TDAmeritrade order problems

I traded like a clown today.

And my broker was a bigger clown, so it was a real circus around here.

The first problem I had with TD Ameritrade today was that I shorted a stock,
and as I am shorting it, the stock runs way way down, so I get the worst fill ever,
then turns and starts going back up as soon as I get filled,
then I wanted to short some more, but I get a message that says:

Day Trading Buying Power cannot be used to purchase this security.

I just figured out that if you took both the stock I already had and the new stock I wanted to purchase it would have been slightly over the amount of cash I had in my account.
Even though it was telling me I had buying power more than double what I was trying to buy, and day trading buying power of 4 times that.

So not sure how big of a problem that way, anyway next problem.

I screwed up and bought a stock that I was short, so now I have a short and long position in the same stock.

I call TDAmeritrade and they start in on some voice recognition system and they want me to go through there set up procedure. So it takes 3 or 5 minutes to get through all the menus and options and entering my account number and my pin number and waiting to see what number they want me to push.

So after all that then they put me on hold for 10 minutes. I guess this really reinforces the need for a separate account with another broker that you can flat your trades with incase of an emergency.

In 15 minutes I could have been killed in a stock that was flying against me.

So during this time I decide I want to so ahead and get out of my long position and just be short the stock. So I enter a sell order, and this is what I get:

In order to break a short against the box position, the short position must be closed out first.

So their system won't let me get out of my position, fortunately I was flat.

Anyway, the eventually showed up on the phone and said sometime in 30 minutes or so they would flat out the trades.

But when they did it did not show up on my screen, I called them back 2 hours later and asked about it because I didn't want to carry these two positions over night and get some kind of daytrading cash call on my account.

God only knows what they would do.