Josh Freed: Here are some small problems to help you trump your big one

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Breathe in, breathe out … Breathe in, breathe out.

OK, you can read now.

After weeks of worrying about the U.S. election, you probably need a rest so you can prepare to worry for the next four years.

Sometimes the best way to forget big problems is to concentrate on small ones, the tiny things in life that irritate you.

So here’s my 2024 list of little things that bug me:

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Automated phone menu mazes keep getting longer and more baffling, with nine choices leading to six more, that lead to five more, then another seven.

The only rule is: You can’t press 0 for a human being, until you’ve completed the maze.

Somewhere around the fourth menu of choices, which never include what you’re calling for, you’ll get impatient and press “#” to speed through the options.

Don’t! This will prompt a message saying “Your choice is invalid,” then you’ll be sent back to square one to listen to the first nine choices again.

To increase your frustration, recordings will keep repeating that it’s quicker and easier to solve your problems on their website.

But, of course, the reason you’ve called is because you already spent 55 minutes on their website and got nowhere.

Traffic: Montreal is a city where all roads lead to Rue Barrée.

But you rarely know you’re on a cul-de-sac until you’ve been sacced. In the past week, I’ve learned parts of both Dr. Penfield Ave. and Côte-St-Luc Rd. were closed, but the “rue barré” signs didn’t appear until it was too late to escape.

Why can’t work crews put the warning before we enter a cul-de-sac they’ve created, rather than after, when we’re forced to make a group U-turn with 35 other vehicles in the same car trap as us?

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The GPS has made driving more efficient, but also more boring.

I used to have much-loved shortcuts to get anywhere in Montreal by using obscure small streets, back alleys and maybe cutting across someone’s front lawn.

Now the second there’s a possible shortcut the GPS herds us all down the same small street and across the same lawn, turning my shortcuts into massive traffic jams.

We’ve all become ants in a car colony, but God forbid our GPS should go off-line mid-drive. We’ve largely lost our own sense of direction and might never see home again.

Subscriptions. It’s effortless to subscribe to anything today whether online papers, TV channels or a cottage cheese delivery club.

You just click a single button saying FREE TRIAL. CANCEL ANY TIME!

But breaking up is hard to do. Unsubscribing will take two days of searching online for the secret cancellation website or unlisted phone number that’s the only way to quit.

Even once you find it and call, they’ll put you on hold with a message saying:

“All our agents are unavailable because we fired them. Please prepare three hours of food and water and wait for the next agent to be hired.”
Beep.

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“If you’d like to SUBSCRIBE to our service, just press 1. You can CANCEL ANY TIME!”

U.S. legislation will soon force companies to make it as easy to unsubscribe as subscribe.

That’s good news for us “subscribers” who can finally unsubscribe to all the things we don’t remember subscribing to.

The bad news is we’ll have nothing left to subscribe to because the only way most subscription services make money is from people who’ve forgotten they subscribe.

Quebec acronyms: Everywhere we turn there’s another incomprehensible acronym, an alphabet soup of unpronounceable consonants no one can fathom, in any language.

Am I calling the MUHC, the CHUM or the CIUSSS? The SAQ or the SAAQ?

There are more than 1,100 acronyms in Quebec’s health bureaucracy alone (honest).

Just to see a specialist you must phone the GAP (not the clothing store: a “Guichet d’Accès”). They’ll decide whether you’ll go to a GUF-R (walk-in clinic), IPS-P-L (nurse practitioner), GMF-A (superclinic) or a MUHC hospital.

So if you don’t want to spend the night in an emergency ward corridor for a stuffy nose, you’d better learn your acronyms ASAP.

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Americans create easy-to-recall acronyms like ACE (Acute Care for Elders) or DADS (Department of Aging and Developmental Services).

Our French superhospital CHUM is a rare easy-to-pronounce Quebec acronym. It’d be way easier to remember our English one if it were spelled MUCH (pronounced much) instead of MUHC (pronounced Muh-hic).

Pharmacy products: As pill bottles become more childproof they’re harder for anyone to open, especially older people who need pills most.

You must either press down with all your strength, or yank up, or wrestle it to the left, or the right — or tap three times and shout “Open sesame!”

Even a bottle of mouthwash has a plastic seal you need a butcher’s knife to stab through, followed by a wrench to get into the antiseptic bottle you’ll need to treat your knife wound.

They’re tamper-proof, childproof and elderly-proof.

Whew! I’m glad I got all that off my chest, and maybe yours, too.

If you send me enough other things that bug you, maybe I can keep your mind off our real problems for another four years.

joshfreed49@gmail.com

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