For MY Convenience

I found myself once again totally relating to a comic strip this week:

Baby Blues Comic Strip for April 03, 2015 | Comics Kingdom

See, over Spring Break, Jerry and I were running errands, and we needed to make a deposit at the bank.  We pulled up to the drive through lanes and found a big sign:  CLOSED.  We parked and headed inside to the lobby.  When we finally got up to the teller (long line, one teller) I inquired as to whether this was a temporary closure, and was informed that not only was this a permanent change, but that it was for my convenience.

Yes, MY convenience.  See, they upgraded the (single) ATM so that it can take deposits, and now we won't have to wait in line for one of the four tellers that used to run the drive-through lanes.  Nope, now I can conveniently wait behind eight other cars that used to use the drive-through that are now in the one and only ATM line.  Certainly smacks of convenience to me, no?

Not two days later, we received a request for documentation for a charge against our new FSA debit card.  You know, the one they gave us for our convenience this year.

Last year, our insurance company sent the amounts to the FSA service provider, and they automatically cut us a check.  I didn't have to send in anything, didn't have to file anything, zip, nada, nothing.  But it turns out that procedure wasn't convenient enough.  No, this year we have a debit card that we can use to pay for those expenses so that the money never even has to come out of our pocket to be reimbursed.  Only when we use the card, we then get the above mentioned notification that requires us to gather the itemized receipt from the doctor, the EOB statement from the insurance company, and either scan or photograph them and send those to the FSA provider.  Yes.  That's definitely more convenient.  (Not.)

So spring break ends, and I head back to work.  During one of my first lessons back, I am reading books about bones and skeletons to my Kindergarten classes.  I have a stack of four books on top of a four-foot bookshelf shelf, and when I reach for the second book, the book on the top of the stack slides off and disappears behind the bookshelf.  In my head I'm thinking a lot of words that I can't say aloud in front of my students, but I slap a smile on my face and come up with a new plan.  Yea, let's sing this song!  Let's dance this dance!  I fill the 10 minutes that should have been spent reading that book with other activity and make it through the lesson.

At the end of the day, I had to unload the books from two bookshelves full of non-fiction books, pull the shelves away from the wall, and retrieve the lost book to use in the lessons for the rest of the week.  As I was putting all the books back on the shelf, I thought to myself, "You know, this isn't so bad.  I'm sure that the bookshelf was just holding on to that book for my convenience."