Counting on people

I really dislike it when a company has promised to do something, then isn't punctual about doing it. We got rid of the EverDry folks, but now we're getting the runaround from the gutter people. First, they're waiting for the screen to come it, since it's back-ordered. (Excuse me? I thought that was your business.) Then my husband asks them to come anyway to clean the gutters before we get another heavy rain. They were supposed to come Monday. By 4 p.m., they hadn't showed. Then my husband called. "Oh, we're running late. We still may get there before dark, but if not, you're the first one on our list for tomorrow morning. We'll be there and finished by 8 a.m." Husband has golf today, so I have to get up about 6:30 a.m. to wait for these folks.

By 2 p.m., they still had not arrived. Finally, about 2:30, they get here and do their work. At least I assume they did it. At no point did I see any ladders in the back. Hubbie assumes they climbed up on the roof on the front and just walked over the house to clean the back. Maybe so. I have no way of checking. It's supposed to rain heavily tomorrow night, so we'll know for sure if they cleaned those gutters then.

In a different instance, I bought something that had individual elements. One of the elements came in a box that had the lid removed, and part of what I'd bought was missing. The person who sold this to me had put each of these parts in the bag individually so had to have known I was getting this incomplete package--the whole lid was torn off!

I hate to be cheated or lied to. Why is it that people who are paid to serve us so often seem to go out of their way to act as if they're doing us some big whopping favor? I'm nice to everyone. I don't go out of my way to make anyone's life difficult. Why should someone go out of his/her way to add trouble to my life?

I needed a renewed prescription for the test strips for my diabetic blood glucose monitor, so I called my doctor for a renewal. I sent poor hubby to the drugstore to pick it up since I was doing laundry. It took forever, but finally he returned home. Apparently insurance won't pay for new boxes of test strips, but they would pay for a brand-new glucose monitor. That's what he brought home--a brand new monitor, complete with two boxes of test strips, new lancets, new instruction manuals. And now I have a new system to have to learn, all because of some asinine rule that makes no sense.

I sound whiny, don't I? I need assertiveness training. I need the gumption to stand up for my rights, march into stores and return broken or damaged goods that have been sold to me, and not stand for it when people keep telling me I have to wait. Whiny certainly won't get the job done. Maybe one day, somewhere over the rainbow....

On a happier note, I had a wonderful time watching the squirrels this morning. First one of them came up and began to investigate whether there were any pecans. He climbed the screen and acted like he wanted to get inside the house. Then the other squirrel arrived. Apparently these two are not on friendly terms. No sharing. They chased each other in circles around and around my deck until finally, one of them quit and went away. Of course I had to toss out some pecans. It's adorable the way the squirrel will pick up the pecan, turn it around and around in its little paws, sniffing and tasting it, then seize it firmly in its mouth to run off and bury the nut in the yard. Next spring we may have tiny little pecan trees sprouting up all over the back yard. I'm not sure what we're going to do when we run out of pecans. I suppose we can get a bag of peanuts. They're cheap. After all, it will take a couple of decades to wait for the pecan trees to get big enough to produce pecans! (And yes, I know pecan trees won't grow in Michigan. But will peanuts?) S.