactions before; I have certainly complained to my ISP any times in the past. But those felt like more structured, official complaint channels, where I was talking to a CS person specifically trained to handle particular complaints and has access to my records and whatnot. This one felt like it would be an "unhandled case" where the manager at the MD branch might not know what to do and may or may not have access to records to check what I was claiming. It was an interaction with an uncertain outcome that I was unsure how to navigate. The unknown-ness of it all was worrying me. I'm not like this all the time, but sometimes the anxiety just hits me hard for no reason!

Even while running the morning's errands the next day, I was internally hemming and hawing over whether I should push through with going back to the MD branch to complain. In the end I did. And one advantage of going there in the morning was that the employee "D" was there again this time (he was not there the previous night), and I spoke to him and told him the whole story.

Long story short, everything turned out peachy. While he was processing other orders, "D" got the scanning device and confirmed that they did not process any such vouchers on the date in question. I showed him the status message that said it was used at this branch. He tried scanning it again, and I think it also told him the code was used at this branch. He spoke to the manager, and after a while they got back to me and said they need to report it to the head office and asked me to leave my contact details so they could call me back when there's a resolution. I agreed and wrote down my deets and walked back home with a sigh of relief, anxiety overcome. They called me again after a few hours and told me I could just come in to use the voucher at any time, and I went back later that day and used it for my mom's meds. I was just happy to be able to recover that lost value! Also super thankful to the MD branch staff for being helpful and handling everything easily and quickly, no fuss.

I suspect what happened was that the scanner device scanned the code and one of the attempts got through and the backend still processed it even though the frontend had already timed out. Which would be a major bug on their backend side, they should await confirmation before committing a transaction!

In the end, I realized I got anxious for nothing, mostly because I was overthinking things. I was worried that they would take things negatively or think I was trying to scam them and I would have to prove myself or whatever. Maybe I was just lucky that the staff turned out to be very helpful?

It probably helped a lot that I came in with my complaint with a good attitude; I didn't make a scene or accuse anyone of wrongdoing or otherwise raise my voice or anything like that. I calmly told them what the problem was and asked if they could help. It's probably good that I did not immediately come back to complain the previous night when I was tired and frustrated and annoyed! I think in the future I need to remind myself that it is totally okay to raise concerns and try to navigate uncertain scenarios as long as you remain calm and rational and try to assume the best of humans.

The world

Trump's criminal trial is proceeding apace, finishing jury selection just as a man chose to immolate himself outside the courthouse. The whole Iran / Israel conflict has not yet escalated... so far. Bitcoin halving is done! Tesla had to recall all their cybertrucks! OJ Simpson has died.

Post.news is shutting down. Post was one of the erstwhile Twitter clones that popped up after Musk started to kill it. I don't really use it but I think I have an account because I occasionally receive an email titled "Weekly Post roundup" or something like that, which I actually found a bit useful for reminding me about things that have happened during the week.

My Week

This week was another exhausting one, as I was out and about most days. Things to attend to included prep for the next immunotherapy session, an optha appointment, meeting up with relatives who were about to fly back to the US, finishing up the boardgame sessions with friends. Thursday night we attended a comedy-themed quiz night.

The weather continues to be punishingly hot, especially since I was moving about during the day. I may or may not have used the term "sea of fire" to describe my commute to a friend's house.

Given I was out of the house a lot, I don't really have a lot to write about today. I did manage to roam some old haunts in between all these things I had to do, but that isn't really of interest. Well, there are some stories to be told, but probably deserving of their own blog posts.

Media Diet

• Gaming:

  • Single player: Still just mostly just playing Stellaris when I can. Started a new run, trying to play tall and with a federation.
  • Online: Still doing regular grinding in Magic Arena and Marvel Snap, sometimes Eternal. Have not had much time but managed to sneak in a couple of Outlaws of Thunder Junction drafts over the past couple of days. They have not gone well. I did manage to hit infinite in Marvel Snap for the 3rd time though!
  • Been playing some boardgames with friends over the past couple of weeks!

• Reading: Not a lot this week, a few comics here and there maybe. I have fallen behind on my reading targets.

• Watching: Nothing of note. Keeping up with the ongoing TV series though. Shogun continues to be excellent and I am very much looking forward to the finale next week. And there are a bunch I want to start! So many things to watch.

Walking and Health

This past week (Sunday through Saturday) Google Fit says I only walked a total of 60,500 steps. Almost a whole day off the usual target, but I'm good with that given how busy the week is. Actually it gives me a bit of confidence that even if I returned to a full time working schedule, I could maybe possibly still maintain this walking pace?

Website Changes

Not much on the frontend.

Ugh, server resource consumption has been spiking again recently, had to ban another AI bot user agent this morning.

Some Links of Interest

• I pray you're born with gills

  A comic about climate change anxiety

• Scrabble: Mattel launches new version of game which is 'less competitive'

  As someone who used to kinda play Scrabble competitively this is sooo not my preference, but I understand the need to make things more accessible for people of different temperaments

• Making version noir

  I liked this discussion of how a new homepage design was made, especially the part about making the comics responsive

• We Need To Rewild The Internet

  "Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments … that madden the creatures trapped within."

Check out the linkblog for past links!

This Coming Week

• Being out of the house so often has generally meant falling behind on my usual routines; I am looking forward to a lighter week that lets me catch up on things I have missed
• Immunotherapy session #6 tomorrow
• We are probably attending another quiz night on Thursday

Our friend from the US was back in town again for a couple of weeks, and that meant getting together and playing some tabletop games he brought along.

Thunder Road Vendetta

Our main plan was to play another campaign of Arkham Horror LCG, which we first played last year, but our fourth party member was a bit late to the first meeting, so first we decided to play Thunder Road Vendetta. It is a post-apocalyptic death race game where teams of cars race across a field full of obstacles and car wrecks and slam into other cars trying to be the first across the finish line. My aggro strategy to race ahead backfired when my two opponents conspired to take out all my cars early, so sad. Despite that, the game is fun and each turn typically involves cars slamming into each other multiple times, sometimes fatally.

Arkham Horror LCG: The Innsmouth Conspiracy

Once the party was complete, we all chose decks and strapped in for another 8-scenario Arkham Horror LCG campaign. This time we were running through The Innsmouth Conspiracy. I played a bookish clue-getting-type of person last time so this time I chose Tony Morgan, whose focus is on combat using guns and switchblades. Basically taking out the bad guys to keep the other investigators alive while they figure all this nonsense out.

Our run started out terribly as we had to start over the first scenario TWICE. Technically we could have kept going, but we preferred to restart while early in the campaign. That took most of our entire first day!

We did a bit better on the second day, powering through scenarios 2-4, though we actually failed the objective in one of the scenarios (it was a murder mystery and we basically accused the wrong suspect because we ran out of time!). Day three was again very challenging, Tony Morgan died in both scenarios 5 and 6, accumulating trauma, but giving his companions time to escape.

The final day with two scenarios was incredibly close, especially scenario 7, which went down the wire! With the agenda deck advancing at the top of the turn, we had one chance to fulfill the scenario objectives and our clue-getting person needed to hit all his investigate attempts to get us there. But he used all his pumps and on the final roll we needed to pull a +0 or better to survive, with multiple curse tokens in the bag. If you've played the game you know these were really bad odds! They passed the bag to me to make this high-pressure roll, and surprisingly I managed to pull the blue star token, guaranteeing victory. It was an epic moment. Final scenario was not as epic, but I enjoyed the idea of Tony Morgan staring two huge ancient onces in the face to keep them occupied as his companions disrupted the dark ritual to win the scenario.

All in all it took us four whole days of playing to finish the campaign! And our US friend was only in town for two weeks this time, so our schedule was super cramped (last year we had a few months to finish the Carcosa campaign). Luckily our schedules were relatively free and there were holidays during this period. The scenarios all felt very difficult; I think the last campaign also felt about the same level of difficulty, but this time we took a lot more time, maybe 3-4 hours per scenario and often going down the wire with the agenda deck. Overall the game remains very exciting and nerve-wracking and probably still best played a scenario at a time over months instead of our crammed schedule!