This is so very, um…. me.
Today’s the day I did my monthly banking. And that went fine. The people at VanCity are always very nice to me and are accommodating of my needs as a disabled person.
Mostly my need to sit down.
Walking bad. Standing much worse.
After I withdrew my cash, it was time for phase 2 of my monthly banking, the buying of that month’s prepaid credit card.
And that’s when our odyssey began because it turns out that our last source for the ones I have been using, ones provided by a company called Pay Power, have dried up. We went to four different places looking for one to no avail.
So I finally relented and got Julian to get me a card from Pay Power’s apparently triumphant rival called (I shit you not) the Joker Card.
And you have to admit that, as names for credit cards go, Joker’s wild.
So Julian kindly fetches me said card with my usual $500 on it and we go on to my weekly Doctor Chao appointment.
I get home, and the first thing I want to do is get my new credit card registered.
I have trusted an entirely new group or entity with the lion’s share of my monthly budget (the rest stays in cash) and I am very nervous about it.
So I get home, type in the URL for the website, and click Register New Card.
It immediately tells me that I am blocked.
Apparently, the website thinks I might be a hacker. Why, I have no idea. I am certainly not up to anything hinky, and none of the suggestions as to why it may have blocked me seem to apply to me.
Unless there is a “robot” on our network that I don’t know about.
If there was, I bet it would look like this :
I had no idea what to do about that, so I played Dragon Age : Inquisition for a while.
Luckily, when I got up and tried again, it loaded normally. Yay, finally I can register my card and things can go back to normal!
So I type in all the numbers, and it tells me that it “cannot process my request at this time”. And I am like, “motherfucker!”.
My hostility and suspicion explode and I am so pissed off. These fuckers have stolen my money and I want it BACK!
Seething with rage, I took a nap.
When I got back up, I tried inputting everything via Microsoft Edge instead of my usual Chrome, but that didn’t make a difference.
The website had said that if I kept getting that error message, I should call their Cardholder Services line at the number on the back of the card.
Everything on the back of the card is in letters way too small for me to read.
After fretting and fuming for a bit, it occurs to me to just Google the number. This works, and I call it up.
The very nice service rep (doing a pretty good job of suppressing her Quebecois accent) wanted me to read her some numbers from the back of the card.
I did my best but that was simply not gonna happen.
I really should invest in a magnifying glass.
Anyhow, she tells me I can read her the numbers on the front of the card instead, and i is while I am doing this that I notice that there’s a tiny bit of the sticker they use to cover up those numbers left on the card.
I remove it, and voila, a 6 becomes an 8.
Turns out I was typing in the wrong number this whole time!
I apologize to the service lady, end the call, and try the newly corrected number, and what do you know, everything works just fine.
So like I said, it’s a very “me” story because it involves a silly, simple mistake causing me to leap to a ridiculously negative conclusion and end up making a fool of myself.
But you know what? I’m under no obligation to be any more reasonable and/or sensible and/or “smart” than anyone else.
So I did a silly thing. So what? It could happen to anybody.
Thought possibly not as often…. 😛
More after the break.
So I’m a doofus. So what?
All my life, I have been clueless, easily confused and/or overwhelmed, not tuned in to my environment, a maladroit and a klutz, and in general, I have kind of stumbled through life like a sleepwalking zombie.
And for almost all that time, I have been acutely ashamed of it. It was impossible for me not to notice all the problems and troubles I had that normal people did not, and how that made problems for those who loved me too, and so I felt inferior.
The fact that I was mentally superior to most people did not seem like sufficient compensation to me.
And this is about a lot more than just embarrassing myself, though that is bad enough. Subjectively, it makes my world very hazardous, and it means that at any moment, I could do something that causes me great pain and/or humiliation, and it all traces back to the same essential root cause :
I am pathologically internalized.
Almost all of my cerebral resources are dedicated to internal processes. as opposed to, say, processing sensory information.
Not hard to see why. When I was being raped at the age of 4, I fled to the only place available to me. namely deep into my own mind.
And I have been like a turtle in its shell ever since. It has given me extraordinary powers of insight and deduction and creativity, but left me semi-crippled in the world outside my skull – and I was like that way before my current neuromuscular issues.
No wonder I have always been so timid and afraid of the world. I’ve been trapped in a viscous cycle of reality being harsh to me because I am so withdrawn and then responding to that by withdrawing even further.
It also means my world has a big thick jagged line dividing what is In Here (in my inner world) and Out There (reality), and at any moment, I am ready to retreat into my shell and let everything Out There fall apart.
After all, why should I care? I’m safe In Here.
This is no way to live. There has to be some way to encourage my deeper self to go out into reality and stay there long enough to get some positive reinforcement and therefore some examples of there being things worth going Out There for.
Right now, as brutally sad as it is to say this, if it wasn’t for my friends and video games, and food I guess, reality would have precious little in it I cared about.
And that is one rotten attitude to have. Even I can see that.
But it’s not going to change until I change.
Time to become a god damned butterfly already.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.