It’s been a long, extremely busy week. I am annoyed. Not just by the fact that it was a long, extremely busy week, but by a number of things that I couldn’t possibly begin to write out for the sheer fact that I’m so annoyed that I don’t have the attention span to do so. I can only address this one issue - the one thing on top of my list right now, which is stupid Alltel and our damned pay-as-you-go phones. We aren’t talkers and so we have these phones primarily to say “It’s (whatever time,) I’m coming home” and “I’m at the store, what do we need.” I don’t call anyone to just chat. Chatting is so not me. I don’t do small talk, if you know me - if we talk, we talk about stuff, you know? - but I especially don’t do small talk on the phone.

I am getting off track. Amanda had a diaper incident. A nasty, smelly, really gross diaper that decided to exceed the limits of its design - after being squished and squunched a bunch while Amanda played. See, I wasn’t aware of this diaper event, being across the room, until it was too late, smelling its pungent fragrance far too late to detect that a change was in the wind. When asked, because we always ask hoping Amanda will tell us she needs a diaper change, Amanda said, “No, I’m okay.” I knew otherwise, and coaxed her into her room for a change by racing her there.

Once there, everything fell apart - I won’t go into details, but the diaper content had escaped onto her shorts on the inside, smeared a bit on her leg, etc. Not only that, but there weren’t enough wipes to do the job, so I had to manage keeping her messy butt up in the air while grabbing new wipes from below the changing table. These, of course, are in a Zip Lock style back, which is not exactly easy to open one-handed, and the wipes themselves are connected for use in a Kleenex-style box, so one rips off at the seam. I finally managed to get this straightened out, after about 15 wipes, but then realized there were no other shorts to be found. And this is when I got annoyed at Alltel.

We pay them, see, to make use of their advanced telecommunications systems for the limited time we do so each day. A minute, maybe two, every day, with the rare occurrence where we need to spend a few more minutes on their system - but it’s rare. Tonight, I needed to access the system to connect to my wife, the mother of my lovely, sweet child, to locate some new, clean shorts. I called from our house phone, so as not to use up any of my precious pay-as-I-go minutes on my Alltel phone, and was greeted with a message simply telling me that my call could not be completed at this time. Try again later, it asked. I tried again. Same message. Am I missing something? I was pretty sure that the point of telecommunication systems was so that I could communicate, you know, “talk/converse,” tele, “from a distance.” This isn’t occuring “at this time,” or any of the dozen or so times that I attempted over the next 10 minutes.

It doesn’t work with my Alltel phone or my land-line phone. So what exactly is the point of having these phones again? Is it to frustrate me? Because that has been an overwhelming success.