I feel like every time I want to print something I need to buy new ink cartridges and then go ahead and buy a new printer. I just spent an hour troubleshooting my printer and still can’t figure it out. Perhaps the ink cartridge is too old? I think I’ve had it a year, or whenever I got my printer. Maybe not that long ago. It’s got the same number as the one in there but it WILL. NOT. PRINT.
I know why businesses no longer have customer service. I wanted to throw the printer across the room and then punch a customer service representative in the face. There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a way for people like me, who print two pieces of paper a month, to print stuff without going through this hassle.
Two weeks ago I drove to Austin for a day-long meditation course. It took me an hour and a half to get there, and if you’re familiar with the San Antonio to Austin stretch of I-35 you know that’s unreal. But it took me two and a half hours to get home. I was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic for no reason other than people rubber necking at someone pulled off the side of the road.
I sat there for at least half an hour and I was getting extremely upset. I am a homebody for that very reason: in order to avoid traffic and the stress of living in an overpopulated world. But I had a little talk with myself and realized that I need to change.
I need to rethink how I look at the world. Yes, there are now 8 billion people on the planet. It takes way to long to get to Austin from San Antonio these days. And yes, large corporations no longer offer customer service because they’re so big and because they don’t have to. Also, because when we call we’re so outraged we make people cry.
Life is frustrating. It’s hard to live on the planet with so many other people, with so many who need and want so much. It’s hard to live on the planet when you feel so small and insignificant, when you can’t get help for little things like printers. It’s hard when you just want to drive home without any hassle but everyone else on the road wants to stare at a van on the side of the road.
But I want to stop being upset about it. I want to accept it. I don’t know when I realized I feel like a sardine. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point along the way I discovered that so much of my anxiety is because I don’t know anyone anymore. I don’t know HP. I don’t know where to go to get help with my printer. I don’t know how to work the app. There’s no phone number to call, no person to talk to.
I don’t know when I started to feel crowded and claustrophobic, but I do. I feel out-of-sorts and irritable. I would like things to work because then I won’t have to worry about troubleshooting (which could take two minutes or forever). But until the world changes, until people realize that corporate business is bad for morale, I will learn to change my attitude. This stuff isn’t going to change, and I’m powerless to do anything about it. It’s beyond my control and I would like to be happy rather than be right.