I need a Stiff Drink

Stress: The confusion created when one's mind over-rides the body's natural desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it!

-from a bumper sticker I have in my office that my boss brought in for me one time saying it made him think of me. hmm.

I am in a tense mood and feel like I'm reacting poorly to lots of situations and am snapping at people. So, I felt it was a good time to bitch. About some other unrelated things that have been festering as well.

*Our home phone was messed up last week. We had no dial tone and if you tried to call, it gave a busy signal. We never use our home phone, so who knows how long it was out before we noticed. We simply have it because 1) Tivo needs it and 2) The alarm system needs it and 3) I'm old-fashioned and kind of feel like I need it for some strange reason. When our phones actually worked (not just the lines, but the phones - the ones we have get lots of interference and have issues so really don't work properly anyway) I liked having a home phone and talking to someone on something other than a little cell phone. Conversations with grandparents on speaker phone, for example. I'm still a teenage girl at heart (ok, teenage from the 90s, because I guess teenage these days would want cell phones and don't even know what a "real" phone looks like) and like to have a real phone to talk on. Anyway, as soon as we got it reconnected, the calls started back up. It had been nice and quiet for a week or more and suddenly it was ringing again and since we never use our home phone (see above) we know it's not really for us. It was so nice not to have phone calls all day long and messages for Mark A. Dix about a "very important business matter" or for Tyler that were "not debt collectors." I want to pick up and scream into the damn automated voice system "STOP CALLING!! WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR SHIT" but I know that just registers as a hit and they pick up the calls. *sigh. I am on the Do Not Call list and everything. It helped in the beginning, but they've slowly built back up as they find ways around it? Or have the wrong stupid people they are trying to contact anyway.

* I am SO tired of all of the junk mail. It makes me irrationally angry these days. So, I've devised a little scheme and am enacting the following tactics: I've started marking "return to sender" on all of the stupid credit card and insurance offers and sticking them back in the mailbox. Let them pay for the postage twice and not get my business and see if they get the hint. My co-worker did it and it seemed to help lessen the influx for a while. [I started composing this post before lunch. I go home everyday for lunch and I checked the mail and had 5 crap letters to stick back in when I left!! aaarrgghh.] I clearly had 1 too many when Penelope offered her sage advice on avoiding and neglected to go to the site and opt-out back in April and have endured the annoyance for 4 more months. I've completed the form now, believe you me! In the meantime, I'll keep the postal service busy sending that shit back.