Andy Borgmann's Blog

I have to say life has been super frustrating recently. No, it hasn't been anything big, and that is what makes it all the more frustrating. It seems all the little things are going to s#@* and it is driving me nuts!

I am a big fan of using credit cards. Since March of 2001, I have charged $152,961.67. Last year alone I charged $36,945.17 (which included reimbursed business charges), and I received $500 in cash back. That is $110 more than all the cash I used last year (that's right, I only used $390 in cash the entire year).

I usually have all the confidence in the world in my credit card. I have a $22,000 credit limit, and keep on average about $3100 on their (which is always paid in full, so no interest). I have so much confidence, when I travel internationally, I usually only take $40 bucks in cash!

But for some reason, all of the sudden, stupid Chase started declining my credit card on every transaction I tried to make. I would call, they would say it is approved. Denied. I would call. Denied. It took a week of this, and finally I was fed up and I said screw it, I am switching permanently to my backup Capital One card.

Similarly, trash! I was in Indiana for 2 weeks, and then I forgot to take out the trash for 2 weeks in a row after I got back to GA. Needless to say, 4 weeks of trash building up: not fun. But it got me thinking how prehistorically helpless life gets when something as simple as trash pick up gets missed.

Then, the king of all things, my website was hacked in the most creative fashion. Apparently they used my Google Sitemap to find a security vulnerability, uploaded and modified two files on my web server, which (and here is the brilliance) made it so that when you access the site directly (like I do) everything loaded fine. But if you come to the site from Google, Live, Yahoo, Ask, or any search engine, it forwarded to a false page. It took a week before I even knew it had happened, and it took 3 hours to fix!

All this got me thinking about how we take for granted all the simple things in life that are just suppose to work. Credit cards pay for stuff. Websites load information. Trash gets picked up. Think how many hundreds (if not thousands) of things are just suppose to work in just a 24 hour time period. Think how completely dependent we are on things outside of our control. Sure I can pay my credit card bill, but I have no actual control over the transaction going through.

As someone who prides himself on his independence, I think what was good about the frustrations is that it reminded me life, by definition, is not designed to be autonomous. In the face of this natural revelation, reminds me that I am also not dependent from God. Even though I often live my life as if I do not need God, the truth is I do. In ways much simpler and deeper than having my credit card go through.