Travels with The Rayman

Do you ever feel yourself aging?

What I ask is relevant. Doesn’t getting up out of your easy chair and trotting to the bathroom feel a bit different than it did 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 15 years ago? I think those kinds of questions are relevant at every age, but, as we age these feelings take on added weight because time is getting shorter at a more rapid rate than if you are 20 years old, let’s say. I think we can all agree with that.

The back stoops a bit more, the feet feel a little flatter. Getting up fast might cause dizziness and a fall. The eyes take longer to adjust. Hearing is questionable. “I’m going to the room”, he says. She asks, “Why are you going to get the broom?”.

However, along with the changes that time brings on…isn’t it a hoot? When you ask a stupid question at the Apple Store, you receive one of two looks back your way. 1. Oh, isn’t she sweet?. Or you see 2. the OMG….If I live that long, just shoot me, look. It really is a stitch because 1. you don’t care what the snotty kid thinks 2. You are honestly so confused you feel foolish and silly but what the heck. At least your are trying to keep up with everything, keep in the know, keep modern. Another example, you check yourself out at the grocery store and you hit the wrong key and the whole checkout process starts over. Meanwhile, the self check out line has doubled in length.

Then you do silly things that defy explanation. Forgetting where you park. Losing your keys everyday and every way. Standing in the pantry staring, just staring. Missing that appointment…how many times can I blame my iPhone calendar? and still be believable?

Traveling also makes you feel your aging. Like buying a ticket to the Paris Metro, submerging to the wrong platform, wandering a round in a daze trying to figure it out, and then emerging from the earth only to leave the Metro with the understanding that you just paid 10 pounds to go absolutely no where. Or you take the train the wrong direction. Or you hear your name over the loudspeaker, “Jane Doe please report to the Information Counter. We have your ticket.”…when all along you thought your ticket was in your pocket/purse.

Of course, at the opposite end of that story, you ARE older and you can talk to people in a normal manner to get information. You aren’t affected by hormones and feelings of insecurities so your conversations usually are very successful. This is quite good when, say, negotiating your way out of situations. Getting into something is much easier than getting out of something because to get into something, you must pay. Getting out of something, you expect the other party to pay you. So, talking to people is a very important skill. And it does seem to improve with age.

But, I digress. Lost my way, perhaps. Who cares?

The point is…what was the point? Oh, I don’t know. I just got up to go to the bathroom and felt myself aging and thought I would reflect on it for the fun of it. Anyway, 999 channels and nothing is on. Realtime just finished. Nothing else worth watching is coming on. So, blogging is a good activity.

Today, I tried to fix a problem. And it is complicated. We wanted to get xm-sirius radio in the Lexus. Lexus wanted an arm and a leg. So we were told about a unit we could buy after-market. On the internet. A company in Texas. What could possibly go wrong? We approached a local biz to install the unit and antenna. They did. It worked about 3 days. Then it didn’t work. We had just paid a biz to install a faulty unit THAT THEY DID NOT SELL US. And then the unit went south. That is when we discovered that the company in Texas will not refund anything for any reason. In the meantime the local guy gets paid to install the unit and then gets paid for uninstalling it. We get the privilege of paying $13 to return the broken part so that the Texas company can send us a replacement part that we now don’t need because we had the installers put in a new unit with the agreement that they would add the unit we were receiving from Texas into their inventory and give us a store credit. Holy smokes. And when we left the installer, the XM worked. Only one day a few days later, it quit working. So, the Rayman called the installer and the installer had the Rayman drive the car in and he checked everything and everything was OUR fault because we had forgotten to register the new box with Sirius. If we were “with it,” we would have intuitively known that…but, hey, we’re old geezers now and sometimes lucky to find our car at the mall.

But I digress.

So, Rayman brought the car home with the instructions to get the unit registered. All things in this area of expertise must be handled by me. He hasn’t got the patience and in defense of aging, he has never had the patience to handle this kind of stuff.

So, these XM people needed our unit’s number. Well, howdy dowdy…how do you get that? You turn on your XM radio and the unit gives you the number on channel zero. Only our unit does no such thing. So, the XM lady sends me out to the car and tells me to turn it on, turn the radio on, look for channel 0. No channel 0 is forthcoming. Channels 1 thru 7 is all I get. At first, I can hear those channels. Then the talking goes away. So, I decide after a while, I think I will back out of the garage. The woman on the other end of the phone says, “You are in your garage?” (hear “what kind of an imbecile are you, lady?”). So, I back out and things do not improve. Then Rayman returns from the hardware store and I tell him what’s happening and he says, “We have the unit’s number on the receipt. I told you that.” (another imbecile moment, perhaps?) So, Rayman finds the receipt while I stay seated in the car talking with the XM lady. So, 50 minutes after I started the conversation, I got the XM to work. And that’s after untold dollars to install and remove the Texas unit, then install a new unit, double check the antenna connection and so forth. And so the woman at the other end of the phone takes pity on my and offers me three months of free XM service on the new unit. “Just call this, xxx-xxx-xxxx and they will give you three months of free service.” And when I call that number, the man on the phone said, no. “You only get one month.”
Some signs of aging perhaps? But it was fun because if that hadn’t happened, I would not have taken the time to blog because life would have been too boring to report. So, aging really does wonders for the boredom factor. We are rarely bored. We are not working in a cubicle with deadlines and milestones and ladder-climbing bosses. We’re just moving though a speeding up time continuum trying to get life to work for us and that’s great fun, really. Just traveling with the Rayman through time.