So this evening I decided that it would be a better plan for me to go over to a local coffee shop with my laptop, buy some overpriced sandwich and coffee and get some work done on this assignment.as trying to get anything remotely productive done at home is often a Herculean task. Almost 2 hours, $13 and an amazing club sandwich later I had managed to get my daily log of food uploaded (this only took 20 tries) and to drive up my blood pressure as I was preparing to throw my laptop out the window of the cafe.
Here's a little back story to set the scene in which I currently live - in 2013 both my husband and I lost our jobs within months of each other and this sucked. By mid 2014 we were still both out of work, and running our house on financial fumes and the kindness and generosity of both family and strangers. Our church kept us supplied with healthy meals and the occasional gift card and our friends and family helped us out by keeping our kids in activities and purchasing birthday and Christmas presents for them on our behalf. Fast forward to April 2015 and we're now both employed at a total of about 55% of our original earnings and playing catch up with all of the bills that didn't get paid properly for that year we were unemployed. This means that seemingly extraneous costs such as malware protection aren't being purchased in favour of paying our phone bill or buying groceries (or clothes for the 11 year old who is going through his 5th growth spurt since his birthday).
This brings us to my rage issues at the cafe. I apparently know much less about how technology works than even I was aware as I had figured that getting away from our house and the WiFi here would help cut down on the number of annoying pop-ups that have been plaguing our laptop. Nope. In fact, it felt like I was getting more pop-ups while sitting in the cafe! Each time I tried to update my account on www.myfitnesspal.com I would get stuck staring at a screen that had changed to base coding with no images and then an ad for buying the latest and greatest protection from Norton/Windows/Bell/Rogers/the guy up the street's dog... The whole point to my signing up to this otherwise handy site was to enable me to easier track my food intake and my exercise (such as it is) for this class assignment and now here I am stuck in Internet limbo with pop-ups for diet pills, libido treatments, flat abs, and buy our anti virus programming... grrr!! Like Hercules fighting the hydra, for every pop-up I closed, two more would open. I truly wanted to throw the stupid laptop across the room. Or at least the mouse (I wouldn't want to hurt anyone with my temper tantrum). Now I am not a child, or an adolescent; I am on the dawning end of middle age and should know better. Knowing better kept me from destroying an expensive machine. And deep breathing (yay for mindful meditation!) helped me realise that the coffee shop wasn't as much of a help as I had thought it would be. So I packed up and came home to work on the desktop (again, optimistic that the problem was with the laptop...) NOPE!!! and I mean NOPE! And it is with all of this that I realise that my children know some (possibly most) of their language because I have a temper. 8 pop-ups for Norton that wouldn't close (come on!! really??? wth???) and a hissy fit that my wonderful husband tactfully and wisely didn't take personally while he closed them all up and I sit now at my desk typing this account of my anger issues when I'm stressed and not having things come as easy as they used to for me. So here goes with my transparency: Hi, my name is Kim, and I have anger issues. I yell and scream when things don't work the way I think they should. I get annoyed easily when things don't come as quickly as they used to for me. And I yell or belittle other drivers on the road when I believe them to be inept at what should be a simple skill. This is not a pretty trait, and certainly not one of which I'm proud; but admitting it is the first step, right?
“There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out. Of course, the aftermath was less pleasant. Once you'd told everyone you hated them and not to come after you, where exactly did you go?”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
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