Life has it's own course. Try as we might to manage the time we have in life, we can't. That is the flat-out truth of the matter.
Ever kept track of what you've done for any given time? When my husband was studying to be a minister, one of his professors had him do a time-management log. He had to literally account for every minute of his day for a solid week. Sleep, eat, leisure, work, study, bathroom breaks. Every single thing had to be logged in and tallied up to a bottom line of 24/7. It was the most annoying thing he's ever done, but it was an exercise in how to maintain a more productive life. It helped him recognize areas where he wasted time.
Talk about a waste of time:
Today I spent one and a half hours on the telephone trying to order a copy of my birth certificate. (I had already sent the money and ordered it via snail-mail over two months ago, but Vital Records had not sent it.) So it is crunch time. I need that certificate ASAP. So I get on the phone to order it. All but 5 minutes of that hour and a half were spent listening to annoying jazz music and an occasional voice recording which screeched, "your call is important to us, yada, yada, yada." At one point a real live lady came on, and I told her my problem and she gave me another telephone number to call. When I asked her to repeat the number, she got angry and shouted the number at me, then hung up. Looks like people who are paid to talk, don't like to talk. (Maybe they ought to get a job walking dogs?)
I am not exaggerating about how long I was on the phone, either. My cell phone battery died, and I had to hang up and start the process of waiting all over again on my land-line phone. On the second call, I waited 50 minutes. Before you comment and inform me that I can get a birth certificate online, let me tell you, no I couldn't. The drop-down menu for the city in which I was born, didn't have my city listed. I couldn't override it any way shape or form. Had to call the VitaChek folks and do the whole thing via telephone. Now, here's the kicker. The reason my certificate had not been mailed from my state already with the money order I sent in, was because I had not included my photo ID. The VitaChek folks didn't even need a photo identification. They don't even need it to send me one. Bureaucracy! Go figure!
So, I'm thinking through this process and realize how ridiculous it is to try and maintain a productive schedule in one's life. What should have taken 5 minutes, took nearly 4 hours, if you include the time it took me to send the first request and take it to the post office. It cost me nearly 8 times as much to get it done, too. (Who knows what happened to my 12-dollar money order?) Folks, we are not the captains of our own ships. We do not always have control over our lives. We are most often at the mercy of others. In fact, as far as this expensive certificate is concerned, I can't even get my money back if the state I was born in can't process the information they have been given. It's gone. $72.05. Caput! Poof! And, I will have to go back to square one. That thought is about as productive to me right now, as the possibility that it could occur. Lord, help me. I feel so abused! selahV
