I’ve been trying to contact the optometrist I went to last Saturday. Nearest one to me is in Ridgecrest, 50 miles away through the mountains. He does an eye clinic at the Ridgecrest Walmart every Saturday, and lives in Palmdale, about 65 miles away from Ridgecrest. There’s another optometrist in Ridgecrest but you have to wait a month or more to see him and pay twice as much to do so. Anyway, called all Effing day and finally someone answered the phone, late this afternoon. I’ll get back to this.
But first, I had to get gas for the car, and paid $7 a gallon for regular, which may be a nominal price for you in Europe but is obscenely high here and is blamed on the crap going on with Iran, even though the USA is the world’s biggest producer of oil. The Monkey Cage.
Next door to Gas Rapers Inc. is the Von’s Grocery where I went in and paid $60 for a small amount of groceries and the pin pad first demanded that I choose which amount I will give to their charity. Chose None, then it demanded that I agree to let them sell my email address to people who will send me lots of ads, I chose Disagree, then it let me pay for the food. The Lion’s Den.
Back home, final call trying to reach the optometrist and at last I did, right before closing, because I wanted a referral from him to the eye doctor in The Big City, and he told me that it was on a slip of paper his young female at the desk gave me, which she never did. So I asked him to email it to me and he told me they can only Fax, they can’t email. When I tried to get him to send it to the eye clinic of my choice he started arguing that I had to have an appointment with them first, when they want a referral before making an appointment. I finally got him to say that he would Fax it to them. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. The Donkey Show.
A day in my life is almost as good as a trip to the San Diego Zoo. You know, it’s really kind of amazing. Here we have all this automation and computer intelligence and everything, and it’s harder to make contact with services and get anything done than it ever was before all this technological advancement. Seriously, life was way simpler and prices for everything were lower when compared to average income. If I needed to see a dentist I called him up and generally got in the next day if not sooner, if a doctor, you went right in. If I needed a plumber he’d be there in a few hours at most. Lines at the grocery checkout were never more than 3 people and we didn’t have to buy the bags or bring our own.
Now everything is so fucking complicated and difficult it boggles my mind. This is not progress.