Frustrating Day

Yesterday was an extremely frustrating day. I spent the morning trying to reach Herald House, the publishing arm of our church. I called several times, only to be put on "hold" and after twenty minutes or so I would hang up and try again to get through. Finally, I left them a message to call me back so I could give them the church's credit card number. I had finally sent them my order with e-mail. I waited an hour but they never called back.

Finally, I logged on the church's web page and asked the administrator there what was going on with Herald House. She said headquarters and Herald House were closed because of inclimate weather. After spending the morning trying to get past the automated answering machine, I finally learned why they were not answering me. I had missed seeing Phyllis and Gerry and still had the church to clean.

After I got Leslie's e-mail telling me to just do it online, I did try to do that. While filling out their form online, I put the credit card number in and it let me check over my order for accuracy . I noticed I had misspelled the word "Crossroads" in the church's name and went back to correct my error. Then they wanted me to put the credit card number in again. I was afraid they would double my order and charge me again if I did that so I just closed the window, I will wait for them to contact me on Monday...hopefully not while I'm at work on Monday morning.

So it was 1:30 before I could go see Phyllis and Gerry. I finally got to leave for church at 2:00. I finished out there at 3:30 and then Bob came out there to see how bad the ceiling looked. Finally I came back home to let Slinky back in the kitchen. It was 30 degrees at 4:00 when I got home and he was very cold out there for three hours.

I fed him about 4:30 and he soon went to bed.

Then I came in to watch the news. That's when I noticed the captioning. So I called Cox and they tried to walk me through the process of finding the closed captioning area so I could turn it off. Then they discovered they had no closed captioning on their programming. I hadn't done it with the TV because I no longer had a remote for the TV. It was a fluke. When I got their remote, I had taken the batteries out of the one I had been using and put it away. The TV would not go to channel 4. The one they have their program set up for. It would skip channel 4. Cox said I would have to put the batteries back in my old remote for the remote to change to channel 4 before I could receive a signal again. Long ago Bob had thrown away the remote that came with the TV. He said it was too big and ungainly. So I would have to re-program the universal remote he had bought to take it's place.

I looked for batteries and found I only had one. I needed two. I took the batteries out of my camera and put them in the TV remote. The instructions are printed in 6 pt type so I had to find a magnifying glass to read them. Leslie called back about then to say Jeff was coming over to help me. Just before he got here, I had the remote re-programed and the TV turned to channel 4. Just as he walked in I was attempting to turn the converter box on. I couldn't get it to work so he took the remote and finally got it turned on.

The entire day was a frustrating mess! The TV mess just topped it off.

Maybe today will be a better day. I am going up to Chanute at noon to finally have lunch with Gay. Hopefully it will be warmer for Slinky to be outside. It's supposed to be but then it was supposed to have warmed up yesterday too but never got above 32.

What a day!