I was scheduled to make a business call at 9 yesterday morning. Set my phone to alarm at 8:55 so I wouldn't forget.
I'd also planned to call the Social Security Administration about a matter that has been driving me nuts since I retired. (I may give you the full low-down, once it's resolved, or perhaps before then, if I get any more pissed about it. Which could happen. Likely, in fact. Anyway . . . .) So, since I had almost an hour to kill, I called the 1-800 number.
Have you called the SSA l-800 number lately? (If you haven't, don't. Just get your butt in the car and go see somebody, face to face, and hope it does you some good.)
Right off the bat, the recording said the wait was going to be 30 minutes. In the past few months, I've been on hold on that line in excess of 5 hours at a stretch; 30 minutes is nothing to me now. So I put my phone on speaker, propped it up on my work table, and did my morning word puzzles while I waited on 9:00. (I must say that the "hold" music is like an icepick in each ear, even with the speakers on.)
A real person finally came on the line about 8:50. ("Thirty minute wait," my foot!) Five minutes later, my phone alarmed to remind me of the 9 a.m. call. I thought, "Oh, shit! I am NOT hanging up to make that call!" And yet I had to do it.
I ran inside, got the kitchen phone, and made the 9 a.m. call while the SSA worker was gone looking for a supervisor (yes, my problem was/is that bad). When the person answered and I told him my situation, he agreed to post-pone the call until the afternoon.
As usual, nothing was resolved on the SSA call. Thirty minutes later, I hung up, frustrated.
But I also had a noon lunch date, and I'd been looking forward to it, so I shook off the frustration and tried to make myself presentable. (It was a big job, but I had plenty of time.)
At 11:30, as I was walking out the door, The Husband called and asked me to go check on one of our sons who was home from work, feeling poorly. After lunch, I'd planned to run by the community garden to check on the things I planted last week. I was feeling a little anxious about my son, but I went ahead with my lunch date but planned to cut it a bit short so I could see about the kid. Though I knew it would make me a little late for lunch, I stopped by the community garden first and made a quick run-through. My lunch date pulled into the restaurant parking lot at the same time I did. We did enough catching-up to last us a bit, then I went to see about the son. (He's okay.)
I spent about an hour with him, then came home to find emails about the SSA issue. The emails asked for the same shit I'd sent both by email and by snail mail.
Fun, fun stuff.
Let me just say this: if you have to deal with the SSA workers - really anybody, these days - try to be patient. Try to be nice. Every call they get is a problem, I imagine. They are stressed. We all are stressed, and it's pretty easy to "pop off" when things don't go well. But it doesn't help, especially on the phone, where you can't immediately reach out and throttle somebody. ;)
On a lighter note, the seeds I planted in the community garden last week have sprouted well, one bright spot in my day.
Then The Husband came home in a new (to him) truck. There is a running joke in our family about vehicles. During our 45 years of marriage, The Husband has had many, many vehicles, while I've had, like, six, counting the one I had when we married. I get attached to them and don't care about a new one until the old one gives up its ghost. When we bought my current car in 2017, my "daily driver" was the Wrangler, and there was nothing wrong with it, I just didn't want to keep putting miles on it because I'd promised to give it to The Grandson. My kids couldn't believe I'd about a new (to me) car. My daughter-in-law asked, "Did you tell the salesman you'd see him in 2040?" Smart aleck. ;)
I may have told you this story, but when I got the Wrangler in about 2001, I was driving a 1995 GMC Jimmy. It was a used vehicle, and after about a couple of years, it started giving us trouble. A sulfurous, rotten egg smell emitted from the tailpipe. I would see people at red lights holding their noses. Then the digital dashboard lights went out on my way to work. I banged the dashboard and they came back on. This banging worked for a little while, then it didn't. I never knew how fast I was going. I ran out of gas a couple of times. Then the driver door got to where it made a scrunching noise when opened or closed. My brother-in-law (an auto-body man) said it was the bearings, and "That m*th*erf*cker is going to fall off in the road one day." I said I'd drive it until it did.
Then one day, Son #2 called to ask if he could trade in a Jeep Cherokee we'd loaned him. The Husband said no, trade in the Jimmy and give Mom the Cherokee. (I hated that Cherokee, but that's another story.) When I came home from work that day, I cleaned out the Jimmy, and my son came to get it. He traded it in the next day.
Mid-morning that day, I remembered that I'd left some hat pins stuck in the back of the passenger seat headrest. I called my son and told him to stop by the dealership and get my hat pins out of the Jimmy. He did that on his lunch break. On his way back to work, he called me and asked, "Mom, did you hear what happened to the Jimmy?" I said no. He said, "It's a good thing we'd already signed the contract. When the salesman went to get your hat pins, he opened the driver door and it fell off in the parking lot."
I still laugh about this.
I called The Husband to tell him what happened, but only got his voice mail. I was laughing and could barely get the words out. When he listened to his voice mail, he collapsed on his desk, laughing. His co-workers thought he was either crying hard or having a heart attack until he played the voice mail for them.
There was one other thing in the Jimmy that I'd forgotten about until a few days after the trade; a FedEx envelop of dried salvia divinorum leaves.
Never heard of it? Neither had I until I read about it in some book about brain stuff. When smoked, the leaves of this plant are said to produce a sort of mystical experience. I was curious, so I ordered some (it was legal in this state at the time), but I was also a chickensh*t, and had never even opened the mailing envelope, had just stuffed it under the truck seat when it came (to my office, no less) and forgot about it. It had probably been under the seat for a year or more. By this time, it had been outlawed in this state. I'd probably have gone to jail if the cops had pulled me over.
I called the salesman. "I need you to get something else out of the Jimmy. There's a FedEx envelope under the passenger seat. Don't open it. Just throw it away."
He said, "Hon, that piece of crap is long gone."
I said, "Well, then you'd better call the salvage place that took it, because if Bubba opens that envelope and smokes what's in it, thinking it's pot, he's in for a big surprise."
I still laugh about that one, too. :)
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