Elderly Errors

    This isn't my story but I thought it well worth sharing. I am elderly and sometimes very simple things can get out of control. .

    My neighbor was telling me about his parents who are both 89. They live in their own house but have four children here who can look after them. 

    His mother fell in the den and couldn't get up. She called her husband. Husband was not wearing his hearing aides and watching television. He had the volume turned up so that he could hear the TV. Mother called but she didn't get an answer. She called many times and husband couldn't hear her.

    So Mother decided to press the call button on her lifeline. The life line people called and of course the husband answered the phone. He doesn't know his wife is in trouble so he says everything is fine and goes back to watching TV.

    It's a good thing there was somebody on life line who was pretty sharp and thought something was wrong.

    The life line people came about five minutes after the phone call and got things sorted out.

    So with us elderly people things can get out of control in a hurry. 

   I imagine Dad got told to always wear his hearing aids. 

HOW MANY MISTAKES DOES IT TAKE ?

     My driver's license has come up for renewal. 

     Now here, private businesses look after driver's license renewal. They look after many more things like car license, registering of companies, land title services   just a lot of legal things that the government requires.

    Okay back to my driver's license. Here at a certain age , like eighty, you have to get a medical in order to get your driver's license..  The micro manager had to get on this right away. I would have waited but that's another debate. We went to the registry to get the form for a driver's license medical. Then hurry up and get an appointment for the said medical. 

    Okay it starts here. The receptionist threw my medical form away. She said it's all done electronically. Okay, I'll believe you. So for my examination the Doc gets the medical form on his computer , fills it out, and tells me to stop on the way out and sign it. Fine. They made a copy and gave me the original to take to the registry. Are you counting the mistakes yet.

   I get to the registry and they notice that there's nothing on my old license that said I wear glasses when I drive. So quickly over here to the eye tester machine. So you have a clerk giving you an eye test and not just measuring if you're 20/20. ..the colorblind test, depth perception! You have someone giving you a test that they don't know anything about.

   About that time I was thinking well how many mistakes have to be made before I don't get a license? What goes on with the system?

   The last time I renewed, my address was in another province!

    Well , I was given the standard paper interim license with the real one to follow in a bout 60 days. 

   Am I finished with mistakes yet? I hope so.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE OLD WHEN....

     Now you could spend all day filling in the blank on this one. There are endless expressions that can classify us as old.

    Well the Micro Manager and I did the classic boo boo yesterday. I hope no one on the street was watching.

    We had a celebration of life we wanted to attend. Don died before Christmas and this week the announcement was in the paper that the event would take place on Saturday.

    The church is only three blocks from my house so I told the Micro Manager to get started as she walks very slow. When I turned the corner I could see that the church parking lot was empty. I knew something was wrong. I met the Micro Manager returning from the church. What's gone on? Have we missed the celebration of Don's life. 

     The first thing we did when we got in the house was to check the paper. Sure enough the celebration was to take place Sat, Jan 19 . We were on Sat. Jan. 12!

     Now how could both of us get together and make this mistake? I guess we're getting old!

    I followed Don from 1963 but never met him until the 1980's. Don left Inuvik in June of 1963. I arrived in Inuvik in Sept of 1963. I often heard about Don as he was well respected and liked. I arrived in Red Deer, Alberta in 1969 and was surprised to find my northern friend Michael and I teaching at the same school. Michael and Don were the very best of friends so I heard that Don was in the area. I did not actually meet Don until the 1980's. From that time on we participated in many of the same organizations. He was a quiet gentle man who gave us many great examples of how we should live our live.

OOPS! SORRY

      My math yesterday was terrible. It was 40 years ago Elvis died not 50.

       So no wonder some of you felt very old.

      Two sharp eyed bloggers caught my error. The first was Steve at Shadows and light and the second was Bill at Somewhere in Ireland.

      Thanks to the two sharp eyed bloggers and thanks to readers for putting up with me.

IT JUST DOESN'T ADD UP

     I've told you before that I do my own income tax. It's a pain and a lot of work. For the last 10 years or so I've been incredibly accurate as the micro Manager checks me. Before that I often made careless mistakes.

    Today I received my income tax assessment. That's the piece of paper that tells you if you did things correctly or if they found mistakes. So a mistake could cost you more money or get some back. 

    Well today's assessment had good news. The balance was nil. Now usually when I see nil I file the assessment and that's the end of things.

    Today one little note caught my eye. It said that I had a minute capital loss( less than $10.00) I had filed a small capital gain but no capital loss. So this gave me reason to look more closely at the assessment. I could not find out how they calculated a capital loss. 

     Then I noticed that they calculated my total income about $10.00 less than I had calculated. I checked net income . It was minutely less than what I calculated. Later on I found a line with a figure that was completely wrong. If I'd used their figures I would not have owed them one dime.

     So after all this , they said I didn't owe them anything. I really don't know how the income tax department does addition and subtraction.

    I'm not going to ask them about this situation. With friends like these who needs enemies. The next tax checker could use some voodoo math and want more money out of me.

   Have you ever found the tax dept. to be inept with their math?

BIZARRE EVENT

     Sometimes things happen that are very hard to believe. Such an event happened to us this week.

     10:00 AM Tues. morning I answered a call from a furniture store.  Call display said name unavailable. They said they had something at the store for us. I said just a minute you can talk to my wife. I wondered if she might have asked about something in the store.

     Well, it turned out that they had a table waiting for us to pick up!!!  We hadn't been to the store for years. They were insistent that we bought a table 3 days ago.  No we didn't. They asked if maybe we had forgotten! My wife told them that she remembered that she definitely had not been in the store.They had all our information and that we had used a debit card. Now this story was really starting to stink. They were pushy and insisted we pick up the table. We were confused. We thought maybe someone was pranking us like sending  a pizza order to the house.These people were aggressive. They told us to check our account and see if anything had been taken out of it. One person said the table had been paid for and the other one said the table had not been paid for. Neither one of them backed down and said there might be a mistake. The call ended with my wife saying she would contact the police. They did not hesitate. 

    Now we knew some things were wrong. We don't have a debit card? That really raised our level of suspicion and anxiety.

    My wife did call the police and talked to a very helpful officer. She suggested contacting the manager before going further. We had been reluctant to call the manager for if he had been in on the scam.

    We did contact the manager and he said he would check it and get back to us. Several hours later he called back . He had solved the problem. A telephone number is used to call up all your information like address, names and more. The table was paid for. So what the manager found was that the phone number the sales man entered had one incorrect digit which of course, made it our phone number. The manager was much better than his staff. He explained the problem and apologized and we were much relieved. Then he had to trace down the people who had bought and paid for the table.

    If the first clowns had taken a deep breath and thought for one second that they might be wrong they may have prevented the situation from escalating. They really made us suspicious. We didn't know if it was a scam. 

    After two days it was a relief to have things solved.

    

Rippin' Mad

     Now I'm a fairly cool and collected kind of boy. I don't get excited . It bothers me when somebody does show a loss of control.

    However, the other day I did get upset with myself.

   I decided to put a small bracket on my desk so that I could mount a fancy lamp. The desk has always been dark. The lamp was an extra so why not use it.
  

This should give me the precise light I want

My fancy block to attach the lamp

    I cut a piece of wood and sanded it nicely and painted it the same color as the desk. I attached the block of wood to the desk with four screws. I measured carefully. I drilled a hole in the block. I then used the drill tip to mark where I wanted the hole drilled in the desk. Here's where the wheels fell off the bus. To drill the hole in the block I needed  solid surface. I know! I'll use the desk. To begin with I watched carefully that the drill was over the edge of the desk. I was distracted and started again. I wondered why the drill hadn't gone through the block? Darn! The drill was going through the desk! A few choice words were said! Then I regained composure.

    I still had more painting to do. I filed the hole and painted it with the other touch up I had to do.

    It was a lame brained mistake. Am I the only one who makes this kind of mistake?

Readers Are Very Forgiving with Comments.

     In my last post I made a major error. It was an error that was crucial to the post.

     I put down that the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show 60 years ago. Now I meant to say 50 years ago.

     Readers had their own neat ways of dealing with my blunder.

     Some just ignored my blunder and made their comment.

    Some made a point of saying 50 years in their comment.

     Some made very oblique comments that were very clever. 

     So my apology for my error. My thanks to you dear readers who dealt with the error in some interesting and understanding ways.

     Do I ever have some awesome followers. Thanks for following my blog and supporting me. You are the best.