Tag Archives: Life

About That Time I Forgot My Phone Number, and then Everything Went Wrong

So … I needed to get my car serviced this morning. Have a road trip coming up, and today was the only day available at a service center anywhere near my house (I had to drive an hour to get here) before we’re due to leave – later today. Booked the service a month ago, tried to make sure I got the day off, all that good stuff.

In fairness, when I scheduled the appointment, I entered my email and phone number correctly – I know this, because I was able to receive the confirmation notifications via text message, etc. The problems all started when I arrived.

I was a few minutes late, I’ll admit to that. I’ve never been to this part of New Jersey before, and I didn’t really anticipate what traffic would be like, and gave myself too little time to get here. I arrived maybe around 9:10 AM for a 9:00 AM appointment. A little late, but nothing major, surely.

When I got to the service center, they handed me a form to fill out, and walked away. Not entirely sure what that meant, I filled out the form with my name, service requests, and phone number.

But here is where it all went wrong. I wrote my phone number down wrong. It was a simple mistake – I mixed up two digits at the end of the number (49 instead of 94). I asked if I could head across the street to grab breakfast at a nearby diner, and inquired how long it would take; the answer was yes, and I don’t know but we’ll call you.

So I go have breakfast. I take my time, assuming that if there was anything they needed to let me know, they would call me. I don’t get a call. I assume everything is fine. I finish my breakfast, and head back to the service center around 10:30 AM – it’s been about an hour. I take a seat in the waiting area, and start to play Angry Birds on my phone to pass the time. I’m used to this – service appointments usually take a couple of hours.

Around 11:30 AM, I’m starting to wonder what the status of my car is – just idly wondering, not anxious or impatient or anything – so I go up to the front desk. The receptionist is on the phone, and as I’m waiting I notice they have a digital board on the wall with the names of each customer and their appointment times. Very convenient – I look for my name. It’s there for a 9:00 AM appointment … marked as “not arrived”. Well, that must be a mistake, so I wait patiently to speak to the receptionist. Then, as the list scrolls, I see my name again … as a 9:30 AM walk-in. Marked as “awaiting service”.

Now things are seeming weird. So the receptionist finally gets off the phone, and I ask if I could get an update on my car. They fiddle around in the system for a moment, and then, with a look of disconcerting bewilderment, call over a service advisor. The service advisor says to me, “Are you Chris?” I nod. “Chris N?” I nod again, somewhat dumbly. “I tried calling you three times. Someone else answered.”

At this point, I’m very confused. I haven’t received any missed calls, I tell them. Then they show my the phone number I wrote down. Incorrectly. My look of mortification must have been comical, because both the receptionist and the service advisor laugh awkwardly. “We didn’t even start the inspection,” they tell me, “because we couldn’t get in touch with you to find out what you needed.”

At this point, I’ve waited two hours for nothing to be done, and it’s entirely my own stupid fault. So I sit down, review some of the paperwork, and agree to the multi-point inspection, tire rotation … whatever stuff cars need to get done to them, I don’t know. Maybe a couple hundred dollars, I shrug it off.

I go back to the waiting room; I’m not leaving again, that’s for sure. I put on some headphones – making sure the volume is quiet, so I can hear my name be called again – and settle in for a wait. Not too much later – maybe 45 minutes – the service advisor comes back. “Here’s what we found,” they tell me. “You need a lot of work.”

”How much work?” I ask.

”Two thousand dollars worth,” they tell me.

I think all I could do was blink. “Two thousand dollars?”

”Your fluids all need changing. Your air filter has mold on it. Some other stuff …” Cue the sound of rushing blood in my ears, and the fading out of their voice.

I mutely agree and sign off on the work. I know nothing about cars. I assume that the things that are wrong are … well, actually wrong. They walk away to start the work, and after a few minutes of letting the news sink in, I start to Google what the various services they’re recommending should actually cost. In fairness, they’re all about on par – maybe 10% more expensive on average, but I’m at a authorized service center/dealership, and I assumed they’d be a little more expensive.

But still … $2,000? I don’t have that kind of money.

So now, I’m sitting at the service center, still in the waiting room where I’ve been patiently, quietly, humiliatingly sitting as everyone comes and goes around me, trying to figure out how many coffees I’m going to have to not buy in order to pay off a $2,000 car service. Divide by $4, carry the 12, take the square root of π … it’s a lot of coffees. It’s 2:30 PM. I’ve been here for five and a half hours, and there’s more waiting to come. My family are waiting at home for me to return so we can get a very, very late start to our trip.

The good news is they had all the parts …

Well … Now I’m Depressed

My last post was a good few months ago, discussing the fact that being mentally stable can have its downsides – notably, the fact that really, it’s kind of boring. I haven’t had a whole lot to say since then, despite my promises of more frequent posting here back at the start of the year, but the honest truth is that there hasn’t been a whole lot going on in my life; work, home, work, home … it kind of all just blends, day after day, into a mishmash of boring daily routine.

But the good news is, that’s all changed. Now, I’m depressed. (Really it’s not that good.) For the past few weeks I’ve been slowly settling into a decline of mental state, to the point where today, I spent my day off primarily sleeping in bed, just waiting for the day to be over.

It all started well enough; slept in a little, got up to make a nice breakfast of crepes and bacon. But little things set me off – things that previously might not have bothered me. I couldn’t get the coffee machine to work. The crepes stuck to the pan. The heat and humidity of northern New Jersey don’t help. And just like that, I wound up in a childishly bad mood, storming off to sleep the morning away.

And there I stayed, on and off, until now. To be honest, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this at all. It isn’t deep, it isn’t important, and it isn’t meaningful. I think it’s just a way of exorcising some demons, perhaps – talking to anonymous internet people who just maybe understand something of what I feel.

The honest truth is that it isn’t really all that bad; I’m not cripplingly depressed, I’m still going to work – I’m able to function. It’s more like a festering dismal mindset, something that rears its ugly head when I have a moment to spare and nothing better to think about. Distractions – work, entertainment, movies – work well, but then of course there are the more destructive coping mechanisms as well.

For me, it’s primarily alcohol. Not anything outright alarming; nothing overly copious, no morning hangovers; just … a few beers every single night. Maybe some whiskey. Enough to take the edge off. And I don’t necessarily think there’s anything terribly wrong with that, either – it’s just a question of whether or not I’m becoming dependent on it. I haven’t really gone a night without drinking in a month or more, and I wonder how I’d feel – emotionally – if I did.

I know that this is a passing phase, and that I will recover from this and feel better. I also know that it won’t be easy making it through to that point. It’s potentially dangerous, too; not outright life-threatening, but for my physical, mental and emotional well-being. It comes with a kind of “fuck it” mentality, a sense that I just don’t care anymore, which can lead to overspending, overeating, over-drinking … you name it, I might do it.

Eventually I’ll emerge from the other side of this canyon, but like any dip into a deep well, it’s harder climbing out than falling in. The good news is that life is relentless, pushing you forward whether you like it or not, and for all the struggles, I’ve made it this far and I’ll make it further.

Until then, I’ll drink my beer, and eat too much cheese, and sleep all day if I want to. It’s the only way I know how to make it through.

It’s Funny How Time Slips By

I had the strangest sensation earlier (it might have been the hallucination of a pre-wake dream) that April was almost over, and we were barreling toward September. A kind of grand perspective of the year, a notion that with four months down, it really isn’t that far until most of the year is gone, and then not much further until all of it is. And in that thought, it occurred to me that the year is really only made up of days, and it doesn’t take much for a day to go by without consequence – so that by extension, the rest of the year can go by without us really even being aware of it.

Time is a strange beast, gnawing away daily at our lives until there’s nothing left. Even into the minutes that make up the day, they can pass like treacle – so slow that you hardly notice, and it seems an endless moment until something else happens – or they can fly by like the Flash circling Superman. For example, I woke up around 8 AM this morning, and I didn’t have to leave for work until around 11:15 AM. That’s a lot of time to do stuff – theoretically. Here’s how my morning played out:

  • 8 AM – 9 AM: Lie with the cat.
  • 9 AM – 9:15 AM: Have coffee.
  • 9:15 AM – 10:30 AM: Nap.
  • 10:30 AM – 11:15 AM: Write this post.

And trust me, I almost didn’t write this post – mainly because I couldn’t think of what to write. I was lying in bed, cozy and warm under the covers but wide awake, and thinking to myself: What on earth should I do now? It was one of those moments where it felt like I had all the time in the world, and nothing to do with it.

But the scary part about that is that the attitude of “there’s plenty of time” is also what leads to lost time. A kind of procrastinator’s curse, if you will. It’s one thing if you put off until tomorrow in order to get something else done, but when you put off something in order to get nothing done, not only does it feel like you’ve wasted your time, but it also feels as though you’re wasting your future time, knowing that you’ll now have to do something when you might not really have the time to do it.

For what it’s worth, I’m not saying that having a warm, cozy morning nap is a waste of time; sometimes it’s exactly what you need. I’m no stranger to self-care, and dealing with mental illness most of my life has taught me that I really do need that ‘me-time’ – at least from time to time. But this morning was different; I wasn’t feeling depressed, stressed, anxious, or really anything negative at all. Instead, I think what happened is I fell into a routine, a habit that has spawned out of the need for sleep and self-care, which led me to, if not ‘waste’ time, at least not use it productively. I could have done any number of things this morning, and I actually would have felt like doing them. But I didn’t.

This sort of philosophy, this kind of behavior that I know I fall prey to really quite frequently, I think, is why I feel like time is slipping away. The more I think about it, the more I wonder how many months – perhaps even years – of my life I could have back had I not spent them sleeping, or moping, or feeling like there was no point doing anything. Not that any of that was really under my control – depression is a real villain, sometimes – but it makes me wonder if, for example, The Redemption of Erâth would be complete by now if I was some other person. Or perhaps I would be further ahead in my career at work.

All of it amounts to the thought that my life is really very limited, and having lived through a decent chunk of it already – all of which is time I’ll never get back – I worry that there isn’t enough of it left. I mean, I could die tomorrow, of course, but assuming nothing untoward happens to me, I still only have maybe four or five decades left. Which, right now, sounds like a lot. But I know me, and I know that I’m going to wake up one day and find that I’m actually old, and that I’ve wasted my life.

Maybe this is all coming across as a kind of midlife crisis rant, and perhaps that’s exactly what it is. I’m certainly not here to commit to ‘doing better’, or not wasting my life anymore, but at the same time, I’m very conscious that every day that goes by without an accomplishment – however small – is a day I’ll never get back.

So here’s my accomplishment for today: I wrote this post. Perhaps no one will read it, but if you do, let me know what you think about life, and time, and whether sleeping the day away counts as a waste. I’d love to hear your thoughts!