Spring Cleaning Before the Fact

It's not Spring but today I cleaned.

A lot.  I was in an angry twit.

Through this little home-based business I run, selling horticultural testing instruments to orchard growers (yawn), I have cause this time of year to make shipments to places in South America and the Southern hemisphere.  I have been doing this for more than fifteen years.  I sort of know how to run the show.  Occasionally, I run into a glitch or a new rule or federal regulation that creates a temporary pause in my day.

I sent a shipment out to Peru yesterday.  (Note: I had been working on this sale for TWO years: a big durn deal for a new customer in a NEW country.)  Today I got a phone call from our shipping people, stating that that they were missing some required paperwork.

"No, you're not."

"We require ----."

"No, you don't.  Someone is mistaken."

"We can't ship it unless we have ----."

And so the conversation went, all morning and all afternoon, between eight people from the shipping company and me.  They were wrong, I was right.  (So I contended.)  In that each person from the shipping company kept transferring me to another office, I was pretty much grounded at home all day long.  And boy, was I frustrated.  Because: They were wrong.   I was right.

Add to this fun and games, the fact that my new "fiber optic internet" went out mid-afternoon.  No home-based internet communication here in rural Kansas.  

I cleaned out the refrigerator while I waited for a phone call.  And I cleaned everything out from under the kitchen sink.  A couple more phone calls.  I cleaned the oven.  Another phone call...

I moved into the dining room, and cleared everything away from the east wall: dining chairs, hung paintings, etc.  I emptied the china cabinet, so that it could be moved for what will be a monumental repair:  the entire east wall of our ca. 1887 plaster & lathe wall needs addressed.

Towards the end of the "workday", I received a phone call worth some satisfaction towards my plight.  In fact, I WAS right, and they were wrong.

At least, that's what I was told at the end of my day.  The shipment is out of Kansas and heading to parts deep south, without the questionable paperwork.  Well...tomorrow may well tell a different tale.

What I have is a prematurely-Spring-cleaned kitchen.

Yahoo.