Coffee heat rising

Scams & crooks

Lazy, Hazy, Gauzy Day of Summer

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Well: Day of Spring: it’s only April. But in Arizona, the weather will be summerish by most region’s standards.

What a strange and gorgeous day. Lovely, balmy temperature beneath high, soft gray clouds.

Normally, Ruby and I would have taken off for the park by now. But I’ve spavined a hip, so she and I loaf. She has taken over the foot of the bed, and I’ve repaired to a pile of pillows. What could be better, eh?

A-a-a-n-d…as we scribble, in comes another fake email under a friend’s name. At least two dozen of these have hit my in-box over the past year or two. She’s a fellow volunteer at the church — or was a “fellow” while I was still doing that. Dropped out of the choir and the church phone-answering job when my son started dragging me to the Mayo every Sunday morning: the end of a fun activity and the loss of a bunch of friendly associates.

ohhhh well. Anyway, I haven’t been able to shake the scamming emails, no matter what I do to try to block them. Just now, dozens of these reside on my in-box…it’s gonna take an hour or two to delete them all. What a damn nuisance!

Better get to work on that….

Here’s another one, claiming an auto-payment to Cox will be made…in the amount of $115.

Oh, yeah?  I don’t normally do auto-pays, for obvious reasons. So…scam or no scam? Do I really have to call Cox today and navigate their nuisance-y system to find out WTF this is?  And if it is a scam, how did they get my payment data???

And why would Cox be gouging me for $115, when I don’t make long-distance calls?

Godlmighty, am I sick of this stuff!!!!!!!

G*d-D***ed PHONE

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Y’know, I’m just about at the point where I can imagine not having a phone at all. Not ANY phone!

These days a phone — especially a land line — is more of a nuisance than a convenience. This morning the f*kin land line jangled for the third time — BEFORE 9:00 A.M.! — with a**holes trying to hustle me. Last time, I took a DEEEEEP breath and SHRIEKED INTO THE GODDAM PHONE as loud as I could manage:

G-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-H…..

The convicts hired to hustle you over the phone are wearing headphones.

So when you SCREAM into the phone at the top of your voice, that actually hurts the bastards’ ears. And interestingly, the SHRIEK-a-thon technique has cut the number of pestering nuisance calls. Quite a lot: I’d say by about 80 percent.

Telephone soliciting should be against the law.

But that would put a dent in our “freedom of speech,” right? Free to bug you and me….

Seriously, though: if you blast each ba*tard who calls with the loudest noise you can muster, that DOES bite into the flood of phone solicitations. An air horn would do the job, if screaming is not your preference.

Many of the jerks calling you in the early hours of the day (and all the rest of the hours…) are calling from inside prisons.

Yes. Phone soliciting is a prison enterprise. Check it out: just google phone soliciting prison industry, and you learn all about a gigantic scam tailored for convicted scammers and other criminals.

Hey…you’ve got a crew of crooks. Why not put ’em to work doing what they do best?

Go-o-o-d Morning, America!

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Just back from a mile-plus peregrination of the ‘Hood, dragged along by my furry boss. How can I count the ways I just wanna sit down and swill a cup of coffee?

Stumble over to the easy chair. Flop down in it. And…

RINGY-DINGY-DINGY!

Goddamned phone. A Goddamned phone solicitor on the other end.

I tell him where to make his next phone call and slam down the receiver.

Honest to Gawd. Phone soliciting should be illegal. Seriously: I realize it’s “freedom of speech” and all. But shouldn’t the rest of us have something like “freedom of privacy” or “freedom of peace and quiet”?

***

The neighborhood park is so lovely! I adore this area. Beautiful, quiet, upscale, affluent, right in the middle of everything

O’course it ain’t perfect. Right across the street from the park stands a house whose occupants fled after a pair of home invaders barged in, grabbed them, tied them up, threw them in the bathtub, and proceeded to loot the house.

So. If you live here…yeah: you keep your doors locked all the time. And you do NOT answer the door unless you know who’s on the other side and what they want.

But then…come ON! No place is safe. Just the other day some sh!thead barged into a madly upscale home in Fountain Hills, a mighty swell dive. And I’ll tellya: before that happened, I would have said Fountain Hills is as staid and secure as you can get, this side of Sun City.

My mother, who was scared of her own shadow, cowered in terror all the time she lived in Sun City. She dwelt behind heavily locked doors and windows. And yet…really…she was less terrorized out there than anywhere else we lived.

Something must have happened to her. If it did, she never told me. But really: you wouldn’t act like that unless you had some reason to be scared.

Me, I find the company of a dog amply reassuring. Ruby is no German shepherd (not by a long shot!). But she does alert whenever anyone comes around.

And really, that’s about all a dog can do for you. You’re the one who has to take care of yourself: get to a safe place, grab your pistol, call the cops, whatEVER.

Ruby: the four-legged burglar alarm.
😀

UN-Be-LIEV-able!

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Literally unbelievable, as it happens today.

This afternoon, in came a hustling piece of snail-mail, trying to get me to Send Money Now and HURRY to sign up for that wondrous product. It looked like BS to me…sort of. But..but…sort of NOT.

Actually, it seemed to be trying to say my homeowner’s insurance is expiring and I need to renew a policy…right now!

Fortunately, the WonderAccountants were home. They live right across the street.

So I took the wad of paper over there. They looked at it and shortly decided it was a scam. Out with it!

Actually, it took them a few minutes of studying the thing to come to that conclusion. You can be sure that if they were given pause, I would never have been able to figure out that it was a scam.

Lordie! This stuff just comes avalanching in on us! When you need a professional to assess the validity of a piece of junk mail…ohhhh gawd! What kind of world DO we live in???

What incredible luck that those two wonderful folks moved into the house across the road! They’ve saved my tail feathers more than once!

Morning Has Broken…

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Like the first day…
Blackbird has spoken,
Like the first bird…

Actually, we don’t have blackbirds here in the lovely Sonoran desert. We have telephone solicitors.

The ba*tards start calling you as dawn cracks. Ringy-dingy-dingy Ringy dingy dingy ringy…. If you have any fantasy about sleeping in, fuhgeddaboudit!

We’re told phone soliciting is a prison industry. Apparently, a large portion of these nuisance phone calls are coming from convicts, placed from inside local and regional prisons. Makes you wanna just hurry right out and buy whatever they’re peddling, right?

I used to blast a horn into the phone whenever the ba*tards would jangle me up. Now…well..that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. And really: if the job is being done by people who are forced to it by their prison guards, I suppose it’s not every nice to try to blow out their eardrums.

I suppose.

On the other hand, it’s not very nice to jangle me out of bed by dawn’s early light, either.

I’d disconnect the phone at night, if I felt safe doing so. But…I don’t. I’m here by myself, and if anything happens that I need to call 911, then…yeah: I’ll NEED to call 911. Now, not after fiddling indefinitely with the damn phone.

What a gorgeous morning!! 

Guess Ruby and I had better head out on our morning walk, before the day heats up. And so…

A-WAAAAYYY

Nothin’ Better to Do….

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Jeez. Can you imagine? The locals have got nothin’ better to do than to sneak onto my front porch and steal my bird feeders!  They did it again this afternoon.

What bastards!

Welp: after this, the birds will have to repair to the back yard — behind locked, six-foot-high gates — to snack on their birdseed and their hummingbird juice.  Guess I could booby-trap the front patio with cameras…but really…. That does seem like it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Literally: even if I catch them in the act, the cops aren’t likely to do much (or anything) about it. Like there weren’t better things to fill a police officer’s time?

It’s stupid and it’s petty. But it sure pisses me off!