Nothing’s ever easy! It’s become my mantra over the last few years. Ask Lisa. She’ll tell you. Ask bro-in law Mike. It became the mantra of both of us as we were building the cabin a few years ago. It all stems from the daily knee-deep crap that one must wade through to get things done. It stems from issues like these: I can never just order something from a mail-order company and find it on my door step 2 or 3 days later. Not without my credit card getting billed 3 times. Not without the product arriving broken, arriving in the wrong color or not arriving at all. Not without having to call the company at least 8 times to find out where in the Hell it is.

I can never assemble an item that has “some assembly required” and finish it in a “normal” amout of time. Not without 3 trips back to the store for the missing parts. Not without reading and rereading the assembly instructions to determine if I am losing my sanity (which I am by the way) or if the non-English-speaking Vietnamese idiot that translated the instructions from Chinese to Korean to English is in need of immediate attention in the form of my fists wrapped tightly around his neck.

And finally (and this is the incident that led me to today’s post) I can never get the proper paperwork filled out by any government agency, large corporation or Dr’s office on the first request. Not without using 2 tanks of gas driving back and forth to put in 17 additional requests. Not without sitting at the computer to draft a one page letter explaining exactly what I need, why I need it and when I need it by.

I’m not sure if my mantra “nothing’s ever easy” was derived by the increasingly lackluster customer service exhibited by so many companies these days, or if perhaps it stemmed from my inability to take the bullshit that they all so easily dish out.

Either way, watch for me in the refunds line at Wal Mart. I’ll be the one making the refunds clerk cry while I wait for the company’s regional corporate address.