Ups and downs

Didn't post for the past few days - I've had to cope with some health issues. I started a new diabetes medicine - which may or may not have some side effects, it's hard to tell.

The reason its hard to tell is because, as is so often the case, different problems intrude on one another. This week I had blood pressure problems - purely situational - and it's taking me a few days to sort the problems out. I had a problem on Wednesday with a customer that - unfortunately, as I foresaw - cascaded into such turmoil that my blood pressure must have spiked into the "death is imminent" zone. I've been watching my blood pressure like a hawk since then.

The customer didn't mean to be difficult; she was - literally - a halfwit who wanted something and I couldn't achieve it for her. When you deal with a person of genuinely limited intellectual capacity, you have two problems:

1. They don't understand you; and
2. When they don't understand you, they think it's your fault

Because they don't have the intelligence to have self-doubts, it makes it hard to communicate. In this case, after some effort (spread over two days and multiple phone conversations) we got through to her (yes, I had to ask for help from other people).

THEN the woman, who had come to the office, finds out one of the documents she had been carrying was missing, and - of course - said we lost it. We had to turn the office upside down and eventually found it, on the floor, where she had dropped it as she shuffled around.

At the point she accused of us losing the document - when I thought we had her out the door - I just about stroked out.

This was all compounded by the fact that, like so many people of severely impaired intelligence, she mumbled and spoke very indistinctly. That combined with an East Texas dialect reduced me to having to ask for a translation from natives.

I didn't dare to check my blood pressure until the next morning, and then it was 214 over 114. It's much improved, but I'm monitoring it closely.