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The Complaint Department
Is Now Open
One of the funniest The New Yorker cartoons I can recall dates back to 1998 when it was featured in a final-season episode of “Seinfeld.” A pig is standing at the “Complaints” window in a department store and tells the woman employee, in a caption submitted by the TV character Elaine: “I wish I was taller.”
Well, I’m 6-foot-4 but I am not short of complaints…
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I wish 2020 was shorter instead of seeming to have already lasted about 18 years.
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I used to get annoyed when I would forget to bring my own reusable bag into a store, but now that I’ve gotten better my new problem is leaving my mask in the car and having to go back to retrieve it.
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I wish I wasn’t always forgetting my Internet passwords, a seemingly daily occurrence with one account or another. I reckon I reset my email password alone more often than Jeff Bezos earns another 10 million dollars.
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Speaking of Amazon, I have annoyed myself during the coronavirus pandemic by relying too heavily on the convenience of click-and-buying things online – after, naturally, re-re-re-resetting my Prime membership password first – instead of putting on a mask and going to a local store.
I vow to do better in 2021. No, beginning now.
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Speaking of the Internet, I have a complaint about websites that ask me to prove I am a person (and not a spam program) by typing in a series of displayed random letters and numbers that look like either hieroglyphics or something drawn by Picasso while he was drunk.
Worse yet is when I am presented a photograph of a busy intersection and asked to click on each of the nine gridded squares that contain portions of the five major food groups.
In either case, I usually mistake cars for apples or guess letters to be numbers.
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“Woody, you knucklehead,” you might say. “Just write down your passwords and the problem is solved.”
Well, I can’t begin to tell you how annoyed I get when I lose my list of passwords – which is a full page long, by the way, because cyber experts tell us that not having a unique password for each and every account is more dangerous than storing nuclear waste in one’s refrigerator.
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I worry about our local restaurants surviving during the pandemic, but I do have a complaint about some of them for wrapping my take-away orders in two pounds of aluminum foil, paper, cardboard and eco-unfriendly Styrofoam, which is a huge complaint all in itself, plus a bag. That’s a lot of unneeded waste for about five minutes of use.
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I have a major complaint about people who don’t clean up their dog’s messes at parks, beaches and even on sidewalks.
I wish there was an ordinance requiring such Styrofoam-brained dog owners to personally clean off the icky shoe soles for those of us who take a messy misstep.
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I similarly have a complaint about people who treat our beautiful beaches like a pigsty by leaving behind litter.
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I wish half the sesame seeds didn’t always fall off my bagel and make my place at the table look like a pigsty.
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It annoys me that robocalls and spam email are harder to stop than LeBron James.
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My final complaint for today is that the pig cartoon in “Seinfeld” was actually fictitious, although The New Yorker later ran a caption contest with the same drawing. The winner? “Stop sending me spam!”
I wish I had sent that in.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …
- Personalized signed copies are at WoodyWoodburn.com