Well, it never fails that dad calls me either on a Friday or Saturday night. Yep, prime times for going out and having a life… I mean, who is surprised. Since my college days, dad has always used these time slots to call and make sure I was in my dorm room studying. Now, he still expects me to subscribe to his fear-based “don’t go out at night” philosophy.

So today was kind of a shitty day. You see, last night, really late I got a Rover request for a doggie boarder starting TODAY. The lady mentioned that her dog should get along well with Marty, and then I had to tell her that Marty died. It’s in my Rover profile that he passed last December, but I still have him listed as a pet in my profile bc well, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to “delete” his profile. Long story short, that sent me down a rabbit hole looking at pictures of him and Remy and reading my old blog posts about the days we said goodbye. Goddamn, they were high maintenance in their golden years. Then I started crying. Went to bed and left my contact lenses in by accident.

Woke up in the middle of the night with my eyes super puffy bc of the damn contacts. Met with the new Rover client in the morning and then went doorknocking for my open house. Met some nice neighbors in that community. Also met some not so nice people who cut me off and shut the door on me. Fine, whatever. Then prepped all my materials and got a call in the afternoon from the list agent: They just got a super strong offer on the house I’m supposed to host. Granted, the list agent was kind enough to give me the option of whether or not I wanted to continue hosting the property. I decided to proceed. Maybe they can use a backup offer. I dunno.

So I finally get home, eat dinner, then dad calls. He can’t access his iphone, bc the text is monstrous and there is no accessible way to unlock his phone. This has happened before and I had no idea what he did to get it into zoom mode. Last time, he had to go to the AT&T store and have them fix it (double tap with 3 fingers at once). This time, I told him to do the same thing and he said it didn’t help. Then 30 secs later, it worked. Who the fuck knows. I mean, it’s so frustrating, bc I have gotten dad a decent laptop (upgraded every few years) for well over a decade and still, all he can do is basic plane tickets, stock trading, bank transactions, and scanning. He still can’t really email, doesn’t know to forward or reply or attach. He still reads too many junk/forwards and just gets hung up on something every other day. And I have showed him a bunch of times!! Same shit with the iphone. Can’t text. Doesn’t read email on the phone. Just looks at stock apps and uses the basic phone function (but not even voicemail). So freaking annoying. He’s a smart guy. If he can figure out stock/investment shit, he should be able to do more functions on the phone and PC.

So today he tells me he wants to upgrade to iPhone 8. How much, what are the specs, when is it available. I don’t fucking know! I’m not even looking to upgrade. Maybe he asks bc he knows John will upgrade but John almost always gets top of the line (different use case than my dad) and he buys direct from Apple. So Dad says, “oh you know, if you have time, maybe you can research it for me.” Fucking A. Yeah, I’m just sleeping and lounging around all damn day. Sure, I can research it.

So I go to AT&T chat and of course, I cannot get any info from the rep without logging into Dad’s account. What is your account and pw. Don’t know. On chat for about 45 fucking minutes, going through various iterations to finally get a working userid and login. After that, I have to learn the differences between upgrading via AT&T vs. Apple. And all the installment plan options. Basically, 90 minutes later, I have sufficient information to proceed. You know, just a simple thing to research on a Friday night. SMH. And more than half the time, I waste tons of time researching shit for dad and in the end, no action. We’ll see if this is the case regarding the iPhone.