Coffee heat rising

To renew or not to renew…

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…that is the question. Whether ’tis better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous costs, or to read my favorite magazine online for free. 

Actually, the cost isn’t outrageous: Atlantic Monthly is trying to get me to re-up my subscription, telling me the regular price of $25 I’ve always paid is some sort of special “alumni” discount. As though they really could get new subscribers to pony up $60 for twelve issues. Twenty-five bucks is only two dollars apiece to have the magazine packaged up and delivered to my door by the U.S. Postal Service. That can’t possibly cover the cost of mailroom staff, mail list management, packaging, and shipping. It’s a bargain, really.

I do enjoy The Atlantic. But the problem is, oftentimes I don’t read it. Sometimes a new issue will arrive and I’ll realize the old issue is still sitting on the bureau in the bedroom or on the desk in my office, scarcely ever opened. My life is so fractured and so gestalt that I rarely find enough time to focus on anything longer than a few minutes. Unless…yes, unless I’m in front of the computer. These days, the only time I focus on anything for any length of time is when I’m sitting in front of a monitor or trapped on the light rail reading page proofs.

And oddly, The Atlantic is online! Apparently the whole thing is posted, free of charge, cover to cover. Not only that, but it’s got videos, it’s got slideshows, it’s got blogs…all sorts of extra content. And all free. 

So…why would anyone even think of sending a $25 check to get a paper version—a lesser version, really—of all this splendid stuff? It’s hard to come up with an excuse.

One reason, I guess, is the impulse to try to help keep journalism alive. It’s like a charitable contribution. Too bad it’s not tax-deductible.

Would I pay $25 to read it online? 

Nope. As a medium, the computer screen doesn’t give me what I’m looking for in leisure reading: the tactile sensation of pages turning, the portability…with a high-speed cable connection, you can’t carry a computer to the backyard, to the breakfast table, to the bathtub. And what could be more uncomfortable than craning your neck to read a laptop monitor? That’s not my idea of leisure reading.

On the other hand, as a practical matter I’m not reading the magazine in those places.

I do occasionally pick up on ideas from Atlantic writers for this blog. If I read every issue online, I probably would engage more of those ideas in my own writing, more often, because FaM’s dashboard would be right at hand. Instead of putting down an article with the thought that I must blog about it—and then forgetting it—I might go directly from the author to Posts > Add New.  

Hmmm… Maybe I should void this check?

What say you?

Do you cling to your hard-copy, snail-mail subscriptions, or have you abandoned them in favor of the Internet? Why? If we all stop reading print magazines, what will that do to the world as we know it? And what will happen come the Revolution, when all us proles are knocked offline, or, as in China, our online choices are censored?

Chance has fishes!!

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OMG! Take a look at the pair of incredible trout Chance and her friend the goddess came up with!

She wants some ideas for recipes. Go there and share yours.

Blogger isn’t speaking to me again this morning, so below is my offering, which I hope will reach Chance one of these days:

 SDXB likes to poach trout in white wine. I believe he dilutes the wine with a fair amount of water. Adding some herbs gives it a little panache. Simply place the fish in simmering water & wine and cook gently until it’s done through.

When he first proposed to do this on a camping trip, I thought he’d lost his mind, because my ONLY way to prepare fresh-caught white fish was sautéed in butter. He was having nothing of it, though. He insisted on poaching…and I was amazed at how delicious the result was.

I’m not sure this would work with trout, but here’s something I learned from the proprietor of a Greek restaurant: Preheat the oven to around 375 degrees. Chop some ripe fresh tomatoes. Add some minced garlic, some parsley, and some other chopped fresh herbs such as marjoram, thyme, basil, chives—whatever you have. Add some crumbled feta. Toss together. Place a fish steak (I’ve used salmon, halibut, cod, and mahi-mahi) in an open pan. Pile the tomato mixture on top of the fish. Drizzle a little olive oil over it. Then bake until the fish is done to perfection—don’t overcook. To die for.

How to keep the customers coming back

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Awesome customer service! That’s how a small business keeps customers coming back in the door, year after year. And it’s the way a specialized hardware store beats the big boxes.

• A human being answers the phone.
• Employees treat customers as they would like to be treated themselves.
• Skilled workers really are skilled.
• People go above and beyond the call of duty.

Doors in progress
Doors in progress

While we were renovating the downtown house, I stumbled across an amazing windfall: in my neighborhood, a great old house on horse property was being demolished to make way for a cluster of McMansions. The guy who was pulling it down had salvaged the doors: two sets of huge solid mahogany French doors, a matching single back door, and a solid mahogany front door. I grabbed the entire lot, including all the hardware, for $300. 

These magnificent pieces of workmanship now reside at the little house downtown, where they have transformed the place. 

The hardware, as it develops, was all made by Baldwin, one of the most expensive lockmakers on the planet. All of it except the front door’s lockset was in perfect working order. The hardware on the front door never worked right, and the level handle on the interior flopped down like a broken paw. And, as it also develops, Baldwin locks are very hard to repair: not just any locksmith can work on them. To complicate matters further, the hardware dates back to about 1950.

A couple of months ago, the deadbolt broke. I called a locksmith whose name I lifted from Angie’s List while the Phoenix-area list was still free. He came by, looked at it, and said it was beyond his ken. He referred me to an outfit called Anderson Lock and Safe, and said if anyone could fix it, they could. 

Amazingly, these folks will send a locksmith within an hour or two after you call. Even more amazingly, they have a whole crew of locksmiths who seem to know what they’re doing. Soon we had learned that the deadbolt was broken because Eric the Fly-by-Night Contractor had installed the strikeplate wrong, so the bolt was hitting metal; eventually that’s what broke the lock. As for the handle: that was a challenge. A spring on the inside had worn out, and Baldwin no longer made such a spring.

One of the men took the lockset apart and showed me the complicated interior. It was fashioned, he said, like a Swiss clock. All the interior parts were hand-milled. Today, even Baldwin uses mass-produced parts, to keep costs down. Although a Baldwin lock sells for upwards of $300, no one makes anything like the lockset we had. He estimated its value at around $400; his boss thought it was worth more like $700.

This guy repaired the deadbolt, fixed the strikeplate, and got the handle to sit horizontally, but without the spring it had to be manually placed in position. It didn’t really work: it just looked like it sorta worked.

Then along came Bila the Painter. He needed to remove the lockset so he could sand and refinish the outside of the door. He couldn’t figure out how to get it off, so I paid to have Anderson come over and remove it and then paid again to have them come back and reinstall it.

In the course of this project, the handle ended up flopped back down again. Pretty quick, Anderson sent over Bill the Locksmith. This guy, who seems to have the best time in the world playing with locks, took everything apart, did some more repair work on the thing, but said he couldn’t fix the handle without a spring.

I said, well, the other guys had said that spring is no longer being made.

True, said he, but he figured there had to be something like it somewhere. He promised to keep an eye out. He went off. M’hijito and I gave up.

So yesterday the phone rang out of the blue, and there was Bill the Locksmith! He had found a spring he thought would work in the lock. So I threw on some clean clothes and raced down to meet him at the house. 

Half an hour or forty minutes later, lo! The lock worked, the handle stood cheerfully at attention, and the entire assembly operated like new!

Not only that, but he planed down part of the door frame that Eric the F-b-N Contractor had left crooked and sprinkled powdered graphite on the ill-fitting weatherstrip that Greg the Handyman installed. So, when M’hijito got home from work last night, he found a front door, deadbolt, and fancy lockset that actually work!

Says he, by e-mail:

This is most incredibly fantastic.

 

I am sitting here and I am very, very pleased.  It’s probably hard for someone else to understand the degree of my pleasedness.

Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s two people who will tell all their friends to use Anderson Locksmiths. One of them will broadcast that message to the population of the world. And that’s how small businesses can fight big box chains.

🙂

Sears Credit Card: A new fast one from MasterCard

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What should come in the mail today but a notice that, o lucky me, I soon will be receiving a shiny new gold-plated MasterCard to replace my ancient Sears credit card, which I thought I’d canceled years ago.

Huh. “Your new card gives you MORE!” 

Oh boyoboyoboy! 

“Earn Rewards Points!…
…with FREE membership in Sears Choice Rewards when you call 1-800-669-8488 and enroll by 10/31/09″

“Plus Earn Up To 1,500 Bonus Points!!!!!”

Be still, my heart. I can hardly contain my excitement.

At first I thought this thing is a straight-out replacement for the Sears card, which materialized some time back when I bought some appliances on one of those 12-month no-interest deals. If you have the cash to pay upfront, these offers can be played to your benefit: you just set the money aside a high-interest online bank account or into your credit union’s highest-paying account or 9-month CD. Then in the 11th month, you pay off the debt in full. Allows you to earn a few dollars on the float. Makes you feel smug.

However, a study of the fine print reveals that you don’t lose your regular Sears charge account unless you call an 800 number and have the MasterCard activated. If you do nothing, well then…nothing happens. The Sears card does not go away, and the MasterCard does not function. But if you don’t want them to send you an unsolicited credit card, the better to expose you to identity theft, then you have to waste some time navigating their punch-a-button maze to call and tell them to knock it off.

Well, I thought I’d closed that Sears account. Dug up the old, dusty file folder and found…nay. The last time they sent me a shiny new blue Sears charge card, I just dropped it in the folder and forgot it. The sticker with the phone number to activate it is still stuck to the front of the card.

I carry two cards in my wallet because some establishments refuse to pay American Express’s exorbitant merchant’s fees. That notwithstanding, I use AMEX because a) Costco won’t take any other card at its gas pumps and b) it gives me a $250 to $500 kickback once a year. Since I don’t carry cash, I need a back-up card if I’m to do business with retailers and service providers who won’t accept AMEX. That feels like one card too many for me: given my choice, I’d use only one card. So I absolutely positively do not need a MasterCard with a Sears logo on it.

This fine offer came in a first-class envelope labeled “credit-card replacement information—open immediately.” What it really is is issuance of an unsolicited credit card. I did not ask for this card, whose interest rate can go as high as 29.99%, and I don’t want it. Nor do I appreciate having to waste my time in their punch-a-button maze to get rid of the thing.

Didn’t they make that illegal?

If you’re a Sears customer, watch for this coming your way. And if you already have a perfectly fine general-purpose credit card, ask yourself why you need another one. If the answer is “I don’t,” note that you have to call them to “opt out” of this unsolicited gift.

Purchases!

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With the advent of more and more good movies and British television shows to watch over the Internet—and the steady loss of good things to watch on my television—I moved a moderately comfortable Eames-style chair out of the TV room into my office. There, I could push my desk chair aside and pull up the Danish lounger to luxuriate in front of some of the wonderful performances to be had by computer. This left a big, gaping hole in the TV room’s decor. So, I decided I should try to purchase an inexpensive chair for that spot. No one ever sits there, so it doesn’t have to be especially comfortable, but it shouldn’t be too ugly. 

I’d spotted a dowdy but more or less acceptable chair at a store that bills itself as an antique mall but really is a collection of second-hand furniture dealers’ booths. I don’t remember what the style is called—I always used to think of it as “ranch furniture,” because you’d see it on ranches and even in the dorm rooms at the University of Arizona: the chair consisted of a wooden frame with wide, flat armrests big enough to set a can of beer on; upholstery was a seat cushion and a back cushion. Although they can be surprisingly comfortable, this one wasn’t, and while the fabric on the cushions was in excellent condition, it was truly hideous and would have to be replaced. 

But I can make cushions and could certainly have built new covers for those. Though the dealer wanted $175 for the chair, I figured I could push it down to around $150.

Still: it wasn’t a very pretty chair, and if I hired an upholsterer to recover the cushions, I could end up paying another hundred bucks or more for the final product.

A notice came in the mail from Crate and Barrel, advertising a 50 percent off sale. Hot dang! On the first day—Thursday, I think  it was—I shot out to Scottsdale like a rocket. Hope springs eternal in the consumer’s breast…

Well, if Crate and Barrel was selling anything at a 50 percent mark-down, I sure didn’t see it. They had one piece marked off 40 percent…the sort of thing that goes on sale for a reason, the reason being no one in their right mind would want to own it. Otherwise, the deepest discount was around 20 percent. The two chairs that would have done the trick in the TV room were well beyond my price range. 

While I was there, though, naturally I had to wander through the houseware department. There I found…ta DAAA! These excruciatingly nifty Polish glass items.

They reminded me of my wonderful Polish sister-in-law, who once gave me a glass sugar and creamer set that looked very much like the one here—a little more modern and stylish but very similar. To my dismay, I broke the creamer a few years ago. I always regretted not getting to know my former sister-in-law better: she and I had much in common other than the brothers we married. She lived on the East Coast and then later in Texas, and the distance made it hard for us to stay in touch. 

So, with this purchase in hand I drove back into town and revisited the junk antique store, planning to buy the wooden chair. Boy, those cushions were ugggg-leeeee! Each was an off-size, too: no chance of buying cushions somewhere else to wriggle out of having to make new ones. And the chair’s joints were loose: it needed to be taken apart and reglued. This thing was beginning to look like a large project, and one that could run up the price considerably.

Pier One has some cool furniture. Most of their chairs are sterling uncomfortable, but comfiness was not a high priority for this decorator item. Besides, it occurred to me that I might get one of their wicker or fake-wicker outdoor chairs, some of which have real panache and actually are more comfortable than their interior furniture. So, before making a final decision about the $175 second-hand masterpiece, it was back across the city to the nearest Pier One outlet.

Their latest sales ploy is to have an employee accost you the instant you walk in the door, eagerly offering to follow you around the store and direct you to the many things you surely will want to buy there. I hate that. So I had to tell the manager, who was the accoster of choice that day, to leave me alone, thank you. 

I found several patio chairs, any one of which would do the job. The one I liked was selling for around $125, but of course you had to pay extra for the seat cushion. The ones they had on the chairs in the store were sterling hideous (have you noticed lamps and upholstery fabrics all seem to be done by graduates of The School for Ugly Design?), and the only cushion I liked didn’t fit the chair.

They did, however, have a couple of wicker indoor chairs that were reasonably priced and very nifty-looking. The jazziest of these was one of the most breathtakingly uncomfortable things you would hope never to sit in. But another, given the right cushions, was pretty tolerable. If guests came over, I could sit in the Pier One chair and let my friends have the better seating. Unlike the seat cushions, Pier One’s throw pillows are to die for! It’s hard to resist coming out of that place with an armful of the things. Soooo….  This was the result:

The wicker looks almost black in this image; it’s actually a dark brown. Overall cost, with the chair and three fancy pillows plus 8.3 percent tax: $334. More than I wanted to spend, but a heckuva lot better than the $1,266 Crate and Barrel wanted for the best of its offerings. I figure I probably would have ended up spending pretty close to fifty bucks on upholstery fabric to rebuild the second-hand chair’s cushions. And regluing the joints…who knows how many hours of my time? Actually, that job might have been beyond my skills, so I would’ve had to hire a handyman to do it: two hours of Greg’s son’s $30/hour time: another sixty bucks.

$175 + $50 + $60 = $285, plus the cost of my time and hassle

So though I didn’t get a bargain, I don’t feel I did that badly, either. Not bad at all. Forty-nine dollars for to save four or five hours of my $60/hour time devoted to repairing and upgrading the junk vintage chair? I’ll take it.

😉

Missing unemployment payment accounted for

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Okay, so we’re all sitting in this auditorium jam-packed with furloughed Great Desert University employees, listening to the HR people and a couple of gurus from Department of Economic Security telling us how we can access the unemployment insurance that is supposed to cover the twice-monthly furlough days. 

At one point, the DES guy says, “You’ll get a debit card, and your benefits will be deposited to this debit card.”

A groan rises from the audience and fills the hall.

“Oh, I guess you don’t care for debit cards?”

No joke, says someone. 

So, can we ask to have a check sent to us or to get direct deposit? someone else asks.

“Yes,” he says, “you can ask for direct deposit by going to the Web site, downloading a form, filling it out, and sending to DES along with a canceled check. But the first payment defaults to the Chase debit card, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

We will, we’re given to understand, either have to spend the money on the debit card at retailers or go to an ATM or the bank and ask to have it in cash. But, we’re told, we must be careful, because Chase has a number of gotchas, and will charge fees for any number of arcane reasons. Read the paperwork that comes with it carefully.

Ducky.

I filled in the forms to claim unemployment, and within a couple of weeks a debit card arrived. At first, it developed, no money was on it because DES sent the cards out before they even got the data on ASU’s employees; since the agency is not online, it would take several weeks to manually keyboard information on several thousand furloughed employees. Eventually, enough time passed that I started to see the requested direct deposits appear in my checking account, so I figured the initial deposit must be there; all I wanted to do was retrieve it and move it into savings, there to wait for the day in December when I will be canned.

After several frustrating tries, I finally gave up. It simply would not disgorge the money, and no one at two different branches knew why or what to do about it. 

So, I mailed the damn thing to DES and asked them to return whatever money they’d put on the card to the federal government, to whom it belonged.

LOL!

Weeks later, along comes this message from an assistant director at that august agency:

The week ending February 7, 2009 was your mandatory, nonpaid waiting week. Your next Shared Work week was the week ending February 21, 2009; this was the first paying week of your Shared Work benefits. Because your employer’s certification for that week [was?] on March 16, 2009, the order to move your benefit payments from your debit card to your bank account had already taken place on March 9, 2009. [Is there logic here? Where?] The benefit payment was not made to your debit card, but to your bank account on March 17, 2009. The reason your Chase debit card could not pay your $48.00 is because no funds were ever put into that account.

Reason is because…oh, God, I hope you were never in one of my required writing classes…

That distraction aside, why on earth did DES tell us that the first payment would default to the debit card, no matter what, no questions asked, no rebellion brooked? But then…what on earth does this person’s message mean, anyway: GDU asked that I be paid on March 16, and so DES paid me on March 9? Hey: who needs to be online when you’ve got a crystal ball?

WhatEVER. Apparently giving away the debit card was giving away nothing.