Today I had a fairly typical Mercury retrograde experience. I relate it because it is helpful in understanding Mercury retrograde phenomena. I made a routine call to my health provider to order over the counter material – toothpaste toothbrushes, vitamins etc. Generally, this is a five minute call. After verifying your identity they take you to an automated line that asked you if you want to repeat your last order. Usually I do. The whole transaction generally takes 5 minutes. It’s not rocket science. But today as I was waiting for the automated machine to take my order, suddenly the call was interrupted and a strange commercial started to play – nothing to do with my order.

It was a commercial promoting the healthcare provider and they just started playing out of the blue. When the commercial finished I was suddenly connected to a human person. So I had to go through the process of verifying who I was, my address, my member ID, my age etc. All of this was already on record. Then we manually take my order. The customer service person was extremely flustered. He put me on a hold a number of times. Then as we got to my order, he miscalculated the cost – by a lot. So we had a back and forth on that. It meant going through each item and adding the cost. There were more “holds”.

Finally everything was OK and my order was taken. A five minute call became 45 minutes. And here’s the kicker after I hung up I went to my car. It was hemmed in by a huge moving van. No way to get out. In the 21 years that I’ve been here I remember only one other time when this happened. So, I was stuck. The good thing was my appointment wasn’t very urgent and the delay was not a problem. But you get the picture. Delay, delay, delay. Snafu after snafu. This was not (thank God) life threatening – only inconvenient. But this is classic Mercury retrograde.