During a recent conversation, I noticed that I vented about three different topics consecutively. In a moment of self-awareness, I think I apologized and jokingly said that I hoped I wasn't always like this. Fortunately, the response was understanding.
So this got me thinking. Am I always angry or ranting about something? Sure, I haven't been happy with Metro delays, and my kids have a wonderful habit of not listening. I also notice that I've been swearing a lot more to myself (either out loud when no one is around or in my head) lately. Granted, I think I have some good reasons to vent that of course I want to share.
1. We're currently looking into bundling cable, internet and the home phone together, so I decided to call Verizon to get pricing information (and after receiving dozens of offers in the mail from them over the years). After an awkward (and painful) beginning of the call, where the Verizon representative had significant difficulties spelling my name and address correctly, he finally gave me the basic information. However, when I asked about the equipment costs and installation fees, he informed me that I would need to give him my social security number to run a credit check to proceed. I refused. I wanted to know the complete costs to help me make an informed decision about whether or not I would choose Verizon. I called them, so it's obvious I'm serious about pursing a deal. Why do they need my social in order to tell me this? At a standstill, we agreed to end the call.
2. Our homeowners association cited us for damage outside our front window. We are trying to replace the entire area with a material that basically would not cause us to deal with this again. While the material comes in many different colors, it is not an exact match to the paint color we have, and we can't paint on this material. It's really close though. So now we're awaiting the board's ruling on whether or not we can proceed based entirely on the possible color difference. They may say that we're good but we would have to paint the rest of the house with the new color. That's not going to work. They may say we're not good which would bring us back to square one. Basically, we're now waiting for the board to give us a ruling as to how to spend out money on something I would never have considered spending money on until we got the notice.
Back to the title of this post, I realize that many of you don't know me and others probably haven't talked with me regularly for a long time. Based on these two examples though , am I unreasonably angry or are these rationale reasons to vent?
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4 comments:
I think adulthood is particularly full of this type of stuff and it's OK to be annoyed with it. Knowing you, you're probably taking it into some sort of stride when comparing these issues to the types of other serious things that can happen in life.
My recent annoyance is that I was notified on July 27 that our HOA was changing management companies as of Aug 1 and that we had to start paying our HOA payment to that new company before August 1. Way to give some notice there. We do auto bill pay so the payment had already been sent to the old management company. I called them and they said they didn't manage us anymore and I had to call another number. I called that number and had to get transferred around. They ended up saying my payment would be automatically forwarded to the new company, but didn't say when. So as if this already wasn't a pain in the $#!, now I have to monitor to figure out when an extra payment gets posted so I can change my bill pay not to pay the new company for one month. UGH!
I think this is all perfectly reasonable stuff to get angry about. Although, after years of being able to control my temper, I find that with all the wedding stress and some work stress, I now fly off the handle over some really dumb stuff. So maybe I am not the best person in the world to ask.
Amy - I heard a story recently that one of oldest son's friends (age 4) said that she wants to be a kid when she grew up. I would love that! I'd love to go back to elementary school time when you played on the playground and had recess and there wasn't too much homework yet. Being a grown-up sucks sometimes. Good luck with the HOA stuff.
Josh - I'm glad that you think I'm not crazy (at least about this). Good luck with wedding stuff. You're almost there!
Life's little day to day stresses can certainly get to us, it's normal! I think what it is important is that we don't let things like that control us and we try and keep a clear head as much as possible!
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