A lyric that Lady GaGa could have written for my lovely, if organizationally-challenged, wife.
We recently had the sort of week that left us shaking our heads, and wondering how there can be so many souls out there seemingly without a conscience.
Hoping to enjoy some fresh air on a clear spring day, I ran home on my lunch hour so that my wife and I could take our two dogs for a walk. We only had about twenty minutes, and just did a short route on the streets around our home. Our conversation covered the many decisions we're trying to make, how strained we feel right now both in terms of time and budget, and what we can do to reduce our stress. Most of it comes down to money, which I think is pretty common for married couples–even those who aren't spending thousands of dollars trying to make a baby, or caring for sick pets.
Shortly after returning from our walk, my wife realized her Blackberry was gone. Panicked, she retraced our steps in full in less than twenty minutes, but there was no sign of it. We did the route again later when I got home from work, and then tore our house apart to be certain her Crackberry wasn't mislaid somewhere indoors. It was gone, and the only explanation that makes sense is that it somehow fell out of her pocket on our walk without us noticing, and someone picked it up. It was fully charged and had plenty of contact names and personal information for anyone who found it to try to contact us, but no one called.
We placed ads on Kijiji and Craigslist offering a $300 reward, even stating that we'd be happy to just get the memory card back. If someone was that desperate for a used phone, they could keep it. One of the first responses my wife received to the ad was from someone who said they'd found a Blackberry in our area, and they would "let her have it back" for $600. We asked what the screen saver photo was to confirm it was hers, but got no response. Charming. We had no choice but to incur the unexpected expense of replacing the phone, but there was no way to replace the information on it that wasn't backed up.
A few days later, I realized that a credit card number was stored in a memo on the lost phone, so I went online to check my statement. Lo and behold there were two charges from a gas station in Scarborough that I'd never been to, dating back two weeks. This had nothing to do with the lost phone, I was able to connect it to visiting my mom in hospital, and using the card at the parking machine (which I noticed was out of order the next few days that I was there). What kind of evil person defrauds people trying to help sick relatives?! More time was lost dealing with the credit card security people, but the charges (including pending ones I didn't yet know about) were reversed relatively easily, and I was issued a new card. I lost a little more faith in people's innate goodness.
As if this weren't enough, we finally decided it was time to spend the last bit of money we'd received for our wedding, which were two $50 bills a friend had folded into origami hearts and stuck inside a picture frame. We carefully unfolded them, tried to use them for a purchase...and discovered they were counterfeit.
It's sad to run into this much dishonesty in the space of just a few days. I struggle with the idea of how I will raise a child to believe the best of people, be savvy enough to recognize when a person is bad, and not let it bring them down when they encounter a deviant. And how to stop my child from ever becoming one of the deviants...
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