BY MICHAEL P. SCHENK

Is it just me? Or is it increasingly challenging to go see your docs? So, we recently stayed overnight in Cleveland because of concerns about morning fog on the highways. The hospitals seem to be, or are, so big that timing your visit is increasingly challenging. A for-instance is navigating to the parking garage, parking, and then walking amongst 10 to 12 story buildings to locate the one building and floor you need to find. So we had what WAZE said was a six-minute drive to the location, but it took, in actuality, 24 minutes to find the garage, park, and locate an elevator which was out of order. Then we trundled down five flights to find an exit & then navigate to the building we needed, which was part of another building. We had to ask for help to locate this time a working elevator and reach our final goal. This six-minute drive was correct but in all we spent the total of those 24 minutes to achieve victory. And just to break it down, ten minutes was spent in the parking garage finding a spot, properly parking, and descending and exiting the parking garage. Oh well, is it just me? Or us?

Are we all getting a little tired of acronyms? This clever use of capital letters to shorten (supposedly) our time to understand what is being discussed leaves many of us behind in the dust. To be clear, why is this happening, and when will this habitual use of capital letters end or include directions during presentations, so we are all on the same page?

I have addressed this before, but are our cars getting too technical for us to use? We just wanted to reset our trip odometer and combed through the manual without success, googled it without success, and finally, when taking our car in for warranty work, even the service manager had to spend eight minutes trying to figure this out. In my prior vehicle, all I did was toggle or press a stem on the dash and bingo, it was done. We finally conquered this simple task, but is it just me? Why is this so challenging? Or better yet, what tech nerd felt this simple task had to be made so hard?

Lastly, it is just so out of this world that we somehow had WAZE working on our dash and on my phone issuing different commands to the same final location. So, we argued about which was the correct way to go while in the car on the highway. All we wanted to do was go to our favorite coffee shop, and all this stress was generated by the impossible situation of WAZE sending us down two different paths.

In my rolodex of repeating songs this month is Robert Goulet and his song “If I Ever Leave You,” as I have been reliving my dad singing this song Sunday morning at home. He was not much of a vocalist, as I am not also, but he really enjoyed this song. I think maybe Andy Williams did a version of this also back in the day. It is, of course, a romantic ballad describing how it is impossible to leave the one you love. Sappy, I know, but it does play in my head over and over. The other song is “Lost Without Your Love” by Bread. Sorry, another sappy love song.

Oh well, see you around Ottawa County!!

Mike