Infamy! Infamy!

 

You know, you spend a damn week indoors for the most part, waiting out the rain, sitting on your dead ass listening to your husbands car videos and dicking with your computer, and then it all fucking hits in the space of an hour, BAM-

-I get a bill saying I owe 311.00 for a doctors appointment that consisted of me spending fifteen minutes chatting!  Chatting! With my endocrinologist.  Oh, our insurance paid 45.00 of that.

-This same bill informs me that I am two months in arrears.  TRY SENDING THE BILL IN THE MAIL SO I'LL RECEIVE THE MOTHERFUCKER, how about.  Great!  Just GREAT!  I had an impeccable credit rating.  I paid the whole thing down tout de suite and came back home glowering. Then:

-I finally get in touch with my old psychiatrist (The beloved Dr. Thang Do, who can do no wrong) who is retiring, and find that a. He and his lovely wife are moving to Hawaii FOREVER because he is retiring, and b. he will not refill my Adderall scrip because he c. wants to wean me off another medication so that d. when I am transferred to the care of his successor, she won't geek out when she sees that I've been given both downers and an upper.  

I only use the Adderall in very, very limited amounts at infrequent intervals, when I'm faced with a lot of grown up activities and issues and need the focus.  I take a pediatric dose, in fact.  I understand completely where he is coming from.  It took he and I several years to build up a relationship where he felt comfortable leaving me to pick and choose what additives and preservatives I needed to get through life, and I'll have to build up the same kind of thing with his successor.  but....AGGGGH.  Then,

-I had to call and make a preliminary appointment with his successor, which cannot be done with one simple phone call.  Oh no.  I have to talk to her, then go online, with both computer and phone at the ready, and open an account on Patients Portal, where all the paperwork and general office bullshit is handled, and

-THE MOTHERFUCKER IS SPUN.

I cannot describe the gyrations and horror I went through trying to get an account opened on this fucking 'streamlined, time saving, simple and accurate' piece of shit lame ass slow claggy glitchwad of a portal.  So, I...

-Had to call Patients Portals helpline.

-Cue more horseshit.  Luckily, after a rocky start where our phones decided whether or not they needed to use a condom,  I reached a very patient, kind and competent young man with a voice that could melt sheet steel and a lovely way of expressing himself, and together we mucked our way through the swamp of poor website design and slow servers and bad code that is Patients Portal and finally, finally, I was able to establish an account, and I only shouted 'FUCK' seven times.  The poor guy was laughing so hard by the end that I felt we'd established a real rapport.

Sermon follows.     

I always make it known to help center personnel that I understand that they are not the authors of my disgruntlement, and try to be mannerly and kind to those poor kids while explaining that I am 61 and have no patience with this crap.  And I always, always go out of my way to praise them to the skies when the deed is finally accomplished, because those calls really are monitored by their supervisors - I used to do call center work, and I know.  If some poor kid gets my drama on the line and can manage to drag me through all the barbed wire and landmines to a solution, you BET I praise that kid to the skies by the name they give me so they'll get a good review.  You should do the same.  I've been a call center terminal.  It's thankless.  You're the flack catcher. Be kind to your call center friends! 'Cause a duck may be somebody's mother! Be kind to your friends in the swamp! Where the weather is very, very, domp! You may think that this is the end!  Well it is!    

-On top of all this, MY H.R. GIGER 'ALIEN' T SHIRT HAS NOT ARRIVED.  

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH!

I paid bigtime for that fucker and it's like they're still picking the goddamn cotton out in the field or something.  I WANT MY H.R. GIGER 'ALIEN' SHIRT!  It's been a damn month.  They've already asked me online for feedback, and children?  I GAVE THEM FEEDBACK.  I held my electric guitar right up next to those stacks, cranked it up to eleven, and set it on fire. Oh, they got some damn feedback.  I'm expecting a check.  Will I ever see it?  Who's to say?  It's only 30.00 fuckin' dollars, RIGHT????

-Interwoven with all this kerfuffle is the sad fact that my cell phone and I don't get along At All.  And all during this kerfuffle my cell phone played an integral role, because nothing can be simple any more. You can't just pick up a phone and talk to a person and then things happen and you get a letter and it's all done.  No.  I won't even go into the sheer aggravation and dislike that exists between myself and the little wafer of dodgy technology that everything in the fucking 21st century seems to hinge upon.  It's TRAGIC.

-I went to bed early last night after a heavy meal that dropped me like a stunned rabbit. I woke up and went out into the living room to watch a little comedy, get right, wait to get sleepy again, when all of a sudden I heard a sound which was for all the world as though someone had slit open a ten pound bag of rice and slung it against my windows.  I ran to look out the front door and it was raining hayrakes and pitchforks, just straight down from the skies, and it was as tepid and dank as the locker room at the YWCA.  I stood on the front porch and could not see across the street.

A little rain is good.  A little more is fine.  A whole metric shitload in the middle of late Spring is not so good.  I had to go out and mow the lawn this afternoon because I swear that rain drew the grass up out of the ground like a snakecharmers' flute.  Yes, Mr. Inexplicable DeVice can laugh; I had buttercups all over hells half acre out there.  Not now, of course.  Oh hail no.  

-If I go and use the hose bib at the back of the house, I get dive bombed by a white crowned sparrow who has established a nest in the pink lonicera nearby.  If I open my front room window, I get called shitty names by a white crowned sparrow who is building a nest in the clematis jackmanii growing right alongside that window.  If I walk under my weeping alder, I get called a commie pinko fag by the white crowned sparrow who has nested in it's canopy and brooks no invaders.  

That made trimming that alder back a real adventure.  Man, that was one pissed off tiny birdie.  I trim my weepers on the Vitruvian rule:  Muk is the measure of all things.  It's not like I'm cloud pruning and disrupting shit.  These are just agitated little over-caffeinated birds who need to shut up. 

-I have a house sparrow building a nest in my campsis radicans, the one that leans on my shed.  It might actually have a clue and leave me alone. Then again, it might be partying with the hummingbirds, crowned sparrows and hornets and take an attitude. Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Only dopes take dope.  Just say no.

-I have a mole the size of a cock-sucking Tonka truck tunneling underneath my back yard.  This thing throws up hills the size of Vesuvius and has cut channels from the back fence to my house.  I stick the hose down it's tunnels and blast the fucker?  It just comes up somewhere else.  It's been a while since I had anything bigger than a vole out here, and I am considering evil solutions.

No. Do no attempt to save me from myself, gentle reader. This is MY GARDEN.  It may be a sweet wee fuzzy rodent with paddly paws and a cute pointy nosie, but the fucker must die before it finds a girlfriend.

Infamy!  Infamy! They all got it in fa' me!