who has time for this?

Ugh. This morning attempted listen to XM streaming on my computer and found myself locked out of the account I’ve been happily using for years. Despite having other things I’d rather be doing, I did a little searching about my problem and found that anyone who had a password with “special characters” in it has had the same problem. And that asking to have the password set via the online form doesn’t work. I dreaded calling XM – who has time to deal with crappy customer service?

Oops. I had just broken my resolution to no longer say “I don’t have time.” I *do* have time. I’m at home, alone, drinking coffee. Yes, I have time. Sure, I have a long list of things I’d like to get done, but I have to take charge and decide what has the highest priority for me.

Lately, I’ve been getting annoyed whenever I hear someone say “I don’t have time for that.” (Honestly, I’ve been getting annoyed in general, but that’s another story.) You do have time! We all have 24 hours in our day, each and every one of us. And, for the most part, we choose how to spend our time. (I understand that there are certain circumstances out of our control, and we don’t all get to choose how to spend our daily allotment of 24-hours.)

I figured if I was going to get annoyed at others saying “I don’t have time” that I had better give up saying it myself in order to not be more of a hypocrite than I already am. So giving up this mantra is my newest resolution.

Instead of “I don’t have time,” I have to examine why I won’t do something. “It is not a high priority for me right now.” “I’m not interested.” “There are other things I’d prefer to spend my time on right now.” “I don’t have the patience to deal with it.”

That was the XM answer. “I don’t have the patience.” In the past, dealing with XM customer care has always been an ordeal. One hand never told the other what it was doing. It was a frustrating maze of run-arounds and excuses that always left me bitter and grumpy.

But, I figured, I’m here, at home, doing fairly mindless things on the computer, let me call up and straighten out this trivial mess. Amazingly, my call was answered right away. The representative immediately understood my issue when I explained the problem and the research I had done, and she fixed it on the spot. In a pleasant, knowledgeable manner. Without getting annoyed that I don’t know my phone number (so many phones! which one? I couldn’t access my account to find out.) nor my account number.

And now I don’t have the dread of calling stewing in my mind making me even crankier. It was the right thing to do — making time to fix a problem, trivial as it may be…