And there were several of them this week.
1. My son sent an over-sized birthday card without realizing it would need extra postage. In the past if I received mail with postage due, the mailman would deliver the mail anyway and put a little envelope in the mailbox for me to put the change owed inside and return it via the box. I always paid up. Always. But this week, the mailman left a note and took the card back to the post office so I had to make a special trip to pick it up. The postage due was only 70 cents. It probably cost me $2.00 in gas to go to the post office and back. That’s just plain obnoxious, Postal People.
2. You saw those snow pictures on my newly planted flowers last week, right? That was annoying, too, but clearly my own fault. I know better than to plant stuff in Northern Colorado before May 15th.
3. The orange neighbor cat was back sniffing around my garden. We’ve chased him away twice so far. I haven’t been able to put the cat repellent out because it’s too windy and I really don’t like having it blown in my face. Keeping the soil in the garden wet is my only weapon at the moment as this cat doesn’t like digging in mud.
4. We’ve received several calls this week from the scammers who tell us our medical alert system is ready to ship but they need a boatload of information to complete the deal. Some of them are robo calls, but a couple have been real people. I yell, “This is a scam and I know it, so stop calling here.” But it appears we’re on a list of senior citizens, the nation’s most vulnerable group. I keep wondering who sold our names and ages. You idiots, stop selling our names, ages, addresses, and phone numbers. That’s a crappy way to make a buck. Geesh.
5. Somebody is trying to hack our computers. They try so many methods, but one I find particularly annoying is when I get an email with the name of someone I know in the email address box and the subject line “For Pat.” When I run the cursor over that email address name, it’s something totally foreign and definitely bogus. Who has been in my email address book in order to get that information and then how did it get into the hands of a spammer?
I hate that we have to be so careful and that we’re vulnerable if we’re out here doing our writing promo stuff on email and social media.
6. One of my projects for this afternoon is to run a deep scan on my computer. My husband found trojans on his computer last week but they didn’t show up with a routine scan. He found them only with a deep scan. One more big fat aggravation.
What’s driving you crazy these days?
Oh I feel for you on the computer viruses. I’ve had to clean out a couple and they are tenacious and difficult to track down. Grrrr.. irritating, indeed!
I hear you, Pat! Been there. I was phished (spelling ?)and it took forever for me to recover. So what else is driving me crazy? Grocery shopping, my weight, my cats, my husband, traffic, my to do lists, figuring out social media…oh well! I love your blog!!
Pam
I feel you! Scammers and spammers are the bane of my existence. I also have a gripe against retail and org. websites that seemed designed to be NON user-friendly–if there’s a way to make it more complicated and/or confusing, they’ll find it. Jeff Bezos may be a power-mad megalomaniac bent on total Web domination (as some have suggested), but I bless him every time I log onto Amazon.
Scammers! Argh! I wish they’d try to scam me and find that they are way deep into an account with no money in it!Also I hate it when I go to some site about something in particular and then see ads on any of my accounts about whatever it is I’ve looked up. Especially as a writer – I might look up cremation and then get all these ads – Lost a Loved One? No, you asses! That would be careless. Thanks for allowing me this moment of rage – so cathartic!
What bugs me is when I sit down to write, and my computer does an update that then requires a reboot. It happens way too often , and I lose 10 minutes or more every time.
Hi Margot — I like that “noisome pox” curse. I’ll be stealing it, if you don’t mind.
Stephanie, that’s exactly what’s going on here. I was home all day that “Sorry we missed you” note was tucked in our mailbox. And the postage just keeps on going up.
Sadly, the post office seems to be getting worse as time goes on. We have community mailboxes. Since I started working from home, I’ve noticed if I have a package that requires a signature, the postal carrier just leaves a note in my mailbox that reads “Sorry we missed you” rather than trying to knock. I’m home all day–so I know he didn’t even try. So I have to make a 10-minute drive to the post office and wait in line because he’s too lazy to drive a half a block and get out of his truck.
Pat – You really have had an aggravating week! A noisome pox on all scammers and hackers! As I think about it, it’s really scary how easy it is to get one’s name, email address and so on and make a scam look entirely legitimate unless one’s savvy. Sad that we can’t have the trust that we used to be able to have…