Well, had a pretty rotten day today, and here's a short rant.

To paint the backdrop my wife is in hospital after a very painful shoulder surgery, which is staged so she gets to endure another few months of pain until she gets the actual shoulder replacement. So here's the day - Mercury definitely in retrograde.

I started the day by paying bills, which was good. Then I did my usual payday Amazon and King Soopers orders. As part of the Amazon order I got two boxes of plastic trash compactor bags (heavy) and a little box of those Temptations Tuna Treats for the cats. Then, at Kings, among other stuff, I ordered four 32 oz (quart) bottles of half and half.

Logged in to work and was trying to tie up loose ends at work before going to the hospital. There was an ASAP that I had to get done so I'm working on that - it's complicated so I had to concentrate.

In the meantime I get this alert on my King Soopers app that the half and half isn't in stock but we can substitute four 16 oz (pint) bottles for the four quart bottles. Now, I'm ordering a gallon of half and half here, right? 4 quarts = 1 gallon. And, mathematically, since 2 pints = 1 quart, then if I want a gallon in pints, I have to get eight, not four. Right?

But the app doesn't let me. Now I should have known better than to dial into their soul-sucking black hole of customer care, but...sigh...I did. After screaming 'agent! agent! agent! agent!' over and over until the AI said it would connect me with someone, I waited 10 minutes (not bad) on hold before someone answered.

I explained the bit above about my order, and she said let me connect you to the store. So a lady answers at the store, and I told her what I wanted and, well, that's against the corporate rules, because you simply can't add to an order. I explained that since I wanted a gallon of half and half it was immaterial whether that came in eight pints or four quarts, but she just talked over me. Ended up hanging up on me.

Furious, I called the store manager and ended up getting this lady's subordinate. Hey, this just keeps getting better and better, right? So I called the lady back and she said she, just this once, would add four pints to my order. I thanked her, feeling soul-soiled from my own anger.

Then I went to the hospital to see my wife, who was in horrible pain, and the infectuous disease doctor came in to see her while I was there. He said it was unusual not to find infections, and it led him to think she might be suffering from some inflammatory type of arthritis, rather than being infected. When he left, she collapsed in a heap of tears because this doctor had actually, if you read between the lines, told us she hadn't really needed the surgery and if she'd been referred to a rheumatologist first, we might have her horrible, debilitating arthritis under control this very moment.

Now, this HMO, which I will not name, (whoops, just had a fleeting thought about the ruler of Germany who abdicated in 1919), screwed us around for years while her arthritis got worse, and NO ONE, NO ONE thought it might be good to refer her to a rheumatologist? Really?

Her arm was black and blue too because they kept screwing up the IVs. Basically right out of a Stephen King horror novel. Because being sick here in 'Murika really IS the stuff of horror. Did you know that at age 63, when I should be doing better than I ever have financially, I had to take out a loan to pay my financially crippling copay? And cover some dental surgery I needed? Well, this is the lounge, so I won't get started on healthcare.

OK, so I get home, and Amazon delivers the package. One day delivery. Pretty good. Oh, but wait! The person who packed it ALL in the same box - the thin little plastic jar of cat treats with the two heavy boxes of garbage bags - gosh, how can we be surprised if the cat treat container broke and scattered little square tuna stuffed treats all over the bottom of the box. I get that Amazon is probably not that great a place to work, but seems like you'd put the heavy stuff in one box and the light stuff in another.

Finally, to cap it all off, the piece de resistance of the whole thing, is when I got to Kings to pick up the order, the very nice young lady who brought it out to my car for me, told me her boss had them add those four more pints of half and half to the order, and I thanked her.

But.............she was an American kid, because I talked to her - no accent or anything. Just a kid who went to public school here in the 'Murikan 'burbs.

She pronounced 'pints' line you would pin. A short i. Pin - ts. As opposed to pronouncing it like a pine (tree) - p-eye-nts. Think about that while you recoil in mindless horror at what we have done to education system. It should be funded really well, and be so excellent it is the envy of the world.

Well, enough of that. Sorry to rant. Shitty day.

Oh, well. Now I'm gonna watch a little TV.