Professional Courtesy

Today was a most interesting day at the funeral home (as most of them are). I took a death call on the phone from a funeral director in Louisville as the family had requested that we take care of the burial part of the service. They wanted to have a graveside service here in my town and that was all, meaning no visitation or use of our facilities at all.

Customarily the originating funeral home will make the removal and prepare the remains, dress and casket the deceased for visitation and/or funeral service before sending along to us for the committal service at the cemetery. We would, out of professional courtesy, be afforded the outer burial container (or vault) sale. Everything is going along as smooth as sticky honey until I find out that there is going to be NOTHING done as far as a service in Louisville. GRRRRR. Trying not to dig too deep into how we do what we do, if the family chooses no visitation and no service in the originating city, we would do it ALL except the removal and preparation of remains. I just feel like we got the shaft this time in such a way that our firm would never have done. Tsk, tsk, tsk is all I can say. Okay, now I feel better.

Actually, the day was interesting before I got to work. Let me back up and make you smile. 55 year old woman hurt my lower back 3 weeks ago and am just now able to function and walk like a normal person. Hence after going to the grocery store the other night, I left 2 12-packs of Diet Coke on my steps going into the house from the garage thinking my next visitor, whoever he or she was, would be kind enough to bring them in. Well, in a frantic "I'm late again" mode this morning, of course I tripped over the Cokes and fell down the steps onto a big pile of Mom's "stuff".

Gets better, since I got old, I have to take an 81 mg aspirin every day to thin my old lady blood. Well, let me tell ya, it works. I have bled like a leaky faucet all day long. At least that may have helped decrease my blood pressure.

THEN, my much-anticipated i-phone that arrived a few days ago became my least favorite new toy. My daughter told me I had not set up my voice mail. I have a personal office techie geek (a/k/a Frank) who knows everything, so I had Frank show me how to do this. NOT working. Frank sends me to the AT&T store. Bad move when the customer service guy (and I use that term quite loosely) says, "you know, you're right, this IS a defective phone". I ask him to send it back and order me another one. "Oh no, I guess you'll have to call customer service on the phone, I can't do anything here." WOW........ So have you heard the one about the lady at the AT&T store this week. It was not pretty. In the end, "Rob" got them on the phone and after way too much wasted time, my voicemail is working. Still don't have everything up and running, but I'm menopausal and I can only take one thing at a time with this phone .