Recently, a friend and I were having one of those idle conversations about what, if anything, we would do differently if we won the lottery. I said I would fly first class and hire someone to come to my house and cook a couple of times a week. My friend, wise woman that she is, said she would hire a personal assistant.
Of course. Why hadn't I thought of that? I immediately traded in my wish list for hers.
Why do I need a personal assistant? Well, here is what my last week looked like.
MONDAY:
I called a plumber to fix the water pressure in our shower.
We had a new screen door installed. (Made possible by my spending hours online last week looking for, and ordering, a screen door.)
TUESDAY:
The plumber came and fixed our shower.
We realized the screen door wouldn't open to its full arc. I texted the person who had installed the screen door to see if he could fix it.
WEDNESDAY:
I attempted to use Venmo to do a good deed. I didn't have sufficient information about the person I was trying to send money to, so I had to exchange emails with someone who had the info.
I saw I had received a bunch of text messages and realized my phone was not dinging to notify me. I went into settings and tried to fix this a couple of different ways. No success
THURSDAY:
I called Apple to get help with retrieving my Word documents from the cloud.** (This was in follow-up to another call to Apple a couple of weeks ago seeking help with my very-slow computer. The person who I talked with that time called my six-year-old computer "vintage," and said he would try to help. He walked me through taking things off the computer and putting them back on. The next day, I discovered my documents were stuck in the cloud. It took me a while to get up the energy to call back . . .).
During this second call to Apple, a nice woman hastened to be of help when I told her I would rather stab myself in the forehead with a fork than call Microsoft. And by hastened, I mean she spent two hours with me, after which I believed my problem was solved.
FRIDAY:
My occasional yard helper was supposed to come, but our street was being repaved, and after we texted back and forth about how he could reach the house, we had to reschedule.
A technician came in the late afternoon (after I had waited all day) to fix our internet connection. (This was in follow-up to our losing the connection three times in the last month. He came after I had many interactions--I won't call them conversations--with a robot over the course of many calls to our internet provider, trying to reach a human being.) I didn't catch the technician's name. I will call him Ralph. He looked like a Ralph. We had a conversation that went something like this:
Ralph (after fiddling with the box outside our house for over an hour and climbing a pole in order to fiddle with another box): Your DSL lines are too fast for the distance from the something, something.
Me: Huh?
Ralph: I can’t slow them down without an order, and I can’t ask for an order. The customer has to do that.
Me (voice rising in panic): So, I have to call CenturyLink? Please, don't make me call CenturyLink. Please, don't make me talk to a robot.
Ralph (sympathetically): Something, something about what he would try next.
Ralph (a while later): You shouldn't have to call CenturyLink. I just have to drive to (fill in the blank, I didn't understand where) to check the line. It should be fine.
Me (restraining self from grabbing his sleeve): Wait. What if you leave and it still isn't working?
Ralph (in a don't-you-worry-little-lady voice): I'll be able to tell from the other end. I'll come back if it isn't working.
Me (muttering to self as Ralph left): Please don't make me talk to a robot.
By some miraculous twist of fate, the connection held and I have not seen Ralph since.
(Also on Friday - The person who installed the screen door came by and loosened something. It still isn't right.)
SATURDAY:
I started a blog post about Ralph and the robot. As is my habit, I saved it in a word document, with the intention of transferring it onto the blog when I was finished.
SUNDAY (today):
I tried to make a Skype call to my cousin in Scotland. I discovered that Skype had disappeared from my computer. I was unable to reinstall it.
I looked for the blog post I had started. It was nowhere to be found. Apparently, the help from Apple has led to new documents being stored in a place that I am unable to find or access. (My brother and sister-in-law will be visiting this week. She is good with computers. I am hoping she will be able to help me. Are you reading this, Janice?)
I went to my niece's house to pick something up, and, while I was there, asked her to help me with my text notifications, which she kindly did at lightening speed. (Bless the young people.)
I rewrote this blog post. Believe it or not, I left some things out . . .
So, yes, a personal assistant (preferably human) would be nice. I am thinking maybe I could pool my resources with a bunch of friends, and we could take turns using such an angel to de-stress ours days.
Want in?
** I used to think the cloud was literally a cloud. I thought the information was floating around above our heads somewhere. I was disappointed to learn the cloud was actually a warehouse full of computers somewhere in central Oregon.
