FRUSTRATION FEST

My wife and I just spent a zillion dollars having plumbers dig a giant tunnel under our house to replace a less than functional 47-year-old sewer pipe. Several times in the past year, it had caused our master bathroom to turn into a shallow sewagey swimming pool. Okay, the flooded floor was likely not anywhere near as repulsive or smelly as you were just imagining, but it still was not pleasant. And of course, it always seemed to happen at the exact worst time… not that I can think of a particularly optimal time for a damaged sewer pipe to cause a bathroom flood.  To add insult to an already expensive injury, additional frustrations ensued when fear of further future floods caused us to abandon that room and only use the guest bathroom for two months while waiting for the scheduled below the baseboards burrowing to begin. (Too much alliteration?  Yeah, I thought so. I was trying to make sewer water seem a little more lighthearted)

Previously, we had the same plumbing people do similar work on the other side of the house after we got tired of our kitchen sink occasionally doing an impression of the Niagara Falls basin. The last straw that time was when we had people over for a fancy dinner and my wife had to cook without the services of a functioning sink and I had to later do the evening’s massive load of dishes in a bathtub. We knew it was just a mental thing, but pots and pans scrubbed in the bathroom just did not seem as clean, no matter how much extra soap I used.

On both pipe replacement jobs, the actual plumbing work had been perfect (or good enough by typical 2020s work standards where it’s not advisable to look too close, worry about details, or assume you won’t overpay after an excessive wait). Unfortunately, their subcontractor that physically dug both holes, did a crummy job repairing my sprinkler system soaker hoses that were damaged in the excavations.

I am the only member of my family that lives in Texas and the rest enjoy teasing me about all things Lone Star. They find particular joy in pointing out how ridiculous it is, that you have to water your house here. Yes, you non-Northern Texaners read that right. I have soaker hoses, not to water my constantly dying front lawn flower beds of death, but instead to water my house.

The sandy loam and clay soil in the area wreaks havoc with the slab foundation style house construction used here. If you do not regularly water the area next to your house during the deserty dry summer months (and often even if you do) you will likely need massively expensive foundation repair work that makes the hole we just excavated look cheap (at least 20 houses in my immediate neighborhood have had major foundation work just in the past year). 

You can add that to the list I referenced a few weeks ago, of items not mentioned in the Welcome To Texas brochure. I think the only reason the current steady flow of transplant Californians moving here in mass, do not complain about this pricey foundation mess in foreboding warnings to all their fellow future flee-ers, is because it’s no worse than the west coast’s constant threat of earthquakes, mudslides, and forest fires. It’s always something… says the guy who used to deal with Florida’s abusive hurricane season.

So just like last time, the week after they finished tearing up my lawn to replace the sewer pipes, I had to become a sprinkler drip hose repair boy. Certainly, a frustrating task after throwing an ungodly amount of money at the repair people. Yes, I know I could have called them, but the contract states they are not responsible for damage to those types of hoses, and they did attempt to mend them. Just not very successfully.  But I was not going to let that spoil our relaxing Sunday. I figured I would get it done late in the afternoon after my wife and I finished with our usual relaxing weekend brunch and list of errands.

We try hard to make our weekends a good balance of restorative relaxation and getting needed crap done. Saturday had been very productive, so I was looking forward to a lazier day. Things were going well but unexpectedly, our Sunday afternoon turned into a giant frustration fest. Mostly of the First World Problem type that I should be embarrassed to complain about. You know what I mean; like when some mega-rich person whines endlessly about the unacceptable three-minute wait time between being served their bottle of 2013 Roederer Cristal Champagne and imported Kolikof Purebred Beluga Caviar on his Mediterranean-moored yacht’s deck. 

You see, my wife and I got new cell phones that afternoon. Most of my life, I have played the martyr-Dan frugal card and purchased some mid-range-ish okay-ish practical phone. Then kept it way longer than advisable. My current cell was an old very buggy ‘like-model’ insurance replacement they sent me several years ago after my original got stolen. As a self-flagellation type punishment for letting my old one get swiped, I put up with its constant issues much longer than I should have.

Early last year we had discussed replacing it when our provider advertised a new “free state of the art phone” with “any trade-in”. Unfortunately, because my phone was so old, it fell into the category of one of those fast-talk small-print ad asterisk exceptions, and they were only willing to credit us an amount similar to the price of a 12-pack of store brand generic soda. Neither of us take well to bait-and-switch gotcha deals, so we quickly walked out in frustration and had not been back since.

I think my wife finally got tired of hearing me go ballistic every few months when my sputtering old cell would do it’s usual paperweight impression and yet again crash, lose its data, or stop reading its sim & memory card (mind you, she is just as bad as me in that behavior, which makes it more obvious to her).  So, part of her birthday gift to me was the promise of a new fancy shmancy cell phone, no matter how ridiculously over-priced my practical brain felt it was. 

We still think our indifferent heedless cell-phone salesman that day, made a mistake when he offered me an ample enough trade-in rebate that we said yes to not only replacing my phone but also my wife’s. But papers were digitally signed and pricey new shiny and slippery (why do they make them that way) pretty close to top-of-the-line cell phones were procured for the both of us. In the past they had always moved my phone data from one to the other in the store before I left (maybe that’s a sign of how old it was), but in this age of sloppy workmanship and lack of customer service, like the house hole digging people had (man do I sound like a grumpy “you kids get off my lawn” old coot), we were told we had to do that ourselves at home. 

Postponing our last errand to later, we excitedly rushed home to start transferring the data from our old phones to new, a task that our inattentive salesman hastily described to us as simple and easy. Needless to say, there was nothing simple or easy about it. Especially because my jacked-up unresponsive old phone was intent on losing and deleting my data rather than moving it through the ether to its replacement.  It was an astoundingly frustrating process that we still have not completed.

Needing a break after two hours of aggravation, we left to run our last errand to a pet store. A few weeks ago, we had one of those sad die-offs in our fish tank. We were only able to save one fish and had since completely scrubbed and changed everything in the tank. It was a frustrating long process, but we had finally finished things up and were ready to restock. We tried the weekend before, but none of the three nearby pet/fish stores had what we needed.

Living in the north Dallas burbs might suck for house foundations, but for shopping it’s usually amazing. There is a massive cluster of cities close together and each has its own set of every store imaginable. Striking out last week at the three closest pet stores here was no big deal since there are plenty more not far away in the abutting built-up cities.

We assumed certainly we would have better luck this weekend. But that was not the case. Between the lack of stock and unversed staffs, the first two pet/fish stores offered us more of the same frustration as the previous weekend. Finally, we drove the 10 minutes up to a place in Allen that surprisingly had most of what we were looking for. Like the hole digging work next to my house, nothing was perfect, but close enough to finally satisfy us.

We got back home, and it still looked like all of my old phone’s data was lost and the new phone had nothing on it yet. Getting more and more frustrated, I knew it was best to walk away again. Even though it was the hottest part of the afternoon, I went outside to dig up and mend the leaking poorly repaired soaker hose in the gloppy Texas mud. Of course, that too did not go as quick and easy as it should have either, but what home repair ever does. 

As I was doing the work, I noticed my neighbor’s bothersome cottonwood tree was again blooming, spewing its fibrous droppings into my pool en-masse, which throws off the ph levels and mucks up the filter system. I needed to clean all that out yet again, before the equipment was permanently damaged. After finally finishing with the sprinkler drip hose and pool problems, I was covered with mud, sweat, and chlorine, but on the way in for a much-needed shower, I could not resist checking on my phone’s status. It was somehow worse. It was still error messaging that it could not transfer anything, but now it appeared all the original phone’s data had been deleted. The word frustration did not begin to describe how I felt at that point.  Again, I just wisely walked away because I needed to clean up before my family’s weekly Zoom call.

Nothing calms me down more than walking and swimming on a seashore. It is truly my happy place. I find being near water mentally therapeutic and recuperative. But there are no seashores in North Texas (despite what the locals think, lakes don’t count), which is why despite all the maintenance work, I love having a pool. It’s the closest thing I got.  But when it’s not an option either, there is my old friend the hot shower. And that afternoon, it was perfect. Along with the dirt, I also washed away my afternoon’s frustrations.

Standing there under the shower with its now fully functional drain, I thought about all the things that were frustrating me that day. If I lost all my old phone stuff, who cares. A mild inconvenience compared to how much easier my world was about to be with my amazing new phone. The plumbing and sprinkler work was finally complete, so life can return to normal. The pool would be fine, and I am blessed that I could afford to have one in the first place. And as for the six different pet store scramble, well that just triggered a whole massive other thing that I needed to stop and be thankful for.

(Okay so I take long showers sometimes… I was having a revelation type moment in there, let me be.) As I scrubbed away any final traces of the day’s frustrations, I thought about that last pet store in Allen where we found what we wanted. Everything seemed normal in the busy strip mall: the full parking lot, the many shoppers, the friendly employes. Yet less than two miles away from there, just the day before, the Allen Outlet Mall was the site of yet another of our recent constant stream of mass-shootings.

Two miles and 24 hours away, several lives were prematurely taken. Two miles and 24 hours away, the priorities of everyone there were instantly shifted. Two miles and 24 hours away, people’s worlds were shattered, mutilated, and changed forever.  Yet today the world kept spinning and life went on as usual. And I suddenly felt like I had no right to be upset about a phone, pipe, fish, or pool. These were irrelevant First World problems. My universe was intact, and in the big scheme of things I had no right to complain.  Had I been two miles and 24 hours away, things could have been very different and that is way too close to waste time being frustrated over petty nonsense.  

When I got dried off, I rushed to tell my wife about my priority adjusting epiphany, but she had already independently reached the same conclusion. We exchanged ‘what-if’ glances and slipped into our normal comfortable routines. We chatted with my family on the Zoom call, made a nice dinner, and had decent success finally getting the new phones functioning.  All seemed normal again, except I did notice we definitely said a few extra ‘I love yous’ before going to sleep.