The Humor in Hindsight

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Today my mom and I had an almost completely unproductive adventure: we went shopping. The purpose of our trip was to come up with some sort of wardrobe that I could take with me to Jerusalem, since the culture is much more modest and conservative over there than it is here. Unfortunately, we came up with very little.

The other purpose to our adventure was to get my mom's cell phone fixed, as well as clear up a few issues with our plan. This purpose was just as unsuccessful as the other one, though looking back it was at least a little humorous.

See, we started out by going to the Verizon kiosk in the mall. The employee that we talked to informed us that they only dealt with Verizon FIOS, and that we'd need to go to the upstairs Verizon kiosk to deal with phone issues.

So we trekked upstairs and quickly located the second kiosk. Where the employee there promptly informed us that he could do nothing about the phone, and he could not help us with our other issues. He then spent about ten minutes telling us where to go, what to ask for, and how Verizon could help, adding in a personal story of how they helped him when his phone pocket-downloaded three hundred dollars worth of crap (this story took up about nine of our ten conversation minutes).

And on we continued, driving about ten minutes to a shopping center where we located an actual Verizon store. However, it turned out to be a Verizon wireless store, meaning that it could do nothing about the phone and nothing about the issues. The poor employee in that store was so bored that I think he was actually excited to help us when we walked in. Though really he couldn't help us at all.

But he did point us onward, and we wound up at our fourth Verizon place of the day. The employee at this store could order my mom a new phone, but he wasn't able to diagnose what was wrong with her current one, and he could sortof tell her what caused her other issues, but he couldn't do anything to fix them. He could tell us where to go to get everything taken care of though, so we made progress! However, our ridiculous run-around took so long that, by the time we finished at the fourth store, the time was 6:06, and the fifth store that should have been able to fix all our problems was closed. At least we knew where to start tomorrow.

I'm not sure where exactly the gratitude comes in here, because it was extremely frustrating at the time. Luckily, it turned out to be one of those stories that I'm able to look back on and laugh at. So I guess that's something - the humor in hindsight. It really helps put perspective on what would otherwise be a frustrating life.