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Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Is Your Contractor Insured? Really?

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So here’s another little life lesson I learned from the Olde Folkes yesterday. Decided to present this in a separate post, because it is a VERY big effing deal. Y’ere ’tis:

Whenever you have a contractor of any kind working around your house, ALWAYS BE SURE THEY’RE INSURED!

That’s even if you think they’re the nicest folks to come along since God created the Angel Gabriel. Even if they seem honest as Abe. Even if they work as hard as a plow horse.

Got that? Don’t just ask if they’re insured. Demand to see the policy. You want proof positive that they have general liability insurance or that they’re licensed and bonded with your state registrar of contractors.

When J & L sold their home of 40 years and moved to the Beatitudes, a life-care community, they hired two women who are in the business of helping elders move into old-folkeries. There are a number of these places in the Valley, and the pair have registered themselves with a bunch of them. For J & L, who are in their nineties and were moving to an apartment that was — maybe — two-thirds the size of their home, only with no garage and no garage storage and a tiny kitchen and no room for L’s office, these two ladies were a godsend. They advised on what furniture could fit into the new digs and where it could be fit, they packed up as much as could be stuffed into the apartment and arranged for movers, they put stuff away in closets and cabinets, they even got someone to custom-build a way to hang the expensive draperies J wanted to take with them.

As part of the bargain, once the couple was moved out the moving helpers were to arrange and supervise an estate sale, to sell off the (many) possessions that simply could not fit into a tiny apartment on the fourth floor of an old-folks’ home.

I remember thinking, as the two women were telling me this, I don’t recall seeing any ads from your outfit in the estate-sale listings to which I subscribe in gay profusion. Are you trying to say “yard sale,” dears? If so, how’s about telling the client that? But I kept quiet. Maybe, after all, they did their estate-sale business under some other moniker.

Okay. So this gigantic project chugs along and eventually they get the folks moved. They tidy up the remaining goods, and now this estate sale is supposed to take place the following day.

That night, the house is broken into and everything of significant value is stolen. The women say the lost items were appraised (really??? Who are you kidding?) at $5,000.

The house is locked up behind mighty iron security gates, brain-banging deadbolts, and an expensive and efficient alarm system. Sooo…WTF, say I.

J says the two women “forgot” to turn on the burglar alarm when they left that evening. The perps, who magically knew the alarm company’s stickers on the window alluded to nothing, broke a window, climbed in, and made themselves to home.

“Forgot:” Yeah. R-i-i-i-g-h-t.

So now the women tell them that they — J & L — will have to make this claim on THEIR homeowner’s insurance!

Say what?

Can’t you just hear the insurance adjustor’s reaction? “Ohhh no. Not a chance in Hell. You had already moved out of the place and you had consigned the property to these people; therefore the consignee was responsible.”

And…say what? Five. Thousand. Dollah? Don’t think so.

I’ve done a lot of yard sales in my life. And neighbors who used to live across the street from me, a  pair who became dear friends, were in the yard-sale business. And…well…y’know what? The entire contents of that house including all the stuff they moved into their new home were totally absolutely not worth $5,000. They had a few works of art that were worth something…but they took those with them.

So. IMHO we’re lookin’ at a scam here.

But that’s just IMHO, eh?

The point is, once the possessions had been handed over into the care of the assisted-moving business, they became the assisted-movers’ insurance company’s responsibility, not the homeowner’s.

Dollah to donuts, that is what my friends’ insuror will claim. And several dollahs to donuts, these women have no business insurance or anything vaguely resembling it.

At the risk of repeating myself…

Whenever you have a contractor of any kind working around your house, ALWAYS BE SURE THEY’RE INSURED!

Robocall Exploits: Part II

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LOL! So the robocall scammers, presumably annoyed — really annoyed — at NoMoRobo so consistently derailing their nuisance calls ever since I subscribed to the program — doubled down today. As I reported this morning, one of them apparently drained the battery from one of my landline handsets, when I tried to use it to espy their caller ID. An hour or two later, in came a barrage of phone calls from area code 186.

This makes it impossible to report an unblocked call to NoMoRobo’s online reporting page. To do so, you have to enter the number’s area code, and NoMoRobo does not recognize an area code beginning with the numeral “1” — and so it won’t take the rest of the number that shows on your Caller ID, either. Clever exploit, eh?

These assholes call me several times. The number they’re using is 186-467-6230.

Turns out that 186-467-6230 is a number used by those scammers who call up elderly people and claim to be an adult grandchild, niece, or nephew who, as the hustle goes, has been arrested (or has been injured in an accident) and needs money fast to make bail or to pay for medical care. Click on that link: the stories it elicits range from astonishing to hilarious.

HOW a grown man or woman could fall for these pitches escapes comprehension. What planet do these folks live on? Do they never watch a TV news show or read a newspaper or cruise the Internet or hang out with their old college cronies on Facebook? Do they spend ALL their time filling out crossword puzzles? The “I’m in jail, send money now” scam has been around for so many years, you can’t even imagine how anyone could fall for it.

At any rate, it was a real blitz today. Half a dozen calls came in, of which three were attempts by the 186 scammers to get through. And the apparent draining of my bathroom extension phone’s battery: that was scary. If they can reach out to your equipment with some kind of code or signal and cause damage, that represents a serious problem. Fortunately, the other handsets were unaffected…only the one I picked up to try to disconnect the call was attacked. But still: this is not good.

New Robocaller Exploit? Or…just coincidence?

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I think — being the paranoiac that I am — that a robocaller just broke one of my landline handsets. As you know, I now subscribe to NoMoRobo, which works with amazing effectiveness against telephone pests. And you can be sure that the electronics the pests use can detect the presence of NoMoRobo when the program derails incoming nuisances.

So this afternoon the phone jangles. Caller ID reads, weirdly, Welcome! Please wait…

WTF?

So I wait for it to ring through to my voicemail so I can capture their data and, if as suspected it’s a sales pitch, I can hang up on the bastards. When they give up, I click on the “last call” button to capture the phone number and caller ID so as to send it along to NoMoRobo, which collects this stuff. And what I got was…NOTHING.

Blank. Nothing. Dead as a doornail.

Well, f**k.

So I tried another phone set, and from that was able to download the (without a doubt spoofed) phone number. Sent this and a report of the exploit along to NoMoRobo.

But…this is a new one. That phone was not out of juice. It was sitting on a charger when I picked it up. And yeah, the charger was plugged in. So drained was it that it took about ten minutes for the handset to come back to life.

Now, you know and I know that I am batsh!t crazy. With that in mind, you will have to add whatever grains of salt you choose to this speculation:

I suspect that somehow they did something to disable my phone.

We know this is possible for cell phones: the technology exists to drain a cell phone’s power. Maybe this works on a battery-operated landline extension????

Why? Somebody out there (not surprisingly) really, REALLY does not like people to subscribe to NoMoRobo.

Anybody had this experience before?

Use It Up or (Dammit) THROW IT OUT

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So I’ve spent the past few days helping some dear friends move out of their home of 40 years. They sold it, successfully, and now they’re moving into a very attractive and comfortable life-care community. I’d call it the Queen Mary on a Concrete Foundation…it’s quite the luxury liner.

These are folks who live a normal life in a normal home: they’re not what you’d call, by any stretch of the imagination, “hoarders.” They buy what they need. Over time they use it up and go back to Costco to buy some more of what they need. They have a lifetime of tschotskes of the sort that come to rest in the homes of ordinary people: pieces of cherished artwork (some of it valuable); several exceptionally handsome (and exceptionally expensive) lamps, the usual collections of dishes and pots and pans and glasses and whatnot; a computer and a desk and a filing cabinet and a TV and a couple of easy chairs and all those good things. If you were invited into their home, you would find it pleasantly middle class and comfortable.

But…my friend Ms. J has lived there 40 years. She and her late husband built the house all that many years ago. Mr. L, her present husband, married her and moved in heaven only knows how long ago — I do not, but can say they’ve been married as long as I’ve known them, which is some 18 years.

It’s a two-bedroom house, explicitly and attractively designed for an aging couple to spend the rest of their lives in. The late husband passed; she remarried, and now the two incumbents are in their 90s. They decided the wisest thing to do, at this point, would be to follow their friends into the environs of the upscale old-folkerie, where they will be cared for like passengers on some grand luxury liner until they shuffle off this mortal coil.

Sensibly enough, they signed up for a two-bedroom apartment, which they got. It’s a very, very nice place. And it appears, at a glance, to be about the same size as their long-time manse. It has two bedrooms, two bathrooms. A separate dining room, a nice living room.  A full-size kitchen. A washer and dryer. A truly spectacular view off the sixth floor. Three restaurants for you to dine in with your monthly chow allowance. Cleaning help included. A library on-campus. Clubs, activities, transportation…the certifiable Life of Riley.

But…

A two-bedroom house with 40 years of seniority does not easily fit into a brand-new two-bedroom apartment.

The apartment doesn’t have a garage: the garage that has sheltered a lifelong accrual of collected valuables. And most to the point, the garage that housed a large upright freezer, the home of innumerable Costco Lifetime Supplies of various food items. Nor does an apartment have the kind of closet space and kitchen space offered up by a house, even a modestly sized house.

Much of the stuff that couldn’t be moved or that is now simply redundant will be offered up in an estate sale, getting it out of their hair, out of their adult children’s hair, and out of the movers’ hair.

What a job! Moving is always a challenge…but when you’ve been in a place for 40 years, it’s more than a mere challenge. “Ordeal” might be le mot juste.

I was reminded by this adventure of the many (many!) times I’ve held forth on the subject of decluttering, dating way back to 2007. And…then was reminded that I need to put my money where my mouth (or keyboard) is. It has been quite a while since I’ve shoveled out the Funny Farm. So this week, I think, I’ll go through the closets and toss out anything I haven’t worn (or wish I hadn’t worn…) in the past year. Also need to go through the garage cabinets, kitchen cabinets, and office closet to get rid of things I’m just not using.

This is a good thing to do whether you live in your shack until the end of your life or are forced to move to some place that’s easier or cheaper to care for.

Moving is difficult under the best of circumstances. But when you’re in your 90s and you’ve been accumulating stuff in the same place for the past 40 years, it’s quite the nightmare. Whether you move or whether you shuffle off  this mortal coil in place, leaving your worldly goods to your unlucky offspring, you need NOT to accumulate junk.

That was something my father the sea captain knew by habit, since most of the time he lived in a first mate’s or captain’s cabin on a tanker: i.e., one room. My mother also knew not to stash too much junk — and he wouldn’t allow her to — because they moved so often. But y’know…I’ve been in this house for almost 15 years and hope to live here until I die. Whether I get shanghaied into an old-folkerie or just leave this place to my son, it would be a good idea to clean out the unused junk now, while I still have the strength to do so, and then to make it a habit to throw out anything I haven’t used in the prior year. I sure don’t want my son to have to deal with shoveling out all the junk you can collect over a lifetime.

This month being January, a thought occurs: Why not designate January as THE annual decluttering month? Then you would be reminded to shovel out the redundant junk on a regular basis, instead of getting around to the job only when forced to it. January is a perfect time: right after Christmas, when you’ve presumably acquired some new junk to find a home for.

Merry Christmas…i guess

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Christmas treeWelp, Merry Christmas one and all. Think some spiritual thoughts…that will take Herculean effort. (So we invoke one ancient culture’s religion when we see our own, as interpreted by its fundamentalists, has failed). Personally, I find it a shade difficult to choke up much merriness, given that we’re watching our country crash in flames.

Thank God I’m too old myself to be called into active military duty, or to have a kid young enough for that. The mess the Trumpites are making in the Middle East sooner or later will come back to bite in a big way, and at that time a mere force of mercenaries will not suffice. Expect to see your sons and daughters — or grandsons and grand-daughters — called up for active duty within the next decade. To say this bunch has plunged the country into chaos is, my friends, an understatement.

Or maybe we ourselves will want to join up, if the military will take us. God knows, we’ll need the money.

Watching what appears to be the start of the Bush Crash redux, I have exactly zero confidence that a collapse of this magnitude is going to do me any good in my enforced retirement. What I do feel confident of is that it will leave me with nothing like enough in savings and investments to support me through my dotage. It is almost certain, thanks to the lunatics who put a seditious fool in the White House and inflicted their set of wackshit discredited economic theories on us all, that I will not have enough to live on for the rest of my life.

During the 1970s, I watched my father’s savings — an amount he thought would support him comfortably through a lengthy retirement — melt away under an inflationary blowtorch. Now we get to watch my generation’s retirement savings disappear, too.

Lovely.

Oh well. There’s not a thing we can do about it. If you haven’t hunkered down yet, financially speaking, it’s too late now.

Remember what I told you, some time back: Politics is economy; economy, politics.

In one last gasp of optimism, tonight I’m singing with the choir for the evening service and then for the midnight service. That will be fun. The church tends to overflow on these big religious holidays. Though it’s not exactly empty the rest of the time, on Christmas and Easter people flow into the parking lots.

We — the women’s chant choir — sang for Compline last night. It’s a very short but very lovely service. The entire thing is sung, much of it in chant. It’s  relaxing and soothing, something that’s much needed these days.

In between the two Christmas Eve services, we have a potluck dinner. That should be fun. I’m hoping SDXB will show up for that and for the late service. Connie the Long-Haul Trucker is in Moab, headed toward the Valley as fast as she can fly for as far as the gummint will let her drive in any one 24-hour period: expects to reach the truckyard about 10 a.m. tomorrow. So she will miss the Xmas festivities, but will be here to see her family on Christmas day. That’s something. I guess.

Cassie the Corgi continues to have her ups and downs. Yesterday was a definite up. Today she seems to have crashed, along with the Trump economy. {sigh} Not only can she barely hobble around but (to continue the endlessly amusing simile) she seems confused. It’s like she’s not sure where she is. She’ll get outside and look around, appearing utterly flummoxed, like she’s wondering Where am I? What is this place and what am I supposed to be doing here? Eventually she’ll pee on the ground and then stumble back in the house, evidently only slightly enlightened.

That’s today. Yesterday she was downright peppy and for a moment was actually running around the backyard (very, very briefly) after Ruby.

So one is led on a merry psychological chase, in which one moment you think gosh! maybe she COULD recover somehow and the next you’re figuring where to dig her grave.

The neighborhood is brightly decorated. One street is completely lined with luminarias. Young people love to gussy up their places for Christmas, which is a delight. I personally am too lazy to feel inclined to climb on a ladder to hang up lights, then climb up again to take them down and then make myself crazy wrapping them back up and putting them away. Never have been much for conspicuous decoration, myself. But that doesn’t keep me from enjoying other people’s displays.

Luminarias line a garden path as part of Hispanic celebration of Christmas

 

 

Life on the Phoenix Roads…

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If you read this blog often, you know how much I /s LOVE /s driving in Phoenix. Our drivers make California drivers seem eminently sane, drug-free, and thoughtful of their fellow beings.

Today I drove out to ever-fascinating Sun City to socialize with SDXB, visit a large Asian market on that side of town, and then have a very nice dinner at his house. Then it was time to drive back into beautiful uptown Phoenix.

Earlier in the day, we had ascertained that I should, at all costs, avoid driving back toward the Loop 101 freeway on Bell Road, one of the mainest drags leading in and out of Sun City. Bell, an eight-lane thoroughfare, cannot handle the volume of Christmas shoppers pouring in from the west side to the Arrowhead Mall shopping center, and so eastbound it was dead stopped. He urged me to head homeward via Union Hills, the last surface street south of the 101 to intersect with the western north-south stretch.

No problem maneuvering through Sun City’s winding streets to Union Hills and thence onto the 101.

So now…I’m flying east across the 101 behind some air-conditioning company’s service truck, whose driver leads the way with confidence and apparent derring-do. Well… Until he gets a bit confused.

He wants to go south on the I-17. But like any normal human being, he’s buffaloed by the signage and the spaghetti strands, so starts to turn off on 35th Avenue. But then it dawns on him: DAYUM! NOT HERE!! 

So of course he veers across the painted lane triangle and plunges back into the traffic.

You expected common sense?

So, no doubt, did he, that small lapse aside. But forthwith he runs into AIRBORNE DEBRIS, flying junk that whacks his windshield and bounces around in the breeze.

WTF?

Now he and I sail past some woman who’d been traveling in front of him, driving an agèd white sedan. This character slows a bit, as she & her passenger are dumping stuff out of the car onto the freeway. She swerves onto the shoulder and the woman passenger opens the passenger side door — with the vehicle still moving — and briskly shakes out a blanket, discharging even more trash into the air and onto the road.

W, indeed, TF…

The AC dude and I jet past her, unscathed. At least my car is unscathed…don’t know if any of the junk hit his truck and if it did, whether it chipped or dented anything.

You know my theory about Arizona drivers, right?

Hypothesis A: Every moron in the world has an electronic chip implanted in their brain. This chip is linked to my car, which sends out a signal every time I climb into the driver’s seat and turn on the ignition. Alerted by this signal, all of the morons drop what they’re doing, leap into their cars, shoot onto the road, and get in front of me.

Well, I’ve refined that theory, which has as its drawback the logical outcome that no one else on the road, other than me, would ever encounter a moron. As we know, everyone on the roads here encounters morons. Alllllll the time.

So. with that evidence in hand, we have:

Hypothesis B: At any given time, one in ten of your fellow drivers on the Arizona roads is a moron. That means one of every 10 cars coming toward you and one of every 10 cars sharing the lanes on your side of the road is, indeed, a certifiable moron.

Hypothesis B has a number of advantages over Hypothesis A. First and most obviously, it explains the presence of morons in the company of all drivers here, not just me. While you could explain that by noting that the morons have to pass over the streets in order to reach me, thereby encountering quite a few other drivers upon their appointed journey, if all the morons were activated by the chips in their brain and those chips were signaled by only one transmitter in my car, the roads closer to my starting point would have more morons than the roads further away, because the morons would converge on the source of the signal. Also the morons would be on the road only when I am, which does not, empirically speaking, appear to be the case.

Hypotheses B explains the homogeneity of the moron presence in the traffic and shows how the morons are able to affect all reasonable drivers, not just one.

Less paranoid, too, Hypothesis B is…

Map from Wikipedia. By Algorerhythms – self-made, using data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5816748