It’s the little things that push us over the edge. One might say I’m back to “grumpy” status. My readers should know that I myself are renowned for my infinite patience and calm dignity in the face of inanimate objects acting in concert to thwart me, but I have seen others react badly. These are just some of the things that cause adverse reactions under the right circumstances. Here’s just a sampling.
You’re trying to open a medication container to get out one or more needed pills. The cap stubbornly refuses to open. The arrows are lined up. The little tab is right under my thumb, in the “should open” position. The cap flies off, spraying pills all over. Now, one has to bend over and pick up thirty pills from the floor. We blow them off because sanitation is very important, and put them back into the container. Then we try to gently “pour” one pill into the palm of the hand, where two different pills are waiting patiently for consumption. Three pills spill out. We make a valiant attempt to put two back. They do, plus one of the other pills that shouldn’t be there. Now you have to try and shake out the mismatched pill, which seems to have found a home in this new, unfamiliar bottle. It’s making acquaintance and refuses to come out until . . . . . . . . . .
Hoses and cords. What is their deal? Why do they like to tie themselves into knots, find loops and slip through them, and otherwise cause unspeakable tangles? The tubes from Her Ladyship’s breathing apparatus is a case in point. The process includes about 30 seconds of set-up and 10 minutes of untangling the hoses. Garden hoses do the same thing, but there’s the added fun in that you spray yourself during the untangling because you forgot to shut off the nozzle last time you used it. I did that just the other day, and had to dash into the house to change so nobody would think I had an “accident”. Electrical cords, phone-charging cords all do the same thing – there is a deviousness built into them that promotes mental ill-health and anxiety.
I come to at 2:30 in the morning, look out and see bright light coming from the living room or kitchen. It’s then I realize that I forgot to shut off a lamp or two before going to bed. Getting up and going out to turn them off means that I’m now fully awake as I return to bed. Her Ladyship has a new lamp with a remote, next to her chair in the living room. It works wonderfully well except that, should the power go off, or even flicker, the light comes on when power is restored. That means I have to get up, go out, try to find the remote for it, which looks exactly like the other six that control various television functions. By the time I get back to bed, I’m so fully awake, that I’m ready to . . . . well, watch tv or write a blog about little things that annoy me.
Emptying the ice bucket. Now that we all, or most of us, have automatic ice makers either in the freezer or in the refrigerator door, (Side Note: someone should tell the fine folks at Publishers Clearing House that the old-fashioned ice trays they continue to sell may not be hugely profitable. Nor are the de-icying sprays they feature along with the trays. But I digress.) We have one with an ice bucket in the corner of the freezer, and we have a bottom-drawer freezer. It works exceptionally well, except that, as we all know, from time to time the cubes all freeze together, so you have empty them out. That way, the ice maker can do its job. Invariably, as I pull out the container, that’s the moment the maker decides to “dump its load”. All over the freezer, around the edges and to the floor, where the cubes run for dear life and skitter across the kitchen floor to a spot under a cabinet. They must say to themselves, “I’m safe here. He’ll never find me until I melt.” I attribute those moments of inspiration and insight to inanimate objects, and I’m reasonably sure that it’s true and they’re mocking me.
You log into an account online. It asks for your username and password, which you put in. (I keep my on my computer, so I can enter them automatically. I know – I’m not supposed to do that.). Then it sends you a verification code. That’s usually to my phone, but sometimes to my email. I either have to run and get my phone, or switch to check my email. Often it hasn’t sent the verification code to my email yet, but of course it’s time-sensitive. I get back to sign in, only to find that I have to start over again, and it’s sending me a new verification code. Now I’m not particularly tech-savy, but I thought the username and password were the verification codes. You can’t be too careful these days I guess, what with Russian and Iranian hackers in a golden age of, well, hacking. I loved the t-shirt that said, “My identity was stolen, and it somehow raised my credit score 18 points.” Also fond of the one that says, “Can’t wait for the computer prompt for username and password, that responds, ‘close enough’.”
The oil companies bump the price of gasoline over $5, so that when prices come down to $4.79, we think we’re getting a “great deal.” Of course, we’ve forgotten that gas was $2.30 at this time last year. Or the wireless phone carriers advertising a “new phone – on us.” It thought that meant it was free. We just upgraded our phones, and they weren’t.
You’re waiting at an intersection to pull out. There’s a car coming at you – usually a large pick-up truck, one of those that can tow an apartment building, or a Mercedes. Just a nanosecond before it gets to you, it puts on the directional and turns off. Or, it turns off without use of the directional at all, because using directionals is optional for drivers of large pick-ups and Mercedes. You could have pulled out safely for quite some time, but no . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conversely, there are those that will go for miles not realizing their directions are still on from when they pulled out of the driveway. I believe that Jerry Seinfeld jokingly referred to this as an ”eventual left”. Legal in many parts of the country where large senior populations live, like Florida. You don’t really know when it will happen, but at some point, these drivers will turn left, taking everyone, including themselves, by surprise. It’s that thoughtful, considerate driving that just makes you nuts from time to time.
You’re waiting patiently in the cashier line at the grocery store and the dear soul ahead of you pulls out her checkbook, or worse, her change purse. She (and I hate to sound sexist, but it’s invariably a woman) starts to count out coins, because she’s sure she has the exact change and wants to get rid of them. Meanwhile, those behind us have our debit cards poised for a quick transaction. Similarly, the other day at the store, I was going to pick up some lottery scratch cards for Her Ladyship. There was a man parked, and I do mean parked, as immovable as the Statue of Liberty. He’d bought a bunch of tickets, but apparently their weight and bulk precluded him from taking them home and scratching them there, so he was busy scratching them all off as he blocked the vending machine. I smiled at him, but rather than picking up on the universal facial expression for “get out of my way” and moving, he informed me that he’d be done “in a minute”.
I was all set to barbeque on Father’s Day. We’d been planning the meal for some time. It had been overcast most of the day, but chose the moment that I turned on the grill to start sprinkling. I looked up at the storm clouds with my best, “Really? Now?“ expression, but that seemed to have little to no effect. It wasn’t raining hard, just enough sprinkle to be annoying, and it meant that I had to dash for the porch between turns of the meat.
The phone rings two or three, or six or eight times just as we’re sitting down to lunch or dinner. We should be able to put our meal times out on the internet, so telemarketers will know not to call then. There should be some sacrosanct times. We have a call block on our phones, but somehow those folks selling Medicare supplements or extended car warranties are exempt. Their calls come right through, routed conveniently through Indiana or South Carolina. Of course, in fairness, our friend Lady Peacock calls anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes into my afternoon nap too.
Finally, I’ve been battling woodchucks in my gardens. I written extensively about this before, but it persists. They’d nibble here and there, so all of the gardens were affected. It’s not like they went through one bed like a buzzsaw and left the rest alone. Nay, nay, there are holes everywhere that lush plants used to be. One even climbed up onto a bench and munched away at some containers, leaving stubble in its path. A neighbor came down with his traps and caught a family of them, so hopefully that will be the end of it for this year. But I have my doubts. I’ll start replacing things and then they’ll be back, torches and pitchforks poised in defiance.
I'm Thinking...No! 