Sidetracked

Saturday, June 08, 2024

Yesterday, I forgot everything, including that it was National Donut Day and that I was scheduled to work. In the afternoon, a manager phoned, and I leaped into action, tossing on some working-style wear and hurrying away to work for a few hours. That forgetting prompted me to worry about my brain’s ongoing capacity to perform. My friend Julie says it’s more likely I didn’t sleep well enough the night before; thanks, Julie; I’ll take that one.

Actually, I became sidetracked early by a delivery the day before that wasn’t right. Arriving home from work, a riding lawn mower ordered online from Walmart had been delivered in my absence. The machine was in a large wooden crate and sitting on a pallet. Its wheels were in cavities to hold the mower in place during transport. Without a hydraulic lift capable of freeing the heavy machine’s wheels, I had no way to remove it from the packaging and pallet.

The next morning, after a long struggle to determine the delivery company and find a phone number, I managed to contact it. A sympathetic person said the organization didn’t have lifting capabilities and that its delivery workers never unpackage products. She suggested I ask a neighbor to help me unpackage and unload, but that job seemed too big. Finally, I called Walmart and had long discussions with several customer service types. Their simple solution was to return that whole package.

What a waste of time, of shipping, and of labor! Anyway, everything is going back to Walmart.

Right away, I did what should have happened in the first place and called Home Depot, where I used to work and know how the store handles deliveries. I ordered a riding mower and asked that it arrive fully assembled and unpackaged; no problem. HD will have the mower soon at my home and immediately driveable.

Those complicated negotiations consumed at least a couple of hours. Immediately afterward, I got busy handling chores and never thought about going to work. Nonetheless, I became unhappy about the forgetting, because it might signal an unlikeable.

There’s something welcome about blogging relative to comprehending the electrical and chemical processes happening within a brain. As long as I can string together ideas and concepts clearly enough and with logical flows, I may assume brain activities are functioning properly.

Still, how can one simply forget to go to work, and on a scheduled day?

Dear Friends: ‘Tis a puzzlement, mixes of stress, anxiety, and emotions in a single brain. Diana