Coffee heat rising

Angst

Are Your Name, Address, Phone Number, Income, and Credit Rating Being Broadcast to the Universe?

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Holy God! Take a look at what Fabulously Broke found! Do not pass go before you click here and enter your own name.

When I went there, I discovered they’ve published my street address—with a map to my house!—telephone number; approximate age; credit rating; wealth level; value of my home; gender; marital status; length of time I’ve resided in my home; socioeconomic status of my neighborhood; type of structure I occupy and and the year it was built; its alleged value; whether it has a fireplace, central heating, central air, or a pool; how many kids I have; my educational level; my hobbies; my occupation; my interests; and my zodiac sign.

To be fair, some of these are left blank. Some are wrong—hilariously, they think my house is worth in excess of a million bucks. I wish!!! Some of the data clearly came from Facebook: I recognize the disinformation I entered there.

However… Spokeo also has another me in its bowels: Some woman by the same name is still living with my former husband at my former address. Interestingly, this woman’s information happens to match my own real-life personal data.

Folks. I divorced before there was such a thing as social media. The Internet barely existed when I ran away to the Alaskan outback. So…wherever these SOBs are aggregating their data from, it’s not all coming from the Internet.

If you go to their contact link and send them an e-mail demanding that they take your personal data down, you’re forced to enter their choice of subject lines. Select “business matter” instead of “privacy” to reach a human being. Select “privacy” and instead of sending the dear-sir-you-cur you’ve scorched into their contact form, you get instructions for a hoop-jump and the advice that the only way to get your information off their site is to remove yourself from all the social media sites you use.

In other words, if you don’t want these bustards publishing your current address and phone number to your abusive ex- who threatened to cut off your head, pee down the hole, and flee with your children to East Zambia, you may not participate in any social media of any kind. Either that, or you must leave a trail of lies wherever you go.

I wonder if Spokeo’s management can spell “class action suit.”

Postscript: Go here for an excellent video taking you through FaceBook’s new privacy settings, step-by-step.

Head-banging in the corporate bureaucracy

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Godlmighty! Yesterday I realized that Fidelity never sent my April 403(b) drawdown. So now on Monday I have to try AGAIN to get those people off the dime.

What torture! I just hate bureaucratic runarounds. I hate them even more when the bureaucracy is private instead of governmental. At least with the government the employees are usually trying to accommodate you.

I have talked to CSR after CSR after CSR—every time you call, you get a different person, and you never can get through to Person 1 who told you X or Person 2 who told you Y. I have asked and been assured now three times by three different people that the drawdown required by the State of Arizona would be made correctly and would be direct-deposited in my checking account. The result is that since last December I’ve gotten two checks sent in the mail. And this month I’ve received nothing.

It just makes me so angry. We originally had the option to invest with Vanguard in its 403(b) plan. As soon as that became possible, I moved most of my 403(b) funds over there, because all my nondeferred savings were at Vanguard, whose fees are low, whose profits are handsome, and whose customer service is excellent. That lasted all of a year—I guess Vanguard must have been too competent to work with Arizona State University.

If I weren’t afraid the state would deny me the rest of my RASL, I’d roll the money over into my big IRA now. In fact, my financial advisor and I hatched a plan to have them roll a portion of the drawdown over to the IRA, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing battle with the bureaucrats about that, mostly because I wanted to see how I would get by in the summer before cutting the drawdown from $500 to $100.

Presumably, though, that wouldn’t have happened, either. The only way I’m going to get the money where it belongs is going to be to roll the entire amount over. And I’m really afraid that’s going to get me in trouble, since the woman who administers the RASL program insists that to be eligible you have to be drawing what she calls a “pension”—i.e., a monthly drawdown from the state’s 403(b) plan.

I’ve concocted a new plan, though. To wit: leave enough cash in the 403(b) fund to cover the time between now and the date the last RASL check is issued, but roll the rest of it over. There are only 22 months remaining, and so the most I’d have to leave in there—assuming I continue the drawdown I’m currently making, which I’d actually like to cut—is $11,000.

Whatever I decide to do, though, next week I’m going to have to bang my head against the bureaucratic wall again. I’m royally sick of that!

The Three A.M. Waltz

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God, how I hate waking up in the wee hours of the morning! Is anything, anything more annoying and frustrating?

I’m so tired I’m almost sick, and I can. not. sleep. Part of it is worrying about losing a chunk of cash in the mail just when I have to get a new crown…that money would have about paid for the dental work. Now I’ll have to raid savings to cover it. Part of it is worrying about how I’m going to get another raft of papers graded around the mass of choir rehearsals and performances that will occupy the rest of this week. Part of it is being pissed at having to get my teeth crowned as a result of all the bruxing I do out of stress and frustration. (LOL! “Why do the heathen grind their teeth?”) Part of it is worrying whether the IRS got my tax payment, since that went out in the same mail as the lost checks. Part of it is annoyance that Fidelity’s online statements are not current and that there’s no way to figure out which of the several accounts they’ve got up there corresponds to the money fund for which I have a book of checks, one of which I used to pay my taxes. Part of it is that it’s going to rain again, so the air is a little humid and vaguely uncomfortable. Part of it is disappointment that (I think) Funny lost the current March Madness round at Free Money Finance. Part of it is hunger. And part of it is just old-lady insomnia.

Yesh. At 9:30 this morning—now only five hours away—another mountain of muzzy student papers will come to light on my desk. The day will be occupied with classes through 1:45, at which point I have to drive to Costco for gasoline. Then it’s off to rehearsal.

This week the choir had rehearsals last night and has another rehearsal tonight, a performance tomorrow night, rehearsals and performance Friday, rehearsal and performance Saturday, rehearsal and two performances Sunday. When exactly I’m going to find time to read the mountain of student papers, to say nothing of my client’s first two draft chapters, I do. not. know!

Yesterday I didn’t get to his dissertation because I spent the most of the day writing the post that will come online in about two hours and arguing with the credit union and the post office. This morning at three o’clock I was in no condition to edit copy. And still am not: I’ve killed the last hour and forty-five minutes writing posts to cover the next two days.

Let’s see… 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., that’s four hours. It’s now  almost 5 o’clock. If by some miracle I can get back to sleep until seven, maybe I could eke a full six hours out of the night before I have to go to class.

And so, to bed…

General quotidian miseries

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{grump!} It’s not like I didn’t have enough screwing around to have to do…

Apparently the Post Office lost an envelope sent to the credit union containing three checks, one for my personal account and two for the Copyeditor’s Desk account. It was a printed envelope from the credit union, so the address was correct, and I distinctly remember checking to be sure each item in the the fistful of mail I stuffed in the mailbox had a stamp on it. So I guess all those checks are just gone. Today I’ll have to call the issuers and tell them to stop payment and send me new checks.

Problem is, one of them came from Google Adsense, where it is dead impossible to reach a human being. The only way to make Google reissue a check will be to go to a particularly annoying, frustrating website and claim never to have seen the thing. Doing that will mean

a) I’ll have to lie, because I most certainly have seen and endorsed the damn thing, and
b) it will be another two months before I get another payment.

Problem with using the Google web annoyance is that if I claim not to have received the check and then it arrives at the CU and gets deposited, then it will look like I’m trying to steal from Adsense. Google is notoriously inclined to simply cut off customers it thinks aren’t dealing straight with Adsense. So, I guess the better part of valor is just to eat the $157.

Damn it. The specific reason I did this was that it is a freaking hassle to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus just to deposit a couple of checks. It consumes gas unnecessarily, and it expends pretty close to an hour of my time. The West campus stands in the middle of a down-at-the-heels bedroom community with no commerce where I might get any other errands done while I’m over there. I take that back: there’s a Costco in that general direction, but it’s an extra stretch and more wasted gasoline up the freeway, and a Lowe’s and a Home Depot at the freeway intersection. Not that I shop at either of those places much anymore.

So, to avoid hassle I’ve brought a basketful of extra hassle down on my head.

But the big concern about this is that when I drove over to the nearby post office and dropped that envelope in the mailbox, I also mailed my tax returns. Yesh. Both the personal and the corporate returns. For both the state and the feds. And I sent Tax Lady her payment in the same outgoing mail drop.

It looks like TL cashed at least one of her checks, the one I wrote on the corporate checking account; the second was written on a Fidelity money market account, along with the check to cover the federal tax. So if she got her envelope, presumably the Post Office didn’t lose everything I tried to send that day. I’ll have to get into the Fidelity account online—another fine little hassle—to see if the feds have cashed the check for their pound of flesh.

Where the PO is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t call any kettles black. I add my own extravagant incompetence to everyone else’s. It’s a wonder the human race gets anywhere at all.

Yesterday in my senility I utterly FORGOT that the 101 students were supposed to be at the library hearing a talk from our most accomplished and lively librarian! We blew away an hour and a half chatting about research methods in the classroom, and none of  us, not a one, remembered that we were supposed to be elsewhere. That was because…

a) I had totally spaced any memory of this appointment; and
b) When I posted an announcement to the young things in BlackBoard, I forgot to hit “e-mail to all recipients,” and, as usual, none of them checked the class announcements board.

So, this truly wonderful librarian showed up in the computer classroom and stood around for half an hour wondering where the hell we were.

Arghhhh!

Yesterday, too, I had such a blinding headache I began to wonder if I was having a stroke. It actually made me dizzy…felt like I was listing to the right as I was trying to drive and walk. Wasn’t, though; it just felt that way.

And of course in this general state of misery I had a meeting before classes and then had to drive from North Phoenix to South Scottsdale after spending four hours in front of classrooms full of late-stage adolescents. There Poisoned Pen Press gratefully accepted the novel I’d just finished editing but had no new work for me.

Fortunately I have some paying work to do today…though I will say, I don’t feel like doing any work, much less of the paying variety.

Driving from pillar to post yesterday, I was regaled by Tony Judt’s unholy tale of his trials with ALS on NPR’s Fresh Air. It’s a gut-wrenching story. You’d like to say you can’t even imagine what it would be like to live through such a horror and then die of it. But you can: Judt describes it with vivid clarity.

It’s one of those moments that brings to mind one’s own mortality. Please, God, let me drive my car off a cliff, let me die in a plane crash, let me drop dead of a heart attack. I think if I received a diagnosis like that, the first thing I’d do is pick up my father’s pistol and blow my brains out. Judt at least has his family around him and apparently has the resources to hire in-home nursing care. I have no one but my son, who has to work and could not devote three to ten years to caring for a dying woman. He would have to leave me to waste away alone in a nursing home.

Having chosen not to exit pursued by a bear, Judt—an eminent historian—has written a new book addressed largely to young people, Ill Fares the Land. The NPR site features an interesting out-take from its introduction. Says he:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

Just so.

The news of the day continued with reports of crazed right-wingers planning to murder police officers and foment a rebellion against the federal government. That, to my mind, is far scarier than anything our enemies among the fundamentalist Moslems can do. IMHO, unless something is done about the growing schism in this country, within 20 to 50 years we will be looking at civil war.

To top it all off, I got a truly nasty e-mail from someone on the choir informing me she doesn’t know who I am and does not care to hear anything from me. F*** you very much.

Sometimes I get out of patience with life.

Ominous development

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This afternoon the head of our neighborhood association sent this interesting report from one of the residents:

My family and I live in the northwest part of the R*** P*** neighborhood. At 5:15 pm my five children were home together as their dad was working and I’d gone to a school function—about 20 minutes after I left with a girlfriend, whose son was also at my house, a beat-up black Cadillac or that type of car pulled up right in front of our driveway and one man got out and came to the door while three others waited in the car. My oldest daughter (15) watched the man come up to our front door and knock—she didn’t recognize him and got the little ones (4, 3, 19 months) together in my oldest son’s room (11). My son’s room is right next to the front door and he could see the man, in his 20’s, white, buzz cut with light brown or reddish hair and wire glasses. He was also wearing a green shirt that said “Carp” on the back. My daughter said the man didn’t seem too clean and had nothing in his hands to suggest selling something. She said the passengers saw her through our front window and one in the back seat was texting on the phone. The man knocked and then rattled the doorknob for approx 7 to 10 minutes. The man looked into my son’s room through the window and my oldest daughter shut all the shutters and curtains and called the police, but the man and his friends left before the police arrived. My daughter saw the car turn around and drive towards 19th ave. Luckily, we have an alarm and my daughter set it after the police left so she could feel a little safer.

My girlfriend and her son and me and my children were all in my front yard for about an hour before we left to go to the school function, so it makes me think our house was being watched. The odd part is that we had two cars parked in front of our house, so it did look like someone was home. (Normally the cars aren’t there.) Then again, the man definitely saw my daughter and son and heard the younger ones. It seems he wanted in the house.

I’m only going into so much detail because of course I feel terrible that I wasn’t home, but also because it seems like our house was targeted. I’m concerned that these people wanted in the house, that it was daylight, there were obviously children home, and in fact a neighbor’s bike was near our front door but it wasn’t taken.

Holy mackerel! That’s one of the scariest stories I’ve heard in the 17 years or so that I’ve lived in this neighborhood. During that time, we’ve had two home invasions that I know of, but neither involved Bad Guys going after a clutch of children.

The northwest section of the neighborhood is not very good. It’s an area that’s been severely thumped by a series of unhappy circumstances: a slummy supermarket that went unregulated by the City despite chronic code violations; a huge, noisy intersection over which the cops like to park their helicopters while chasing perps; proximity to a set of apartments that have been allowed to turn into tenements and to a blighted district that’s your basic war zone; and most recently the corrosive destruction wrought by the unfinished and apparently never-to-be-finished lightrail train tracks. It was harder hit by the depRecession than any other part of the neighborhood, with the result that even more of the housing than before has been turned into rentals—and they already had plenty of weedy, run-down rentals.

Because of the blighted rentals, it’s reasonable to suspect these characters meant to visit one of their drug-dealing colleagues and had the wrong address. On the other hand, if the mother is right in thinking they were being watched, then obviously they knew only children were home. In that case, it’s very creepy.

I walk the dog at night. And when the weather is nice—as it has been today—I like to have my doors and windows open. Guess I’m going to have to rethink those behaviors…