Category: 生意­ / Business

Busy and Interesting Day

Today was a pretty busy day, but let’s start with the fun part. Tonight we went out to eat Thai Food at Mei Kung restaurant. It’s a pretty well known Thai place and Maggie frequently points out various local celebrities dining there. The only one I’ve really know all that well was Shunza but tonight when we were eating Maggie pointed out that Mavis Fan (范曉萱) was waiting outside for a table. After a while she came in and sat at the table right next to ours. I’ve been listening to her music for several years.

Anyways, back to other things. This morning I went to the accountant’s office to pick up my bank book, business license, tax stamp, and a bunch of various documents. Then I went to the bank with Maggie where we did a whole lot of stuff including getting the company bank account finally activated, get the extra US$ money over the initial startup capital converted to TW$, claim a wire transfer from my US account to my personal account, and do a bank transfer of the second payment for the contractor. I’m getting good at writing my Chinese name now from signing lots of documents.

Then I went to check out how the shop is going. The wallpaper is all up now and they were working on the walls in the back room. With the wallpaper and tiling done up front, it’s really starting to look nice.

Equifax Customer Service Sucks

UPDATE: Problem resolved! For more, and Equifax contact information please see here: http://blog.jameslick.com/?p=560

I went over to the Annual Credit Report web page to get my current US credit reports. The process was surprisingly painless for the first two, Trans Union and Experian. When I got to Equifax, everything went smoothly up to the point where I got my order confirmation and transaction code. Despite the order having been confirmed, clicking on the ‘view my product’ link resulted in a page saying that they were sorry I was having problems logging in and telling me to log in again.

They didn’t ask for or give me a username and password when ordering, but I have an Equifax login from previous orders, so I dug them up and tried them, but was told that the username or password are invalid. No problem; they have a password recovery link there. I give it the required information and get back: System Error. Lather, rinse, repeat. Same problem multiple times, even the next day.

Next stop would be customer service. Unfortunately, Equifax makes it approximately impossible to contact them by phone or online. They tell you to login to your account to contact them, which doesn’t do a bit of good if you can’t log in. All of their publicly posted phone numbers are for “automated systems”, and hitting 0 does not get to an operator. Googling for a contact number didn’t help either. I found a customer service number in an old email, but it has been disconnected. That email also had a customer service email address which I sent a request off to. We’ll see if that results in anything. If not, the only remaining option is to contact them by writing to a PO Box.

It’s really annoying when companies put up walls like this that make it nearly impossible to contact them for any reason, not to mention having such flaky systems that you have to contact them to get anything done.

If you haven’t already ordered your free credit reports (available to all but north-east states currently), go over and get copies through the above site. It’s a good idea to review your credit reports once a year, and work on correcting any negative items. Unless you are going to take out a large loan soon (house, car, etc.), don’t bother paying extra for credit scores. And let me know if you have any difficulty with Equifax too.

UPDATE: Problem resolved! For more, and Equifax contact information please see here: http://blog.jameslick.com/?p=560