Something Else

Lately I find myself wanting to complain about something but not complaining because I know my little whiny complaints are nothing in the grand scheme of things.

So they are all building up inside of me, these things I want to complain about. I want to let them out. I’m about to get whiny. Look away.

For example, for the last year I have wanted to complain about my groceries being delivered early. I know, I know, someone is busting their butt to do my shopping for me (during a pandemic) and I should be grateful. It’s just, I worked at home even before the pandemic. I don’t care if you are the tax assessor or the neighbor or my best friend, you cannot show up at my house during working hours, ring the doorbell, and expect a response from me. According to my work analytics I spend 92% of my time in meetings. I once put a sign on my home office door that said, “You knock, you die” and let me tell you, nobody knocked! In other words, I’M ON THE PHONE.

So, when you give me options for delivery windows, like 5-7, I look at my calendar and go, oh good, five will work because no meetings. But when you show up at 4:45 instead, I’m on the phone and my perishables are on my front step rotting in the heat for fifteen minutes.

I understand being early is probably a bonus for a lot of people. I understand this is a ridiculous complaint. Now you know!

Second, why is it that I can order my license tabs online but not a duplicate title? Not only do I have to physically go to the DMV, which we all know already sucks, but I have to find a special one with the special paper. It’s 2021, please for the love of humanity can we modernize the DMV processes?

And while I’m at it, let me complain about how dumb my car is. Last week, hundreds of miles from home, I locked my keys in my trunk. I already know how dumb I was, although my car could have given me a heads up, which it did not. Luckily, there was a very nice shop in town that said they could open my car for me. Get inside the car, pop the trunk latch, problem solved!

It took only a matter of minutes to get the car door open.

“Your alarm is going to go crazy,” the nice man Dave said to me before opening the door.

“Ok,” I said, “As soon as I get the keys I can shut it off.”

I opened the door, the alarm sounded, I went for the trunk button.

Nothing happened. It seems my car is dumb enough to let me lock my keys in the trunk, but smart enough to make it so the trunk latch doesn’t work if you don’t use the fob for opening the door.

“Well, I should be able to fold down the backseat,” I said stupidly.

Because guess where the latches to release the back seat are? In the trunk!

Chloe, Dave’s wife, started googling how to get into my car. Dave disconnected the battery and reconnected it to see if that would reset the trunk button. Nope!

This is the part where I gave Dave permission to break things. Break the trunk cable, it’s fine, I need my keys.

The trunk cable would not break even with all three of us pulling on it.

Eventually, we disassembled the back seat, one bolt at a time. This gave us about five inches at the bottom to see in and try to hook the keys- which were buried under a bunch of stuff 4-5 feet away.

Dave started pulling everything out that would fit through the five inch crack, and eventually got to the key.

The next day I brought my car to their shop, and they used air tools to put the backseat back together. I opened the trunk and pulled the back seat latches to release them, and left them like that, because I’m still smarter than my smart car.

Dave remains undefeated, and my car remains easy to lock your keys in and almost impossible to get them out. I never loved technology more!

You were probably expecting a bunch of complaints about the state of the union, as it were, but those things are things that seem to fall into the “acceptable to complain about” bucket and quite frankly, I’m sick of them and I just want to complain about something dumb. Something that’s not going to kill me or someone I love, something that’s not going to fire up tempers or divide a room.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all I had to complain out was my groceries being delivered early.

Feel free to tell me your non political, non-pandemic, non- life threatening complaints. I’m ready for them.

Nic