…is not a golden retriever. Or even an English retriever, the proper name for a “white golden retriever.” He’s a German shepherd tricked out to look like an English retriever.
HOLY mackerel, what an adventure last night.
M’hiijto has gone off to southern Colorado to visit his ancient grandmother, leaving Charley the Alleged Retriever with me and Ruby the Corgi for a few days and nights.
About a half an hour or 45 minutes after our little tribe had shut off the lights and gone to bed last night, somebody came up to the house and apparently tried to get in. Charley was in his accustomed nest at the front end of the hall, where he can see the front door in case his Human shows up (hope springs eternal in the canine breast). All of a sudden, that dog EXPLODED. I mean, Ger-shep explosion: high insane rage explosion. He started out loud and angry, got more and more emphatic and then rose to GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THAT BED, GRAB YOUR DAMN GUN AND GET OUT HERE!
Holy shit.
Welp, I grabbed the phone, not a pistol, and flew up the hall, pursued by Ruby, who was barking LIKE HE SAID! LIKE HE SAID!
Charley was just insane, trying to get out the door, trying to get through the window, roaring like a freaking lion.
They hadn’t set off the motion sensitive lights, but they’d called for backup. Someone drove up in front of the house; they jumped in the vehicle and it shot off down the street.
So about 80% of The Copyeditor’s Desk’s customers are in China. One of the things we do well is to polish the grammar and style for research articles on arcane topics in mathematics, science, and economics for Chinese academics, who must publish in English-language journals to advance their careers. The more of these we do, the more Chinese academics appear at the virtual door. After Paypal decided to do a number on me, I looked for alternatives and finally decided the simplest and cheapest strategy would be to have clients wire payment to me.
But since I bank in a credit union that’s too small to have a SWIFT number (required for wire transactions), this meant I would have to open a checking account in a major international bank. Hence, it was off to Bank of America. It looked like this ought to work. Now I had two business checking accounts, one at the credit union and one at the venerable BofA, which wished me to transfer $3,000 from the CU into the new account — or else. Fortunately, they gave me three months to get around to this.
So now I have a fancy new bank account in a shiny new high-rise tower and boyoboy. It has two SWIFT numbers, one for transfers in dollars and one for transfer in yuan. Hot diggety.
Kewl, huh?
Okay, so the client’s university goes to wire a small payment into this elegant new bank account.
Shortly, the client emits a squawk:
From: Dr. Big MucketyMuck, Associate Professor, Master Supervisor, Director of International Center for Cooperation and Exchange, Director of the Mogul Center College of Business Administration, Erewhon University of Economics and Business
To: Funny, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.
Hi Funny,
Could you please give me another bank account? There is a sign (‘) in the name of the last one, and my university told me because of it, they can not succeed in wiring the money. Thanks a lot.
Chortle!Got that? They would not accept a wire transaction to a bank account whose name contains an apostrophe. Proposed solution? I should go and open ANOTHER bank account, this one with no punctuation in the business’s name. 😀
How wondrous isthat?
Quite wondrous enough to elicit the “enough-is-enough” reaction, that’s for sure. At this point I decide to throw in the towel and just stop doing business with overseas clients. After this, if you can’t pay me by check, I ain’t a-workin’ for you.
This presents a problem: four out every five of our client projects come from Chinese scientists. But what the hell. It’s past time for me to retire, anyway. This, after days of crazy-making hoop-jumping to create that new bidness checking account at BofA.
Closing the fancy-Dan checking account takes two trips down to the bank, one of which consumes an hour of jawing and driving time. As I drive home, I’m feeling frustrated, annoyed as hell, and depressed to lose 80% of my business to Paypal’s crooked greed (yes, I did send a complaint to the AZ Department of Financial Institutions, which licenses PP to do business here).
But…guess what? MIRACLES DO HAPPEN!
Stumble in the door, finish cleaning the kitchen (a job interrupted by the junkets to the bank), then click on the ole computer.
And what should be lurking in the email but a query from a think tank at the Great Desert University: can I, will I, would I puhleeeeze index not one but two volumes in their forthcoming series in Latino studies?
Hot. Diggety. Damn.
I guess it’s God trying to say “there, there, little girl…” 😀
Time passes. Late last night I get curious and ask the Internet an idle question: is it really true you can’t wire money to a credit union?
Sez the Internet: “Well, yes and no”:
From UW Credit Union: https://www.uwcu.org/checking/personal-accounts/wire-transfers/
Wire Transfers
Moving money almost anywhere in the world is fast, easy, safe and convenient with wire transfers. Please note: domestic wire transfers usually occur within 24 hours, while international transfers vary, typically reaching the destination within 7 business days. To complete a wire transfer, log in to Web Branch and select Wire Transfers under the services or visit our nearest branch. Be sure to gather the following information prior to beginning your wire transfer to streamline the process.
Wiring Funds to Your UW Credit Union Account
The sending institution will need the following information:
ABA Number: 2759-7907-6
Our Name: University of Wisconsin Credit Union
Our Address: 3500 University Avenue | Madison, WI 53705
Your full name, address (as it appears on your account), UW Credit Union account number
Note: UW Credit Union does not have a Swift Code, IBAN or other international routing code, nor do we have a correspondent bank. You are able to wire funds to your UW Credit Union Account without this information. Your international financial institution will have a corresponding bank in the U.S. they can wire to, which will forward the funds to UW Credit Union using our ABA routing number: 2759-7907-6.
Uh HUH!
So, we’ll be taking that over to our honored CU branch manager and asking him, if the UW credit union can do this, why can’t we? I think we can: I think by “send it to an international bank,” this may have been what he meant to say…not “you have to have an account at an international bank.” At any rate, I’ll see if he can manage this. If so, maybe, just maybe I can manage to get paid for the work I’ve done over the past couple of weeks, rather than having to comp three clients.
The wind is blowing so hard here that it just blew out the flame on the covered gas grill. It’s knocked piles of two-foot-long shield-shaped palm tree thingies into the road, which I soon will have to go out and clean up. And M’hijito is driving through this fine weather phenomenon (plus blowing snow…) through Four Corners to lovely Grand Junction, Colorado, thereinat to visit his 105-year-old grandmother. His much younger mutther is not a happy camperette.
***
Soooo…. An hour or so later (dinner having been cooked and snarfed down), I’m out there gathering palm-tree shields out of the street and some neighbor stops and rolls down his window and thanks me.
Like I should have left the debris scattered all over the road to puncture people’s tires? Maybe left the litter all over their yards for them to enjoy? Lordie.
Oh well. I’m sure in a few hours there’ll be more to collect. Conveniently, a stiff gale is wailing in out of the west, which means the palm debris (which is very much a mess) is being blown over the wall, into the road, and NOT into my swimming pool. Thank You, dear Goddess.
***
But in other precincts, today I got to enjoy a different kind of wind blowing, of the hot air variety.
You’ll recall that when I took my dog-hair-clogged Shark vacuum cleaner up to the venerable 35th Avenue Fabric World/Sew & Vac, they at first gave me a runaround and then announced that it could not be fixed, because Shark vacuums are such junk that no replacement parts are available and even if they were, you can’t open the machine’s body to work on its innards. It was, they said, your basic throw-away.
Stupidly (being very tired and very sick of driving through the homicidal traffic and very discouraged), I said OK, how’s about you throw it away? Said they: why shore, and they took the allegedly defunct machine off my hands.
As it turns out, this claim of theirs was a lie.
This morning I took a much older, still functioning Shark, basically the same model as the supposedly unfixable one, up to a different vacuum repair shop. I’d had this thing since 2010. It has never stopped running; I’d simply bought a second one knowing that if it ain’t broke, some developer will fix it, and so I should have one that still ran as well on hand. When I bought the second one (the one 35th Avenue told me couldn’t be cleaned), I relegated the first machine to the garage, where it sucked up a great deal of dust and grime. It still ran, but was too dirty to think about operating inside the house.
I’m figuring if I can get a real vacuum cleaner repair dude to spiff it up, I can take the new, $150 Shark (which indeed has, since the machines first appeared, been “fixed” in a baleful way) back to Costco.
So I arrive at the shop, where I’m told sure, we can clean it and restore it to like-new life. While I’m standing there(!!), the guy calls his supplier and asks if he can get this part and that part. But of course, says the supplier: we’ll ship that right over.
Uh-huh. We should have this ready for you to pick up on Monday, says New Repair Dude.
***
I was raging furious when I drove away! Basically what has happened here is 35th Avenue simply lied to me, in a transparent attempt to get me to buy a new and much more expensive brand from them.
How much more expensive? Well, lemme tellya…
So angry was I that I decided to drive down the road to 35th Avenue — both these shops are on the west side, both right on 35th Avenue — and give the bastards at Fabric World/Sew & Vac a piece of my mind. Which is what I did, suggesting to the guy who ran the repair department that if they didn’t want to do business with me, all they had to do was say “We don’t work for aging white women.” He was, of course offended, but I did not give a damn and continued to tell him that he needed to tell his staff not to lie to the customers.
At this point, the phone rings and he starts talking to some woman who has left off a vacuum…giving her the same line of bull: your vacuum is such cheap junk we can’t service it. AND — get this! — he then says to her that if she wants a vacuum that will run well and last for some time, it will cost between $800 and $1,000.
WTF? Both of these Sharks were still running fine — they were just dirty. The first is ten years old. Each one cost under a hundred bucks. He gets off the phone and I suggest again that maybe it would be better if they did not lie to their customers.
“Our supplier can’t get the parts for Shark vacuums,” said he.
“Maybe you need to get a different supplier,” said I.
I asked him to return my machine, and of course they didn’t have it. Presumably they’d already tidied it up and sold it to some other sucker.
Can you imagine? What bastards!
***
Welp, I see that on Amazon, the old Shark Navigator is still available — that would be the one without the shoulder-wrenching swivel head. So I’m thinking that if I can get Costco to take the new one back and Repair Dude gets the old one cleaned up and operating, I may buy the old-fashioned, un”improved” version from Amazon just so as to have a functioning, reasonably priced machine in the house. The one I’ve got, which dates back to 2010, surely won’t work forever.
And, judging from current Amazon reviews, the new one won’t work for more than a few months! 😀
You think I exaggerate when I whine that my life is over-run with morons? Consider last night’s adventure, not an uncommon one in these parts…
Many of the neighborhood lanes here in the ’hood have no sidewalks. That’s because when the tracts were built, the area was out in the country.
People wanted to feel they were living in semi-rural suburbs, and (more to the point) it was cheaper for developers to neglect building sidewalks. Nowadays, though, we live in the big city, not in some sleepy suburb of a sleepy small town. Alas, many of our honored citizens just cannot grasp that as fact.
So…last night I’m headed down to the church. As usual, I putter along the ’hood’s smaller lanes by way of avoiding the back-wrenching speed bumps our City Parents have installed, since I’m already in plenty of pain and would rather not be treated to more of it to get to a main drag.
It’s after dark. I turn off the sub-feeder street that runs along the east side of the park onto a pretty road that gives its name to Lower Richistan, so as to get to Main Drag East. Just as I make the turn I see this whitish thing floating in the air some yards in front of me. Whaaa????
It’s a big old dog’s off-white rear end.
I know this dog: he’s a Great Dane mix, very mellow. But it takes a second to figure out what the pale patch looming through the dark is.
Fortunately I stop the car while I ponder this through. Mr. Dane is accompanying his human, who is dressed completely, head-to-toe, in black or navy-blue. The human is INVISIBLE in the dark. Not only that, but s/he’s pushing a black stroller, which is similarly invisible.
The only way I spot them is that a car passes on Main Drag East, a block ahead, and its headlights backlight them.
A-N-N-N-N-N-D this genius is walking right up the MIDDLE of the right-hand lane of the road. If he hadn’t had that dog with him, I would’ve hit him and his baby.
I almost stopped to let him know he was invisible and suggest that maybe he might want to at least get out of the middle of the road. But then thought ya can’t fix stupid and went on my way.
The walker had on a pair of sneakers with tiny reflective patches on the heels, but they were so small as to be unnoticeable. This is NOT a safe thing to rely on whilst stumbling around in the dark.
Dunno about you, but I can remember being told in grade school — more than once — to always wear light-colored clothing when walking around outside after dark. An adult who’s old enough to spawn a child shouldn’t have to be told this. Wouldncha think?
Almost fainted when I saw the American Express bill this month: $1250! Holeee Mackerel!
Since I’m running low on money anyway and am not going to make it to the end of my “fiscal year” when we’re slated to pull out another Required Minimum Drawdown, this was a bit of an eyepopper.
The fact is, though, that only about $700 of that was for living expenses. The vet charged $200 to put Cassie the Corgi down. The plumber charged $350 to rotoroot the plumbing. Et voilà: budget busted.
Fortunately, I’ve been putting $300 a month into emergency savings, so had a couple thousand bucks for damage control. Transferred $200 to help cover the bill; and if at the end of the month push has come to shove, I can transfer another two or three hunnert into checking for survival purposes.
Meanwhile, the scheme to decommission the Copyeditor’s Desk’s Paypal account continues apace. After hours of hassle, I finally managed to trick damnable PayPal to establish a new account, except that they wouldn’t let me attach it to the corporate bank account. So now money paid for editorial and blogging work will go into my personal account, and then will have to be transferred, with elaborate explanations to the tax man, over to the corporate checking account. That is going to be a vast PITA.
However, speaking of decommissioning: WonderAccountant has a modest proposal. She thinks we should change the business’s structure from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship, an LLC, or a C-corp. And she’s got somethin’ there.
If we made it a sole proprietorship, tax prep would be enormously simplified. The only drawback I can see is that the credit union will want to close the corporate checking & savings accounts. However, WonderAccountant and Mr. W.A. believe we can keep the EIN, and so we could quietly not tell the credit union that any change has occurred. This, we will address later…after tax season.
Meanwhile, all the tax stuff for her is in hand. How I hate this bureaucratic stuff! And how happy am I that I do not have a job in which all you do is wrestle with bookkeeping and taxes? Eeek! Let me count the ways!
Oh, in the PayPal department — and the Department of Outrageous Corporate Bureaucratic arrogance — can you believe this?!? Paypal actually demanded that I provide my bank account number AND password!!!!!!!!!Only in a fine-print line does one find a link to allow you to bypass that bit of bullshit.
Can you imagine? Like I’m gonna give PayPal direct access to my money and let them spy on every thing I do with my bank account? Yes, and while we’re at it, fork over my password to the next hacker who takes on PayPal!
Meanwhile, just as I thought the editing bidness was so moribund I might as well shut it down altogether, along came another of the redoubtable Chinese mathematicians, with 18 typeset pages of elaborate theroretical explication.
What amazing stuff. When you read this copy, you realize how creative and original mathematicians are. The whole premise for the system she uses to describe as a way to understand a specific set of empirical phenomena is a metaphor. Her demonstration works because she founds it in a metaphorical view of the real-world conditions she addresses.
And just as I reached the last few paragraphs of this project, in came a message from a senior scholar who contacted me some time back about helping him with a new biography of a very interesting mid-twentieth-century Chinese figure. This is a book I would really like to work on, and more to the point, he is an eminent scholar with whom I would really like to collaborate. Too, too exciting!
In other pastures of the Elysian Fields…I canceled tomorrow’s crack-of-dawn appointment with the adorable Young Dr. Kildare. Suddenly, out of the proverbial blue (is that also Elysian?), the back pain slacked off markedly. Yesterday afternoon it started to feel better, and this morning the pain was almost gone.
Well. In the first place, I’d just as soon not waste YDK’s time if the damn back sprain is going to go away on its own. Less generously, the prospect of spending a full hour in rush-hour traffic fills me with annoyed horror. To get there by the 8:00 a.m. appointment time, I’d have to leave here at 7 a.m., and the drive would be gawdawful. So…”feels better” served as a convenient excuse.
And a chimera: by 4:00 this afternoon it hurt like hell again.
Among the several tasks I’d set for today was to get a grip on Chapter 36 of Ella’s Story. Right. Well. I filled my pen, anyway.
Okay, so here’s something to amuse yourself…and all of us, should you wish to share: How many Pests and Nuisances rate as true pet peeves in your life? Because I’m a crabby old lady, I can count up quite a few. But it may be that normal people take a more equanimous view of Life, the Universe, and All That.
This reverie was spurred by a kindly ninny who elicited one of my favorite pet peeves: good-hearted souls who think God smiles on them when they cede their own right-of-way to people who do not want to invade their right of way and who just wish they would get going and get the hell out of the way. Yesterday Ruby the Corgi and I were headed out of Richistan across Main Feeder Street NW. Cars, as usual, were coursing up and down Main Feeder. We stopped at the corner, safely on the sidewalk, to allow all the motorists to pass. We were next to a stop sign on Richistan Way; there’s no stop sign on Main Feeder Street. This, as you must know if you’ve ever driven a vehicle, means that motorists on Main Feeder have the right of way.
This woman comes along. She wants to turn right onto Richistan Way and then hang an immediate left onto the frontage road that runs parallel to Main Feeder. This is obvious. It is not disturbing in any way. It is a perfectly commonplace and benign maneuver. Ruby and I wait for her to make her turn.
But no. She stops in the middle of Main Feeder and waves her paw at us, demanding that I cross in front of her.
Dayum, but I hate that.
Look: When you have the right of way, you have the right of way. Do not wave people across the goddamn road in front of you when you have the right of way!!!!!!
Why? Is it not a good and Christian thing to do, to give others a break?
No. It is not. This is why:
When you fail to take the right of way that by law and custom are yours, no one knows what you are going to do. If I cross in front of you because you’re waving at me to go even though it’s your turn to go, and then you or someone else hits me, you idiot, that is taken not as your dumb fault but as mine!
I speak from experience.
My son was just out of infancy and riding in a car seat when I drove down to the airport to pick up his father, who traveled quite a lot. At the time, Sky Harbor had two one-way ring roads, one leading to the airport toward the east and a parallel one leading out of it toward the west. Each had two lanes. We needed to get across the eastward-bound road to get into the west-running lanes. The east-bound lanes were jammed. We sat at a stop sign for a few minutes, waiting for a break in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Suddenly a guy in the lane closest to us stopped, held up all the traffic behind him, and waved at me to proceed.
Still young and stupid, I didn’t know any better so presumed he knew it was safe to go. It was not. A car coming up beside him slammed into my car, causing quite the commotion.
Fortunately our baby was not injured. I was mad as a cat but shortly realized that was stupid: I should have known better than to trust a moron behind another steering wheel.
Don’t do that. If you have the right of way, take it and don’t make a nuisance of yourself.
In that same department, how about the nitwits that drive into your blind spot and stick there? Yeah: I had one of those today. He cruises up beside me in the left-hand lane, bearing north on Central Avenue, and parks there. Luckily I was able to see the clown in my side mirror — he was not visible in my rear-view mirror, as the ridiculous Venza has more blind spots than visible space.
If I sped up, he sped up to keep pace. If I slowed down, he slowed down. So, with no one behind me in either lane, I hit my brakes, damn near stopped before he grasped what was up, and swerved in behind the bastard. Defeated, he continued on down the road at a normal rate of speed.
A thousand curses upon his offspring and all their spawn!
And how about the air-headed women who effing bathe in heavy perfume? Ya know, laydeez (and gents): a little dab’ll do ya!
This afternoon I encountered not one but two of them in the AJ’s parking lot…just walking from the car to the door. No doubt their perfume was expensive and wonderful and sexy and seductive. But a) I have exactly zero desire to be seduced by some strange woman (or, oddly enough, by any woman); and b) one person’s expensive and wonderful is the next person’s pyuiieee!
Each of these women, who came along separately and appeared not to know each other, emanated a fog of perfume — in the middle of the damn workday! — that was enough to suffocate a vulture.
Don’t do that, please. And forgodsake don’t do it when you’re going to the office!
Then there are the nitwits who walk and text, proceeding across a parking lot or up a sidewalk utterly oblivious of where they’re going or who they’re about to run into. Encountered two of those in the AJ’s parking lot this morning, one as I was walking toward the store and one as I was walking out. The first numbskull was so enthralled with whatever was on her phone, she damn near walked into me. Only reason she didn’t was that I stepped aside before we collided.
Water-“saving” plumbing that doesn’t work. Is there any greater water-waster than this junk? The kitchen faucet that takes half your lifetime to fill a pot…hence, you go off to do some other small task rather than stand there and watch water dribble into the pan, so that by the time you get back, the pan is overflowing. That’s real ecological. The accursed toilets that supposedly take a third of the water needed by a real toilet to flush: meaning you have to flush three times to get everything down.
Yesterday the toilet plugged up. Nothing out of the ordinary had been flushed down there, and I just had the entire system roto-rooted a couple weeks ago, at great expense. Called the plumber. He didn’t call back until after 7 p.m. By then whatever was down there had dissolved, having sat in the pipe for hour after hour after hour, and along about mid-afternoon I’d managed to flush it down without overflowing the bathroom. God, but I hate those damn toilets!
See, one of the things I figured would happen when the climate-deniers took over the White House and the Congress was that maybe we’d get functioning plumbing and real light bulbs back. That would have been one good thing the Republicans could have accomplished. But ohhh no! They have to spend their energy on a hate campaign, and twitching around with a ridiculous clown in the Presidency. Ah: yes, there’s another pet peeve: the politics of the day. What a circus. If they’d given us back real light bulbs and working plumbing, we might have found some way to justify their existence. But noooo.
Speaking of gadgets, we have phones that require batteries to keep running. Jeez. One of my handsets apparently needs a new battery. This used to be an easy problem to solve: take it right up to the Radio Shack around the corner, where the clerk would kindly produce a new battery and prize the phone apart to install the thing. Now I’ll have to traipse across the city to a special store that sells batteries and try, as sweetly as I can manage, to persuade the sales staff to fix the damn phone for me. Good luck with that. If this scheme doesn’t work, I’ll have to buy a whole new set of phones, requiring all new programming and all new coordination of six handsets. Ugh.
A-n-n-d one last shot: the ubiquity of vast, privacy-invading monopolies that have taken over almost every aspect of our lives. They’ve done it so inexorably, so ingratiatingly, and so subtly that most of us aren’t even aware of how dependent we personally — and our entire culture — have become on organizations that are not are friends and not in our service. Take a look at what is happening as one tech writer tries to disconnect from five gigantic electronic entities…and consider the implications of what she discovered when she did.
Gooood dog, Charley!
So about 80% of The Copyeditor’s Desk’s customers are in China. One of the things we do well is to polish the grammar and style for research articles on arcane topics in mathematics, science, and economics for Chinese academics, who must publish in English-language journals to advance their careers. The more of these we do, the more Chinese academics appear at the virtual door. After 
You’ll recall that when I took my dog-hair-clogged Shark vacuum cleaner up to the venerable 35th Avenue Fabric World/Sew & Vac, they at first gave me a runaround and then announced that it could not be fixed, because Shark vacuums are such junk that no replacement parts are available and even if they were, you can’t open the machine’s body to work on its innards. It was, they said, your basic throw-away.
Fortunately I stop the car while I ponder this through. Mr. Dane is accompanying his human, who is dressed completely, head-to-toe, in black or navy-blue. The human is INVISIBLE in the dark. Not only that, but s/he’s pushing a black stroller, which is similarly invisible. 