Frustrations..........

This morning (Wednesday, 5/31; at about 3 a.m., in the dark) a minor thunderstorm passed to the south. It didn’t do much — at least not here — rained a little, and scared Killian into our bedroom.
It also dumped the electricity for a short time; enough to fire up the standby. It also sent our range- and microwave-clocks into the ozone. Our VCR has a clock too, but it apparently is backed up by a battery — it has to be off a long time for it to tank.
When this happens I fire up this rig and reset the time. It’s getting it from an Internet-source — the atomic-clock in Boulder I guess; same source for the satellite-clocks that do your cell phones — and I can reset it by clicking a button.
I then reset my digital-watch, and use it to reference the range- and microwave-clocks.
.....Or so it seems; this morning we crashed mightily in flames.
About five months ago, shortly after I retired, my digital-watch tanked — or rather the reset button stuck. It was at least four years old, so I dutifully went to the running-store the buy digital-watch #5. I buy running-store watches because they are also stop-watches. They cost maybe 40 bucks.
#5 ain’t like previous digital-watches. I has three time-zones, three alarms (for what?), an occasion-alerter (“bomb-time”), and 89 bazilyun other functions (including starting your dinner remotely from across the universe).
Just resetting the time is a massive hairball; I had to get out the manual, written in contorted english by Japanese monkeys.
As is often the case with a stroke-survivor, resetting the time was impossible. It kept talking about a “next” button on the watch, but none of the many buttons on the watch-face were so marked. A manual-diagram said the “mode” button was also the “next” button, but such things are hard for a stroke-survivor to discern — especially when there is little time.
We had to get to the PT gym by 9, and hope we could get home by when the plumber showed up at noon. Our trip to Ontrac to buy a lawn-tractor got canceled, and by departure-time from the PT gym an errand to the funky food store also got canceled. The CR-V also needed gas; all we could hit was Weggers and the gas-station. Retired: hah! Utterly swamped.
Resetting the watch was only supposed to take a few minutes (I’ve done it in the past); but a “few minutes” was quickly adding up to 25 minutes.
Plus the Californy time was wrong, and reading October, for crying out loud.
I managed to get the watch-time reset, having finally figured out “mode” was also “next.”
But the Californy time is still waiting, and all the alarms are “on” (I don’t know about “armed”).
Time was flying by, so everything had to be deferred. The watch is reset, but the range- and microwave-clocks are just slopped.

A couple weeks ago we reinstalled the voicemail on our landline, primarily because there are those who refuse to dial cell phones; which had previously been our only voicemail.
I have the landline voicemail access number memorized into my cell phone, so I can access it from my cell phone.
So while at the gas-station I tried it — it was 11:55.
“Now what?” It dialed our home-phone; gave me our welcome-message. There is an access-number, and I used that, but somehow it called our phone and didn’t give us the messages.
Who knows? What else is new? I deal with this kind of insanity all the time — stroke-survivor.
I had to give up and forget the voicemail. It was almost noon, and it was gonna take 10 minutes to get home.

Probably the worst reason I had to retire from the mighty Mezz was that there things always went fairly well — or so it seemed — an antidote to the insanity here at home.