So, here’s the thing. There is not much that peeves, grieves, and rankles the blue blazes out of me, more than some banking or credit company personnel demanding to speak with my husband before I can conduct business with them over the telephone. I mean, what year are we talking here?
Where are they when you need your credit and banking information to be truly secure? But, try to do business concerning your own accounts and bingo, they are as secure as Fort Knox.
Especially over the last few years, every human being and their donkey want to be recognized for autonomous liberty to be heard. And yet, even when I am a joint account holder with my partner at some financial institution (not local), I’m still treated way too much as the little lady of the house, with few brain cells remaining from “all that darn washing, ironing, dusting, and baby-making” to speak to a customer service representative.
I mean really, didn’t we burn our bras over fifty years ago? Yes, I’m ranting, raving, hollering, and maybe cussing a little bit.
This indignity bugs me. Maybe it’s mostly because in our partnership, household and business, I handle the lion’s share of the management. So, I’m the one calling a customer service representative when things go wonky.
I’m the one pushing forward through the morass of paperwork and internet hoo-hah to get the job done. I get the headaches and have to go for a cleansing walk outdoors to get the nonsense of bureaucracy out of my head.
So, when some woman, man or child says to me, usually at the end of a long day of similar silliness and I want to finish one last chore that beckons from my desk, “who’s the primary account holder,” because they couldn’t possibly put two people as primary, and I reply honestly, “my husband.” It happens.
“May I speak with your husband to get permission to continue speaking with you.” Oh, my word, can you hear me screaming? I haven’t needed permission to speak since high school where we were taught to raise your hand until acknowledged.
I want so badly to shout, “I am a joint account holder, not the little woman, and my husband has no clue what I need to know from you. Why is it that you have to get his permission to speak to the person who knows what we need from you?”
If I were seeking that same information over the Internet, my neighbor’s dog could be getting the permissions that I can’t get as the secondary account-holder, over the telephone. To be frank, I didn’t want to be bothered with opening that account so my husband said he would do it. He got two-thirds of the way through the process and asked me to finish it. And here we are.
If this were to happen in the reverse, and I were the primary account-holder, and my husband, a secondary, trying to get answers over the phone, which is never going to happen, I couldn’t scream institutional sexism. And I hope, it would happen to him the same way it happened to me. Otherwise, it truly is institutional sexism.
As it turns out, this written rant was begun when I was angry. I knew, that I’d wait a bit and the anger would subside, then I’d edit.
However, I began to think, instead of editing my diatribe, about how best to handle anger in general. I grew up in the Christian Church and I’ve read Scripture for many years. In fact, the recesses of my heart, head, and my entire being is permeated with Scripture, which leaks out in the oddest moments and sometimes relates to the funniest experiences.
The first Scripture that comes to mind about handling anger is, “be angry and sin not,” from Ephesians, Chapter 4. I know that anger hurts the one who carries the anger around. One can exercise, cry, work, yell, cuss, journal, talk-it-out and in the end, anger held, just becomes self-harm.
We all get angry. It’s what we do with it that matters. I think we can’t let it transform into something else. So, go ahead and be angry, but….
I guess we all should seek to be butterflies. I think something called righteous anger is supposed to make us into butterflies. We’re maybe supposed to be angry, accept it, then turn it into something useful to humanity, or a much more complex entity like knowledge, wisdom, amusement, forgiveness, or art.
So, to all you bureaucracies out there, stop trying to clog up my pores with your untenable and absurd policies. I’m moving on and you can absorb all the sunshine and flowers emanating out of my newly cleansed pores. Until next time.