**Caveat: This is a bit glum**
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It’s October. My car went for repairs on August 9th. It’s being held hostage against payment from the insurance company.
How is it that every other company expects electronic payment but the insurance company has to mail a paper cheque?
“Good news!” they tell me. “Payment has been mailed today. It should be delivered within 5 to 7 business days.”
That’s if they send it to the right dealer this time.
Still, after the excruciating phone calls at the beginning of this fiasco, at least I did not experience a repeat of that ordeal when further damage was discovered.
The representative who initially dealt with my claim from the distance of Texas, appears to have dropped out of the picture and when I texted the fix-it shop I was told that my contact there had left the company.
Perhaps they ran away together, although it’s a little hard to visualize.
Last I heard, I might get my car last weekend.
Or was it the weekend before?
I think I’ve given up caring..
…as long as I don’t get an unexpected charge for the loaner vehicle, in which case I may have a fit.
The month of September was a dud, which brought a series of large bills and bad news.
Apart from the assault on my bank account, the news does not affect me personally, but I’ve never been good at sitting around and watching things unfold.
When things go wrong, I always want to be doing something.
Not that my doing in the past has been all that effective. In some cases it is really better for all concerned if you just stay out of a situation.
But it is pointless to waste time regretting one’s past inept failures, because what’s done is history.
Yesterday I wrote about the value of thinking things through. Which is all very well if time allows. There’s a lot to be said for not acting in haste.
Despite all the years of practice I have had, waiting around, I am not good at it.
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The advent of email was a two-edged sword for me. It offered instant communication, but in the past, if you penned a letter while emotionally upset, you had the ability to tear it up. With email, you hit ‘enter’ and off go all those angry words and pointless sarcastic digs.
Pretty soon, I discovered that not everyone was an email devotee. Communication requires that another party reads whatever missive you have sent.
No good assuming another person will be aware of your great plans for whatever it may be. It offers everyone total deniability. No accountability.
Email turned into rather a nightmare in my opinion.
Take a day off and you come back to an inbox that is overflowing with messages drowned in bullshit.
Spam filters only help so much. Every day I seem to get “phishing” emails. I fell in one of those traps some years ago in a moment of distraction.
How do those bastards know when our defenses are down? They always seem able to zero in on those occasions when we are pre-occupied.
What I wouldn’t like to do to such opportunists!
Basically, I think I am at the moment feeling frustrated with the way of things in this 21st Century.
It’s not that I do not embrace change. Modern inventions have brought great advantages for which I am grateful.
No, it’s not all that.
It’s that society is falling to bits around us.
Everything is a competition. Achievement points based on revenue. Screw satisfaction. Screw efficiency.
Got to please the share holders! No matter what.
It is a competition that calls for cold, ambitious and often un-principaled participation in which human emotion has no place.
It is a sorry state of affairs.
Whatever happened to law and order?
It seems to me that you no longer need to be a decent law-abiding citizen.
All you need is to have your lawyers be capable of finding more loop-holes than the opposing team. And modern law is a whole network of such loop-holes.
The only ones who have to obey the law are the humble folk who can’t afford the sort of charlatan who can negotiate this network.
Humble folk cannot hope to win, even if they are innocent. They have to hope for a short sentence or someone to have an attack of conscience.
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It’s all a scrounge to stay on top. Poor folk are expendable:
Throughout history all those hundreds of thousands of troops that have been sent to fight the interminable wars provoked by leaders who sought to inflate their egos and their wealth and their perceived power.
Being expendable is what the poor folk are for.
It is the nature of the beast that is a human being.
It was not my intention to be gloomy. Sometimes words force their way out
I am glad for you, Carolyn, as things are marching in the right direction. Let’s hope you will have your car back next week.
Joanna
I think you express so well what many of us are feeling no matter where we live. The super rich as you say are except from these problems. I feel capitalism is imploding and who knows what will come next. I try to take one day at a time otherwise it is too much. Insurance companies are parasites. When my house flooded years ago it was a nightmare dealing with them. Stay strong. X
You’ll have to queue up behind me to do very nasty things to all of the ne’er do wells. Now I think of it we may have to round up a few more people. There are so many of them to sort out! Keep smiling when you can. Talk to the animals and trees, and keep up the marvellous supply of phots! 🤗🤗
I share your gloom, but the sight of the Red Squirrel cheered me up. At least nature will survive us humans.
Best wishes, Pete.
Yes, sometimes you just need to get all these words off your chest … wish unlawfully things to those who makes life hard for you. I would, if it was my car! And I did not even know that cheques still exist … heck!