It seems to me that no matter how well I try to plan something — taking various contingencies into account — invariably something happens that causes whatever I am doing to take longer than I had expected.
I can't imagine I'm alone in having this experience!
Sometimes it's just very minor things. Something like changing your method of payment on the web site of some company you owe monthly payments to... and a process you think will take a couple of minutes leads to thirty minutes of clicking around and using an automated chatbot to get absolutely nowhere... like it never occurred to the company that someone might use a different credit card, or have their old one stolen, or whatever.
Or spending 45 minutes on hold to get customer service... only to have the call disconnect when you finally get through to an actual human CSR. Or — this actually happened to me a few weeks ago — you get through after a hour of waiting, only to hear "Our offices are closed today for an internal training program. Please try back tomorrow."
WTF, over?
One of my least favorite time wasters are recipes that lie about the prep time. I guess they are afraid nobody would use their recipe if they said "allow 90 minutes just for slicing and dicing" so they say "prep time 30 minutes" to lure you into a false sense of comfort!
Then there's the whole "some basic assembly required" issue... in which you spend three hours attempting to assemble the International Space Station with one Allen wrench and five pieces of string... using instructions written in Russian by a 5-year old with dyslexia.
Sometimes, things take longer than expected because people simply don't learn from experience.
Doctors would fit in this group. They schedule patients like it never occurred to them that some appointsments will run long, and sometimes they will be called for a phone consult in the middle of the day, setting them back 20 minutes on all remaining appointments.
And then, of course, we have "next day delivery" that takes a week. At least it tends to be partially right... transit time is one day, but it takes the company four days to find a box and put my item in it!
I shouldn't speak too loudly, though... I sell on eBay, and there are days when I simply am not available to do same day shipping...
Of course, it also takes longer than expected for my investments to gain any value... but then, that's a pretty common occurrence. Maybe they are just bad investments!
Anyway, it does make me wonder what's really going on here? Do things actually take longer than stated or expected? Or do we simply have unrealistic expectations as to how long any given task, event or activity should last?
Then again, maybe time is pretty consistent, but we become more impatient when we are actually waiting for something to come to fruition.
Although that sounds like a bit of a platitude, it's probably more true than we'd like to admit!
Reardless, it definitely is frustrating when you think something is going to be easy and quick and it turns into a lengthy saga!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2025.02.26 00:55 PST
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