You Though AT&T Was Bad Aug 28, 2009

Well Grandma Wood gets my award of appreciation for her email this week. She was the only one that remembered that there is a poor little missionary over in the South China Sea floating around. Ok ok ok… so now that the typhoon is gone I am no longer floating.  Thanks grams I love you to pieces.
I was just teasing you all, I am sure that you haven’t gotten used to the fact that I email on Saturdays now Instead of Wednesdays. This week has gone by so fast! Being in the office just makes time fly by. We are just busy busy busy. All day!
I am in charge of working out the cell phone situations for all the missionaries in the mission. We currently have 118 cell phones. So recently I have been working with a cell phone company called ZhongHua to get a new cell phone contract signed. It makes me want to pull my hair out. You thought cell phone companies in the states were bad. Ha… Try Taiwanese cell phone companies, you have to be extra careful or else they will try and charge you all sorts of penalties. For example 2 days ago I sent an email to our contact at the cell phone company, She didn’t respond. So yesterday early in the morning I sent another email, no response. Finally at about 4:30 pm I called her and was like hey did you get my emails. And she was like yeah, but I finish doing it before responding. Whatever she was trying to wait until the next payment period started before responding. What I told her to do in the emails was cancel 10 phone lines, before July. We pay month to month so as soon as the 1st of the month comes around we are automatically signed up for the entire month. Anyways, so after I called and told her I wanted them cancelled yesterday she was like okay. You know what happened? She called us back about an hour and a half later. She knows that the Operations Manager (me) is in charge of the phone stuff, but she asked to talk with President Hoer. Luckily, I heard my companion answer the phone. Anyways, so she got on the line with President Hoer. President didn’t know that I have been trying to get her to cancel the phones for the past 3 days. So I started listening to the conversation on speaker phone and then she said, “So I will just go ahead and cancel those phones next week, is that okay?” Sneaky little stinker huh? She knows how our mission office runs because they have been dealing with us for years, so she tried to go around the person that actually does the phones so that they could force us to sign up for another month. However, I ran into President’s Office and told him, “Hey, tell her not okay, she needs to cancel those phones today!” So he told her and then she tried to say, well lets just wait until Monday, but Monday would be the start of a new payment period. Isn’t that a slimy thing to do?! I was so ticked. Anyways, we got them cancelled.
Hahaha… I feel bad for you all. You have to read about me whining about cell phone companies. You probably want to hear about missionary stuff. Hahaha… well, we had a couple of good lessons last night. We were walking around in this park looking for people to contact and I ran into this somewhat drunk man. He wasn’t like drunk drunk, he was just a little buzzed. You know the really friendly type. Anyways, as soon as he saw me HE started talking to ME. Crazy! People hardly ever talk to us first, usually they look at us like we are alien cyborgs. So I sat down with this man and started talking with him. Really nice guy! Anyways, he told me all about how when he was younger he was in some Chinese mafia and used to be the one they would send to scare people or beat up people. Then he got married and decided to leave the mafia and all his mafia friends abandoned him. He had a really bad drinking problem though. And then a couple years ago he had his first kid, so he got a real job and stopped smoking. Then after another year he started to not drink as much. So now he only drinks on Friday nights occasionally with his friends in the park. Anyways, I sat down with him and we talked about eternal families, that if we prepare in this life we can live with our families in the life to come. He loved it! And said he would come to church on Sunday. He wasn’t really drunk so he won’t forget, plus I have his cell phone number. But he wants to bring his whole family. It was perfect too because he said he was looking for something to help him make the final change to being a good person. I told him through Jesus Christ we can all change. We will see what happens I guess.

Love ya
Elder Anderson