Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted | Funny about Money

Busted, Disgusted, and Can’t Be Trusted…

August 20, 2016August 20, 2016 by funny

So I have $1.33 to live on for the next 11 days.

If I stay on budget, that is. Of course there’s significantly more than that in the checking account.

But…heh… At this rate, there won’t be for long!!

The $217 water bill plus the $250 power bill plus the $293 for the countertop oven did me in. The situation wasn’t helped by the $250 dentist’s bill for what he thinks are “routine” X-rays.

Welp, the weather is cooling down — it’s only 80 degrees at 5:00 this morning. But of course the power bill I have to pay in September will be for August’s electric use, and it’s been hideously hot most of the month. So presumably that will be another $250. It’s rained a couple of times, but the yard watering is done automatically with an irrigation system, so presumably that will be the same. I replaced a leaky faucet timer, but I kind of doubt that will save much.

I may have to move out of the house, if utility bills keep skyrocketing like this. The bastards at the Corporation Commission, most of whom are Republicans in the pockets of Arizona Public Service and Salt River Project, just fold to requests for rate increases, so every year our bills go up and up. The only way to get rid of the corruption is to get a more educated populace who will vote the rascals out, but in Arizona, home of the low-rent education system, that ain’t gonna happen.

The other option, I suppose, would be simply to let everything in the yard die. That seems kind of counterproductive, because the yard is the main reason I stay here…

Out of curiosity, I decided to keep a running record of the Surprise! costs, those extraordinary jabs that exceed the proposed budget. Since the new budgeting scheme started in July, we only have two months’ worth. But so far it’s an eye-popper:

Ugh! Think of that: almost $900 of unplanned expenses in two months! And in two of the three most expensive months of the year, when utility bills are through the roof. Never fails, does it? So since we started the budget gambit, we’re averaging almost $450/month in unplanned costs…to be precise, it’s $877/2 = $438.50/month

If I wanted to adjust expense categories to account for several hundred dollars of extraordinary expenses in the budget, where would the money come from?

I could cancel my long-term care insurance. That would save $142 a month.
Amazon Prime could go away: $11 a month
Let the homeowner’s insurance drop: about $70 a month, maybe.
Find new homes for the dogs: about $40 or $50 a month in dog food
Drain the pool; about $40 or $50 in electric, plus a small amount in water bills
I’d say “stop shopping at Costco,” but I almost have: I’m $106 under budget, and the budgeted figure halves historic spending there.
Stop getting my teeth cleaned
Kill off all the trees, shrubbery, and vines in the yard.

None of those looks very promising, except for a tiny savings on Amazon Prime. Letting my insurance drop would put me at enormous risk. Every other possibility would deeply damage my already feeble quality of life.

One thing I could do, though, is tell the dentist that I can’t be going in there in the summertime. If the routine dental bill were moved to a winter month, when utility bills are a fraction of what they are now, they wouldn’t bust the budget. Also, I’ve got to remember to tell them not to X-ray my teeth for fishing expeditions. I’ll call the dentist’s office today and change next year’s date to November, when bills are at their lowest. Or maybe February — bills are low then, too.

Thank heaven there’s no inflation, eh? 😉

Spring 2016 flowers 6 — Good-bye to Eden?

ONLY in Arizona!

July 6, 2016July 5, 2016 by funny

You’ve gotta see this one to believe it. Truly, only in Arizona could a candidate for public office bear such an apt name…and have the effrontery to run with such frank (heh) honesty about the character of our fine leadership.

At first I thought this was a joke when my friend from Massachusetts sent it over. Educated Easterners tend to think all things associated with the State of Arizona are a joke.

Googled the guy. Yep: he shows up in a New Times article. But New Times is an alternative weekly, one that’s occasionally given to sleaze and often given to irony. The article itself could be a joke. Though it wasn’t dated April 1, we still have to classify it as dubious.

An article in the East Valley Tribune suggests there really is such a person, and that in the past he has, shall we say, exaggerated his role in the installation of rubberized asphalt on the Valley’s fine freeways. On the other hand, no daily papers in the state are great, and the Trib is one of the lesser stars in a dim constellation. Still dubious.

But then we have this. Holy sh!t.

There IS a Frank Schmuck, and he has run for public office before. The Tucson Citizen, which in 2008 was a halfway decent newspaper, reports that the Citizens Clean Elections Commission was investigating the guy for complaints that he violated the Clean Elections Law, failed to report expenses for a fundraiser, failed to report vendors providing services, and exceeded the maximum amount for early contributions from supporters.

Yup. The man is ideal for the Arizona State Legislature. Li’l Abner’s ideel representative.

Check out the disclaimer at the bottom of the guy’s page:

Paid for by Team Schmuck. Use of Military Rank, Job Titles, or Photographs in Uniform Does Not Imply The Endorsement of The Department of Defense.

Probably the Fourth of July is not the best time for a candidate to assure us that he doesn’t endorse the Department of Defense.

On the other hand, it does brand him as a member of Arizona’s ill-educated Good Ole Boys Club, whose members are graduates of a public school system that consistently ranks among the nation’s bottommost three. In this state, not understanding the difference between “of the Department of Defense” and “by the Department of Defense” — or how to use capitalization in title case — is actually a qualification for public office.

😀

Caveat Emptor: Amazon as Consumer’s Pal

June 18, 2016June 18, 2016 by funny

So on the corgi forum where I hang out, I’ve read about this harness that hooks to the leash in front, instead of up at the back. The strange positioning of the leash clip discourages your dog from surging forward and dragging you down the street.

Perfect, think I, for Ruby the World-Class Iditarod Champion.

Yesterday I happen upon a new-to-me locally owned pet store, which just opened next to my habituated Trader Joe’s. When I go in to shoof it out, I run across one of these exotic harnesses. Naturally, I buy it: size medium. The cost: $39.99.

I put this on Ruby early this morning, when it’s cool enough to walk — along about 4:30.

Amazingly, it works as advertised: Ruby walks right along with me. Right from the git-go! She does not try to haul me to Yuma.

But, even though I tighten it as much as possible, it just doesn’t fit Ruby. In fact, it’s so loose she manages to climb out of it.

Luckily, Cassie heels as a matter of course. So I take her collar off her and put it on Ruby, who would take off for Yuma on her own if she got free for an instant.

Back at the Funny Farm, I happen to look up these Easy Walk harnesses on Amazon, by way of seeing what commenters have to say. And there, what should I find but that the things are going for $23, and one vendor is offering it for $17.99! Free shipping, one and all.

Well sh!t. I am royally irked.

I take the thing back and tell the manager the it’s too large. She says do I want an exchange or a refund. I say a refund, I guess, since I can get it for $17 at Amazon. Not looking even faintly surprised, she says, “We match prices.”

I think, Isn’t THAT sleazy? You’ll rip off your customers as long as they don’t wise up, hm? But since I’d like to have one of these things and not wait several days to get it, I exchange it for a size small.

Can you imagine? They know they’re gouging and they have the effrontery to, in effect, admit it by dropping their price to the lowest bid…but only if you’ve gone and searched it out.

Brought the “small” size home. Doesn’t fit Ruby: way, WAY too small. So now I’ll have to traipse back up there again to return it.

Y’know, I prefer to shop local. Given a choice between a locally owned retailer and some faceless mega-chain, I’ll buy things like this from the local store. And yeah, I’m willing to pay a couple of dollars more for the privilege, understanding how business works.

But not twice as much!

The Cheapskate Jamboree: How much is a man’s life worth?

June 17, 2016 by funny

Yesterday a neighbor called and asked if I could give her Gerardo’s phone number, he having recently deployed his underlings to trim the hated palm trees that flank (and contaminate) the swimming pool.

In the course of conversation, she asked how much I’d paid.

“Two hundred and forty bucks,” I said. “For four trees.”

“That’s too much!” she squawked. “I only paid $30 a tree the last time.”

Let’s think about that…

A Mexican fan palm is a nasty plant. Those fronds that wave so decoratively in the breeze are lined with vicious thorns. They’re very heavy, and they do not readily biodegrade, presenting a serious headache for waste disposal companies in cities where a lot of yards have palms.

Over the course of a year, a season’s green fronds die off as new fronds grow in, creating a “skirt” of dead palm fronds around the trunk. This stuff harbors cockroaches, snakes, black widows, and termites. Also, to the eye of the gringo, it’s unaesthetic. In the springtime, the commonplace Mexican fan palm, which grows to about 100 feet, sprouts long, prolific seed wands (“inflorescences”) that drop tiny, hard flowers into the pool and then eventually drop hard seeds into the water. The flowers clog the filter, forcing you to backwash once or twice a week — a job that should need to be done no more than once every two or three months — and soon requiring you to hire a guy to come take the filter apart and clean it professionally. The seeds also get into the filter, and in addition they BREAK your $350 pool cleaner.

So, we of the White Middle Class hire a class of fearless Mexicans who show up armed with lumberjack equipment. In 100-degree heat, these men will climb a hundred feet into the air, saw off the dead fronds (and, unfortunately, many of the live ones), and cut off the damn seed things.

Then they climb down and fish all that crap out of your pool. This latter chore alone can best be described as one bitch of a job.

All of that might be shrugged off as the life of a Mexican immigrant, hm?

No.

Trimming a palm tree is about as dangerous a job as you can take on. Every year or two, a man gets killed when he undertakes to cut back a palm.

In addition to the obvious risk of falling a hundred feet or so, you have the problem that palm fronds are extremely heavy. If one falls on you and you can’t get free of it, the thing will suffocate you in short order.

This is a common fate of those who die in the palm-trimming trade.

If you’re all the way at the top of a 100-foot trunk and you’re tied to the thing with a lumberjack’s belt, you can’t get out from under a frond that drops down onto your head and face. And nobody can get up there to help you before you smother.

If you’re on the ground and one of the things falls on you, it can knock you out and suffocate you as you lay there, if it doesn’t kill you quickly by breaking your neck. The trimmer himself can’t get down the tree in time to save your life. Assuming he notices at all.

Often you’ll see these guys working with just one spotter on the ground.

Gerardo supervises the job himself, and he also shows up with at least two other guys to wrangle the fronds as the trimmer drops them. But even then: only the trimmer has climbing equipment. If anything happens to him while he’s at the top, none of the men on the ground can get up there fast enough to help him. Without gear, only the strongest and most agile of men could get up there at all.

Forty bucks is too much to pay a man who freaking risks his life so you can have a damn palm tree in your yard? Next to your freaking pool?????

Personally, I think Gerardo is giving away his guys’ services. The trimmer is not going to get anything like $40 per tree, because Gerardo has to pay the other two guys, and he undoubtedly skims off something for his own time — or at least, he surely should. I can’t believe he charges anything less than about $200 a tree.

And even at that: is a man’s life worth $200?

Wannabe Customer to USPS: Phbtthhphtbbb!

June 7, 2016 by funny

Today it took the better part of an hour and $12 to send my Arizona tax returns to the Department of Revenue. I would’ve done better to have driven downtown and hand-delivered the thing. It wouldn’t have taken any longer and, since gas is under $2 a gallon just now, the cost would have been about $1.95 plus $60 worth of my time. Not $12 plus $60 worth of my time.

Think of that: the real cost of mailing a tax return was right around $72. Thank you, USPS!

Wonder-Accountant delivered the mountain of personal and corporate returns yesterday — we’d had to take extensions on both, since she spent the tax season enjoying the same surgical adventures I so loved a year or so ago. She of course was able to file the federal returns electronically, but the forward-looking State of Arizona, ever ten years behind the rest of the country, will only accept hard copy. So she prepared and addressed the snail-mail envelope and the return-receipt request and all that.

This being Tuesday, I figured the lines at the Post Office would be within reason, so headed out around 2 p.m. to pony up cash to the USPS at the station closest to my house.

And yea verily! Only three people were in line ahead of me.

So I joined the merry crowd. And stood there. And stood there. And stood there. And stood there. And stood there. Three customers were at the counter. Two postal service agents were waiting on them. One of these wandered off, leaving the other to continue what evidently had already been a lengthy transaction with a woman. The two male customers at the counter had struck up a casual friendship while they were standing around the P.O. — which should tell you how long they’d been hanging out. They chatted back and forth as if they’d known each other since the beginning of time.

They probably had.

Two of the people in front of me were listening to the conversation between the remaining customer service agent and the woman. I didn’t hear what was said, but they did; whatever it was, it elicited a snort of “wouldn’tcha-know-it” laughter and a knowing glance between the two in line. The transaction at the counter visibly entered a more complex phase, with extensive yakking back and forth. Now that agent wandered off into the back.

And, like the other one, she stayed gone.

So now we had three people standing at the counter and zero customer service reps on the other side of the counter.

Time ticked past.

Eventually, after I’d been standing there about ten minutes, I thought…my time is worth something…and this exercise ain’t payin’ the bills! Decided I would count slowly to 120. If one person moved forward in the line, then I would stay. If no one moved forward, I would go to another post office.

Speaking of slow, there are surely only two possible explanations for the customer service efficiency at the Post Office: either they train their employees to move in slow motion, or they put some kind of drug in the water fountains.

One hundred and twenty s-l-o-w-w-w-w counts later, neither agent had returned to the counter. Everyone was still standing in place. A couple more customers had come in the door and joined the back of the line.

I left. Drove over to the post office in the ’hood where I used to live, which at times is a pretty efficient operation.

There a man practically ran to get to the door ahead of me. He slammed his way through the door and then deliberately shut it in my face. Not the fault of the USPS, of course, but a clue to why employees just might be less than enthusiastic about waiting on us Great Unwashed types.

He charges to the line and grabs a place at the back. Didn’t have to charge far, because the line was almost back to the door.

Here, too, only two workers were on hand to deal with a horde of customers, and those two workers also appeared to have imbibed some soporific from the water supply.

Obviously, this was going to waste even more of my time than had already been wasted. I left.

Drove over to the nearest FedEx outlet. Parked right in front. A guy coming out of the store kindly waited until I hobbled from the car to the sidewalk before stepping off the pavement to walk out between the vehicles. Not so irritable, apparently. Wonder why?

Inside, two customer service types were staffing a desk that had no (0.00) line. They had no problem shipping the package down to the Department of Revenue using the registered mail, return-receipt-requested forms Wonder-Accountant had prepared. And their arms and legs moved in real time, which was interesting.

Fee for the privilege of getting a functional organization to send my taxes to my honored government: $12.

If I’d had the common sense to go there first, that’s all it would have cost me, since that FedEx storefront is about a five-minute drive from my house.

To schlep the packet down to the Arizona Department of Revenue, come to think of it, would eat up about an hour, round-trip (plus God only knows how much in parking and in time required to find a human being there). Google provides the address…and 46 customer reviews averaging 1.5 stars, all told.

Some of the citizens’ appraisals of ADOR’s customer service are less than adoring (heh). This one has got to win some prize somewhere:

This place sounds like a scam. I’m not sure if this is a real Department. When I called the number on the letter it went straight to the person who’s name was on the letter. It never went to a switchboard or an operator. Then when I asked to whom I was speaking to, I could barely understand him and it was his own name he could not pronounce. I felt I woke him up, or he was watching TV. Did not want to converse with him or give them any personal information like SS number, phone number, date of birth, none of that stuff. Going to have to research to make sure this is a real place.

This is kind of weird.

Follows. No matter how colorful some other government agency gets, Arizona’s always takes the cake. 😀

Next tax season: Just go straight to the FedEx store and pony up the cash to ship off the state returns. Don’t even think about trying to use the U.S. Postal Service.

Who Tells Pollsters the Truth?

June 6, 2016 by funny

So again, as during every election from dog-catcher to President, we’re presented with cascades of statistics about what kind of people voted for whom, how much they earn, where they shop and how much they spend there, and what barn they were born in.

I look at those reports and think…huh?

The first question that always comes to my mind is who tells some snoop anything, much less the truth?

If I were still voting in person — which I don’t, and can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would drive to a polling place and stand in line when the government will mail a ballot to you — the last thing on this earth I would do is say how I voted to someone who barged up and started asking nosy questions. Certainly I wouldn’t tell such a person how much I earn.

I respond to nosiness like this in two ways: either by declining to answer or by lying. And I’ll bet a fair number of other folks do the same.

If I have to come up with something for the privilege of getting a fair price on groceries, I’ll emit disinformation — Safeway, for example, thinks I’m a deceased German shepherd whose phone number happens to belong to the Phoenix Safeway corporate offices. Usually, though, I’ll shop somewhere else or decline the “price cuts” on offer — which amount to another way to raise prices and then claim they’re giving you something “on sale” when they charge the ordinary retail price.

Other times, I simply say, “I’m sorry, I don’t share my [telephone number, e-mail address, name of my first-born child] with retailers.”

If a pollster walked up to me outside a voting place, I would tell him to take a flying eff at the moon. There is no way I would answer questions like who did I vote for, what is my party affiliation, and how much do I earn.

Surely, the nature of the folks who would answer questions like this must skew poll results.

Would you answer any such questions? Truthfully?