I was slightly more annoyed Thursday, when the day that I had been told I would need to wait for an oil water heater fixer to appear had turned into five.
By the following Saturday, I was annoyed enough that Eric had to tell me to speak nicely to the repair man on the phone who said, "What? An oil water heater?" Of course, 4 hours later, Eric was struggling to control his tone of voice when he was told that, oops, no one was on the way, but someone would be soon.
When the oil water heater repair man left, with our check for $75, which we paid for the privilege of hearing him tell us that he didn't know what was wrong with the heater and it probably wasn't covered anyway, both of us were feeling the stress. We tried to laugh it off.
The laughter was a bit forced this week, when I stayed home all morning to meet the plumber, who, for another $75 check, was happy to tell us that he couldn't fix our toilet and a replacement wasn't covered by American Home Shield.
That same day, I spent an hour on the telephone with Hewlitt Packard. We purchased our printer about a year ago in Switzerland. Last week, the ink started getting low, so I went to Target to stock up. I couldn't find the right numbered cartridge, but found one that looked the same. When I took the cartridge home, it fit in the printer. But when I tried to print, the printer display told me that the cartridge was incompatible. Being a resourceful type, I searched the problem online, and found that even though the cartridges are EXACTLY THE SAME, HP puts some sort of secret code on them so that the printer and cartridge must come from the same country. In our increasingly multicultural world, this seems a bit jingoist on the part of HP, but whatever. Happily, an online "HP Expert," reported that all I needed to do was contact HP for a free regionalization reset. Two, one-hour phone sessions later, the HP representative was delighted to tell me that, though a regionalization reset would not work on my printer (for reasons he was unable or unwilling to explain), HP would be happy to "upgrade" the printer . . . if I sent the Swiss one to them at my expense and payed a small upgrade fee. I asked if this would cost more than just going to the store and buying a new printer. He said that it probably would. At this point, I said thank you very much and hung up.
The most annoying part of that whole annoying week was that I couldn't figure out what it all meant. If there is anything I hate, it is an inconvenience without a lesson. Then last night, I was self-medicating by reading G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown. In the short story, "The Queer Feet," I found the explanation. Chesterton writes:
In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it.
We went to the aquarium on Saturday, and the best part was watching the dolphin show, wherin the trainers lead the beautiful animals through a series of jumps and tricks that everyone seems to enjoy. I hope American Home Shield and Hewlitt Packard got similar joy from our contortions to make their systems work. But at some point, even we become weary of jumping through hoops.
This weekend, Drew leaned how to install a toilet.
And our new printer is an Epson.
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