Whew! What a week it was. I whined and wined but I’m back to my hot tea and chocolate chip cookie now. Things weren’t at the crying stage, moaning only.

First, the transmission on my husband’s car died, long before it was to be expected. I went all over the internet researching the whys and what-to-do. There’s a picture on one site of a transmission. It looks like a scaled down NASA prototype headed for outer space.

I recalled my mother telling me how she once fixed an old Ford Model A or T with a hairpin. I was shocked as my mother couldn’t repair anything.

So, my husband rented a nearly new car with a brake pedal much smaller than in his car, and therefore bumped into another, very beat up, car when his foot slipped off the pedal. His license plate was wrinkled a little but the “victim” was planning to alert the police.

I remembered a story about my father-in-law. Back in the 1930’s, he met another car on a dinky country road around a curve and they bumped together. The men got out and jumped up and down on the bumpers, shook hands and went on their separate ways.

Next, we received a phone call from one credit card company and a letter from another that said our cards may have been compromised (their word) and we would need new cards. “Be sure to notify all the companies that you are paying automatically,” they said/wrote. Well, gee, I thought, that will only take me all of next week to wend my way through the punch this number and that to get to a live person.

Then I remembered how we used to use that green paper stuff to pay for things. What a concept!

After that, while talking to the credit card person who called, I discovered that that we had also been flimflammed by a company that supposedly sold me a membership to something. If you didn’t call them to cancel after 45 days of the free (yes, free) offer, you would be automatically charged $24.99 a month, which I was. Yes, I should have discovered it on my charge bill, but together with being flummoxed and flimflammed, I was foolish and failed.
Nothing can be done to fix this, I was told.*

My next memory was of the stories about the flimflam men who used to roam the country selling this and that. They were easily taken care of by the Sheriff who simply threw them out of town or into jail.

Are you flattened yet from reading all about the maddening modern life we all live? Well, sorry, but there’s more.

The lights on our TV has dimmed. It looks like night at the beach when it is in Florida July 4th at noon. I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do about this problem.

My parents owned a cabinet style radio for about a zillion years with never a problem. It had a fairly large window showing the station numbers. In the 1950’s, a young boy visiting neighbors came over to my parents’ house, looked at the radio and said, “That is the smallest TV screen I’ve ever seen.”

Okay, thank you for reading. I just had to get that rant out of my system. Sure, things could be a lot worse and are for a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean that things like I just experienced don’t tick us off. At least some of us.

Here’s a blatant pitch–You can buy a book I wrote. It’s on Amazon. The title is “Ticked Off And Tickled About It.”

*However, I have contacted the Attorneys General and Better Business Bureau where the company is located. It has already been sued and lost over this scheme/scam.

COMING NEXT: TRITE IDIOMS ARE LIKE TRITE TRAVELING