I Can't Make This Up

It’s been a week, but yesterday won the “I can’t make this shit up!” trophy.

I woke up yesterday with a list of to-dos—positive, move-the-needle-forward tasks. I even got my hair done…my annual cut and color, a gift to myself for momming so good the last year, aka keeping my kids alive and putting everyone else’s needs above my own. Yesterday was a gift to me.

Until 3 o’clock happened.

I got home and walked into a shitstorm. I received a call from the hospital about my son’s upcoming surgery. The physical form was one day shy of the acceptable 30 days, leaving his surgery in doubt, a surgery we have been trying to get for him for a year.

While I was on the phone with his doctor’s office trying to figure that mess out, my son was trying to call me, but I couldn’t answer, so I yelled upstairs to his brother to call him to see why he was late getting home from school. My son yelled back down at me, “Why can’t you do it, Mom?” I yelled back up at him, “Because I’m on the phone with his doctor!” Then I got a text from my missing son that his bus was late.

As soon as I got off the phone, Contractors #1 & 2 showed up to replace the window screens in our bedrooms because Kansas apparently has ‘Gorilla’ hail now, and the sky gorillad all over our bedroom screens.

This was the contractor’s third visit. I gave them the measurements before their first visit. On the second visit, they took our shredded window screens with them so they could “make” them back at the shop.

Yesterday, they brought the new window screens. While I returned my mom’s phone call that I missed in the chaos of all of this, to tell her, “No, Mom, do not give money to that shady Facebook request while complaining to her about the painting contractors who didn’t show up this week, I was watching the contractors trying to shove the screens in my bedroom windows.

When we got to my son’s room, contractor #1 installed the screen. It was too small. There was a one-inch gap between the screen and the top of the window, a gap so large I could fit my hand through. It clearly did not fit.

While we were standing in the closet looking at the tiny screen the contractor had just installed, he yelled down to his boss explaining about the gap, and his boss yelled back up at us, “It’s supposed to be like that!”

Contractor #1 and I looked at each other, and I said, “That makes no sense.” He said, “I know.”

Then, Contractor #1 yells down to Contractor #2 and asks why it’s supposed to be like that, and Contractor #2 yells back up at us, “It’s for air!”

Air.

Now I’m no expert on window screens, but isn’t that what those 1,000’s of tiny holes in the screen are for?

Contractor #1 explained to me that Contractor #2 was going through some stuff so he was in a bad mood. I thought, “Oh well, then by all means, let’s not upset him with something as petty as an ill-fitting window screen, you know, the very thing he came here to do.”

Needless to say, they left without any explanation, and we still don’t have screens in our windows. I don’t know if the fourth time will be the charm or if they will even be back.

My son finally made it home an hour late, and the chaos finally passed, but it was a stressful few hours.

The screen needed to breathe.

Funniest shit I’ve heard this week.