I have mentioned my devotion to Grammarly before. It is an app that lives on my desktop PC, monitoring my spelling and my grammar. It has saved me from dozens of there for their swaps, from hundreds of misplaced commas, and from tens of thousands of mispellings misspellings.

Grammarly also uses its Artificial Intelligence brain to categorize the “tone” of my writings. My latest report card was:

Confident: 33%
Optimistic: 33%
Informal: 22%
Friendly: 11%

I guess that is a fairly good assessment of my personality and of the way I write. But when you add it up, it only comes to 99%, not 100%. Since that report, I have been wrestling with myself, trying to figure out what makes up the final 1% of me.

This morning I discovered it! I became ANGRY and it felt good. Some background: Over the weekend, we traded in Barb’s car for an updated, gently used one. We handled the haggling and paperwork on Friday and Saturday (The price of a one-year-old used car was practically as high as the original MSRP, but that’s a story for another day.)

Barb picked up the sparkling white sedan yesterday. I told her to be sure to notify our insurance agency about the update, and gave her the name and phone number of our local agent. Barb called twice, left two voice mails, and got no response. I called the agency main number, left a message, and got the same response as Barb–nothing.

Starting to get fed up, and not wanting Barb to be driving around an uninsured car, I tried a different tact. I called the national emergency number on the back of our insurance card, explained the situation, and begged to be transferred to the correct extension at the national office.

I was connected with someone who could give us immediate coverage, though he pointed out this was really supposed to be done by the local agent. I nodded my head and thought “whatever you say, just get me covered.”

Today I got a call back from the local agency. “Did you leave a message about something?” That’s when my 1% let loose.

“Why didn’t anyone answer our calls yesterday? What happened to our agent? Why weren’t we informed she was no longer with the agency? Who was taking care of our account?”

I didn’t lose control. I didn’t act like Matt Nagy dropping F-Bombs on the officials in last night’s Bear’s game. But I made no attempt to hide my anger at such poor customer service to a “Private-Client” at a very high-end insurance agency.

I know it was a small thing to become furious with. I know most people have much greater concerns and existential reasons for anger. But it felt good to let that 1% of me fly–even if just for a moment.

So maybe 1% Anger will show up on my next Grammarly report card. Until then, I just hope it just keeps finding my missing commas.

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