The other day I was walking the dog with my partner, chitchatting and wrangling the poodle during her twice-daily leash freakout. Somehow the topic of my (only) ex came up. I joked about her family definitely being in the mob.
“I mean, they owned a garbage disposal company in Connecticut. Could it be any more cliche?” I said.
“How come she didn’t put a hit on you?” responded my spouse.
“Maybe she did and I didn’t know it.”I thought about it. Come to think of it, some years after our falling out, I began having issues traveling. My name had somehow wound up on a list of “people that need extra screening at the airport,” which every airline I dealt with denied the existence of.
Me: “Why can’t I check in online?”
Airline representative: “It’s just a routine random screening.” [sic]
Me: “This is the fifth time in a year. That’s not random. What list am I on?”
Airline representative: “There’s no list. It’s random.”
BULL.
So, I wrote to the TSA and asked that my name be removed from the non-existent list that was causing such a pain in my butt. They subsequently sent me a security redress number that I had to use for the next three or so years. The ordeal had cost me hours of valuable pre-travel meditation time.
Perhaps every inconvenient thing that had happened in my life since 2004 was the result of a vendetta. Maybe I had been the victim of a mob hit for the digital generation, one that bestows annoying, purely first-world problems on its unknowing victims. Sneaky geniuses!
Here are some other “hits” I’ve experienced, which may or may not be mob-related:
- Having to change all of my logins while traveling abroad because of some hack or virus;
- Constantly being in the slow lane while driving or trying to check out at the grocery store;
- Having to re-sign-in to my phone’s social media accounts, or having to re-enter my passwords in my internet browser;
- Getting the slow guy at City Hall enter our names onto the marriage certificate; and
- Having to call 1800 times to get money back from airlines and health insurance companies.
Surely there are more that I currently can’t remember. But now I know that if something stupidly inconvenient happens, it’s all because of my checkered past; I brought it on myself. See, things do happen for a reason. And that reason is the mob.
I Came, I Saw, I Blogged 