We all get frustrated, right?

I’m not a per­son who is eas­i­ly frus­trat­ed.  Normally, I have a lot of patience — some have said the patience of a saint, but that seems fair­ly extreme. There are, how­ev­er, some things that con­sis­tent­ly frus­trate me to no end.

I don’t usu­al­ly have road rage, with the excep­tion of some of the times I end up behind some­one, in beau­ti­ful weath­er, dri­ving 30 miles per hour in a 50-mile-per-hour zone. I tell myself there’s no rea­son to ignore a chance to enjoy the col­or­ful scenery, but that doesn’t work if I need to be some­where by a cer­tain time. At such times, I tend to mut­ter com­plaints to myself. My grand­daugh­ter, at one point while rid­ing with me, felt it nec­es­sary to let me know that the dri­ver of the oth­er car couldn’t hear me. I cer­tain­ly hope not — I would nev­er do that if they could! (And I’ll bet I’m not the only one who does that.)

Another is when I go out to eat, and the per­son wait­ing to take my order hov­ers right there as though I don’t need any time to look at the menu and decide what I want to eat.  I admit it: I can be a lit­tle slow in mak­ing my choic­es. Fortunately, that doesn’t hap­pen very often, as they usu­al­ly ask about drink choic­es, and that takes no time for me to choose. If they have cof­fee, I order it — if not, my oth­er choice is sweet tea with no ice. I was only stymied one time when they had nei­ther, so I ordered Sprite with no ice. (That’ll get you a sec­ond look!) I haven’t been back to the place since. The ide­al solu­tion is a buf­fet, where I can look every­thing over, but you’d bet­ter have time for a leisure­ly meal if you go with me.

I get frus­trat­ed when I’m involved in a good book or doing some­thing I’ve put off, and one of my grown chil­dren decides to text me for the first time in a week to ask how I am. I love to hear from them, but I hate to text. It takes for­ev­er to type on my phone’s tiny key­board with one fin­ger. I hate to make mis­takes, then have to go back and cor­rect them. Hitting send, then see­ing a mis­take is even worse, but I’ve giv­en up on mak­ing a cor­rec­tion with a lit­tle aster­isk star in front of it. Let them think I’ve for­got­ten how to use good gram­mar and spelling in my old age. 

The very worst is when they want to have an extend­ed con­ver­sa­tion via text, even when I’m not doing any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. I’ve fig­ured out a solu­tion to that sit­u­a­tion. As soon as I start answer­ing prompt­ly and with­out mis­takes (bless you, copy and paste), the con­ver­sa­tion ends with­in a few min­utes. They usu­al­ly call when they want some­thing. (I hope they nev­er read this.)

The worst frus­tra­tion I have is with our local mete­o­rol­o­gists. I don’t real­ly have a prob­lem with them point­ing to an area on the radar, then pac­ing back and forth in front of the area I live in while the clouds move behind them as they explain the expect­ed weath­er. It does, how­ev­er, dri­ve me com­plete­ly bat­ty when they stand in front of the sev­en-day fore­cast while they tell me the highs and lows I can almost see. What is the point of show­ing the next sev­en days of weath­er when I can’t see it as a con­sec­u­tive whole? Surely oth­ers are annoyed with this. I had almost giv­en up when I dis­cov­ered that I could see the whole fore­cast at one time on the noon news. Whew!

We all have frus­tra­tions, but I hope your frus­tra­tions are few and most­ly minor. I hope as well that this brings a smile to your face, and maybe a chuck­le. A lit­tle humor goes a long way in mak­ing the frus­tra­tions of dai­ly life more livable.