Rant #2,105: I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down

Welcome to the Ranting and Raving Blog, and for me, welcome to another week of misery ... or at least that is how it is starting out for me.

I woke up today, and felt something awry on the left side of my mouth.

I believe I either lost a filling or a cavity came out full blown.

It is also affecting my ear, and the entire left side of my head is bothering me.

So as a result, I am going to have to try to get an emergency dental visit today.

I don't know what it is, but for some reason, not even a full three months into 2018, this year has been a horror show for myself and my family.

If it is not one thing, it is another, both very large and very small.

Just when we think that everything is finally right, things just seem to go wrong.

All the stuff I have been talking about--or kind of talking about to you, as I have not told you everything--has kind of gotten fixed, or at least I believe it has gotten fixed.

And just when we think that everything is A-OK, another monkey wrench gets thrown into the mix, messing things up once again.

And the sad thing is that it does not appear as if we can escape from it.

Myself and my family are under some kind of black cloud now, and every time we get one thing where it should be, another thing comes our way, out of left field, to deal with.

A lot of the stuff is pretty elementary, like the cold I had last week which is morphed into pretty much bad allergies, just like I thought it would.

But a lot of the stuff is larger.

One thing, something that I honestly have not gone into here, because it really isn't appropriate to talk about in this forum, came to a head this weekend. It appears that it is over, but I thought that it was over a few weeks ago ... but it reared its ugly head again just as we were going into the weekend after a very busy and annoying work week.

But that is now over ... I assume.

Another annoyance also reached its head this weekend, and I can tell you about that one.

My car registration comes due in April, and through last week, I had not received any of the paperwork New York State sends you when you need to renew your registration. Normally, you receive this material two months in advance, but I had not received anything as of last week.

So I called the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, and that exercise is akin to watching paint dry, or something like that.

I called, got someone on the phone, and was summarily disconnected after I went through the whole song and a dance with them about why I was calling.

I then called them back, was put on hold for at least a half hour or 45 minutes, but when I finally got through, it really turned out that it was a godsend that I had called and spoken to them directly.

What happened is that the reason that I did not receive my registration was two-fold.

First, New York State is doing away with paper notifications, and I had been put into the group that was testing this procedure out, meaning that that is the reason that I did not get my paper notification.

The problem was that I did not get an email or any electronic notification about this--they just opted me out of the paper program without my knowledge!

The idea was that I was supposed to go, "Hmmmm, I did not get a paper notification, so, duh, let me try to update my registration online."

Well, guess what? That is just what I tried to do, but to no avail. The system would not take my information, and that leads to the second reason why I did not get my registration material in the mail.

I changed the company that I receive my car bill from about two years ago, so the current lien holder is not the original one that I had. I did it simply because I refinanced the car, and got a better rate from my current lien holder.

New York State was alerted to this, but to their own admittance, they never entered in that information onto my file.

Thus, according to them, even though I was in their system, the registration of my car was pretty much null and void, because the updated information was never entered in on their side!

Now, how this would have played out if, god forbid, I would have been in an accident is anyone's guess, but happily, that never happened.

What did happen is that when this was all sorted out, I did pay for my registration online--something I did not want to do--and I finally got the materials on the weekend, and the updated sticker is now affixed to my vehicle.

But millions of other drivers are going to be impacted by this online-only registration alert. I have opted out of it, and will continue to get paper alerts when my car needs its updated registration in two years--but what about others, who know nothing about this and will probably get into the same jam I got into?

Leave it to New York State to make a problem where there is none to begin with.

Anyway, this is just one of the calamities that I have been in, and rectified, during this young year.

Now my tooth is the next thing, and I shudder to think what can come next to myself and my family.

And that's the tooth ... err, the truth of the matter.

I can't stand up for falling down, and I have to ask myself .... Why?

Update: The "P.S." to this is that now, as we near 6 a.m., my mouth feels a lot better than it did an hour ago. I have little to no pain, and my ear appears to better.

I even ate something on the offending side, and I don't feel any discomfort at all.

Maybe this was a false alarm; I really don't know at this point.

I will monitor this thing through 9 a.m., and then act accordingly.

So the bottom line is that I might go to the dentist, or I might not ... let's see how the day goes on from here.