Mercury Retrograde:
Revenge of the Household Appliances
by April Elliott Kent

How's Mercury Retrograde going for you?  Despite my constant protestations that fears about Mercury Retrograde are more or less superstition, it's been an aggravating few days here at what seems to have become Mercury Rx headquarters.  Perhaps its retrograde transit of my third house emphasizes its diabolical message of communicative and technological snafus. Or maybe Mercury decided I needed to be taught a lesson.  In any event, here are some highlights from the front lines:

First -- the day after Mercury turned retrograde -- the venerable old second hand dryer we bought about six years ago decided to croak with two loads left to dry.  Did I want to buy a new dryer with Mercury in Aquarius (electrical appliances) retrograde?  Um, no... but even less did I want to go to the laundromat.  So off we schlepped to the local Labyrinthine Home Repair Warehouse store to replace the monster, and, while we were at it, its leaking, ugly duckling cousin of a washing machine.

Other than almost getting killed by a truck on the way to the store, it was a surprisingly pleasant and straightforward shopping experience.  They had the models we wanted, in the colors we wanted, for a price we could sort of afford, and would deliver them the very next day.  We'd receive a call first thing in the morning, said our salesman, confirming the delivery time.

Uh oh, I thought... here's where Mercury Rx will rear its ugly head.  They won't call, or I'll miss the call, or they'll insist on coming at a time when I have to be at school, or whatever.  But my fears were for naught: they called and delivered the appliances a half hour in advance of the expected time.

Of course, when they showed up they couldn't/wouldn't perform the installation in the previously agreed-upon way, and the salesman had sold us a wrong part for connecting the dryer, and to make a long story short we have this gorgeous washer and dryer sitting in our laundry room, and the washing machine works but the dryer is not hooked up.  We're waiting for the idiots to come back and fix things.  Grrrrr.

All this happened smack in the middle of my heroic efforts to repair, for the gazillionth time, a buggy script on one of the websites I maintain, which had of course gone gloriously haywire while I wasn't looking.  And I was having a hard time focusing, since I hadn't had a lot of sleep: In the middle of the night, I awoke to find my husband pummeling the CD player next to the bed.  Unable to sleep, he'd been trying to play a CD and the machine, apparently possessed, had gone Linda Blair-berserk.  It calmed down after a "cold boot" (unplugging it, replugging it)... but we never really got back to sleep.  Until it was time to get up.

I'm not entirely sure why we bothered.