It's incredibly hard to become a customer of @Telstra so you can give them money. They absolutely despise money, and do everything in their power to erect as many obstacles as possible in the way of a normal person establishing a billing relationship with them.

First: "I'd like to buy a 4G WiFi hotspot please."
"Umm, we don't have any. Maybe try K-Mart."

Are you serious? You can't sell me a mobile broadband service, and you'd prefer me to go to a department store. Okay...
So I go to the department store, and they have the same Telstra product $20 cheaper than Telstra does.

Go to activate it. Error message, SIM serial number has already been activated. Well goddamn.
So, back to the @Telstra shop. "Yes, I know I can return the whole thing, but all I want is a $2 SIM to get started. Can you just sell me one of those?"

No. They don't have any. Zero SIMs in the store.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT OTHER PURPOSE DOES A TELSTRA SHOP HAVE?
Their first suggestion was to buy one from @AusPost, but they take 24 hours to activate their prepaid SIMs. Maybe try Woolies?
So I do that, and get my SIM, and go through trying to activate it. And ... now the identity check fails, so I can't.

Fuck. What?
Get @Telstra online support involved. "We'll send you an update in 30 minutes." 70 minutes later, I ping them for an update.
After much to-and-fro, it turns out that my identity check failed because someone at Telstra 8 years ago entered "Mark Newtown" instead of "Mark Newton" next to my drivers license number, so now I can't prove any ID at all to Telstra for any product.
Online support has fixed that.

So now the SIM ostensibly works.

It has taken 11.5 hours from first visit to the Telstra shop to having a working SIM in a WiFi hotspot.

I could have given up at any time. I don't know why I didn't.
How can they be so fucking bad at this? Every interaction I've ever had with @Telstra has been horrible, and they just don't learn anything, ever. All I wanted was a simple retail service, the thing their network of stores exists to sell, and they can't not screw it up.
Goddamn. So glad that's over.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.