So, alert readers may recall that last Saturday I was in a bad mood. Something about a missing document, which frustrated me so much that I found it hard to also cope with the mechanisms of a faulty toilet and a dysfunctional printer or the intricacies of a PayPal account.
Frankly, only one of those four problems have been solved, but I already feel better about everything. One thing I think the Buddha and Epictetus would both agree upon is that it isn't our problems that upsets us, it's our reactions to our problems.
The "missing document" was the 2019 decal for my tag ("tags" are what we call "licence plates" here in Georgia). The way things work down here is once a year you mail in your renewal application along with a check for the annual excise tax and proof of an emissions inspection, the the DMV mails you a decal for the upcoming year to put on your tag to prove you've rendered the appropriate dinero unto Caesar and that you're not a gas-guzzling belcher of greenhouse gases (at least not more than is legally allowed). The decal is due at the end of your birthday month and after that, you're liable to get a ticket if you don't have a current decal.
Earlier this summer, I sent in my renewal along with a check and the emissions report, and one fine summer afternoon, the decal arrived in my mailbox. Most years, I walk from the mailbox directly to the car and immediately affix the decal on the tag, but this year I didn't for some reason or the other (I don't remember - maybe it was raining, maybe I was in a rush to change clothes and head out to a show). And then, as you can probably guess, I was never able to find the decal again.
I turned the house upside down twice looking for that letter and the decal - once last week and again over the weekend - and simply could not find it. I retraced my steps, I looked in the trash, I searched the car and my yard, I looked in places it logically shouldn't have been because I had already searched all the logical places it should have, and no dice. It was gone.
Here's what I did find - July's rent check from my tenant (I lease an unsellable condo to a nice couple in Vinings). Back in late May, they sent me a check for July along with the June rent as they expected to be traveling this summer, but requested that I hold the July check until 7/1. I filed it away along with a stack of bills due in July, but when the First rolled around, I couldn't find it. It simply wasn't there.
So even before I turned the house over looking for the decal, I had turned it upside-down looking for the rent check. Finally, the nice couple paid me for July's rent via PayPal, with the understanding that if the check did show up, I would tear it up and not double-dip on them. Problem was, they were first-time PayPal users and sent me the money as a vendor, and PayPal, as part of it's "Buyer's Protection" program, is not releasing my money to me until I can show them "proof of delivery" in the form a FedEx or UPS tracking number. Of course, no such document exists as there was no delivery of merchandise, so PayPal will not release the July 1 rent money to me until August 7.
Okay, fine, whatever. I can wait. But it's frustrating and I hate bureaucracy. Worse, while turning the house over again in late July looking for the decal, I managed to find the July rent check. It was right where it was supposed to be with the July bills - I don't know how I missed it the first time. If I was only more observant, I could have avoided the whole PayPal debacle and not have to wait until August 7 for money that should have been sitting in my bank account since July 1.
So, back to the missing decal. I found a form online to request a replacement decal, but it said that if the original was "stolen or lost," you had to include a police report along with the application. Hey, I live in the City, there's no way I'm calling the police to ask for a report on a lost piece of mail, and there's no way that the police would respond to such a request (other than hanging up on me) even if I did. I figured I'd just have to wing that part of it and went to print out the form, which is when I discovered that my printer was inexplicably no longer working.
No need to dive into that story now (or the story of the faulty toilet). The long and short of it is that Monday morning, July 30, the second-to-last day I could legally drive my car without a new decal, I went to the DMV and they were totally cool about it. As you can guess, lost decals happen all the time. There was an $8 charge (no big deal), but they filed the required form for me electronically and said that no, even they didn't understand why the form requested a police report for a lost decal. Within 15 minutes (probably less), I had a new decal on my tag and was now legal to drive around the great state of Georgia.
The printer's still not working, I haven't repaired the toilet yet, and I still don't have July's rent, but I already feel better because at least I solved the decal problem. I guess the point of this post is how our minds can take one little setback (a lost piece of mail), combine it with other small setbacks (a missing check and a broken printer) and manufacture a crisis out of it, and then let that crisis affect our mood. As stated above, it's not the events that upset us, it's our reaction to those events.
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