Life Lesson #2: Any call that will require sitting on hold should be made from a work phone

There is a phone on my desk at work. It serves many purposes. The top 2 or 3 have nothing to do with my job. My personal favorite is using it to sit on hold for extended periods of time with large companies that claim to care about my business but really give a rat’s ass. For example, when we got rid of our cable recently I spent 45 minutes on hold waiting for the Time Warner Cable “retention” department. Interestingly, it was the billing department that transferred me to wait in that 45 minute cue but billing had answered my call on the first ring. Taking my money is clearly a priority. Letting me cancel is not. But really, whatever. It’s called speaker phone, Time Warner Cable. And you can sit on mine all day. Like I care. I’ll even leave the phone still on hold to go to the bathroom because if you hang up on me while I’m gone oh, redial, well. Sometimes your hold music isn't even that bad to listen to and I catch myself getting annoyed when you break into a good song to tell me about how you'll be right with me. My husband had trouble getting some allergy medication covered by the insurance company recently because of some precertification requirements. Not a problem, Aetna. Bring on your red tape. I called Aetna first thing every morning to confirm that the world's laziest nurse over at the doctor's office still hadn't bothered to fax the paperwork and then dropped a dime to the aforementioned nurse to let her know I was still waiting. Four days of that and wench nurse #1 was calling me up to let me know everything was taken care of. Work phones kick ass.

Better

Last month, I talked about getting my hair cut. Never found time. Never found a hairdresser. Never found a hairstyle. Last week, I saw the photos on Kerflop of the Tea Leoni inspiration picture and how her cut turned out. Loved both cuts and admired her changing up her look. But still no haircut for me. Then one day I spent an entire car ride with my husband pulling split ends off like I had some split end OCD. Just chatting and pulling. That’s when I had a hair epiphany. My hair had become such a sad shaggy mop that there was fundamentally no way for me to look worse after a haircut. Absolutely any cut would look better. I became more scared of not getting a cut than I was of actually getting a cut. So I called up some place in the mall I knew nothing about and let some chick I met two minutes before hack off my hair. When I couldn’t find a photo of a hairstyle online to take with me, I even decided to roll with the Tea Leoni inspiration and found a couple of her cuts I liked. A little bit longer than the Kerflop one but still fresh and smart. And here I am. People have been asking what made me do it. I tell them new year, new me. The part I tend to leave off is that I decided I might feel like less of a loser if I looked like less of a loser. And, I might add, I do.