Still ringing, still riding, Microsoft morons

So I was unable to get an appointment yesterday at the clinic to have someone look at my ear.  I will be going there this morning instead.  My ear still feels closed although the level of hearing is better than when it first happened.  What has not changed is the low volume but constant ringing sensation I have in the ear.  Last night I dumped a 50/50 mix of vinegar and isopropyl alcohol in the ear for a few minutes which gave me a somewhat painful burning sensation.  It will be interesting to see what sort of diagnosis I am given.

Last night after work Cindy accompanied me to the school for some riding, her on the Minipro me on the Ninebot One.  I wanted to both get more practice in and show Cindy that she didn’t have to be so fearful of me crashing on the wheel now that I have some basic control.  We zipped all over the school grounds.  I used Cindy as practice for me as I tried to follow where she went on the Minipro which has more precise steering.  I was able to navigate wherever she went.

When we were on more open stretches the higher speed capability of the wheel was evident.  When the minipro speed limiter was kicking in I was able to keep going faster.  The Ninebot One E+ has a top speed of between 14-15 mph compared to 11 for the Minipro.  My rides were not without incident.  The one time I jumped off when I was unable to get over a thick lip on the road from the grass side.  I also had a few big wobbles and swerves that I was able to recover from without incident.  It was fun and I wish we could have stayed longer.

I find as I am driving around I am constantly evaluating the area for EUC riding fun level.  I can totally see me keeping the wheel in the car and stopping on my way home at various locations to give the wheel a spin.

I have been trying to get our office’s new Microsoft Office 365 subscription activated since late last week.  For some odd reason it is not allowing me to apply the subscription to our existing account that we set up for evaluation.  I have spent no less than two hours on the phone with someone named “Jake” that is obviously not a US citizen.  I can not quite place his accent but english is obviously not his first language which made the communication very frustrating.

When I would try to apply the key an error would pop up saying that key could not be used on this type of (government) subscription.  The problem seemed pretty obvious to me, I need a different key. He had me going through these maddening hoops that I knew would make no difference like clearing cache and cookies, using different browsers, changing internet options, and turning on compatibility mode.  I told him none of this made sense to do based on the error.  He said he had to have me do these steps before he was allowed to contact level two support.

At one point I lost my cool and ranted on him pretty hard.  I said I was tired of them wasting my time and if he was unable to resolve the problem I would like to talk to somebody that could.  He assured me he was escalating the issue and would get back to me asap.  It just seems ridiculous to me that Microsoft can’t figure this out.  It’s not rocket science.