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Scams & crooks

Another Day, Another Little Cri$i$

by

Homeownership: The Continuing Adventure. What a joy!

Tuesday, June 18

Today’s frolic is a busted door lock. A new workman. A pile of new bills.

Yes. The back door lock jammed. Got it unjammed, but in the process busted the door knob. This made it impossible to secure the door closed.

Fortunately, all the house’s exterior doors are double-secured with heavy-duty steel security doors, locked with heavy-duty monster locks. So: no problem with the local burglars.

The  problem is getting the damn thing fixed.

Called my favorite lock company. Along about mid-afternoon, their guy showed up. Dorked around a bit with the mess: the whole doorknob set had fallen off in the course of my fiddling with it.

So. Yeah. Now he’s ordered a new lockset. He’ll be back to install it whenever the hell it comes in. Ducky.

Good thing, eh, that this neighborhood is such a sh!t-show that all exterior doors need to be graced with them thar heavy-duty steel doors. Otherwise the dawg and I would have to go somewhere else to spend the night. Yes, Virginia: that IS how unsafe it would be to spend a night here without lockable steel screen doors.

Isn’t this cute? WordPress seems to have dropped the feature that lets you enter a color for passages of your font. So that does a number on my habit of using red type as an accent for FaM posts. Ducky.

*********

Wednesday, June 19

Jeez. Never did get this posted. But I did (re-)figure out how to enter colored type. That’s somethin’. I guess.

A fine series of catastrophes has ensued since last I scribbled here.

Just now my car sits in the garage, basically undriveable. I think I can get it started (haven’t tried). If so, it goes straight to the Goodyear garage. If not, I’ll have to walk up there, a 15-minute hike through the humid heat, dodging creeps every inch of the way.

boyoboy, i can hardly wait.

Welp, one nice thing about it is that this pre-empts the proposed journey to Sun City, there to do battle over my parents’ ashes.

Under the best of circumstances, that would be something I do NOT wanna do. With a car that may just barely be limping along, that journey is officially out of the question.

****

The most colorful of our adventures struck in the middle of the night. Along about two or three in the morning, the car’s horn started to blare.

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

ON AND BLASTINGLY ON…

…and I couldn’t turn it off!

My garage is right next to my neighbor’s bedroom. So that meant this serenade was slamming her awake even more colorfully than it was blowing me out of the sack.

Finally, after about 45 minutes of this, I managed to shut it down. How, I do not know. No clue why it finally went off…unless it broke the horn altogether.

Evidently, it’s some kind of vandalism. But how the midnight creeps did it, I do not know. This morning I took it by the Goodyear garage up on the corner.

They didn’t have a clue.

Took it over to the Toyota place this noon. They didn’t know, either.

No way could anybody have gotten into the garage. So whatever they did, they accomplished it remotely.

Hope it doesn’t happen again tonight. If it does, I dunno what I’ll do.

There is a police station up in Sunnyslop — not one that’s easy to access. And there’s a fire station down south on one of the main drags. If it starts again tonight, I guess I’ll have to drive to one of those places and see if a manly type there can shut it off.

And now to our moment at hand…

One ringie-dingie

Two ringie-dingies

Three ringie-dingies

Caller ID: “Spam”

Pick up the effing phone.

* And what would you want, Spam?

* Uhhhh…heh….

* GET OFF MY F***ING PHONE AND STAY OFF MY F***ING PHONE!

Man! Am I sick of the goddamned phone solicitors!!!!

Seriously: phone solicitation ought to be against the law. What a f***in’ NUISANCE!

****

…and…

GAAAAAHHHHH!

****

Wonder-Cleaning Lady has apparently — once again — deep-sixed the window squeegee.

She seems to have hand-washed (call that “hand-smeared”) the west-facing Arcadia door. What a mess!

So I go to get some paper towels and the squeegeee and the window cleaner and…

and…

and…

NOPE!

No squeegee, anyplace to be found!

DAMMIT! This is the second time she’s done that.

But WHY does she do it? Why not just tell me that the damned squeegee wore out?

Tried to clean the window with Windex and paper towels. Got approximately 10 feet x 12 feet of smeared glass.

{sigh}

I should get off my duff and go get another squeegee right now, shouldn’t I?

Wonder if Albertson’s carries them…

DARN it, I don’t want to go out into the traffic (again!) in a no doubt futile trip to buy a squeegee. Guess I should order it from Amazon, eh?

Hmmmm… Six bucks, plus delivery charges.

On the other hand, come to think of it…the last thing I ordered from Amazon — a bottle opener — has never showed up.

I think what’s happening is they’re delivering packages to the wrong address. We have two streets by the same name here, running parallel: Erewhon LANE and Erewhon WAY. Delivery and service folks get them confused all the time. For Amazon, I add to my address in ALL CAPS “Erewhon WAY, not Lane!”

Guess if you could read, you’d have a better job than trundling around delivering packages.

Actually, that’s not fair. The porch pirates here actually follow delivery trucks. Stop in front of the mark’s house. Jump out of their car. Run up to the door. Grab the package. Run back to their car. Drive off after the truck.

One of the neighbors, a techie guy who delights in gadgetry, set up cameras at his front door and caught this caper in action. So…that’s probably what happened here.

Well, I’d better get off my duff. Now I need both a squeegee AND a bottle opener.

And so…{grrowwwllll} AWAYYYYY!

WTF??????

by

An afternoon from Hell brought me home, through 40 minutes of cut-throat traffic, to a glass of wine, a wooden rolling chair in front of an uncomfortable desk, and — when I went to sign in to FaM’s dashboard — a frantic warning that Funny’s website has been phished and it was unsafe for me to proceed.

Sumbiche!

Well, here we are anyway, and honi soit qui mal y pense.

What.

A.

Day.

Started out with my son, who has arrogated communications with the Mayo Clinic unto himself, surfacing to emcee an online appointment with my doctor out there. That was actually fairly benign — much more so than I feared. So we chatted with the lovely, brilliant lady doc, mulled over how we can get some legal hoop-jumps done (a task made far more difficult by the recent demise of my beloved lawyer), and generally wasted time.

Speaking of wasting time, a few days ago I was talked into driving way to Hell-and-gone out to the Mayo’s Scottsdale clinic to join a hand-holding group of patients who are coping with the vicissitudes of senility.

Yes. I spent FORTY MINUTES on the road EACH WAY for the privilege of listening to a bunch of duffers reporting that they can’t remember things.

Right.

And yes. That is EIGHTY minutes round-trip, plus an hour of hot-air time. Jayzuz!

***

Meanwhile, my beloved laptop crashed. A service contract with Best Buy, then, landed the contraption in that fine store’s precincts.

This morning, in comes a call from Best Buy telling me the computer is fixed and ready to pick up. So…this afternoon, after some of the other dust has settled, I jump in my car and fight my way through Phoenix’s lovely surface-street traffic, over to Best Buy.

Get parked. Bound into the Store. Get in line. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand….  Finally get up to the repair desk.

“You called to say my laptop is ready.”

“Huh?“

The guy denied having any clue that the computer was fixed and ready to pick up.

No…kidding.

So I was only slightly furious. Trudge back out to the car. By that point it’s after 4 p.m. Rush hour is in full, rabid swing.

And now here we are: I’m perched at (horrors!) an actual desk typing on an actual desktop computer and…and…grrrrrrrr…and I’m so tired I can hardly think. As you no doubt can guess from the quality of this copy…

Mean-meanwhile: seeking a lawyer for a lawsuit I may have to pursue. More about that later… It doesn’t look promising.

Here’s a fine drawback to gettin’ old: All the professionals and all the business people you’re used to working with have either RETIRED or DIED. Yes. All of them Sooooo… Now you have to try to find new lawyers, new doctors, new car repairmen, new computer techs, new…god help us all, dammit!

GRONK!!

by

Not to say “LOL”!

After a day of bopping around town, bouncing from here to the Mayo (halfway to freakin’ Payson) through the tract-house neighborhood where my son’s pals used to live to a thissa and a thatta…really, I don’t even remember!…Finally got home. So, so melodramatically tired.

One of the stops was a grocery store. Another was a Sprouts…which I s’ppose is a grocery store. Into the house with a fistful of eatin’ cheese and a bunch of food for lunch/dinner. Don’t recall what all that was, ’cause I’m too tired to remember it. Schlep and schlep and schlep…finally get home. So, soooo tired: just want to lay down.

Thinking about my mother, middle age coming on her as I reached my early teens.

In California, she took it into her head to become a real estate saleswoman. Quite possibly not one of the wiser choices she could have made.

But I suppose it was no worse than her career in door-to-door Avon Cosmetics sales.

Yah. No kidding. She did love make-up, and so in a weird pre-liberation era way, it made a kinda sense.

Another disaster for my father to laugh at and to mock. 😮

So now she goes out and she gets herself a real estate license. She goes to work for some woman who has befriended her, presumably so she (“friend”) can leave the amateur saleslady sitting on open houses while she — the REAL real estate salesperson — bops about town at will.

Before long, the erstwhile business partner decided…YES!!! THE FUTURE WAS AT THE SALTON SEA!

This boondoggle — a scam that promised to transform a wide spot in the road next to a stinky, stagnant pond in the middle of California’s hottest, most barren desert — led my mother to destroy my father’s new Mercury. When she drove that swell brand-new car through a sandstorm outside of Palm Springs, the wind literally scoured the paint off the hood and front end — all the way down to the bare metal.

You can imagine how impressed my father was. He was going to sea at the time, so by & large wasn’t home to put the eefus on her entrepreneurial efforts.

***

BING BONG!!!!

***

Bing bong? WTF? Who’s out front at three in the afternoon?

Aaaaahhh jeeez! It’s Wonder-Cleaning Lady. Just as I was about to lay my head down on a pillow…

Ugh! I can barely hold my eyes open. Much less figure out where the money I need to pay her is stashed. Or whether I need to go out and cash a check.

So much for that reverie.

BUT…on the subject of little old ladies and Realtor’s licenses…

I’ve taken the reeel estate course that’s supposed to prepare you to pass that exam. I’d need to review it…but it could be done. And…and…

Well: Here’s th’thing:

If I passed the state Realtor’s exam, then in theory I could get a job selling real estate in some local office. Or…FAR more to the point: it would be easy to persuade a local editor that he oughta hire me to cover the real estate beat. And that could be fun.

Truth to tell, I enjoy real estate: find the whole proposition highly entertaining. So I would enjoy interviewing people and tracking down story ideas and writing copy for local and regional rags. In fact, I used to write for a (now defunct) national real-estate magazine, inspiringly titled Real Estate Salesperson, as well as filling up pages of local newspapers with similar maunderings.

*****

And now a day has passed. Apparently in the commotion that accompanies house-cleaning, I forgot to post this squib.

Ohhh well!

The house is clean. I’ve developed a new and highly uncomfortable li’l ailment that’s had me trotting back and forth to the ER. Nothing much is helping it. Already had an appointment with MayoDoc set up for Friday, so that will be an issue to inflict on her. Goodie…life is grand, eh?

So there!!!

by

LOL! The latest set of exterior decorations is now mounted on the front gates and doors.

😀

Gawdlmighty, i’m sooooo obnxious, even I think it’s funny!

Probably just like your neighborhood, the Funny Farm’s ‘hood is overrun with nuisance door-to-door solicitors. Some of these folks are peddling junk; others are trying to get signatures on petitions. Sooooo…it’s ringy-dingy-bingy-bong at the damn front door, practically every day. Dawn to dusk.

A year or so ago, I got the bright idea of putting up signs saying, in effect, “Please don’t ring the doorbell. No Solicitation.”

As you know, these normally have little effect on the legions of nuisances. Sooo…I decided to make the message a little stronger.

On side gate to the front patio:

PLEASE NO SOLICITING!

We’re not interested in what you’re selling.
We’re not interested in your political campaign.
We have already signed your petition, or decided not to.
DO NOT PESTER BY JANGLING THE DOORBELL, PLEASE!

AMAZON * UPS
Please leave packages inside the patio, next to the front door.
Welcome to Porch Pirate Heaven!

On the front gate to the same patio and on the same side gate to that patio:

AMAZON:
Please leave packages inside the patio, next to the front door.
Welcome to Porch Pirate Heaven!

 

On the security screen at the front door:

NO SOLICITING
****
NO PETITIONS
****
Please!!!!!!!!!

Interestingly, this barrage of messages works!

LOL! As you may gather, these people are almost as pesky as phone solicitors. So a sign that says PRIVATE does exactly no good. And about 10% of them ignore “NO SOLICITING” SIGNS. But apparently beating the sleazes about the head and shoulders with your message gets through to most of them.

Now. If you could only do that with the phone….

Heh… Our neighborhood techno-guru, Will, set up a video system at his front door. So…he can and does capture the antics that happen in front of his house, when Amazon and UPS trucks turn up with thieves’ cars in tow. There’s one woman, in particular, who follows the Amazon truck around in her car, waits till the delivery dude drives off, jumps out of her car and grabs the delivered packages, runs back to her car, tosses them into the back seat, and takes off down the road after the Amazon guy.

Is Amazon Guy aware of this? Could they be in cahoots?

Hm.

As likely as not, I’d say. You’d think after awhile he’d notice he’s being followed. But…it’s gotta be a mind-numbing job. Maybe, just maybe he really doesn’t notice.

Anything’s possible. I guess.

At any rate, for the nonce the “no soliciting, no petitions” message is working. Now…if only I could make that work on the phone!

Struggling Along…

by

Wow! When they say the Land of Old Age ain’t for kids, they aren’t kidding! What a horror show the past few weeks have been.

And…no end seems to be in sight, except for the obvious one.

It’s not like gettin’ old isn’t bad enough in itself: you’re sick all the time, under siege from doctors who want to inflict treatments that are probably pointless, and the ordinary tasks of daily life come to feel like more than you can cope with.

And, speaking of “under siege,” you literally are under siege from every scam artist on the planet.

Apparently they figure that as your faculties fade, so does your skill at dodging crooks. And…they’re probably right. These lists appear to be pretty readily available to anyone who’s willing to pay a few bucks for them. There’s this, for example: for $325 cash on the barrelhead, any scammer on the planet can get access to phone numbers from some 52 million old folks. Conveniently organized by categories such as “pet owners,” “religion,” “gender,” “auto owners,” “new movers” — on and on and on — these things hand you over to the hustlers. No wonder the phone jangles every day!

I’ve had to block numbers from entire area codes. This is fine (sorta) when the area codes are in Los Angeles and waypoints, where I don’t know anyone and don’t do business. But the ba*tards spoof local area codes, trying to trick you into thinking their noxious advertising and scamming calls are from neighbors or local businesses. The Phoenix area, which prides itself in aping LA’s endless sprawl, has three area codes. Since I no longer work in the East Valley nor do I still have much of a social life, I’ve blocked two of them.

This prevents people in the East Valley and the West Valley from calling me. Only problem: my dermatologist’s office is on the west side and the Mayo is on the east side. Neither of these worthy outfits can reach me on the phone.

Same is true for certain friends who use only cell phones. One of my dearest friends has canceled her land line and uses only a cell phone…which has a banned area code. To get in touch, she has to email me.

I did try the strategy of BLASTING phone solicitors with the loudest, most eardrum-shattering noise you can come up with. Rather than carry an airhorn around the house all the time, I’ve found that SCREAMING into the phone as loud as you can, at the top of your voice, seems to get you on the pests’ do-not-call lists.

You shriek:

G-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A!!!!!!!!!!

It does seem to work, at least to a degree. In the weeks since I’ve started this li’l strategy, the nuisance calls have dropped from eight or ten a day — starting as dawn cracks! — to maybe one or two.

And speaking of BLASTING….

M’jito is dragging me to the Mayo next Monday, pretty much over my dead body, to be subjected to an MRI of my brain.

This entails sticking you inside a metal tube and BLASTING EXTREMELY LOUD NOISE into your ears. It sounds absolutely unholy. Apparently some people completely freak out from this “exam,” a procedure for which the term “torture” sounds a lot more appropriate.

And it also seems to me to be utterly unnecessary. Why subject a person to a test to prove…what? That you can barely remember your name, after you’ve told the dear doctors repeatedly that you can barely remember your name?

Well. You and I have a fair idea of why. It’s spelled $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$….

I do not want to be subjected to this. But he has threatened to have me declared incompetent if I refuse to submit.

Whether he could actually get away with this is unknown to me. But what IS known is that if he tries it, he will end our relationship forever and aye.

Since I don’t relish being permanently alienated from him, I’m going along with the torture scheme. But if I’m right and nothing is wrong with my brain (!!!!!), this will be the LAST time I go along to get along when someone demands that I subject myself to anything I don’t want to be subjected to.

Airplanes are roaring away outside: r-r-r-r-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-m-b-le …hour after hour of it. Apparently it’s coming from Sky Harbor: they must have changed the morning flight patterns. What a racket!

My mother actually used to enjoy the sound of fighter jets practicing take-offs and landings at Luke Air Force Base. The locals in Sun City got blasted with that gawdawful racket every morning. She would sit on the back porch, serenaded as she had her first coffee of the day. “The sound of freedom,” she called it.

Uh huh. And coming from Sky Harbor, what we call it is “the sound of cash.”

It pretty much obviates the scheme to move to Fountain Hills. Planes flying into Sky Harbor at dinner time and out of Sky Harbor at breakfast time BLAST YOU OUT OF YOUR SEAT if you dare to sit on the back porch to enjoy your coffee. And the houses out there are built so flimsily, that they barely block the noise even if you stay inside with all the doors and windows shut.

***********

And…speaking phones ringing at the crack of dawn: RINGY DINGY DINGY!

Pick up the phone, ready to blast the solicitor.

Nope: it’s the plumber. He’s sending his son over to dig up and repair the back yard’s leaking irrigation system.

Goodie. Nothing like a little chaos — preferably expensive chaos — to make your day.

NOT a nice person…

by

Nope. Nooo, I’m surely not a nice lady. Not if you judge by this afternoon’s antic.

Need to go to the credit union. Actually, this visit is overdue, and I really, really need to schlep way to Hell and gone across the west side to the CU’s office;

bang around bang around bang around bang around, collect all the junk to take over there, pile it in the car, lock up the dawg, back out of the garage, back out back out ba…waitaminit…

Whozzat guy?

Yeah. Some guy is out in front. He’s not a neighbor that I recognize. That doesn’t mean he’s not a neighbor. Only that I haven’t seen him before.

He walks eastward from the westerly corner toward our easterly end of the block. Turns around, walks back westerly again. He goes up to the front door of a house in that direction. But he doesn’t do anything: doesn’t knock on the door, doesn’t ring the doorbell, doesn’t pull out a key and stick it a lock. Huh uh.

He just stands there for a minute, then turns around and continues to walk up in our direction.

In the department of huh uh!, I don’t want this guy to see me pull out of the garage and cruise off down the road.

But DAMMIT, do I ever need to get to that credit union! Cruise toward the intersection with Conduit of Blight.

Think…nope.

nope nope nope… 

Pull a U-ie, come on back to the Funny Farm. He makes a half-hearted sally toward another front door, then, as I cruise back to my house and back into my driveway, turns around and heads in the direction that he came from.

Park in the garage. Close the door. Stalk inside and pour half a glass of wine. Take up a position in the front courtyard, with the Killer Corgi at hand. Think ohhhh sheee-ut how paranoid CAN a city-dweller get? 

Ruby barks at the kids in Tony’s institution.

The kids across the other street take up a game of basketball-tossing, always a delight.

Ruby ambles indoors.

Tom — Mr. WonderAccountant — comes home and parks his truck in his driveway, across the street.

My wine-glass is still half-full.

Should I ask Mr. WA to keep an eye on the Funny Farm whilst I make a run on the credit union?

How can I count the ways…not?

It’s a gorgeous afternoon.

I decide to avail myself of a beautiful day and a grand kid with a basketball and a fierce little dog and — especially — a glass of wine and a few slices of fancy cheese.

Why does this make me feel like a sh!t?

Well…

Because… Zat guy is a black man. Yea verily, a handsome black man. Yea verily, a radically middle-class-looking black man. But nay verily, not a gent of any color or ethnic persuasion that I’ve seen anywhere near that neighbor’s house.

Yep. He’s prob’ly harmless.

Ayup;. He’s probably a brother-in-law of one of the residents.

But…{sigh} Nope: I absolutely positively do NOT want this guy to see me drive off down the street leaving the garage empty. Nope.

Arrrrrghhhhh!

Would I have felt that way if he were white or Latino?

Possibly not. Surely not if he were white: I would have recognized him as not a neighbor. If he were Latino: I would have regarded him as possibly a neighbor but I don’t think so because I happen to enjoy Latinos and Latino culture and so I would have come to know him, at least to some degree, by now.

Friday: SO MUCH stuff I needed to get done while banging around this afternoon. Dayum!

At least half of it won’t get done. The other half — computer PITAs — can get done tomorrow, on top of a cruise toward the other side of town.

Next Monday: today’s PITA will remain to be addressed.

Life in the 21st century….