Still working on the rumored blog post “In Praise of Men.” I actually began putting words on pixels today, then decided I needed to consult with an actual male person. (Not on how I should write it, but about things going on in his head.) Might be a few days on that, as he currently has a LOT going on in his head. And his time. And every other part of his life.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile I thought I’d pop in and bitch.<\/p>\n
Or better yet, give you, my stalwart (and oh-so-patient) readers a chance to bitch.<\/p>\n
My question is this: Do you sometimes feel you’re living in a high-tech version of a third-world country?<\/p>\n
One hallmark of a third-world country (I mean, aside from really gross plagues, dubious drinking water, political corruption, trash in the streets, highly creative and cheap solutions to thorny problems, etc.) is Things Not Getting Done.<\/p>\n
You know. You want to get your hovel hooked up to electricity, but instead of one call and one service appointment, it requires months of waiting, several levels of bribery, 50 eloquent excuses, and finally paying some kid on a motorbike with a coil of wire over his shoulder to tap you into the precarious tangles of wire overhead that work passably well until they catch your entire neighborhood on fire.<\/p>\n
That sort of thing.<\/p>\n
Today has been one of those days. This summer has been actually been a whole string of those days. All petty stuff, as it so often is. But SO much of it. People who don’t show up. Deliveries that don’t get made. Callbacks that never actually call back. People who say — who promise, who downright pinkie-swear — that they’re going to do something — then don’t. Things broke that nobody can fix. And oh man, the excuses!<\/p>\n
COVID, of course. This year, every little thing that doesn’t get done is “BECAUSE COVID!”<\/p>\n
And I’m sure that’s part of it, Politicians have seen to that. Heck, in that regard, we’re lucky anything’s functioning at all. Give this lockdown much more time and we can really, truly go third world and the current petty aggravations will look like … petty aggravations.<\/p>\n
But for me, today was the day I not only had to go They were sweet. I was sweet. And I was grateful for their time and effort. No Karens here. But in the end I was simply too tired to try any more. We all thanked each other super sweetly, apologized for each other’s trouble, and gave it up as a bad job. I think the final rep may have escalated the problem to a higher-level tech human offline. But I don’t really know, as I couldn’t understand her accent.<\/p>\n No biggie. We all have those days.<\/p>\n But does it seem as if we — you, people you deal with — are having more and more of these third-world problems?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Still working on the rumored blog post “In Praise of Men.” I actually began putting words on pixels today, then decided I needed to consult with an actual male person. (Not on how I should write it, but about things going on in his head.) Might be a few days on that, as he currently has a LOT going on in his head. And his time. And every other part of his life. Meanwhile I thought I’d pop in and bitch. Or better yet, give you, my stalwart (and oh-so-patient) readers a chance to bitch. My question is this: Do…<\/p>\nFull<\/del> At Least Semi-Karen on a vendor who took my $400 deposit on a toolshed\/workshop nearly three months ago and has delivered nothing but repeated run-arounds ever since. THEN I had to spend 2.5 hours on the phone, moving up from brain-dead tech-bots to one … two … then three friendly service reps, each of whom tried diligently and increasingly desperately to solve what initially seemed a small problem.<\/p>\n