Hello From the Grinch

We might as well start at the beginning our customer service woes - last June and Ogden's Carpets.
We have mostly wood floors in our house, but decided that it'd be nice to have some cozy carpeting for our family room, so we picked out our fave and eagerly awaited the installation date. It came, two guys showed up, I gave the one who was in charge the instructions (leave a square of wood uncarpeted around the door so we can still open it). He failed to relay them to his english-speaking-challenged coworker, and we end up with a strip of carpet tacking and a ripped out baseboard where the wood was supposed to be. He pulled out the carpet tacking and left. Lame. So Add and I went in to the store and asked the "customer service" man to fix it. He tossed me a tube of putty, insisted there had only been one worker at our house that day, and sent me out the door. So my mean hubby called him (after talking to his tearful wifey), and he studdered his way through an apology and assured Nate that it was being taken care of. Um, it's now December 16th and we still have holes in our wood floor and no baseboard.
Skip ahead to November and AT&T.
We spend way too much money on phone bills, so we researched and schemed and figured out a way to get it down to a total of about 25 bucks a month and still be able to call our long distance families as much as we want. As part of the research, I called AT&T (our cell phone company) and asked if I (who am under contract for at least another year or so) could pass my contract over to Nate (who has no contract) and get out of it without paying $175 for an early termination fee (because the contract will still be going on). It took about 20 minutes to get the message across, and she said that that'd be fine and she'd put a note our account for when we're ready to make the switch.
So I switch to Virgin Mobile, call AT&T to switch Nate over to my contract, and am informed that it's impossible and they have no record of my previous call. So now we either get to pay them a lot of money, or I can switch back over to them. Too bad we're poor.
Totalling the car - AllState and America First Credit Union.
Things started out okay, with AllState (the other guy's insurance company) providing us with a sweet Toyota Tundra to drive around. Although it was definitely hot, it was way too big for me to drive. Every time I got on the road I felt like I was in a two-ton tank of destruction and it was only a matter of time before I started running people over.
We then get an AMAZING offer for our totalled car - as in, we had it for almost 3 years, put over 30,000 miles on it, hit a deer in it, and it only lost 600 dollars in value from the time we bought it. Beautiful. So we set up an appointment to hand over the title and pick up our check with the nice AllState man in Ogden. Well Nate forgot to sign the title the night before, and he works in Salt Lake, so I called to reschedule. Left a message. Called again, no answer, called a couple more times, no answer. Called the next morning and caught him in his car. He told me to call back, leave a message, and he would reschedule. Called the next day, etc. Finally this past Friday he offered to bring it to our house. He'd be there between 1 and 3. Great.
Calls at 4 and says he'll be there by 5. Calls at 6 and says he can't give me a check because he doesn't have the right kind, so he's transferring it to the Salt Lake office and the earliest we can get our check so we can get a new car is Monday. Meanwhile, they'd taken away our rental car because they'd already extended an offer to us. After lots of stressing and prayers, Nate's home teaching companion (who is a mechanic) called out of the blue and offered to lend us his car for as long as we need. I could kiss his feet every day for the rest of my life.
Saturday we went car hunting, found one (that the home teaching companion looked over for us free of charge) and told the owner that we'd buy it on Tuesday (we had to get the check Monday).
Monday morning I called AllState, we can have the check by Wednesday. P.S. We're driving to Vegas on Friday. Yikes. I beg for mercy. She tells me that if I drive to Murray (an hour away) right then, then I can have it. And they'll only reimburse us for the carseat (that we replaced the day after the accident) if we give them our receipt and the old carseat. Thanks for letting us know about two weeks too late when both of those are long gone! Nate calls and begs for a rental car so we can at least have insurance and tires that aren't bald as Add and I drive for several hours in the snow to get the check, and we end up with another monster truck that I drive white-knuckled all the way down to Murray, almost killing us and another carful in the process.
We get the check, say hi to Nate, who graciously offers to drive to the bank so I don't knock down the drive-thru lanes. The bank says we can have about a fifth of it today and the rest will be on hold until next Tuesday. I want to send myself through the little drive-thru tube and strangle the woman on the other side.
Today we meet the car guy at his credit union, go through the whole loan fiasco, since most of our check is on hold, take the keys, and leave. Nate didn't leave for work until 12:15. Around 1:00 as I'm getting things organized to take to the DMV to register the car, I realize that the lady put the wrong kind of car on our loan, so I call the dang credit union back and another lady says that if I just come in, she'll fix it and give me the title. Then about 30 minutes later, I get a call that says Nate has to come too. They close at six and he's not due home till 6:15.
So Nate decides to come home early. We race to the credit union. The clock reads 5:55. I step up to the doors in time to hear them lock. We tap on the glass as Addison shivers. They ignore us. Finally we head to the drive-thru, where the nice lady informs us that, "we're actually closed." We tell her the situation and she's nice enough to check with the loan lady (who is at fault here). She comes back and informs us that all the loan documents have already been "secured for the night." Meaning what? The lady turned off her computer? Shut her desk drawer perhaps? Maybe it's the snazzy kind with a little lock on it. They don't open until 9:00 tomorrow morning.
No problem, except for one little thing. I HAVEN'T SEEN MY HUSBAND IN ABOUT A MONTH!!!! Between his two grad school classes (attending, researching, presentations, papers, etc.) and the fact that he has to be finished with the index to volume one of the JSP by Friday, he's been working at least 80 hours a week. Seriously, it was a huge deal last night when we decided that the hour and a half between the time he gets home and the time Add goes to bed is not going to contain work or school. I am asleep every night long before he comes to bed, and he's out the door before I wake up. Nate is not a neglectful husband by any means, but there's no way around any of this. We just have to survive until Saturday when we head home for Christmas. That said, Nate is stressed to the max, and I am an emotional basket case. I don't think I've cried this much or this often since Addison was born. I mean, I cried when I had to find a babysitter for Add today. AKA, Nate doesn't have time to go to the bank at 9:00 tomorrow morning.
So the long and short of it can be summed up in the wise words of my older sister Amber, "The moral of the story is - I have no idea. Sometimes life just stinks."