Blood is thicker than water.

That’s supposed to be an analogy for family comes first. Or instructions for janitors. I forget.

I forget a lot these days. It’s the lack of sleep. Or the drinking I do when I’m awake - LOL

Family. Do you ever just wanna shoot yours? But then there’s all that damn blood to clean up. Which is a real pain. Just ask Middle Son, who was selling his bodily fluids (donating plasma) when he began to feel faint, and looked down to see the tube that was supposed to be returning his red cells to him, was instead depositing them onto the floor. He called me with the news that he might be late for dinner since he was essentially bleeding to death and wasn’t sure how long it would take the emergency technicians to bring him back to life.

There’s nothing like having your child call and use the term “emergency technician”. Chalk up another “mommy’s heart stops” moment.

I love my family. I’d do anything for them. But there are days…

I’m still spending a lot of hours on the road and away from home in an effort to take care of my family. The drive is made more unpleasant by exorbitant gasoline prices. The “family of man” seems to be one of the lesser concerns of our Evil Oil Overlords.

Then there’s dealing with the Family Plan. As in telephones, or as I’ve come to know it, Cell Hell.

We have yet to get a bill from the Cell Hellions that is correct. The freshest Hell is Husband’s phone.

Husband is, or rather was, an employee of the provider (an oxymoron if ever there was one). Then the provider decided to fu-, errr…change things in what they considered our too-perfect world.

Husband’s department was aborted by the parent company and tossed into the biological waste bag of a spin-off organization. Some sort of horror movie transformation took place and a monster grew. A monster that is actually making money. This seemed to annoy the Cell Hellions, who have frittered away their small earnings on recording endless-loop voice menus for their “help” lines. They expressed their ire by changing coverage for their demon spawn. All previously-free phone services for employees were killed, in a massacre designed to drive me insane.

I am certain that Satan himself runs the parent company (They both start with the same letter of the alphabet) and he saw that Husband was exceeding performance goals, helping make the demon spawn profitable. Satan said, “There shall be no joy in Mudville!” (or some other rip-off of classic literature) and axed the free phones.

Of course it had to LOOK like a magnanimous gesture, (‘cause that’s how Satan works) so it was cloaked as a “transfer of service”. Ha. Good one, Satan. And of course Husband was too busy exceeding performance goals to deal with Satan, so he assigned me the task. I have more experience, anyway.

The promise of a new and better world was a ruse. Like duh. The “no-cost transfer” memo didn’t get sent to the billing department. They saw the end of the original contract as a termination, worthy of a pound of flesh, and sent an exorbitant automatic debit to the bank. The bank that owns the ATM that ate my debit card that lives in the house that Jack built. (You know I’m getting crazy when I start quoting Dickens - LOL)

Suddenly, the bank account was gutted and bleeding. I always keep one eye on the bank account, because ya never know what sort of shenanigans those bank hoodlums are up to. I saw red - figuratively and literally. WTF is this? Why did the phone company steal our money?

I called. I went through the three hours of endless-loop voice menus. I questioned. Oops, our bad, sorry. Sorry my ass, get the money back in the account and cover the overdraft fees. Well, that’s really between you and your bank. We can only issue you a statement of an erroneous debit. You’ll have to go to Fiesta Night on the Deathstar by yourself.

Fine. I gird my loins, have a stiff drink, and deal with the bank bastards. I have driven ten thousand miles, kept my mother-in-law alive and happy, arbitrated Regulations of Adulthood with a teenage girl, and explained a complicated phone procedure to a man in Calcutta, in the last few weeks.

They didn’t have a chance. The phone charges were reversed, the overdraft fees were annulled, and a fresh bottle of whiskey was purchased.

Middle Son is regenerating bodily fluids and I have sobered up for the next Attack on Sanity.

Jack Daniels and I are ready.

Categories: Family, Humor