As I get older, I notice that things bother me that didn’t use to faze me at all. Maybe I just didn’t have time when I was a working wife and mother. Now that I’m retired, I find myself flummoxed by things like paying for parking on an app on your phone.
How does the app know you’re there? And why does it take 437 clicks to tell it you’re leaving (assuming you can figure them all out before the police arrive to tow your car). What happened to meters? They were convenient and easy and all you had to do was scrounge under your car seat for change.
But more than flummoxed, I get downright cranky about kitchen trash bags. These products state – right on the box – that they “grip the can.” Grip the can, they do not. You put them on the can and they stay there at first. But if you toss anything with any significant weight – like, say, a tissue – into the bag, then it collapses in on itself.
This is annoying. Why can’t it grip the bag? Oh, wait, I’m supposed to buy those giant rubber band things to put around it. Which work very well. In fact, they work so well, you can’t pry the darned things off. You have to cut them off, risking a snap on your hand or arm.
And it starts to get expensive.
Here’s another thing that bothers me as I’m older. Bathroom doors in restaurants that weigh about the same as a young killer whale. And that open inward. Unless you work out with weights, you have to pray someone wants to come in so you can get out.
As I’m aging, I am less appreciative of my annual medical checkups. Now they are called “Medicare wellness checks.” Let me digress to say that for most of us elder, our teeth, ears, and eyes give us the most trouble. These are the three areas of “wellness” that Medicare doesn’t cover. So I’m kind of grouchy going into my annual checkup.
This year in addition to remembering the three irrelevant words (which I easily did, even though I often have trouble remembering what I did yesterday), we had to draw a clock. I’m thinking that in another decade, they will have to come up with a different test. A “traditional” clock isn’t what anyone under the age of 60 has ever really learned to read.
My health professional asked me to draw 9:15 and was not amused when I asked, “A.M. or P.M.?”
Then she made me stand up and sit down repetitively for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is a long time for arthritic knees, but I did it. I have no idea what that told them, other than my knees make very funny sounds after about the third or fourth stretch.
But at last she said, “So you had your blood work two days ago?” I blinked at her owlishly. Was this some of kind of memory trick? “No,” I said. “I didn’t have blood work.” “Well, this says you did,” she said, as though I was already in full-blown dementia. Then she did a double-take and said, “Oh, that was 2023. I guess we forgot to order it.”
So who really needed the Medicare wellness check? Maybe the people who make garbage bags need one, too!
as usual – you are a hoot – the things you mentioned are just the TIP of the ICEBERG – the only good thing that happened this year for me was AETNA came up with a debit card to allow me the help to buy up to 45.00 per month of staple good – no alcohol, soda and a couple other things like tobacco products – but it really help my tight budget – gotta spend it each month = it does not carry over – this was a real treat after my monthly charge to them went up to 46.50 – so I guess maybe I win – if I can spend it wisely!! Aggravating thins to us old folks is a thing that keeps us pumpling!!!