2018 is almost over, and good riddance. Who needs a year which was so full of disaster? Sure there were good times, but who wants to talk about those? I will, but later.
I spent most of my January, every weekday, ordering food for my contact center workers who were trying to eat and plow through thousands of phone calls from customers during one of our worst temperature drops in ages.
Folks, winter is here, so if you neglected to do something to protect yourself and your belongings from the cold, do it yesterday. Not only will you end up on a phone queue if you call customer service, but when the staff is all working and they still need more manpower, they call upon the reserve staff, namely me. I have training, but not the hours of experience, and of course some folks who call blame me for that, rather than their own lack of foresight. I’ll help you, but it may actually take a few minutes more, and I’ve learned that people seem to have permanently lost their patience.
When you have only so many catering choices, it gets old fast ordering food every day. We ate more pizza, pasta, hoagies, wings, bagels, donuts, soda and coffee than was probably served in Horn & Hardart’s automats in their entire history. Every day the routine was the same: grab a cart, pick up the food, figure the tip, distribute the food, expense the food, order more. I gained six pounds.
I got sick more this year than ever, with two bouts of stomach virus and a cold which just decided to sneak into Santa’s sack for me at Christmas.
Ordering all that food taxed everybody’s expense accounts at work, and once or twice that meant I used my own card to pay for stuff. I hope the credit card company didn’t think I ate all that food myself. Fortunately I only gained six pounds and didn’t lose my credit score.
Shopping was a bit of a ride for me, too. I accidentally shrank a new sweater for which I could not get a replacement, but I did find the latest in laundry products to make all the things coming out of the washer looking top notch. It could not save a tablet case from Tumi, though, which got something on it that could not come out; I did try to email their customer service but got no reply.
October marked a year since I tried contacting Virgin Mobile about problems with my broadband reception. They will never get back to me, either. Just saying. I gave up trying. They are launching space missions for tourism, but nobody can answer my questions about Internet service after four letters and three months of trying.
In September Greyhound had no drivers for its New York City run, so I had to drive up there for an opera. Cost me a bundle, and now I have less faith in public transportation.
My gas station ran out of supplies several times lately. That doesn’t help with the amount of driving I do. I replaced my car, and due to GM’s downsizing of their plants and discontinuing several vehicles, my model is a dead car running.
Add to that all the people with personal issues who do not handle them sanely or constructively, including the doofusses in Washington, and it has just been a bad year all around. Our government is partly shut down because of a border wall we suddenly need after over 240 years? That is a bigger problem than anything I’m griping about here.
Of course I do sit down and tell myself that I had about 340 days of good health, and the phone calls did stop coming into work long enough that we could wait a few weeks before ordering catered food again. The bus did run earlier this month without a hitch, I did get gas this morning, and I still have Internet where I can use it effectively, if not where I would always like to.
2019 will probably be a mixed bag, too. Tighten your shoelaces, because here it comes.
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