And it’s cold and cloudy too…

It’s 1:20 p.m. and I’m having my first cup of coffee of the day. I’m at Books-a-Million, having hit the post office and the Parker Road Walmart pharmacy and Kroger.

The entire medical insurance world has figured out that I turn 65 on July 14 because they’re flooding our mailbox with offers for Medicare supplemental insurance. I suppose I should start thinking about it, but not today.

There are two Walmarts in Jonesboro – an older store on Highland and the newer Super Walmart way the hell down south on Parker Road. (We live about 8 miles north of town.) I would rather have a rat in my mouth than go to the Highland Walmart. So when I asked my doctor’s nurse to phone a prescription in for me, I specified the PARKER FUCKING ROAD WALMART.

When I showed up to claim it the pharmacy tech checked and reported they had not received a prescription from my doc. I asked her to check with the Highland store and, sure enough, it had been called to that pharmacy. Did I want it transferred to the Parker Road pharmacy? Well, that’s where I’m standing with charge card in hand, so the answer is yes. Actually, it’s FUCK YES, but there’s no point in taking it out on her.

So instead of a simple grab-and-pay, like I would normally experience when dealing with alert, competent people, I got to piss away 20 minutes while the pharmacist filled the prescription from scratch. Oh, and when I was talking with the doc’s nurse yesterday, I asked her if this stuff was on Walmart’s $4 generic list. Yes, she said.

So imagine my surprise when the charge was $8 and change.

How can this be so hard?

And I should also mention that the 32GB Solid State Drive (SSD) I bought a few months ago for this netbook died yesterday after working wonderfully for a week or so on a clean install of Windows XP. The system can’t even see the drive.

Consequently, I put the original 8GB SSD back in and will limp along with less than 700 megabytes of free space until I figure out a new solution.

It’s always something.