Yesterday it was finally hot enough that we turned on the air conditioning. It doesn’t work. I called our guy, and he came to look at it today (rather, a guy from his company did). Evidently it will cost us about $1500 to fix OR we could just replace the whole system for a few thousand more. They are going to have someone from their office call us and give us the details of our options. I’m guessing this is going to set me back 3-4K.  I wish the sale of our house had gone through last summer, but God knows best.

My son and I got in my car so I could drive him to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to apply for his driving permit. We made it about a block down the road, when the stick shift lever started flopping around and became useless. I pulled over. Long story short: it was the shifter cable bushing. I thought I would have to scrap the car, but I only needed to buy a $25 little plastic piece and I fixed it myself. Of course the plastic didn’t work as advertised, so I had to jury-rig it, and finish the whole thing off by taping the whole thing together with electrical tape (we were out of duct tape….I know. I bought more last night). It works again.

I ordered my new laptop for school on Wednesday, the 15th. I paid a little extra for “Next day shipping” so I could get my laptop by Friday.

I’ll wait a minute for you to do the math on that one.

So I go to Dell’s website today to check the status of my order, and it still says “pending” (as in “Not shipped yet”). At noon I called Dell, and the kind Indian gentleman said, “I would like to be informing you that your bank has not approved this purchase. I would like to be informing you that if you call your bank and ask them to approve the purchase, we will ship your laptop to you.” I called my bank, who said, “Yeah, we didn’t know if maybe this was fraud.” I said, “When I ordered the laptop, you guys texted me to ask if it was really me. I said yes. Nobody has called me to ask, so you should have either called me to check this out, or approved the charge.” The guy approved the charge, so whatever, I guess he did what I wanted, even though I had to poke at them to get it done.

So I call Dell back, they put the sale through, and my laptop is in processing. There’s still hope it may arrive tomorrow (Friday), but if it doesn’t, it won’t get here til next week. If that happens, I’m going to call and demand a refund on my “Next day shipping.”

In contrast, I ordered something off Amazon.com for a friend of mine and had it shipped directly to her house from Amazon.com. I ordered it yesterday afternoon with my free “Amazon Prime two day shipping.” It was delivered today, less than 24 hours after I ordered it. Dell, you should be taking notes.

So I type this, waiting for my laptop, and it’s hot. There are an infinite number of ways that my life could be worse. I am thankful to God that, right now, these are the worst of my problems.

PS: The kid passed his test, and got his permit. Well, he got a paper printout of his permit. The actual plastic card comes in the mail now in a few weeks. Then I went to a vacant lot and gave him his first driving lesson. He did great.