There is a great country song by Gary Allen where the line is "I might have known it, but nobody told me about this part" And so true it is.
So I, like many other fools, was ordained in the Universal Life Church and became listed as a justice of the peace in my area, yada yada yada and performed absolutely no marriages. Then one evening when I clearly should have turned off the computer and gone outside for a walk I went shopping on the Universal Life Church Monastery website and bought five things and yes I made the deal with the devil and I take responsibility for that. Immediately the ULC charged me twice for the order and it took them a week to refund one of the two orders. I should mention that at this very time it seemed like my finances were cursed and everything that could go wrong did, so that week waiting for the return was excruciating. So three of the five things (the cheapest) arrived right away and I realized they were crap but I had ordered them so I just figured I would wait for the other two things and write it off as a painful lesson learned. But more than a month later the two things never came so I wrote to customer service and asked for either the goods or a refund and had no reply for weeks so I kept e-mailing then one day a Brother James (at first I pictured Prince James from Once Upon a Time then later one of the brothers who hit themselves in the face with wooden planks in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail) sent me an email that said "It has been refunded" just like that it has been refunded. At this time the ULC curse was still on my finances so I was out of food, money, almost homeless and right on the edge of sanity so I checked my bank account for the refund every day several times a day for that desperately needed sixty bucks or so. But alas, and this is where the I might have known it comes in. There was no refund. So I e-mailed Brother James, first very nice, sometimes funny a little charming, a little naggy, and he continued to assure me that I had been refunded until he just stopped responding. Then someone named Gomer (I'm not even making that up) did not even mention the refund Brother James had processed but told me that the first refund for the double charge was all the refund I was going to get then snarkily informed me that I had received all the customer service I was going to receive from them. I had been Customer Served, WORD.
Honestly, at this point I need more than sixty bucks to take care of this situation. I feel like I need a financial exorcism to lift the shadow of ULC Monastery curse from my prosperity. I would love to hear from all of you about successful exorcisms you've found. To start I am going to take my ordination certificate ($15) down to the beach and carefully set it on fire (if it stops raining). Then I am going to take the letter of good standing (14) and make it into a paper airplane and fly it into the ocean (then run and get it so that I don't litter the beach, I want to be reckless but I'm just so damn green) Then I'm going to meditate on forgiveness (of myself first because I'm still feeling a little "stoopid")
