Do You Ever Have One of Those Days?

Do You Ever Have One of Those Days?

            Maybe you don’t but I have a tendency to automatically and immediately attach a judgement to various happenings during my day. You know—that’s good; that’s bad. Usually I catch myself and adjust my attitude before damage is done. Usually.

            Today is not a “catch myself” day. Take this morning. Generally the sun hits my back yard patio beneath the jacaranda by 8:30. I like to take a book and cup of coffee out and bask like a lizard for half an hour, Mexican time, which often stretches to an hour.  Ah, beautiful sun.

            At 8:30 the sun made a spotlight on my azure-blue metal rocking chair. Coffee and book in hand, I settled.  Ten minutes later the sky clouded up, temperatures dropped, and I felt a distinct chill. It wasn’t a big deal until I made it one. “Weather.com said sunshine for Etzatlan. Sun must have forgot to check the forecast,” I grumbled on my way back to the house, where I swept my floors to warm up.

            On a scale of one to ten, my spiritual temperature hovered near a four.

Before I could do anything else, I needed to clear up a little communications problem. Have you ever clearly and distinctly said A-B-C-D? Your friend heard E-F-G-H and responded with W-X-Y-Z. I hate when that happens.

            Steve and Theresa, friends from Washington, visited me in April, fell in love with my town and Rancho Esperanza. 

Delia owns the Rancho. Bonnie, her daughter, manages it. Theresa carefully sent every e-mails of the negotiation, start to finish. I had told Bonnie my friends wanted to live here, gave her a synopsis of our history plus a character reference.  

How could we know Delia no longer reads her e-mail. I won’t go into nitty-gritty details. Turned out the deal was made, sealed with a check and neither Delia nor Bonnie knew. I scurried from place to place, making nice, showering waters of clarity to douse miscommunication fires.

Steve and Theresa followed up with phone calls. It all got handled. All is well. A-B-C-D now reads A-B-C-D to all concerned.

My friends are now my neighbors. They’ll be here in February to start work on the pile of bricks they bought sight unseen.

Me, I’m having trouble shaking the icky feeling generated by the misunderstandings and it’s not even my problem. By the way, the sun came out and I merely growled at it. Spiritual temperature dropped down to two.

Next on my agenda was a trip into town to get my teeth cleaned. Going to a dentist, any dentist, for any reason, generates terror in my heart. Elda, my dentist in town, found a crack in a tooth, found the crack before my tooth fell out of my mouth, one half at a time. Well, well, isn’t that just jolly good news! Negative reading?

“I can fix it,” she said, and proceeded to do so right on the spot and it didn’t even hurt.

“Why, you ungrateful little snit,” I told myself. “You could have lost your teeth, one by one.”

Next, I had to deal with money, not my strong suit. Down to my last thousand pesos, read fifty dollars, I had gone to several ATM machines, different banks, each of which spit the card back at me—pfffoooey. I don’t face rejection well.

I suspect my card has somehow become de-magnetized. It happens. I called my daughter to go to Western Union and wire me a few bucks for emergencies.

I had to make three trips to the Western Union and still they would not/could not release my money. That also means three trips for my daughter trying to correct problem. Don’t ask. By the third trip, I had fire in my eyes that not even money could quench. On a scale of one to ten, how far negative can one drop?

Meanwhile, back at my bank, Debbie took care of my bankcard problems. That woman has the patience of a saint and I appreciate it.

Relationships. Money. Health. What a day. If I had a job, today my boss would have fired me.  The icing on my cake is the gasping scorpion which managed to crawl in my front door.

 Hey, most of the problems are resolved, right? So I should feel on top of the world, right? After all, the scorpion was dying.

 Go away. Let me wallow.

Tomorrow the sun will shine again. Well, maybe.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

November 29, 2018

The Grand Canyon of Enhanced Communication

The Grand Canyon of Enhanced Communication   

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  

                The past few months I have been aware of how difficult it is to communicate. That is a broad generalization. But think abut it. How often have you been misunderstood by family and friends, those with whom you share like history and like interests. In my case, usually I didn't ask a pertinent question. Or I made an assumption. Or I did not check to see if we both meant the same thing by a particular word.

            I think long and hard about communication. I'm headed to a different country, one in which I will be the stranger, the minority, without adequate language. I won't know the rules. You know the rules I mean--the unwritten ones. Thinking about it too much gives me heart palpitations.

            Those thoughts lead me to consider a normal everyday communication tool, one which has been "enhanced" to make life (for somebody else--not me) easier. The telephone. Here is a typical instance.

            AAA, of which I have been a member for years, has an entire turkey platter of services. I have happily paid my annual fee and have only used emergency road service and that infrequently. But it dawned on me that I needed a raft of maps for my trip. I was vaguely aware they also helped with route information and such stuff. I decided to check them out.

            I started where anyone would start. I phoned the local AAA office nearest me, a mere hour's drive away. Riiiinnng. Riiiinnng. Riiiinnng.

            Automated answering: You have reached the Bremerton office of AAA. We are open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. through 6 p.m. Please listen carefully to the following eight (I kid you not) options before making your selection.

            So I did. I listened to all eight options and knew that the right one for me was to choose “0” for operator, in hopes of talking to a real live person.

            “O” was an obvious good choice. The automated voice continued. This time I only had to listen carefully to the following four options before making my selection.

            My choice the second time was “0” for operator.

            This time the service rang through, someone picked up and immediately hung up. Was it something I said? Do I have bad breath?

            I'm stubborn. Again, I finger-walked through the routine. Again I chose “0” and “0”. Someone picked up and immediately hung up but not before i heard the first syllable and a half of a greeting from a live voice.            

            Now my dander was up. I gritted my teeth and I once more pushed “0” and “0”. Once more the service rang through with the same lack of result.

            Calmly, very calmly, dangerously calmly, I sorted through my options, chose “0” and “0”. Heather answered. By this time I was so relieved to hear a human live person that my side of the conversation went something like this:

            "Heather, so nice to hear your voice. How's the family? Uh, huh. Tsk. Tsk. How is your mother dealing with this? Is she okay? And the kids, doing well in school? No. Well, remember, this is the rebellious age for him. I'm sure you've given him a strong foundation and he will come through and be a fine young man. And your husband? Out of work, you say. Encourage him to spread his net wide. Something will come up. Hard times do not last forever. Me? Oh, me. I'm driving to Mexico and I need maps. I'm crossing the border in Arizona. I prefer secondary roads where possible. You can help me? Oh, thank you. You take care now, you hear."

            Heather had asked me to come on down to the office. She had arranged for me to receive an assortment of maps which included every state I might possibly drive through, a wonderful huge map of Mexico, and a detailed 104 page trip guide which even points out stretches of road construction.

            Not that road construction can be avoided. I'll be driving through vast empty land with few towns of note. I'm giving myself plenty of time. When I have to stop and wait for gravel trucks and road graders and oilers, I will have maps to study. And if the wait time drags out too long, I can always phone Heather at the AAA office in Bremerton and chat a while.

            With my superior communication skills and stubborn ways, I'm sure I will be okay in Mazatlan. See what rewards a little persistence gave me with only four phone calls?

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

November 7, 2013

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________---