My Time is Everyone's Time

When your unemployed people often find that perfectly acceptable to make free use of your time. Often it'll start out as an innocent request, "Could you______?" (insert request here). Then it morphs into other things like letting the cable guy in, picking up dry cleaning, and so on. It can get to a point where you end up as some one's unpaid personal assistant. This in turn sucks up time that could otherwise be used for more constructive purposes. For example, the niece and nephews are on a school break right now so of course, the parents can't take off and grandmama doesn't want to take them anywhere. This leaves yours truly to chauffer the youngens around. Today it was the library and Coffee Bean. Tomorrow, fortunately I'm on entertain the kids duty because of a recruiting firm interview (I'll you know how that went). Still, this is not first time I've had my time hijacked by a family member who seem to think I'm the unpaid assistant. Grandmama is famous for doing that. Often it's more like "take me here, take me there." By the time I turn around, it's late in the afternoon and I've gotten nothing accomplished. The easy solution is to say "no" but how do you say "no" to an elderly person who happens to be your mother. You see my dilemma. I could draw some boundaries like saying I'm only available between these hours and after that not. The truth is I really hate being the one who gets all the errands and transportation duties dumped on. It's not like anyone gives me gas money or compensates me for my time. I suppose that's being selfish and petty but that's how I honestly feel. The flip side of this is when I need to ask someone to do something for me, the response is allot of hemming and hawing. This results in having to take of my things on top of everything else. When it appears to grandmama I've taken more than one minute to complete a task like the grocery shopping, I start to get desperate phone calls. Apparently breathing is unacceptable. Whatever. Anyway, enough kvetching,

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