The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Chapter 2 seemed a little short and its ending seemed a little abrupt… So I threw in chapter 3 of Ella’s Story. So, two chapters: today’s contribution to the ongoing round of FREE offerings of Fine Literature from Plain & Simple Press.
{Chortle!}
If you like this stuff and want to spread the word, would you go on over to the Plain & Simple Facebook page and “like” the page? Apparently that’s a lagniappe in the Facebook world.
Ever hear the classic circus theme song jingling as you confront yet another hilarious bureaucracy?
Of late, the Kid and I have been thinking about changing our little enterprise’s direction, away from working with individual journals and editors and toward government contracting. One of my spies in the real world asked if we would help with grant proposals for a nonprofit he directs, thereby causing a cash register to ring in the far, far distance. I had actually forgotten that in CE Desk’s previous incarnation, my business partner then — the late Phil Harrison, a bright light in the local marketing and “literary” scene — landed several juicy federal contracts for us. So long has it been, yes, that when we were canned from the Great Desert University I was so focused on the idea that we could simply continue to sell the service we were already providing that I didn’t even consider the possibility of resuscitating Phil’s approach.
Well, when the Kid heard about this, her ears perked right up. She started looking into it and realized we’re a woman-owned business and a totally small business and on and on, and then she got herself into the Federal Business Opportunities site, ran a couple of rudimentary searches, and lo! What should her eyes light upon but several jobs we could easily do.
I explained that these things are highly competitive; we could apply for ten and be lucky if we got one. She pointed out that since the Feds pay a fair rate (as opposed to what our current clients pay), if we landed just two contracts a year they would support us.
Yeah. So that’s what we’re looking at for 2018: hauling our little ship into a new wind.
LOL! This led to a reminder of WHY it is soooo good not to be working for a bloated bureaucracy.
To pull off the proposed shift in business plan, we will need to access databases available most conveniently at the Great Desert University (although I suspect we can get at them through the community colleges’ libraries, too). But I long ago lost my campus ID — required to use the libraries — and so didn’t have the retiree’s convenient version thereof. So the plan was to drive out to the nearest branch campus today, park for free in a credit union space, walk into the CU, extract a pocketful of cash, and then fly as fast as I can to get my picture re-taken and retrieve another piece of plastic to carry around.
Before leaving the house, I called GDU to find out where the desired bureaucratic office was. “In the ‘Welcome Center,’” said the underling who answered. Found two maps of the branch campus, neither of which gave a clue to the whereabouts of a “Welcome Center.” Called the office that dispenses these cards at said campus and reached (of course) a number on the main campus, whose proprietor informed me it was in the same building as the credit union. She thought. She connected me to the office itself, where a woman said it was in the same building as the credit union.
Convenient: makes it easy to cover up my little parking larceny.
Welp, the only other outfit sharing the building with the credit union is the parking authority. Bold as brass, I march in there, ask where the “Welcome Center” is, and am told by the kid at the desk that he doesn’t know but thinks it’s vaguely in the center of the campus. Having taught there many a year, I doubt that somehow.
I walk into the nursing office across the road and ask if they know where the “Welcome Center” is. A person there, very generous with her time, calls the main campus and gets a 15-minute telephone runaround. The best we can figure is that it IS the parking authority office.
So I hike back over there and find that the kid who told me to seek it somewhere in regions to the south IS himself the dispenser of Sun Cards! If I’d gone in the front door instead of the back door, I would have seen a sign on his desk to that effect; if I’d asked the right question (“Is this where I get a Sun Card,” not “Where is the ‘Welcome Center’”) I would have spared myself and my co-conspirator across the road that runaround.
He snaps my picture and generates the plastic. I ask if the university will take AMEX or if he needs Visa.
He says, “It’s free.”
I say, “They told me it was $25.” (Actually, one web page said it was $100.)
He says, “No, it’s free to retirees.”
I say, “Oooohhhhkayyyy,” smile engagingly, and shoot out the door before he or his boss can catch me.
😀 🙄 😀
As these shenanigans proceed, another SNAFU is under way at the credit union.
Yesterday after I return from the junket described above, WonderAccountant emails to say what’s this $1175 payment to Lilliput Mort?
“Huh?” I email back.
“It seems to be a recurring payment,” she returns.
She has downloaded 2017 credit union transactions for my personal and corporate accounts into QuickBooks and is trying to make enough sense out of them to fill out the requisite tax forms.
We study these phantom transactions and conclude that it’s some kind of fraud. I prepare to drive BACK up to the CU and alert them to whatever the phenomenon is, but point out to her that the electronic records I’ve downloaded myself — and presented to her in .csv format — do not contain any sign of these transactions, nor do the paper statements the CU sends.
Waaaaaitaminit… M’hijito and I have a joint account which he uses to collect funds for the mortgage payment on the downtown house. Could “Lilliput Mort” be some mortgage outfit to which the CU has sold his mortgage?
Now I break into that account and find, yea verily, he has been faithfully shelling out nearly twelve hundred dollah a month to some mortgage company in Lilliput.
When I report this to WonderAccountant, she realizes that somehow QuickBooks has engrossed the joint CU accounts along with my own, deciding — even though they’re clearly carried on the CU books as separate accounts — that they all most be one account owned by me.
Lovely.
So she went to work untangling that, eventually deciding to force QB to upload from the .csv files, a fairly simple procedure that (believe me!) is far from self-evident.
Time passes. Late last night in comes an e-mail from my son. “Did you withdraw $60 from my bank account?”
Huh? It is late. I am tired. The $60 figure sounds vaguely familiar, but why would I have raided his account? Whaaa?
It takes awhile, but finally it dawns on me: this is the amount I withdrew to create the illegal parking ruse.
I go into the shared account and see, yea verily, that figure has been withdrawn. I go into my account and see, nay verily, the CU flunky did NOT withdraw it from my checking account. She withdrew it from his account.
This, even though she had my debit card in hand!
So I had to transfer $60 out of my account into his. Which, of course, is why we created that joint account: to make it easy to transfer house-related funds back and forth. But…honest to God.
🙄 😀 🙄
News hunger! Several readers remarked happily when I mentioned some of my favorite news sites the other day. We Netizens have a bottomless pit of news and play-nooz sites from which to build our powerfully held opinions. So many of them do we have that it’s difficult to discern which are reliable, credible sources.
But lo! I have a list — in the form of FireFox’s list of all my bookmarks of news sites. From that, it’s fairly easy to generate a page showing some of the Web’s best places to keep abreast of current happenings. As I remarked the other day, NPR, PBS, and BBC are probably the best of the bunch, in terms of objectivity and intelligence. USA Today is also an excellent source of national and international news, with less pretension to high-browitude. The Christian Science Monitor, interestingly enough, is still a fine source of objective reportage.
As we know, some excellent reporting takes place at newspapers that have an editorial slant. Below, a few from the left and from the right. And given the presence of agenda reporting, it’s important to have a strong Bullshit Detector…or three. I use them all. Frequently.
Investigative reporting is expensive for an organization to underwrite and requires special skills. As a result, we hardly ever see it in local publications, and it has become fairly rare in national media. This is not good: investigative reporting is what the Fourth Estate is all about, and it is the reason freedom of the press is key to keeping America free. Fortunately, investigative reporters live on, largely supported by nonprofits and specialized groups.
And of course, our lives would not be complete without our daily dose of business and science reporting.
New York Times (paywall after limited number of views)
Washington Post (paywall after limited number of views)
Investigative Reporters & Editors
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Business Week (ad-blocker blocker)
Wall Street Journal (paywall)
Forbes (adblock blocker)
Smithsonian Magazine (paywall after limited number of views)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
One of these days (later!), I’ll list these links in a sidebar. So, watch this space…
All right, all right: where else, eh?
Costco.
To my astonishment, Costco carries some decent whole-bean coffees. Not great, but very much on the high side of acceptable. And the stuff is cheap beyond belief.
As you’ll recall, the really good stuff comes from “The Little Guy,”* my favorite local supplier, at $15 a pound — rather more than I care to pay on a regular basis. AJ’s, my former favorite supplier and gourmet grocery market, charges about $12 a pound, but they apparently changed suppliers a few months ago. The espresso is no longer an especially dark roast, and the quality of the bean itself is noticeably inferior to what it used to be. Whole Foods here quit selling bulk coffee. Sprouts’s bulk coffee is excruciatingly bad. Eventually I found an “organic” bulk coffee at the fancy Fry’s supermarket on the fringe of Richistan, where a pound goes for about nine bucks.
And that’s what I’ve been buying: it’s pretty good. Certainly not up to The Little Guy’s product. But more than good enough for gummint work.
The other day I was at Costco with some friends. They use one of those Keurig things, so we were in the coffee aisle looking for their preferred variety of pod. This was an exception for me, because I never go into the coffee aisle there, having been told that all the coffee at Costco is Starbucks.
I personally don’t care for Starbucks coffee. In my experience, it’s low-flavor plonk whose highest and best use is to serve as a medium into which to pour sugar, cream, and artificial flavors. Yuck! The only way to get a halfway decent cup of coffee at a Starbucks is to ask for a café Americano. That will elicit a brew that tastes approximately like a decent cup of restaurant coffee. Which ain’t sayin’ much, but it’s better than what they sell as regular “coffee.”
So anyway, we’re mucking around in the coffee aisle and I happen to notice they carry a “Kirkland” brand, which appears to be different from the bags of “Starbucks” that populate most of their shelves of whole beans. Hm. Read the label: it doesn’t say it’s produced by Starbucks…but that means nothing, since Costco tends to be secretive about its suppliers. And it’s only NINE BUCKS for a fine Costco lifetime supply! A vast, bottomless bag of dark-roast coffee beans beckons.
They also had a make labeled “San Francisco,” hard to resist with a name like that. But the Kirkland was cheaper . . . and . . . why not? It comes in a three-pound bag, enough to last me a month or so. Nine dollah isn’t enough to bankrupt me…if I hate it, I’ll just donate it to someone’s cause. Or…hell, it’s Costco: you can bring ANYTHING back. 🙂
Grabbed that. Turns out to be surprisingly good. Not as exquisite as The Little Guy’s, but very, very good. Better than the Fry’s organic dark roast. Significantly better than AJ’s. And light-years superior to Sprouts.
A month later, having consumed most of the Kirkland bag, I decided to try the “San Francisco” label. It also is pretty good. Not as good as the Kirkland dark roast, but highly creditable. About the same as Fry’s, I’d say. Better than AJ’s, better than Sprouts, surely better than Starbucks.
You can buy this stuff at Amazon, BTW, for a lot more than it costs in the store, and the natives seem to like it: Consumer reviews there range upwards of four stars. Then we have a guy who styles himself as a coffee expert: he loves the stuff. Whether that article is a paid post, I do not know…if it is, I hope he got paid plenty for it, because he goes all out in reviewing the Kirkland varieties. On the coffees I’ve tried, though, I have to say I’d agree with him.
WhatEVER. Give me upward of a month’s worth of decent whole-bean coffee, and you’ve bought my soul…
_____
*Not the store’s name. The affable proprietor was dubbed “The Little Guy” by SDXB within a week of the store’s opening. It’s a tiny coffeehouse in a Walmart shopping center situated on Gangbanger’s Way — draws its clientele from local retirees and from the medical staff at the huge urban medical center across the road.
WHY WordPress has kindly decided to reproduce November 4’s post in the sidebar, I do not know. A query is out to the Web guru. Meanwhile, stop that laughing!
Here’s an amusement: Whilst Amazon makes a grab for Whole Foods, cheapies down its offerings, and turns it into an order-out joint, Aldi is going in the opposite direction: Opening newer and fancier stores, spiffing up the existing properties, and targeting customers who prefer to buy their groceries in brick-and-mortar establishments.
Interesting development, isn’t it? Aldi, according to the report linked above, is betting the farm (heh!) on the proposition that most people would rather shop for groceries in person, especially where fresh products are concerned.
Though it’s a huge risk, it makes sense when viewed in some lights. Given the traditionally low profit margins in the grocery business (typically around 5 percent), dropping your margin to somewhere around 3 percent for the privilege of letting shoppers order online and have stuff delivered has a whiff of suicide about it.
Also, it’s reasonable to suspect that a large number of shoppers may prefer to buy in person, for a variety of reasons. Some may prefer brick-&-mortar shopping all the time; some may find it more convenient to pick up food on the fly some of the time — and they may prefer to do the picking up in a real supermarket with substantial offerings, not in a Circle K.
This may apply to the young and the techie as well as to us cranky old fossils. Last night, for example, my son invited me over for dinner. He kindly made us a pizza, but realized he was missing a couple of items and he didn’t have a bottle of wine. A ten-minute trip to the Fry’s Supermarket around the corner caused these items to materialize… We didn’t have to search for them online, and we didn’t have to wait hours or a day to have them delivered. Obviously, when you order online, someone has to find your items, package them, ship them, pick them up at the warehouse, drive them across the city, and deposit them at your doorstep. That isn’t going to happen in 15 or 20 minutes.
As for us old folks: we’ve been around the grocery-delivery block.
Some time ago, I decided to try ordering up a week’s worth of groceries from the local Safeway. How wonderful, I imagined, not to have to get in the car, traipse through the homicidal traffic, trudge through the store, stand in line to pay, drag the stuff out to the car, and drive back home through said homicidal traffic.
And online grocery shopping would be wonderful. If it worked.
It probably would indeed work for a certain kind of buyer. If you subsist mostly on restaurant food and, when at home, on processed, packaged food, door-to-door grocery delivery would no doubt be highly successful for you.
But if you’re into real foods, unprocessed foods, fresh foods: not so much. The problem is, grocery-store clerks haven’t a clue about selecting fresh fruits and vegetables. What I got when I made the ballyhooed delivery order was under-ripe tomatoes, over-ripe fruit, and wilted lettuce. They don’t eat that kind of stuff, and so they do not know how a fresh melon or a fresh bunch of asparagus is supposed to look.
Nor do they know how to select a decent cut of meat.
Consequently, what you get is not very good — certainly not worth the price you pay for it.
I think the growing popularity of “organic” foods suggests that a number of people — maybe a lot of people — do care about the quality of the food they consume. And possibly that a larger number than you might expect prepare food in their homes.
My son for example, can make a pizza that you simply cannot buy at any pizzeria or grocery counter. Why would he want (for example) a random bag of soggy mushrooms delivered when he’s building a really first-rate meal?
It’ll be interesting to see what develops.
Meanwhile, while we’re watching: what’s your preference in grocery-shopping: on-line or in person?