Annoyances Have you ever had one of those days where everything comes out the wrong way? I just had one. First of all, since I am basically retired, I sometimes lose track of what day it is. When you retire and get on in age it just doesn’t seem important. It doesn’t happen often, but happened to me today. I decided to call my son and have him put his wife on the phone so I could wish her happy birthday. When I called him, he was surprised and I couldn’t figure out why. I said I want to wish your wife happy birthday. He said your are 8 days too early. Then he asked me why I called on his cell phone. I said since it was Saturday, I figured you could put her on. He said there is only one thing wrong with that, it is Friday and I am at work and she has her own cell phone and laughed. This is not the way you want to start out your day. There are times when things just go so wrong, they can create a tragedy. While I had a tiny mishap, the people who lived in Chicago watched in horror on October 8, 1871 when nothing went right and their city burned for 31 hours. One would think a fire in a city could be put out before thousands of buildings burned, but this is not what happened. First of all, the fire started on a Sunday. No one set off an alarm, as unbelievable as this sounds until it was far too late. The fire fighting equipment was inadequate. The conditions for fighting the fire couldn’t have been worse. If luck was involved in any way, it was all bad luck. What is one to do when nothing seems to be going right? I remember a day when I had to register online to get an appointment for a covid shot where the disease was raging. The administration was saying the elderly were to get the shots first because they are the most at risk. I decided to register but there was not one appointment open anywhere no matter how old someone was. I was able to get onto one site but had to fill out reams of paperwork on various screens, but I was willing to give up the time because I thought it was worth it. After what seemed like an eternity, I finally got to the page to submit my paperwork and guess what? If you said the page wasn’t working you would be correct. There was a large button which said to submit, but that button did nothing. On top of that I was not able to save the forms I worked so hard on. It was exasperating, to say the least. It took me two more months to get that appointment and there were a lot of speed bumps along the way. When I went into basic training in the army, we started in a retention center for three days, before actually being sent to the training center. A Colonel came in with a sergeant who told us we better make this place look great or else. We spent the entire day cleaning every inch of the barracks, and buffed the floor to a high shine. We were confident the Colonel would be impressed if he came back. We were exhausted when they came back. The Colonel took one look and took a full garbage can and dumped it in the middle of the floor, and yelled clean this up and left. I look back at that event now and realize he couldn’t find anything wrong but was not about to let us think we did a good job. It was a lesson teaching us we were only lowly recruits. When I was a teenager, I was very athletic and one of the things I liked to do was go down to the bay and row around as fast as I could. One day I asked my girlfriend at the time if she would like to come and she said yes. I got out into the bay and started to row. After I was rowing for a while one of the oars snapped. We started to drift. I jumped out onto what I thought was a small island in the bay and went right through it. I managed to scramble back into the boat and eventually was able to beach the boat on a small sandy island about the size of a city block. When the oar broke it broke in a jagged fashion and I had a fishing rod with me with heavy line on it. I decided to try and tie the two pieces together. It was much harder than it looked and took me quite a while but I finally succeeded. Then I noticed the tide had gone down and the rowboat was much further back from the edge of the island. What was I too do? It took me hours but I was able to drag and push the boat into the water and as I started to row, the owner of the boat rental came by with a motor boat looking for me and towed us back. My date had also pushed and pulled the boat and never went boating with me again. It is a known fact that problems with businesses when the only place you can complain to them is on the computer or cell phone, can cause a lot of stress. There is nothing worse than some expensive piece of software having a problem and the only contact point listed is on the web. I purchased a piece of software with a subscription and a money back guarantee for 60 days. Long story short, it didn’t work as promised. I went to the website and the only contact point was an email address. I wrote to the company and asked for my deposit back and to end the subscription. There was no reply. I had already went on their site and cancelled but that had no effect. They sent me an email thanking me for the subscription and I answered by telling them I cancelled and wanted my money back and to end the subscription and still no answer. Finally, I called my credit card company and cancelled through them. It was all very annoying. My final tale is about something I still can’t figure out. I got a charge for a credit card I didn’t own. It was a withdrawal from my bank account. The bank told me there was nothing going on with the account and the charge was from a reputable credit card. They said they believe it was some sort of typing error by an employee somewhere along the line. Thank goodness my credit card company took care of it.
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