My husband laughs at me sometimes because I personify inanimate objects and corporations. He loves to point out that really the television can’t dislike me, and the cooker is not out to get me, but I know better.

His old car really hated me. Maybe it was my own fault for naming it ‘The Hulk’ but any time I drove it strange things would happen which never happened with my car, and never happened when my husband was driving ‘The Hulk’. The doors would not close and when they did they would snap shut almost on my fingers, the keys would refuse to come out of the ignition, the trunk would refuse to open. Someone might point out to me that it was my own nervousness at driving an unfamiliar vehicle, and the fact that things weren’t in the places I was used to them being, but I know that the car hated me. It hated me because I was constantly plotting ways that we could get rid of it so we would have a more reliable second vehicle which wasn’t rusting and actually had air conditioning.

I argue with my computer all the time too. My computer is called Stan. We’re actually now on Stan 3.0. The previous two Stans were laptops, this Stan is a desktop computer and considering he has 160 GBs of memory for a while there was not nearly so well behaved as the old 40 gig laptop, except for having less issues with me downloading things 9 gigs at a time. He would hiccup and close out of programs, or slow to a crawl when trying to run video games, now that I upgraded his memory our relationship is a lot less strained.
Before my son was born I talked to Stan quite a bit, I maintain his jealousy over my son, much like a favorite pet would have done, is what prompted his screen to pack in two weeks after the warranty expired. Why else would that have happened? My husband talks about things like built in obsolesence and random coincidences, but what does he know? He can’t even tell the difference between .html and .php or Firefox and IE.

My newest antagonist is actually a corporation. I beat the student loan company into submission just over a year ago, so it was time that something else stepped into the fray to fill the villainous void.

Our medical insurance company is out to drive me insane. Their website in particular is unfriendly and uncooperative. I’m trying to see if I have a leg to stand on with regards our local hospital actually being ‘in network’ and someone up there just miscoding things. I know insurance companies do this, they used to do it to my mother all the time when she was trying to sort out my grandfather’s bills. At one point his insurance was refusing to cover the operation he had because they didn’t see where a hysterectomy was medically necessary for a 90 year old man. I can understand their point, but someone had transposed a 5 and a 6 somewhere, given what he’d actually had was exploratory surgery to try and see why he was retaining fluid.

Anyway, back to me and the website: I did a search just now, selecting ‘Hospitals’ ‘within 30 miles’ ‘our zipcode’; it instead brought me to all the family doctors within 15 miles of our zipcode. It’s nice to know they’ll actually pay for our GP as he was the second place listed I mean I didn’t know that before, I’ve just been going to him because he has a nice name :-p sheesh, but hospitals is what I want to know about. I asked for a new search and put the information back in and now it’s timed out. I know their game. They’re trying to discourage me so that I give up and just pay them almost $1600, but the jokes on them. We don’t have $1600. On the upside I still have my sense of humor, but that doesn’t pay the bills.