Small annoyances, Vol. 1
Because there will no doubt be future volumes.
It has been a day.
A day of small annoyances.
Laptop flop
Trying to pull my laptop vertically out of its case, and my tired fingertips – dry, chafed, and split open from weeks of relentless New Hampshire cold, like a thousand paper cuts to your body‘s most sensitive spots – weren’t up to the task. It slipped back down, slipped back down again, and again, until it took two hands to yank it out. Why I didn’t simply lay it on its side and take gravity out of the equation, we’ll never know.
Voice command stand-off
Trying to get an Xfinity service technician out to the wife’s office to revive the WiFi that has been asleep for weeks, only to be stymied by endless menus activated by voice command only. For some reason, I remain stubbornly opposed to speaking my way through menus, and instead pummel the system with an endless sequence of numbers until it throws up its hands and connects me to a real person. Eventually, the menus got navigated and the service got scheduled.
Automated door follies
The automated handicap entrance on the front door to our daughter’s middle school is once again not working, necessitating me executing my best ninja moves: reaching to the ends of my arm’s length to ring the buzzer, yank open the door once it’s unlocked, quickly sneak the reinforced rolling suitcase that holds our daughter‘s AAC speech device inside while simultaneously holding the door and grabbing my daughter in her wheelchair and hurling us both inside with a final Herculean leap. All while the wind whips at our faces and snow blows about. We will tell someone that it is broken. And weeks later, some poor technician who’s only doing his job and knows nothing of our struggles will do his best to fix it.
And yet…
Despite these small annoyances, I am grateful. Grateful that they are not large annoyances. Grateful that I have a working laptop (with which to write this!) and a cute orange laptop case (a gift from the wife). Grateful that just the Wi-Fi is making trouble at the wife’s office, and not flooding as we have had in the past. Grateful that the automated front door is the biggest obstacle facing us right now at our daughter’s school, when there have been far worse in the past.
Raise a glass to small annoyances. May they be the only annoyances you face this week.
❤️
Adam
I had to scroll down because I had been meaning to leave a comment on this post. For some reason, the laptop story was so relatable and just cracked me up. There’s nothing more meaningful in life than to make someone laugh so thank you. I appreciate your writing, even if I don’t always comment. Jenny (Ardys’s old college friend)