Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Do we really want to rescue these folks?…

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Yeah, those folks: the ones who deliberately or heedlessly put themselves at risk by ignoring public warnings intended to help keep them safe. Just now, for example, the ninnies in the Southeast who failed to take shelter or get the fu!k out when the Weather Service and the police issued warnings that life-threatening storms and floods were on the way…how about those ninnies? Why are we sending helicopters and boats to get them out of the mess they plunged into of their own volition?

Here we have this, for example: A woman in Florida who blithely discounts official pleading to get the Hell out as the worst hurricane in the history of the Atlantic Coast bears down. Her grandson, who apparently failed to inherit all her Stupid Genes, realizes she is at risk (along with her dog!!), so he flies into the state, travels to her home, and gets stuck in the predicted floods. Now both their lives are at risk and they end up having to be rescued by Coast Guard helicopters and airlifted to safety.

Know how much it costs to operate a rescue helicopter?

No? Make a guess. Come anywhere close?

It’s SIXTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS AN HOUR, just to run the chariot to pluck some ninny out of a predicament they got into by blithely ignoring all warnings and all common sense.

  • For a rescue helicopter: $1600 an hour
  • For a Coast Guard rescue boat: $1147 an hour
  • For a C-130: $7600 an hour

!!!!

As nothing… The same source tells us the National Parks Service spent almost $5 million in 2007, in search and rescue alone.

Our cup runneth over with stupidity.

Most such rescues have to happen when some fool decides to ignore signs to stay on the trail, decides that the news reports of an incoming hurricane are just journalistic hysteria or Big Brother trying to manipulate us, that God is watching out for them…and on and inanely on.

Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to figure out how to make their own breakfast.

It leaves us with the question of…well…how much DO we want to continue the genetic heritage of stump-dumb stupidity? When someone pig-headedly does something that public information programs and newcasts and road signs urge don’t do that, should we — really — rescue them? Why?

Yeah, I know. God tells us to be good to our fellow nudnick.

But…y’know…Mother Nature issues no such edict. Is it possible that she’s tryin’ to tell us something?

If we rescue them, we invite them to continue contributing their “stupid” genes to the communal gene pool. If we let them get themselves out of their own predicament, we accomplish one of two ends (possibly both, come to think of it):

  • We make it clear to the other ninnies out there what’s likely to happen if you ignore public safety warnings.
  • We remove their Idiot Genes from the stream of humanity’s genetic makeup, thereby very possibly smartening up the generations to come.

Either of those, to my mind, seems like a salutary goal…

Leave. My. Dog. Alone…PLEASE!

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Well, I offended one of the neighbors mightily this morning. Honestly. Sometimes I do wonder WHAT is the matter with people!

This lady — I’d say she’s in her 60s or maybe early 70s — walks around every morning with a pocket full of dog treats. She inhabits the Richistans, so if Ruby and I go over there on the morning doggy-walk, we’re likely to run into her. And we DO go over there most days, because the park, so much beloved by Ruby the Corgi, is simply overrun with off-the-leash dogs charging around.

Yes. The park DOES have a big sign that says “DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH.” But of course it doesn’t apply to those folks, right?

So if we want to stroll through a shady, park-like stretch, we’re pretty much restricted to Upper Richistan.

This lady haunts those regions. She’s out there almost every morning.

She’s very friendly. She’s a VERY sweet person. And every damn morning she wants to give Ruby a doggy-treat.

Now you understand, I don’t especially mind if Ruby gets a random dog treat now and again. But there are some good reasons to ask her to refrain:

  • Ruby is getting fat.
  • Fat is exceptionally not good for a corgi, with its long spine and short legs.
  • I would prefer it very much that Ruby not expect to get doggy-treats from strangers. My dogs’ job is not to suck up to strangers, some of whom (in these parts) are not folks with whom you especially want to encourage chumminess.
  • Some dogs are diabetic. They should not have doggy treats: their diets, like the diets of diabetic humans, need to be carefully tended.

She always asks if it’s OK to give Ruby a treat, and I always, out of politeness, say “sure.” Today I decided to get honest with her, and so I replied, “I’d really prefer it if she didn’t get treats.”

WELL! You’d think I’d insulted all her daughters and their madame!

She got all huffy and stalked off dramatically.

People are SO STUPID about dogs!

  1. The ones who insist on letting their dogs run loose in a public park bounded on three sides by streets full of commuters chugging off to the main drags.
  2. The ones who confuse their dogs with children and burble inanely over their “fur-babies”
  3. The ones who coo, as your German shepherd is getting set to remove their dog’s throat, coo “Ohhhh don’t worry! They just wanna plaaayyyy!“
  4. The ones who let their dog run loose in the mountain parks and then are surprised when their dog sticks its nose under a creosote bush and gets bit by a rattlesnake.
  5. The ones who run their dog by their bicycles as they peddle down the street.
  6. The ones who run their dog by their skateboard as they skate down the sidewalk.

Lordie, I’m fed up with that stuff.

Folks. Your dog is not your child. It’s not a human at all. It is a descendant of wolves, a type of pack animal. It acts like it’s your friend because its species has evolved into a an advantageous, symbiotic relationship with humans. Treating your dog as if it were a child puts your dog at risk of health problems and behavioral problems and you at risk of lawsuits.

Even if you must be silly about your dog, please please please don’t be stupid about other people’s dogs!

‘Bye, Amazon!

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So I needed a new pair of padded bicycling gloves to walk Ruby the Corgi, a powerful little engine who drags the human fiercely enough that a leash will rub the skin right off the palms of your hands. Toooo lazy to drive to the bike store and buy a new pair, I stupidly decided to order a pair of bicycling gloves, size medium, from Amazon. They arrive; I try them on…can’t even get them up to my wrists. These may be “medium” for a six-year-old, but not for a grown woman.

No, I am NOT fat: 5’6″ & 125 lb.

Gotta send them back.

But lo! We have a change in our dealings with that august online retailer! Evidently Amazon doesn’t want people sending unusable junk back anymore…you can hardly blame them, I guess. So they’ve devised a way to discourage people from returning stuff, by adding a layer of hassle to make the process difficult. Can you take the package to the nearest UPS store and just ship it back? Ohhhhh nooooooo!

No more!

Now have to schlep it all the way across the city to the nearest Whole Foods (!!!!) and jump through a row of hoops there.

I have no business to transact at or near a Whole Foods — the groceries are overpriced, and selection is better at other local stores. So this offends at the outset.

But that’s not all:

First, I have to visit the credit union for the day’s first errand. From there to the Whole Foods and back to my house is TWENTY-FIVE AND SEVEN-TENTHS MILES. Yes: that’s 25.7 miles to return ONE STUPID LITTLE ITEM. It’s a quarter of the way to Tucson from here.

Gasoline is going for $4.50 a gallon just now. I get about 19 mpg on my aging Venza. Sooo….it costs me around $5 in gas to send this ridiculous purchase back to Amazon, when I could have WALKED to either the UPS Store or the mailboxes store in my neighborhood.

Once I arrive at the Whole Foods, I ask a clerk where I can return a useless Amazon purchase. She directs me to a DIY kiosk!!!

Y’know what I say to that, dear Amazon?

..I..

That’s what I say to that. With an F and a Y and a u. Once and for all!

On the way home through the crushing, homicidal traffic (tempers grow short here in Phoenix, when the weather is both hot and muggy), I stopped at a bicycling shop and bought a pair of gloves there. They fit.

And I felt remarkably good about BUYING LOCAL.

It’ll be a cold day in an Arizona August before I buy anything else from Amazon.

Brave New World…redux

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God’lmighty!!!!! It’s 11:30 in the morning; I’ve been on the road since 9, burned a third of a tank of ga$, and so far have gotten exactly nowhere.

In the Getting Nowhere Department, for the life of me I cannot enter edits to clean up the formatting mess that is yesterday’s post. NOOO clue what’s the matter with it. Grayson the Web Guru doesn’t seem to know, either. Because, he offers, I copied and pasted it in from a different program?

Well, OK, could be: he’s got somethin’ there. I pasted much of it from MacMail, reproducing a narrative of adventures I’ve shared with friends. But I do that all the time!!!!!! If copying a passage from an email bollixes up the formatting so spectacularly that it can’t be fixed, then 2/3 OF THE POSTS I’VE INSTALLED HERE FOR LO! THESE MANY YEARS would be similarly up-gefucked.

It won’t let me fix the formatting. So I give up. The copy is not unreadable — just a bit funny-looking. The latest effort fixed all but about the first third of the post. Sooooo…fugeddaboudit… Let’s pretend it’s just ducky and move on.

What. A. Day!

It’s 102 out there, with 15% humidity. And not even noon.

Day from Hell started with a simple goal: trot out this morning to visit the nearest hardware store and pick up a battery-operated doorbell. One with two bing-bong buttons. This to replace the one that was disassembled by a thief.

No kidding. I’m sitting in my office and see a pickup pull up to the front of the house. Looks like a yard dude: he’s got a trailer full of yard debris in tow. Guy hops out of the passenger seat. I figure he’s gonna come up to the door and ask if I’d like to hire them to clean out the weeds that have sprouted (in gay abandon!!) since Gerardo and the boys were here.

He walks up to the front gate; pauses there; then turns around and RUNS back to the truck.

Turns out he’s ripped off the doorbell button from the gate!

Backstory:

This house has been owned by a succession of eccentrics. Before Satan and Proserpine (my immediate predecessors) bought the place, some chucklehead who lived here got the bright idea of RIPPING OUT THE WALL BETWEEN THE LIVING ROOM AND THE FRONT BEDROOM. No kidding. This clever strategy turned the front room into a cavern, and reduced the number of bedrooms from four to three. Thereby also reducing the value of the house by about 20 grand.

In the process he also ripped out…yes…the doorbell installed by the developer. Like most sane doorbells, this thing operated on electricity, and so it had wiring that ran through the very walls that Previous Moron Owner had declared redundant. So when S&P moved in, the house had no doorbell.

And when they moved out, the house had no doorbell.

BUT…you can buy handy-dandy battery-operated doorbells at the Depot. Most of these devices have (or used to have…) two buttons: one for the front door and one for the back door.

Since my backyard is secured like Leavenworth, this gave us a redundant button.

But it was rendered UNredundant when Richard the Incredible Landscaping and Construction Dude built a marvelous enclosed front courtyard for me. He installed wrought-iron gates in the wall around this thing. A-n-n-d…conveniently enough, most battery-operated doorbells come with two doorbell buttons. We put one next to the driveway gate (where most people enter the courtyard) and one in the customary spot beside the front door.

This has worked well.

Until that a$$hole stole the doorbell button by the gate.

Ohhkay…i figure i’ll go out and buy another doorbell and set of bing-bong buttons, just like the one I installed a few years ago when I moved into this place.

Well.

No.

Of course not.

They apparently don’t make the damn things anymore. You cannot find them for love nor money.

Beloved Ace Hardware store up by the QT doesn’t have them.

Similarly beloved Ace Hardware Store in the Basha’s strip mall doesn’t have them.

Today we learned that Home Depot doesn’t have them. Lowe’s doesn’t have them. The hardware store just off the I-17 that might have had them (because they had everything) no longer exists: closed, lost, and gone forever.

Any surviving unsold specimens (if they actually do exist) are available only on Amazon.

So. I spent the ENTIRE FUCKING MORNING driving from pillar to post through the heat and humidity, banging around amongst the homicidal morons, and accomplished exactly NOTHING.

Well. Except for witnessing some fine examples of humanity’s nuttiness.

Jayzuz!

Here we are in the Home Depot parking lot, having dodged oblivion twice on the way there. Cruising up to where the reasonably located parking spaces reside, I see a young HD employee collecting empty shopping carts.

Because, after all, no self-respecting HD customer would have the common decency to put the damn things in the li’l stables where you’re supposed to park them after unloading your junk, right?

The kid is heaving a long line of carts across the lot — he must be pushing 15 or 20 heavy metal carts over the tarmac.

Along comes a moron in a beautiful new pickup — all red and shiny and magnificent. He cruises past the kid and the kid’s choo-choo train of carts, then CUTS IN FRONT OF HIM and swerves into a parking space directly in the path of where the kid has launched the carts!

Hooleeee shee-ut!

I think omigod that whole train of metal shopping carts is gonna crash into the truck’s shiny new rear fender!!!!

Incredibly, the kid manages to stop the caravan just before it collides with the truck.

Trudge into the Depot. Ask around. Find a guy who knows about battery-operated doorbells. Nope, they don’t have any with two ringy-dingy buttons.

I know these still exist, because I’ve seen them on Amazon. Say g’bye. Trudge back out through the soggy heat to the car. Resume driving driving driving.

Cruise across the city, under the freeway, through the ever-present road construction, and over to the Lowe’s. First try to visit the Best Buy next door to the Lowe’s, because as we know Best Buy carries everything, no matter how eccentric. Forget that: they don’t open until an incredible 11 a.m.!!! It’s about 9:30 or quarter to ten by now, since I wanted to get an early start to beat the most crushing of the heat.

Lowe’s of course has battery-operated doorbells…but none of them have two doorbell buttons.

Sumbiche.

Drive home, ready to bite somebody.

Dodge a huge truck that tries to change lanes into the driver’s side of my car. Incredibly, escape unharmed.

Get home, mad as a cat.

SDXB on the phone. Tell him this sad story. He starts to lecture me about how to get the desired doorbell, unknowingly reiterating Every. Goddamn. Thing. I. Just. Told. Him. I’d. Done. This, evidently, because he suffers from male pattern selective deafness: this is a guy who literally cannot hear the female voice. And so it doesn’t register with him that he’s advising me do do all the things I’d just told him I tried to do.

Arrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Finally get off the phone, more or less politely.

Get online. Call up Amazon. And yup: there’s the very doorbell.

Order it up. It’s supposed to be delivered by 10 p.m. tomorrow.

That’s assuming, of course, that none of the ‘Hood’s ubiquitous porch pirates steal it before I notice it’s been delivered.

Scamarama!

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Wow! In the past few weeks and months, I’ve been the target of scam after scam after scam!

Latest: a Paypal scam.

In comes a message from PayPal saying I charged up a piece of furniture for something over $900. Uh huh.

You understand: we closed that account months and months ago. As in “enough time for my former business partner to go back to graduate school, earn a master’s degree in psychological counseling, complete an internship, and open her practice as a shrink.”

The months, thus, translate into years. At least two or three years.

Trying to reach a human at PayPal is damn near impossible. After running round and round and round Robin Hood’s Barn, I finally did get ahold of a fella with a pleasingly exotic accent. He says the problem is hereby solved: the fake charge is disallowed and the account is closed.

Right. I’ll believe that when I see it. Or when I don’t see another notice of a fake charge.

You know, there are mailing lists organized by age. That’s how AARP knows to start hustling you to buy a membership, the minute you hit about age 62.

My guess is that some list now shows me as pushing 80 — which (can you believe it? I sure can’t!) is pretty close. Thus the various bad actors know there’s a good chance enough of my marbles have slipped away that they can scam me easily. Hence the endless stream of telephone scams.

I’ve stopped answering the phone — either land line or iPhone. Almost every call is a hustle of one sort or another.

And yeah: I do know about the National Do-Not-Call List…har har! They just ignore that. They know nothing will happen. The numbers they appear to be calling from are spoofed, so even if you were to call the feds and complain, it wouldn’t matter: you couldn’t provide the information needed to track them down, even if they were calling from within the US (which they probably aren’t).

With the iPhone, you can block all incoming and set the thing to let only selected callers through. But I still haven’t been able to figure out how to use the complicated damned thing. As devices go, it’s just brain-banging.

This PayPal stuff spooks me. I’m afraid that if I refuse to pay for the phantom furniture, they’ll wreck my credit. This is one reason I posted a narrative of the little saga here at FaM: If Paypal starts harassing me for the supposed charge, I’ll have a record of when it happened and a public statement that it’s fraudulent.

Basically consumers are pretty much defenseless against the barrage of soliciting and scamming phone calls. It’s virtually impossible to block them without blocking access from legitimate callers. And look it this involved rigamarole Verizon recommends to us!!!

Seriously, guys? Who has time for that kind of BS?

I’ve stemmed part of the tide by blocking calls from area codes where I don’t know people. The Phoenix metropolitan area, for example, has three area codes: 602, 623, and 480. Blocking calls from area code 623 cuts down significantly on the harassing advertisements…but it has a BIG (and obvious) downside. One of my doctors’ offices is in the 623 area code: they can’t get through to me on the phone. Same is true for anyone in 480. Or 520 (Tucson). Or 213 (Los Angeles). Or 415 (San Francisco), 408 (San Jose), 510 (East Bay), 562 (Long Beach, Whittier, Norwalk, Lakewood, Bellflower, Cerritos, southeast Los Angeles County and a small portion of coastal Orange County)…. That is a WHOLE lot of friends and business acquaintances who are cut off from reaching you by telephone. I give out an email address whenever I can, but the truth is, most people don’t quite grasp the problem.

And the problem, apparently, is that as you advance in age, you become a juicier and juicier target for telephone scammers. Before I started blocking area codes and some local exchanges, I’d get as many as ten or twelve calls a day from crooks pestering me.

The 21st Century…Dante would’ve loved it!

PayPal: It Never Goes Away

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Trying to send a complaint to the FTC. Their website form apparently “sees” some character in this disquisition as a disallowed weird character, even though nothing out of the ordinary appears in it. So…Here’s an effort to get it to them by posting it here and asking them to come over and take a look at it. Wish me luck, folks!

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Some time ago, my business partner and I closed the PayPal account for our business, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., since she was beginning a new career and I had decided to get out of the technical editing trade. Recently, I have been getting statements from PayPal to the effect that hundreds of dollars in billing have been racked up on the supposedly defunct PayPal account, for the purchase of furniture from some outfit I’ve never heard of. I have tried twice, using addresses from PayPal’s website, to straighten this out, but it’s impossible to reach a human being at PayPal. Now today in comes another demand for payment of something in excess of $800 for a purchase neither of us ever heard of. Below is a copy of the email I just sent to PayPal, presumably into the ether.

“Into the ether” indeed: when you send an email to the contact address given at PayPal’s website, it bounces right back with an “invalid address” message. Please investigate. And if you would, please, inform these crooks that they’re not getting any money out of me.

Below: message sent to PayPal email address (billing378579@gmail.com) requesting cancellation of fraudulent charges on closed account:

***

billing378578@gmail.com

Okay, see the BS below? This is a fraudulent charge to a PayPal account that SHOULD be defunct and that we have tried to close, apparently without luck. We closed our business, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., some time ago and are no longer doing business through PayPal.

Apparently some swindler has charged up hundreds of dollars worth of furniture on that account. I attempted to contact your people and clue them that no such charges were made by us, and that the account should be closed. Apparently you either have no people or none of your people care whether your customers are scammed.

I am forwarding this email (plus my requests to you to shut down that account and negate this fraudulent charge) to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Trade Commission.

Once again: CLOSE THE ACCOUNT for The Copyeditor’s Desk Inc., Millicent V. Hay, Victoria Hay, or Vicky Hay. DO NOT HARASS ME FURTHER WITH FRAUDULENT CHARGES.

Sincerely,

Victoria Hay, Ph.D.
Former director, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.

I would appreciate some help from someone who is in a position to bring a stop to this fraud. Thanks for your attention.

Victoria Hay
vickyhay@mac.com

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There seems to be no way to reach a human being at PayPal. However, their business is essentially a form of banking and so should be regulated by U.S. authorities. How does one go about submitting a complaint to the relevant regulatory agency? And what IS the relevant U.S. regulatory agency?

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I don’t expect to get far with this call for help to the banking regulators, even though PayPal is regarded as a type of banking operation and even though they have offices on US soil.

Don’t do business through PayPal, folks! They are totally, bullet-proofedly untouchable. You can’t reach a human for love nor money. But meanwhile they’re wrecking your credit by letting crooks rack up false charges on an account they refuse to close.