Coffee heat rising

A “Gift” from Sears

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Lenten thanks, Day 29

A gray morning; a soft soaking rain falls from the sky. Blossoming plants shiver with joy at the last good drink of fresh rainwater before the blast of summer comes up. Not bad, God! Definitely an A+.

So some time back M’hijito needed a new dryer. Since he pays cash for everything, we put it on my AMEX card so I could rack up a little more in the annual rebate kickback, and he forked over the dollars to me. Sears’s come-on to buy appliances just then was an $80 mail-in rebate offer.

I always figure those are a rip. “Mail-in rebate” too often means “no rebate”: even when you remember to gather all the ditzy pieces of paper required, fill out a form asking for information that’s none of their business, and stuff it all into an envelope, half the time you never get any money back. But nothing ventured, nothing gained: shortly after we acquired the dryer, I shipped off the paperwork. That was several months ago.

Now comes in the mail from Sears the rebate…in the form of a debit card! It’s a preloaded Mastercard debit card.

No cash. Noooo….  You’re expected not to drop the money in your savings, but to diddle it away at restaurants and the like. You can transfer the money to your bank account, but this requires you to go online and share all the details of your bank account with Citibank’s Visa employees. You can get cash off the card, but only if you use an approved ATM. If you don’t use ATMs (as those of us for whom cash washes through the fingers like water tend not to do), you’ll just have to spend it.

Okay. So it’s M’hijito’s birthday. I figure $40 apiece would buy us a very nice dinner at a much tonier greasy spoon than we are accustomed to frequenting, and I propose to invite him out to celebrate.

Then I start to look at the swath of fine print that comes with this thing.

It has a $3.00 “account management fee,” which kicks in if you don’t start using the thing. If you use the it outside the U.S.—say in Nogales, a 90-minute drive from here—you get dinged 3% per transaction. If you have not used up the money by the expiration date, they apply a $3.00/month gouge. You are limited to a maximum of 12 transactions a day (“or your daily limit,” whatever that is). To find out what “your daily limit” of transactions is, you have to log onto their website, whose URL is not given. Under the federal anti-terrorism laws, you are required to give them your correct name, correct address, and correct telephone number. They will share this information and any other personal information they gather with whomever they please unless you fill out a separate form, put it in a separate envelope (which you supply) with a separate stamp (which you supply), and mail it off.

It is an “account.” You can reload this card with cash by depositing money with Citibank, and from now until the end of time can pay for junk with plastic. For a fee.

So, I wonder…if they nick you three bucks every time you turn around and this thing is an open “account,” presumably they’re going to start charging you a bank fee of $3 a month whenever it runs out of cash? And it’ll be quite a trick to figure out how much cash is on the thing, right? Because you’ll never know exactly what day of the month they decide to engross three bucks out of this “rebate” gift. And am I right in thinking that effectively Sears has set up a bank account for me, which I have not asked for, at an institution with which I do not choose to do business?

😯

Looking this gift horse in the mouth, I call the number on the card and after just one runaround reach one Duane, a human. When I ask how the $3 nick works and how I go about canceling this thing as soon as I can spend the $80 so generously “given” to me, he admits that on request they’ll send me a check. Great, say I: please do send a check.

Supposedly this vast lucre will show up in the mail sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’ll believe it when I see it.

😀

Really, I do dislike mail-in rebates. They’re such a nuisance. And this new twist is plain annoying. What’s difficult about just sending the money in the first place? Or better yet: How’s about giving customers a fair price in the store, rather than making us jump through hoops to shave off a few bucks?

 

A Concatenation of Fools

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Lenten thanks, Day 28

Well, it was very kind of God to allow me to be born at the apogee of America’s influence and standard of living. But…contemplating the future for our children and grandchildren as we watch our country self-destruct is kinda sad.

The Republicans and their Tea Party infiltrators have dug their heels in the sand and are, no doubt joyously, awaiting the shut-down of the United States government.

Today’s AZFamily news website quotes one of our Republican senators, Jon Kyl, as saying “he believes his party is being reasonable and the other party is not.” Meanwhile the Miami Herald reports that “Republicans have not yielded on their bid to bar federal money from going to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a favorite target of anti-abortion lawmakers because it provides abortion-related services.”

A message to Jon Kyl’s robot pacifier for his constituents:

No, Mr. Kyl, your party is NOT being reasonable. Shutting down the federal government because a bunch of extremists think a woman’s right to decide what she will do with her own body should be rescinded is not reasonable. A party increasingly dominated by those who think all government is evil and that we should cut all public services is a misguided bunch of fools.

What we’re seeing here is the worst kind of blockheaded demagoguery. As a voter, I am sick and tired of watching this revolting sideshow.

In a way, I hope you do succeed in shutting down the government. And please: do keep it shut down for a good long time.

This will make it clear to the 800,000 people you are about to put out of work what your policies will do to this country. It will make it clear to every vacationer and every well-heeled foreign tourist who’s already paid heaven only knows how much to travel to spend time in a national park, only to find the public lands closed down. It will make it clear to every contractor who does business with the federal government, and to every employee of those contractors. It will make it clear to every business that supplies those contractors, and to every employee of all those businesses. It will make it clear to every supplier of products and services to the federal government, and to every employee of those suppliers.

And maybe, finally, when their own oxen are gored, the voters of this country will figure out what’s wrong with the Party of No.

Don’t agree? Fine. Let us agree to disagree. Go here to write to your elected representatives. And by all means…urge them to shut the place down. Please! 😉

Found Treasure: Fancy frying pans and how to care for them

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Lenten Day thanks, Day 27

Thanks to God for the lovely gentle rain She blessed us with last night. The air is cool and clean, and this morning all the flowers are shivering with plant joy.

So I was mulling over the All-Clad Frying pan issue, Frugal Scholar having triggered a certain amount of coveting with her discussion of the treasured gourmet cookware and its worthy alternatives. Way in the back of the vast cabinet under the stovetop, I had stashed a pan I’d picked up at an estate sale. A ten-inch stainless pan, just the size of the nonstick Cuisinart that’s about seen its duty and done it.

After I’d bought this thing, I’d thought how can I put my old friend down? Sentimental about a frying pan…think of that! And then instead of putting the new-to-me stainless pan to immediate use, I stashed it and kept on using the tired Cuisinart.

Well, yesterday I pulled that stainless pan out of the back of the cupboard, and what should I discover? Lo! It is an All-Clad!

It looks practically brand-new, but apparently its former owner was one of the ninnies who posts rants at Amazon to the effect that food sticks on the stainless because they don’t know how to cook in a real pan. It has some scratches on the inside as though somebody had scoured it with steel wool, and the bottom looks bunged-up a bit, as though it had been scraped back and forth on a metal burner. But it’s not badly damaged…I think it’s more than serviceable.

We’ll find out soon, ’cause I’m going to try it at the next opportunity. Not just this minute though: I’m still too sick to eat much more than a piece of toast and a cup of tea for breakfast.

Amazon’s price on the 10-inch All-Clad is significantly less than Williams-Sonoma’s, where you’ll pay 110 bucks for the thing. Given the quality of All-Clad and that it has a reputation for standing by its products—even one of Amazon’s complainers noted that he got a brand-new pan, free of charge—a mere $75 for a brand-new one might actually be a good buy.

What do you suppose would possess a person to take steel wool to a hundred-dollar frying pan?

It’s pretty easy to clean a high-quality stainless pan. You need one or all of these:

• Barkeeper’s Friend (find it with the scouring powders in the household cleaner aisle)
• Ordinary dishwashing liquid
• Powdered or gel dishwasher detergent
• Baking soda and water
• Blue (not green) sponge with nonscratch scouring surface

So. First, if the pan is just ordinarily dirty with a little stuck-on stuff, pour water and a few drops of liquid dish detergent in it and let it soak while you’re eating your meal. Then wash it in hot water with more dishwashing liquid; often after a soak it will wash right up with no scouring. Alternatively, simply run it through the dishwasher.

If this doesn’t work, scour it with Barkeeper’s Friend. Apply BKF to the interior surface; add enough water to form a thick paste. With the soft side of your sponge, rub firmly in circles, moving from the inside to the outside. This will usually clean most dirt and stains off a good pan.

If this doesn’t work but you haven’t seared grease on in enamel-like black spots, rinse the pan well and sprinkle in about a tablespoon of dishwasher detergent. Add enough hot water to cover the soiled areas, stir to dissolve, and leave the pan to soak at least overnight. Use the hottest tap water you can get, because dishwasher detergent is activated by hot water. Next day, discard the soaking solution (do not put your hands in it!), rinse the pan well, and scrub it with Barkeeper’s Friend.

If this still doesn’t work or if you have enameled grease onto it, place a handful of baking soda into the pan and fill with water. Put the pan on the stove and heat the liquid to a boil. Turn it down to a simmer and let it cook in there for about 20 minutes. Keep an eye on it—you don’t want the liquid to boil dry! It will ruin your pan if it does. Also, this stuff sometimes wants to boil over, so you’ll need to be close at hand to regulate the heat. After about 20 minutes of simmering, turn off the heat and let the pan sit until the baking soda solution cools down completely. Then, at your convenience, scrub well with Barkeeper’s Friend.

You can use the type of sponge that has a nonscratch scrubbing pad. These are made by Scotch Brite and are commonly available. Just be sure the packaging actually says it’s a no-scratch scrubber. These are usually colored blue. The green heavy-duty scrubbers will scratch the toughest stainless steel, so do not use these on your cookware. Never use steel wool on a good stainless pan.

It’s pretty easy. Soaking is always better than scouring. Gentle abrasives are always better than fierce ones (try substituting baking soda for the Bartender’s Friend, BTW—it doesn’t work quite as well but sometimes it does the job).

When you’re using a really high-quality pan, you don’t have to and you should not turn your burner to its blow-torch setting. To fry or sauté in a stainless pan, place a small amount of oil or butter in the pan and put the pan over medium heat. When the butter is melted or the oil is hot, add your food. Let meat sear fully before trying to turn it over—if you try to flip it too soon, it will stick. To cook bacon in such a pan, always cook it over low heat. Although this takes longer, you’re less likely to burn the bacon, and when cooked over a low flame bacon does not splatter all over the kitchen.

I do not sear beef on salt over blast-oven heat when using a stainless pan, the way  you can do with a cast-iron surface. I suppose you could, but it seems old-fashioned, and besides, it’s a pretty brutal way to cook a steak. If I’m not grilling it over propane or charcoal or broiling it in the oven, I’ll fry it over medium-high heat in butter.

Have a little respect for a good pan, and it’ll treat you well. 😉

Still Sick and Got Too Much Work!

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Lenten thanks, Day 25

Thank God for bad cowboy music to fill up the empty air in the car when NPR’s local talkathon shows are dull as old chewing gum and NPR’s local pretend-classical station is playing Strauss waltzes and Souza marches.

Lenten thanks, Day 26

On the rare occasions that You decide to allow a full seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, your Godship, that’s very nice. It would be even nicer if You could manage a few more events like that…

Neither time nor energy for much blogging today. This damn virus is still hanging on—unless I’m mistaken, we’re into the fourth week with that now. Tiresome. I swear, every bug takes me twice as long to throw off as normal people seem to need.

One of my students said the disease tends to come back on you, and that when it does it brings on gastrointestinal symptoms. Well, dunno if that’s true, but yesterday I had a bitch of a bellyache and projectile diarrhea. Could’ve been from the cheap hamburger I picked up at Safeway for the dog, though. Night before last I barbecued some of it for me as well as to feed the pooch, and my chunk of it came off the grill on the high side of rare. So it could have been contaminated meat, something that seems to get more common as the days pass.

Speaking of students, I’ve fallen way behind in grading stoont papers, what with being too sick to think, dealing with the eternally ongoing Blackboard fiascos, having the Carnival of Personal Finance take up two full days of my time, trying to cope with not one but two clients on ridiculous deadlines, and then getting distracted with the Macy’s flap. So, I’m going to have to spend the entire day reading papers.

Meanwhile, for your eclectic delectation, here are a few things to read.

Check out this exceptional shopping tool Money Beagle discovered.

While I was trying to figure out if the current viral complaint actually does a) relapse and b) entail gut symptoms, I came across this interesting site from a Columbia professor of virology. Check out the guy’s podcasts!

Here’s a handy thumbnail guide for car buyers. Great pointers for how to hold your own with those dratted salesmen.

And this has gotta be a bookmarkable: eight low-tech ways to revive broken electronic gadgetry.

And once and for all…

Macy’s to Funny: Life Is Good

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Well. The Macy’s misadventure turned out better than I imagined possible.

First crack out of the box this morning, I presented myself at the business office in the nearest Macy’s, which happens to inhabit the snooty Biltmore Fashion Square. I will say, I was primed for battle. But through a great effort of will, I determined that I would be…well, at least polite. After a brief search, I found a tall, silver-haired fellow secreted away in a windowless, crowded office way in the back of the third floor.

I explained the circumstances: Charge forgotten after no statements had arrived; bill sent to a collection agency with a Better Business Bureau grade of “F” because of its disastrous complaint record.

To my surprise, this gentleman turned out to be a mellow sort of a guy, the type who probably never gets visibly frustrated or annoyed, even when confronted by an eccentric old bat the first thing Monday morning. Better, as it developed, he was a man with a Rolodex full of direct lines to human beings. And, best of all, he was an area supervisor.

As he’s punching buttons to make his way through a phone-tree maze, he says, “You know, they’ll want a photo ID.” No problem: I produce my driver’s license, which gets added to the mound of paper now littering his desk—including the correspondence from the collection bureau. He gets someone on the phone; then proceeds to call someone else.

“What’s your address?” he asks.

“Nine ninety-nine Erewhon Road,” I say.

“Hm,” he says.

He gets off the phone from another factotum. Then he says, “Here’s what’s happened. They’ve been sending your statements to the wrong address.”

“What?”

“Yes. Look: the address this credit bureau has, which is the same address our credit department has, is on Erewhon Street, not Erewhon Road. Your driver’s license says you live on Erewhon Road.”

Oh. Em. Gee. My strange neighbor Manny lives at 999 Erewhon Street, two houses away from me. He’s been peeved at me ever since the roofers parked a load of asphalt shingles meant for my house on top of his roof.

It turns out that Manny and his wife have been marking misdelivered correspondence “refused” and returning it to the senders. Cute, huh? Considering that they walk their two dogs past my house to let them shit all over the yard about every third day, you’d think they could bestir themselves to carry a piece of first-class mail over and drop it in the mailbox.

Mr. Supervisor speculates that the reason the physical plastic credit card got delivered is that the post office will not return credit cards, so they probably took the time to look up my real address. As for the dunning letter from the collection bureau: that was raw luck. He thinks probably it fell into the hands of a postal carrier who happened to know the customers on his route, and who also could tell the difference between a road and a street.

Marshaling his vast collection of direct lines to actual human beings, Mr. Supervisor made a couple of calls and within five or ten minutes he had erased the black blot on my records and arranged for me to pay the bill right then and there, in person. Not only that, but he came up with a charge of $23, not $28.

Impressive, eh?

The take-away message here is to resolve issues in the corporate bureaucracy, avoid the punch-a-button maze whenever possible and seek a face-to-face meeting with a live human being.

What a relief! It felt a lot like the way you feel when you finally manage to dig a mean splinter out of your foot.

Much cheered, I decided to take a tour of the Biltmore shopping center, where I used to hang out pretty regularly, back in the palmy days when I could afford to shop in places like Ralph Lauren. Coveted a few iPhones and iPads and drooled on an iMac with a gigantic screen (actually, it’s almost affordable).

The new accountant says the S-corporation can and should be spending a few bucks on business-related items for its proprietor. No question it can afford a new iMac. She even thinks it should be paying for a cell phone (!!). I wonder if it could afford an iPhone.

Over to Williams-Sonoma, purveyor of so many of the now aging accouterments of my nifty little gourmet kitchen. Did I mention that during the past Week in Hell, I destroyed my favorite 8-inch sautée pan? Yesh. It’s pretty much wrecked.

Williams-Sonoma has one just like it, only in All-Clad instead of Cuisinart, the maker of the deceased gem of a fry-pan. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it…that one plus another All-Clad the size of the nonstick 10-inch Calphalon number that’s about worn out would come to around $225. Plus 9.3% tax. For a mere $90 (not counting almost ten bucks in tax), I could get two non-stick Calphalons in exactly the sizes I want. But they have that annoying brushed slate-colored stuff on the outside, which over time collects a patina of grease that will not come off. Oh, covet those shiny All-Clad things!

Frugal Scholar also covets All-Clad and, like me, picks them up at thrift stores and estate sales. And, she notes, at interesting cut-rate sites like this one. Yea, verily: there’s the beloved little pan! As an irregular, forty-two dollah! This outfit has more 10-inch pans than you can shake a stick at, but Williams-Sonoma’s, at $120, comes with a lid, which none of the online models do.

Moving on, I visited a few more of my old haunts and realized the place has changed hugely since the last time I idled away an hour or two there. I have got to get out of my garrett. The world is starting to pass me by.

That notwithstanding, I believe I’m going to permit a little passing by this afternoon. I’ve lost count of the number of evenings in a row when I’ve sat down to dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., after having parked myself in front of the computer somewhere between four and six in the morning. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well last night, with thoughts of some shady collection bureau haunting the night. The day is too beautiful to kill in the office.

The journalism students’ papers (both sets of them) are read, and a start has been made on the freshmen’s papers. The little McBoingers don’t have a major paper due for another two or three weeks, and so they can wait a few days to get their present magnum opus. So, I am knocking off the work for the rest of the day.

That decision having been taken on the way home, the minute I walked in the house the phone rang, and lo! There was a prospective client calling from Virginia, seeking a project manager. A project manager for big projects. Technical projects. That would be the sort done by professionals, not self-published tracts by some wretch who thinks the hoodoos in Sedona were put there by space aliens. Did I add paying projects to that?

So between now and tomorrow Tina (who when last heard from was talking about waiting table again) and I will need to organize something persuasive about ourselves and line up some live references. This is the sort of client that, if we can manage to do a decent job, could keep us in beer and skittles for quite a while.

Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona
Space alien artifacts

Images:

Macy’s in New York City. Mike Strand. Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
All-Clad 8-inch frying pan. Shamelessly ripped off the Internet
Cathedral Rock, Sedona. Tomas Castelazo. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Zapped by Macy’s!

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Lenten thanks, Day 23

Well. At least it’s nice and quiet at four in the morning. Except for Sheriff Joe’s ubiquitous helicopters, which use the skies over our neighborhood as an aerial freeway.

Update: This all turned out for the best. A Macy’s supervisor took charge, figured out why their statements had never reached my house, untangled the mess, and accepted payment for the original bill. It remains to be seen whether the collection bureau, which has an unsavory reputation, will actually be called off. But for the nonce, things look brighter.

§§§

Yesterday I pick up the mail and open what looks like some official correspondence or possibly a long-awaited check from Google Adsense, which sends payment in envelopes like the one in hand, with no clear return address. And what should I find but a threat from a collection agency!

Say what?

They claim I owe Macy’s $91.

I have no clue what this is about, since I don’t ordinarily shop in Macy’s, because it’s too far away, it’s an unpleasant store to navigate, and it’s generally overpriced. I call Macy’s and spend a good hour wending my way through punch-a-button mazes. Finally one factotum claims I made a purchase last September for $28. I point out that’s a far cry from $91, and if I made any such purchase, why does the account number on the bill collector’s statement not jibe with the account number on the credit card they sent me, which was never activated? She has no clue, either.

Finally, while I’m listening to obnoxious sounds and waiting for yet another clueless soul with a Bangladeshi accent to come on the phone, I sift through several months’ worth of Excel entries and discover that indeed, in September I bought a bargain purse for $28. Now I remember! It was one of those girls-on-the-town shopping adventures. Among several strategies that La Maya and I used to drive the price down from about $90 was to agree to open a Macy’s charge account for 10 percent off—hence the presence, in my file drawer, of the unactivated card.

Macy’s never sent a statement. I recall noticing that the bill hadn’t cleared after the first month, but then as my Excel spreadsheet turned into an endless roll of toilet paper, the uncleared line fell out of sight and it simply slipped my mind.

Not one statement is in the file, and I am quite certain no statement ever landed in my mailbox.

M’hijito suggested that I probably didn’t recognize their bills and tossed them in the recycling bin with the flood of unwelcome junkmail that the USPS dumps into my mailbox. That certainly is a possibility. But I doubt it: I’ve been around for more than a day or two, and I do know what first-class mail looks like. Unless Macy’s sends its bills at bulk-mail rates, it’s highly unlikely I would have missed six statements.

No. The only explanation is that they didn’t send a statement and so, since my bill-paying is triggered by the arrival of statements, I failed to notice the outstanding charge.

Hmmm….  Interestingly, I don’t seem to have been the only one to experience what appears to be a Macy’s scam to extract interest and late fees from unsuspecting customers. We have this endless Facebook exchange, in which a woman describes exactly the same experience and one commenter remarks,

For anyone claiming that this is not a scam, they’re out of their mind. This is absolutely a scam to create late payment fees on behalf of Macy’s. Yes, as an employee you can explain it well and yes, as a credit card user, you can eliminate the problem by being aware of what the account is and how it works, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a scam. Macy’s purposely makes it very easy to lose track of a small balance that is due in order to tack on a large fee. It’s a classic shady business technique/scam. Just like when a company asks you to sign up for a “FREE” rewards service or some other set-up that is free for a month, but then requires you to cancel the $9.99 or $19.99 that starts billing every month. Sure, you can cancel it, but most companies who operate this type of shady practice make it difficult to find a phone number to cancel, or they bill it under a name that doesn’t look familiar to you and if you’re not paying close attention to your credit card bills each month, you can end up getting billed several months for something you never intended to sign up for in the first place.

Other people have described similar behavior and said it damaged their credit rating. Macy’s also has another scam, whereby when they issue you a credit card through one of their 10% off schemes, they’re actually issuing you two credit cards, one of which you don’t know about. One is a regular store account and one is an AMEX account. Since they no more bother to tell you this than they bother to send you statements, if you go to your online site to check your balance, you will think it’s zero, because the real balance appears in an account about which you are kept in the dark.

Well, I guess I’m going to have to pay the bastards. But you can be sure I’ll never buy another piece of junk at a Macy’s store again.