Tag: Lists

I have decided to start keeping (I suspect using a gerund is unlikely to be accurate) a list of examples of why my life sucks. Some will be obviously bad or hurtful or damaging, others not so much bad as inconvenient, annoying, irritating, frustrating (I have a huge problem with frustration and don’t handle it well).

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no delusions of having the worst life; quite the contrary, I freely admit that some aspects are actually fairly good and nice, but there is no way it can be considered a great, comfortable, happy life either. The cumulation of all the difference circumstances in my life (financial, social, physical, mental, geographic, etc.) somehow create a convergence that makes me quite miserable overall (i.e., on average).

Whenever bad things happen to me or my (immediate) family, I can’t help but think that I/we are cursed because bad things not only happen a lot (far too frequently to be typical), but they usually happen in just the right way to maximize the hurt. Some people will say that bad stuff happens to everybody and things like these are coincidence, but even a die-hard skeptic has to admit that coincidence can only stretch so far. How many coincidences does it take before it becomes a statistical aberration? 10? 100? 1,000,000? Yes, a perfectly balanced coin, when flipped an infinite number of times will have runs of 1,000 heads in a row or 1,000,000 tails in a row, and so on, but that’s just theoretical since nothing in real life is infinite nor perfect. If you flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads nine of those, then you just have to question if it’s coincidence or something else…

• Last week I put a hold on volumes one, two, and three (of three) of something at the library.

  I checked on my holds two days later and saw that volumes two and three were already transfered to my home branch, but the third one (volume one) was listed as “Missing + 1 Hold”. What the‽ Why did the system not transfer my hold to one of the other copies if the one it was assigned to could not be found‽ There were four or five copies, two or three of which were in. I canceled the hold and put it again, this time it was assigned to one of the copies marked as “In Library”.

  Another two days later, it was Saturday, the day I go out to pick up my holds from the library. I checked again, and there was no change; it was marked as “In Library + 1 Hold”.

  I said “screw it” and decided to go to the library and pick up the copy of volume one in person because we were going to be in the area to run some errands anyway. A few minutes later, I arrived at the library and checked the catalog to determine where to find it, but when I did, it said it was, finally, after a week, “In Transit”. WTF‽

  They didn’t bother sending it for a week, and the moment (literally down to a few minutes) I decided they can suck it and I’d get it myself, they send it out! We ran our errands and a couple of hours later, I went to my home branch (with ~5% hope) and picked up my holds. Not surprisingly, volume one had not arrived yet.

  That meant that I had to wait for a whole week before I could volume one. If it were volume three, or even two, that would be one thing, but volume one‽ That ruins the whole set. (Actually, in this case, the books were really small, so I could get through the whole thing in a week, so any of them would block the whole thing.)

  This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but for someone with OCD like myself, having them split up like this, with different due dates, is quite painful.