Today, St. Patrick’s Day, was also a day of dysfunction. Having an active imagination and open mind, I’m perfectly willing to blame leprechauns. But whatever the cause, it was (in retrospect) a day filled with incidents that were both amusing and a bit disturbing.

Here are some of my experiences today. Draw your own conclusions.

1. The office email server was offline this morning. I could work on other things, but I felt a noticeable gap in my routine. I’m just so accustomed to checking emails first thing to help figure out what I need to get done. Whatever did I do in the morning before email was invented? Having trouble remembering.

2. Our refrigerator is failing, so an appliance tech came by to check it out. His findings: he can repair it (with no warranty), or we can buy a new refrigerator for not much more. Why? Because like too many things, refrigerators are not designed to be easily repairable. The “throwaway” attitude still rules our consumer society! Fortunately, there are signs of that changing.

3. I went to REI to buy some things for servicing our bikes. “The power’s out,” I was told by a greeter. But they were open, so I got the stuff, got in line, and waited. And waited. The young staff, trained and used to scanning barcodes and swiping credit cards, had almost no clue how to fill out sales receipts by hand. They had to write down all the little numbers on the barcodes and ask for the prices, then total it up.

Perhaps the funniest (tragic?) moment was when I paid. My total was $37.10 with tax, which I calculated in my head and laid out two $20 bills and a dime. The cashier picked them up. “Out of $40.10,” she said, then turned to a colleague. “You got a calculator handy?”

4. Next door to REI, the Whole Foods was closed, completely unable to deal with a power outage. This meant I had to drive to the other store across town to get my panini. And many traffic lights were out on the road. Predictably, there were some drivers who didn’t know to treat them as four-way stops, and either pushed their way through out of turn, or sat there frozen. Perhaps some of them are still there.

5. Next, a stop at my new bank, which has a convenient office inside Meijer and has ATMs up north where we camp. I’d set up a new checking account online, which also created a savings account that I couldn’t cancel. So while funding the checking account, I asked if I could close the savings account. Here was the answer: “If we close it now, there will be a $25.00 fee. But if you don’t fund it, it will expire with no penalty.” In other words, it benefits me more to let it die of neglect than give it a quick, merciful end now. Does that make any sense to you?

And, finally:

6. I’d run these errands, along with a few more, right after my workout. They took longer than expected, and I arrived home starving. And when the tub of hummus I’d bought stubbornly refused to open, all the small frustrations took over in a childish act that turned out messy but amazing. I had no idea hummus was capable of such a wide dispersal pattern. Fortunately, enough remained in the tub that I could still have some.

None of the above annoyances were anything close to a real problem, but it can be hard to me to keep that in mind in the heat of the moment. Which means it’s even more important for me to keep things in perspective and be grateful for my blessings.

And I can stop being so smug when I hear that a half-inch of snow shuts down Atlanta or Dallas. All it took here was a power outage to mess up my day, and result in a terrible waste of good hummus. Don’t let this happen to you!