I’m super frustrated with myself and my situation today. I was on my way to Miami Florida with Red Cross today to help with sheltering after hurricane Milton, but I did something real stupid. Somehow I did not set my alarm in my phone. I could swear I did it but maybe it was actually the scheduling of my uber that I remember but I thought I also did the alarm, but now I look and it’s just not there in my phone. I woke up at like 5AM and my flight was leaving at 6 so there was just no way to get there in time. So I called the Red Cross travel agency which has a hold time of like 40 minutes and thankfully I got through just a few minutes before the flight departed so they were able to cancel so at least the Red Cross doesn’t have to pay for that flight. At least I just cost myself time instead of them a bunch of money.
Then they were gonna put me on another flight and so we hung up but then they tried to call me a bunch of times but their number is flagged as spam so my phone refuses to ring for them. I can’t figure out any way to mark their number as not spam. I’ve googled it and another volunteer actually called me about it and for the life of me I just can’t find any way to mark the number as not spam. It’s a thousand dollar fancy pants Galaxy S23 Ultra and I’ve been so so frustrated with it.
Something about traveling by air is always an awful experience for me. I guess I should remember that in these types of situations it’s never some cosmic force that’s causing this. I mean, the last two times when I got stuck in the airport all day, I need to remind myself that they’re doing the best they can at the price point that I’m paying for the tickets. It’s a whole lot better than the other transportation options and they are dealing with all sorts of issues, so it’s like I try to tell myself it could be a lot worse. And in situations like this, I don’t know. This one is all my fault I think… I mean I can blame my phone because it also didn’t ring when the uber guy called twice at 3:30–no I guess I can’t blame my phone because I have it set to silent during my sleep hours.
So this was all my stupidity. I guess the question is, what do I change about my behavior to prevent this from happening next time?
Set my alarm much earlier and check it a couple times. I guess turn off silent mode on my phone for that night?
The pre-scheduling of the uber seemed like a good idea but now I feel bad because I made some guy come to my house and he had to call twice and he probably got frustrated with me and now I have a $25 charge for cancellation.
So I guess I’m writing to try to understand my stress and frustration response to these types of things. It’s not just to calm myself down because I want to remember that Right Now Kalin is not important–at least making myself feel better isn’t. Understanding my feelings is extremely important. Fixing them is extremely not important and sometimes counter productive.
Like my stress response here is trying to tell me something. I’m not meeting my own expectations. I need to do better and not make these kinds of mistakes but also need to not get down on myself about it and focus on a change in attitudes and behaviors both specific and vague that can help this to not happen.
I don’t think I’ve ever done this before. At least I can say that… I think. I can’t remember ever doing this but I wonder if I’ve had dreams about doing this which is what’s giving me this weird sense of deja-vu.
Sometimes I’m tempted to just say “it’s okay. no harm no foul.” then I push it from my mind and distract myself and move on but I don’t really want to do that because I want to learn about this emotional response and understand why my stress spikes so much when I make these kinds of mistakes.
I’m listening to Pink Floyd Division Bell. I thought it might be calming, which it kind of is.