Tag: rage

Am I naïve for having so much faith in people?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sorry, I just can’t get over this yet.  I wasn’t really planning on writing about this again, but on the day my handyman was supposed to come back and finish fixing my fence, he no-showed on me, citing that he was going over on another job he had, which is understandable, but the objection I have is the fact that he had stated that he was going to make it by a particular time.

I’m okay with the need to reschedule and adjust, but don’t leave me hanging and make me have to be the one to get some fucking answers when it was probably very clear that the job was going to be going long, and I wouldn’t have had to feel like a hostage in my own house waiting all day, because I wanted to talk to this guy before he got to work to point out some things.

Alternatively, the title of this post would’ve been “To blow up, or not to blow up,” because I’d been thinking about this a lot over the last day, about whether or not I should light this guy a new asshole on the internet for the absolute putrid way he’s running a business.  There’s a part of me that just wants this to all end, and leave things civil, and let an up-and-comer not get obliterated on the internet, but there’s another part of me that’s sick and tired of constantly waiting for this guy to show up, the fact that when he did show up, he fucked me harder than Andy Dufresne probably did in Shawshank Redemption, and that I’m practically waiting on him to cut-and-run on me, leaving me at more than just a $450 loss.

Originally, I figured I wouldn’t bother, because as shitty of a business this guy is running, I have reservations of blowing up a guy with a million kids and clearly in need of a job, because a bad reputation isn’t just going to cost this guy a few projects, but could very well be the difference with him being able to provide for his family.

But seeing as how he’s clearly got other projects, ones that he prioritizes over mine, which he royally fucked up, I’m a little less piteous of his situation, and I’m feeling pretty steamed over the fact that he left me out to dry.

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To add insult to injury

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The fucking handyman broke my glasses.  Not directly, but as a result of dealing with him, my glasses ended up breaking, and I definitely blame him.  These things cost me $300 back in 2015, and will probably cost me a good bit to replace, even with my insurance credit.

After he royally fucked my yard, and gave his word that he would take care of the repairs, he ended up hanging out at my house until nearly 9 pm, hosing down the scissor lift that was caked in mud, and very likely going to cost me an extra $200 in cleaning charges, plus if there’s anything wrong with it because it was drug around off-road, that’s on me too.  Periodically, I went outside to check on him, and towards the end of his night, we were discussing the next steps in this negative project, and how to get us back to even ground.

But because I’m a responsible fucking person, I’m wearing a mask; but because I’m wearing a mask, and it’s humid-as-balls Georgia, my glasses are fogging up, so I take them off and set them on top of mythical wife’s car.

Long story short, I forgot to take them back inside, and the next morning, I’m doing my thing around the house, and then I get the idea to take my daughter out on a stroller walk, since the weather isn’t too turrible yet.  I’m looking for my glasses, and I can’t find them anywhere, but eventually I just say fuck it, because I don’t need my glasses to go on a walk.  I load my baby into the stroller, and we head outside, and I’m just off the driveway, when I see something on the ground.

Hm, that looks like a lens from my glasses.  I pick it up, and I hold it up to one of my eyes, and it’s at that very second it all comes crashing back to me, where I had left my glasses last.  I quickly start looking around, and then I see one of the arms, and then the mangled frames, and then I see the other lens, somehow bent.

A true FML moment, right then and there, because everything was then as clear as if I were wearing my glasses.

Obviously, it is nobody’s fault but my own, but after the service raping of my yard and fence, I was pretty out of mind for the rest of the day, and clearly it impacted my ability to remember simple shit, like retrieving my glasses, so when the day is truly over, it really is the fault of the fucking handyman.

$450 down the drain, and now a likely $300 more to get a new pair of glasses, because this is one of those rare instances where my Asian-ness kicks in, and I liked having a pair of expensive designer frames.  Fuck this guy

This is a story about pure, unadulterated failure

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I alluded to in my last daddy brog, I was to have some work done to my house, specifically, fixing up the wood around two very high up windows, so that they would no longer allow moisture into my home.  The day in which that work was to happen has come and gone, and hoo boy, do I have a story to tell, about just how much failure can possibly be packed into a single day of one individual person, being me.

For starters, when it was evident that moisture was getting into my home, I was pretty quickly able to deduce that it was coming from an upstairs window, based on where the water was seeping into parts of my home.  Honestly, this was something that was flagged during my home inspection back before I even came into the home, but it wasn’t listed as something that was critical, but something to look out for in the future.  And the future had arrived, and the seal clearly had worn down to where water was getting into my house when the rain came sideways.

So, thinking it was something fairly minor and maybe a few silicone caulk re-sealing wouldn’t fix, I opted to get a handyman, whom might have a 26-32’ ladder, since my 22’ extension ladder wasn’t tall enough for me to go up there and inspect it myself.  It took a day or two for the guy to show up, as he had cited a child emergency on the first day, and being the new dad I am myself, I was extremely understanding and empathetic to the needs of children first.

When he did show up, we joked about how we both hoped this would be a quick job where he could hop up onto the ladder, slather down some caulk, and be on his merry way, bam, easy $100, but it turns out that it wouldn’t be that simple because nothing in the world is ever that simple.  It turned out that the frame around the window was mostly rotten, and even the ladder coming into contact with a piece of it caused it to immediately disintegrate like Castlevania blocks.

Now this, is the point where I feel like I could have changed history.  Like if I were Cable from X-Force, I could body slide to this point in time and smack myself upside the head and tell me to NOT ask the guy,

Can you fix it?

Because of fucking course he said he could, what handyman is ever going to say no and deny themselves the possibility of getting a job?  And then he quoted be some number that I didn’t find egregious, and frankly I just wanted this shit fixed up as soon as humanly possible, and didn’t want to go through too much bullshit trying to track down a window person to come and re-examine and re-quote song and dance.

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New Father Brogging, #016

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to the arrival of my daughter, I read a book about new fatherhood, as well as watched a few videos and read some stuff on the internet in regards to new parenthood.  Naturally, there’s a tremendous amount of overlap when it comes to the rigors of being new parents, and they often times make it sound like the sleep deprivation and dirty diapers are the worst things since the Bubonic Plague.

I guess I’ve conditioned myself fairly well throughout the years, to where I can operate on low amounts of sleep and make do with coffee alternatively, so the sleep deprivation wasn’t nearly as hellacious as all accounts make it sound like it’s going to be, and I’ve cleaned so much poop and urine from a lifetime of having pets that poop and urine from my own offspring doesn’t seem remotely close to being disgusting or nauseating.

Needless to say, it’s tempting karma to say raising a child has been anywhere close to easy, because it most certainly has not been, but when it comes to the things that most outlets and resources cite as being the worst things in the early stages, have been basically nothing to me.

I guess I should’ve started reading more books about once the baby has come home, and the things that start to happen after the third of fourth months, because I feel like now, we’re getting to the stage where I’m beginning to become frazzled and unglued at times, because I frankly am not always handling the pressures of trying to placate a wailing baby in the best manners.

Long story short, I didn’t know about sleep regression, and I didn’t really prepare myself to the rigors of teething.  And when they’re hitting simultaneously, resulting in a screaming baby that is in pain and won’t nap, and then they stay up past their nap time and hit their next feeding window and then they’re overtired and mixing in wailing about that and won’t go to sleep and we can’t put her to sleep because then she’ll never be able to go back to sleep when we get to her actual bed time; that’s where I feel like I need to have an arm that’s twelve feet long, because that’s about as much of wrist I want to slit when the shit hits the fan sometimes.

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When politics actually hit home

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Often times, no matter how much bitching and complaining we as ‘Muricans do about politics, when the day is over, not a lot really happens.  A penny tax doesn’t mean people are unable to feed themselves, and when the government talks about some convoluted bill or law that passes, most of the time very little noticeable things actually occur.  Maybe it’s naïve and insular for me to make such blanket statements, but at least in my little world, the things that happen as the result of stalling and bickering in Washington seldom really feel like they affect life on the home front.

In a prior post, I made a remark about how at no point in the history of my life, has it ever felt so physically tangible, the feeling of disappointment and letdown happening to the American people of the United States until more recently.  As stated, no matter how much I may disagree or not like something that’s now law, a lot of the time it doesn’t really impact the daily living of my life or my family.

Until now.

My wife is a teacher.  My child is immunocompromised.  I’ll just state those facts, and if you understand why this is a major problem today maybe you’ll continue reading.  If not, well go fuck off.

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New Father Brogging, #012

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a portable apnea monitor.  As my daughter was premature, we were not given a choice on that she was required to have one in order to be discharged from the NICU.  Understandable initially, as she, like many premature babies had shown the tendency to have episodes of bradycardia (low heart rate), and it was nice to have a safety net at home to know if something were going wrong at any point.

How it worked was that our baby had two nodes strapped to her chest, that fed into an eight-foot cord, which was hooked into the monitor itself, which gave real time pulsing green lights indicative of her heart rate.  At any point if the baby registered more than 20 seconds of a slow heart rate, elevated heart rate, or shallow breathing, a piercing beep would emit from the monitor, along with the illumination of a red light next to whatever icon indicated the event.

The beep was soul-piercing to hear, and the red light was looking at the eye of Sauron.

At first, we’d experience events a few times a day, as we learned as parents on how to be parents and how to hold our child, feed our child and generally handle our kid in the optimum manner to avoid putting her in situations where she’d be at higher risk of triggers.  But as babies tend to do, she began growing rapidly, as mythical wife and I started to gain experience with handling her, and eventually the number of events began reducing to nearly nothing.

As time passed, the necessity of carrying around a box the size and weight of a school textbook and the long, tangly cable that ran with it began to grow increasingly frustrating, especially to me, as we as new parents, wished to expose our child to more of the world, and not just keep her in bassinets or the Mamaroo, but it began to feel like a literal ball and chain.  The number of events were next to nothing, and I was eager to find out when we could be without it.

During a visit to the pediatrician, we were told that two months no events, and then we’re good to go. 

Two months??  I was pretty livid.

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New Father Brogging, #011

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout this week, mythical wife and I have introduced a baby monitor, so that we can put her down at a scheduled time, and still be able to keep eyes and ears on her from elsewhere in the house, while we try to reclaim a little bit of time for ourselves.  At first, it felt almost alien, having some free time back, and initially I used them only to do chores and tasks that tend to fall to the backburner on most days, but then when I’d finish those, I realized that it wasn’t yet 11 pm, and I actually had some free time back on my hands.  It was kind of nice.

Today, my daughter let out the most high-pitched shrieks I’ve ever heard come from her.  Worse off, we heard them first through the baby monitor, so they occurred with neither parent in sight.  I tore up the stairs and into the bedroom to get to my child as fast as possible, and hearing them in person was the most soul-piercing sounds I’d heard in my entire life.  I picked her up out of the bassinet and held her to my chest immediately.  Moments later I was in the most tears I’d been in since her birth, because no parent should want to hear such horrific sounds emanating from their baby.

Fortunately, everything seemed to be fine; maybe she was having a bad dream, or maybe it was the fear of awakening without the use of her arms, since we have her sleep swaddled.  Maybe a combination of both, or maybe she was overheated, since the bedroom tends to warm up throughout the day.  But either way, because nobody can speak baby, we’ll never truly know to why she was in such a frenzied panic, but all I do know is that it was one of the most frightening experiences for me in recent memory, and I’m still admittedly a little shaken up by it, regardless of if everything is fine.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #011” →