Frogshake

I obsess about the most ridiculous things or rather about unimportant, wee parts of my life. Not that I have OCD – or at least I doubt it very much – but sometimes I feel a little out of me, as if standing next to me, wondering what on earth I’m up to. At times a problem totally consumes all my thoughts and energy, and I am unable to help it, bitching at myself afterwards for not having done anything of any importance whatsoever.

Sometimes, when some stupid problem grabs my attention and takes it hostage, I am unable to let go and am unable to concentrate on the task at hand. Be that work for my studies or trivial things like watching TV. My thoughts drift off, circle around the problem like vultures, ponder it, weight and measure it. After a couple of minutes I usually realize that I’ve missed a couple of minutes of the movie I was watching without even noticing it. Then I usually start roaming the house. I walk up and down the stairs, into every room, feeling restless. Maybe there’s a solution under this pillow? I can feel the problem manifest itself in my stomach, poking and thrusting, begging to be let go. Little bugs dancing under my skin. “This is madness!” I think but continue obsessing anyway. Crazy indeed.

On days like this I tend to get literally nothing done. I go from doing this to doing that, not actually doing anything but waiting for the next day. In the evening I usually start to feel really, really bad. I go like “Shit, I haven’t accomplished anything today,” but then decide not to start working now and do more work tomorrow instead (when has that ever worked for anybody?). By that time I’ve stopped obsessing, for whatever reason. The problem always fades away; always gets freed and runs off. Unfortunately, with it goes the day…

Here’s the second part to the Sony sucks! story. Surprisingly, I got a reply from Sony; but only to tell me that I had contacted the wrong department. So I wrote to the department they told me to write to and they again referred me to someone else. One last time I attempted to make someone care about my dilemma and the reply I got - and this is no joke - was that I should go to the sony.co.uk website and look for help there.Wow. I was glad they told me as I would have never thought of that on my own! Gsus.

Since contacting Sony brought me nothing but sorrow I stopped to pursue this fruitless endeavor and decided to send and email to amazon.co.uk instead. Boy, had I no idea what I was about to blunder into. Not that they weren’t helpful, they were very much so; however, it was confusing. I will not quote all the emails which have been sent back and forth, but will paraphrase the important parts.

My first email: Hello amazon employee, I purchased the The Shield Season 5 DVD and the last episode is 20 minutes short. Please tell Sony to fix it.

Amazon reply #1: Hello, we are very sorry! We’ll send you a new DVD box and you don’t even have to send the one you already own back “as the cost of returning the package is in this case prohibitively expensive.”

My second email: Hi! Well, thanks, but it’s really not your problem and I doubt a new DVD Box will solve the problem.

Amazon reply #2: Hello, we are very sorry! We will still send you a new DVD box, but you have to send the one you already own back.

My third email: Cheerio! Ok then, send me a new DVD box, but do you want me to send the first DVD box back or not?

Amazon reply #3: Hello, we are very sorry! You don’t even have to send the one you already own back “as the cost of returning the package is in this case prohibitively expensive.”

One of the three amazon employees I dealt with suggested giving one of the boxes to charity. I wonder if any charity would want it.

In the end all this emailing, wasting time surfing the web for information and obsessing didn’t get me far. In retrospect it didn’t get me anywhere. As a result I am stuck not with one, but with two DVD boxes which, not all that surprisingly, have the exact same flaw. I heart amazon.