Did 4 people try to call me and not get through?; and, "I'm the boss"

I've had a few people contacting me in email about my ad for housecleaning and help with life in general. However, I wasn't getting calls from the people who looked at the laundromat ad on paper. That one had my home phone number on it. Today I met someone and talked with him in person about what I need to have done - he was someone who responded by email to my ad on Craigslist, not the laundromat ad.

On the way home, I stopped at the laundromat and saw that four (or five, it was hard to tell, I just glanced at it) of the tags had been pulled off my ad, which means people were interested. But I didn't have any messages from anyone on my machine, although last night, I got some kind of call from somebody who I still need to call back today. The home phone and answering machine are the one where I think I have had problems with people not getting through. I suppose I could buy a new answering machine, but I'm wondering whether the problems will still happen no matter what kind of answering machine I have, sort of like the calculator I bought which would malfunction at the same moment that I would hear voices and get a 'rage' attack.

What happens with that phone, from what I've been able to piece together, is that people call it, and hear a message answering them as though they've reached the machine. Then they talk to it and then it cuts off. No message is ever recorded, and I can't hear anything at all if I stand over it while they're talking. I just hear the ringing, then nothing. If I pick up the phone at that moment, nobody is there and I will get a dial tone. I can do *69, which I've tried occasionally, but I seem to remember that it would give me telemarketers and things like that. I verified that something was happening because I called back someone who I knew was trying to reach me, and she said yes, indeed she had heard a message and she had tried to say something and then had gotten disconnected, and wasn't sure if the message was ever recorded. I can't tell if it's only the answering machine, or if it is being tampered with, and I'd have problems no matter what kind of phone or machine I purchased.

"I'm the boss." - Instinctual Types. Some speculation that I might have a strong social instinct and might be a so/sx Four. Or maybe even an so/sp Four. While talking to this guy during the 'interview' today, I was in the 'superior' position, since I was the person offering to pay $25 a week for somebody to help me for a couple of hours. I'm never in a socially superior situation at my job - I'm not the one who decides how we do things around here, I just have to do what they tell me, and if I disagree with them, too bad. It feels good to be the person who decides how we are going to do things around here. People would do what I tell them to do, because I am paying them to do what I tell them to do. I don't have to fight and argue and try to convince people to believe me and go against the entire corporate culture of a big business whenever I don't like the way they do something. This is just me, by myself, asking somebody to help me cook and do my laundry and take out the trash because I'm too sick, miserable, depressed, and exhausted to do it myself on my days off.

So/Sx Fours do well if they have somebody supporting them as they accomplish their goals. They also can resemble Sevens because they're 'putting on a happy face' in a social environment. It might explain why they thought I was a Seven, especially since I get manic when I'm on drugs. So/Sx Four also is said to have a million different interests and projects that they can never complete, and that describes me. Problems with focusing on one project and getting it completely done, all by yourself - I can't do that very well, but I can work much better if other people are around me.

It's still hard to decide what my instinctual stacking is, because I 'have' all three instincts: everybody 'has' all three. Anytime I do something that has to do with self-preservation, I get bombarded by voices trying to convince me that self-preservation is my strongest instinct, but I am unable to look deeply or have insight into the situation, because the bombardment makes my brain shallow and unable to understand anything. The same happens if some situation involves the social instinct or the sexual instinct, and I try to look at it and see how it fits in with the rest of my life and my personality. Anytime I try to understand myself at all, I get hit with fake thoughts that prevent any real insight or understanding. Anyway, you can see the effects of all three instincts because, like I said, everybody 'has' them all, it's just the question of which ones are the strongest, the most well developed, the most relied upon, and which ones are the weakest.

I get manic when I think about what I could do if I hired people to work on projects with me. You can think about things like division and specialization of labor: when a group of people works together, one person can do this, while another person does that, and it all gets done faster and easier.

'Social critic.' That was part of the description of a Four with a strong social instinct. But I'm not looking like Rita Skeeter, the journalist who wants to dig up the dirt and the secrets on everybody. It's more like complaining about the entire culture in general, which might mean I'm a So/Sp. I complain that we're eating bad foods, using too many drugs, paying too many taxes, having too many economic boom and bust cycles, etc.

This is still only a theory. I'm 'trying on' the various instinctual stackings to see which ones seem to fit, and I can't think about it directly - instead, I have to just let 'them' decide when it's the right moment to 'inform' me about which type I am, because I am physically prevented from looking at myself, looking into my own mind.

I've found, through the years, that particular personality types get a bad rap, especially if you don't understand them properly. It happened when I first learned about personality types, in college, when my roommate took some kind of test that said she was an ISTJ, and I was curious about it and decided to go take the test myself. I got weird answers: INTP was my first result. Other times I got INFP, and sometimes INTJ. I took the test again, and again, and again, and I saw that there were four groups of questions in a certain order, and I figured out which letter each question was testing for.

There is a problem with how people interpret the questions about 'possibilities,' which will get you described as an 'N' when you are actually an SP artisan. The test needs to be rewritten. Anyway, from the beginning, when I started reading those books, I got the feeling that it was 'bad' to be a certain type. Some types were 'worse' than other types. So you try to avoid getting classified as that type. In the instinctual stackings, it's 'bad' to be an So/Sp, because those are 'social climbers' and 'politicians.' I don't FEEL like a social climber or politician!