My Profile
Older
E-mail
D*Land
Diary Rings

Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
A Gift from Hil - 2014-12-28
There was A LOT of turkey. - 2014-12-04
Can we just jump to January please? - 2014-11-14
A (don't kick the) Bucket List - 2014-10-28

Join my Notify List and get email when I update my site:
email:
Powered by NotifyList.com

2:36 p.m. - 2011-03-17
Just an Old Fashioned Coward

Today's entry is truly a diary entry in that it's mostly for me to catch up and keep track.

Got my passport pics yesterday. Go me, they're just as bad as the old passport pic and I'm 10 years older to boot. Time has not been kind. Neither has the passport office been. Apparently they think I'm the ex's NEW wife and have her complicated green card problems. Waving my divorce decree, my old passport, my new marriage registry, my Social Security card with my new married name AND my birth certificate which proves without a doubt that I was born in Ramapo, NY and not Glurkistan or wherever the hell wifey #2 was spawned is insufficient proof to those wacky passport folks. I'd dig up my mother's corpse and bring her with me on my next trip to the passport office if necessary, but since she's been dead for 8 years I doubt she'd have much to say. Wonder if my old high school still has my permanent record on file. The principal certainly made enough noise about how it would haunt me for the rest of my life when discussing that ice cream incident back in 10th grade. Perhaps proof that not only did I have wicked aim with the smushy remains of a Nutty Buddy ice cream cone but that I was a genuine student at Hometown High during the same timeframe that wifey #2 was a fetus in Glurkistan and therefore cannot be her, will help settle things my way. That Permanent Record has got to be good for something, eh?

I also got a new phone yesterday. Some of you might remember I just GOT a new phone. Well my new phone (which was exactly the same as my old phone only with a battery that could hold a charge for more than 17 minutes) developed a glitch after barely 2 weeks of contented ownership. The front screen went POOF! Everything else still worked fine. I had not dropped it in the toilet or otherwise abused it, the problem was definitely with the phone itself. I toddled off to the phone store where the nice young man agreed that my phone was being a stinker and Verizon would absolutely replace it for free. HA!

The nice young man couldn't just hand over a new one, I had to speak to the warrantee guy (in Glurkistan, surprise, surprise) and he said they'd send me my replacement phone via FedEx. Fine. Only later that afternoon I got a call. It seems Verizon doesn't have my new/old phone in stock anymore and they'd send me the next best thing. I begged the guy in Glurkistan to send me an idiot's phone. The simplest model they had. He assured me (in his jolly Glurkistani accent) that he would see to it personally that I would get what was basically a 21st century version of a tin can on a string and not to worry.

Right.

Via FedEx I got not one, but TWO boxes (one each on consecutive days) and being the frightened technotard that I am, I brought the unopened boxes with me to the Verizon store yesterday so the nice young man there could choose between what seemed to be a multiplicity of replacement phones and then do the voodoo that makes the phone come alive and put in my contact list because along with being an elderly technotard who's afraid of her phone I can't remember anybody's phone numbers anymore, not even my kid's.

HA!

The two boxes were actually just one phone, the auxiliary box had the battery and charger and some paperwork but NOT an instruction manual. And why would I need an instruction manual for a tin can on a string? Because Verizon didn't send me a tin can on a string, of course. They sent me a�Blackberry.

The astonished horrified look on my face when the nice young man opened the box to reveal that gaudy thing with the slidy keypad and buttons the size of sesame seeds must have been most amusing to the nice young man, but he was sweet about it. He patiently coaxed me to touch the Blackberry and assured me it wouldn't bite. I did. Then he did the voodoo and offered a quick tutorial and after telling me how much I reminded him of his mother (in a good way!) made me go home with this scary gaudy waffle that is masquerading as my new cell phone.

Have I ever told you I managed to kill Alex's Tamagotchi the first time he asked me to mind it for him while he was at school? Or that I once tried to answer the dvd player's remote thinking it was my cordless phone? Or that I was stuck in Secaucus, NJ for 3 hours one time because I couldn't figure out how to buy a train ticket from the dispenser machine?

Stone truth. And now I own a Blackberry.

For pity's sake I'm an artist not a NASA engineer! I'm the latest in a millennia-old line of old school hands-on healers who use herbs as old as time itself. I wash floors on hands and knees with an ancient cheesecloth diaper. I make food on a gas stove in cast-iron pots. My favorite engine is the Ford 289 V-8. Know why? It has precisely ONE electrical component. A wiring harness that jacks into the dash with a single plug. Otherwise this beloved engine is straight up mechanical, a combustion chamber and crankshaft miracle of simplicity. Nothing mysterious about carburetors.

I am happy being a dinosaur. It's comfortable here in Luddite Land. I have no business carrying a Blackberry. I have never once sent a text. And I like it that way.

Today I'm making a boiled dinner of corned beef and cabbage. Corned beef was invented in the time before refrigeration when preserving meat had to be done sans electricity. Nobody had heard of Frigidaire. Okay, I like flush toilets as much as the next girl. I'm happy not to have to make my own leather or spin my own flax. But I can move just so far into the Brave New World. And with this scary stupid Blackberry I've hit my technological wall.


Old and afraid, ~LA

5 Wanna talk about it!

previous // next