Snide Remarks in Sotto Voce

I speak from personal experience:

Being poor has it advantages. Free medical care (yes, totally free), free but lousy dental care, an enormous (relatively) tax return, scholarships to summer camps and activities for my kids. Local charities will help you with bills. I even won a grant from a kindly foundation.

            But all of these benefits of being poor are not without cost. It’s become a full-time job for me, filling out applications (which are like financial affidavits – if you’ve ever been divorced you know what I mean), making copies of tax returns and pay stubs, soliciting references, getting copies of bills (if you pay your bills online, getting actual copies of bills can be surprisingly difficult), mailing applications, keeping records. I keep my tax returns at hand because I have to copy them so often.

            And you don’t just do all this once. For the health insurance and the fuel assistance you have to go through the process every year. Same with the YMCA (our scholarship was dropped this year, so we no longer go to the Y). It’s not that this doesn’t make sense to me – of course you wouldn’t get free health insurance forever. It’s worth the work.

            What irritates me is the all the applications for Affordable Housing that I fill out. There’s a different application for each town. You have to fill them out periodically, and every time you do you are told that there is absolutely NO affordable housing left or that you are number 1,542 on the list and there’s no hope for you. But you’d better fill out this unique ten-page form developed specifically for this town of Snootersville and copy all of your personal financial documents or you’ll be dropped from the list. And even if you qualify, I find that the Affordable Housing people (who, in a typical supply-and-demand power structure, are usually pretty bitchy and discouraging) will hassle you if they think you can’t make the rent payments. Presumed guilty, in this case. (This is in contrast to most agencies, summer camps, fuel oil people, and even moving guys who respond with astonishing empathy and respect.)

            The whole fuel oil thing is fantastically bureaucratic. You apply and then qualify for fuel oil assistance and are designated a certain amount of state-funded fuel oil. Then you must get involved for each individual delivery. It goes like this:

            Fuel oil company: calls to tell me I have an oil delivery in the next few days and I need this particular delivery approved by the state agency.

            I: Hastily call the state fuel oil agency and ask them to fax an authorization to the oil company. This usually involves leaving messages, phoning back, etc.

            Fuel oil company: calls me again and tells me they have not received the authorization.

            I: call the agency again, practically in a panic, because if they don’t authorize the delivery BEFORE it’s made, I will incur the expense of, say $1,000.

            State Agency: tells me I have exceeded my allotment.

            I: Ask if I qualify for the “emergency” fuel oil assistance or whatever it is they call it when you’ve exceeded your allotment, which, in my case, happened in one fuel oil delivery.

            Stage Agency: After some back and forth they determine I don’t qualify since I’m in foreclosure and I’m not actually paying anything towards a mortgage or rent.

            I: Call the oil company and tell them to limit my fuel oil delivery to $300 worth – we’ll have to live without oil if we run out.

            And etc.

            And here is my latest bureaucratic nightmare: my ex-husband (I will refer to him as the Prince) got a check from some nationwide lawsuit settlement from a bank that did some shady dealings when they granted mortgages. Ironically, this is for a mortgage that he acquired with embezzled money. Haha. It’s a check for about $3,400 – a vast sum for me and my kids right now. Unfortunately, the Prince (who owes me about $200,000, and that doesn’t include all the money he stole from me, just unpaid alimony and child support) is now in prison for embezzlement and fraud (BTW, he is not in prison for stealing from me. It is legal to steal from your spouse and use the Civil Injustice system to harass her mercilessly at great expense and force her to invade her 401k to pay for a lawyer. Yeah, that’s cool.) . The check is not assignable; he can’t sign it over to me. I showed it to my local bank manager and she thrust it back at me as if I had just handed her a recently-fired gun. The Prince cannot receive a check in prison, nor does he have a bank account anywhere in the real world. I have a check for $3,400 taped to my wall, and I can’t cash it. Periodically I overcome my frustration and learned helplessness to call the bank and try to figure out how to get this money for my kids. Money order to the Prince in prison? No, they don’t do that. Power of attorney? They will have to get back to me.

            My foreclosure law date is in two months. We don’t have anywhere to go. So here’s my latest plan: I will disperse my kids to friends and boarding school and then check myself into a homeless shelter. I’m beginning to understand that there are several reasons why this might be the best route for me – it’s a big subject that I will cover it in my next article.

            Meanwhile, goddammit, I have to go and call Person to Person to follow-up on some possible assistance I might qualify for there, and then I have to call Family Centers to see if I can get some advice from them, and then I have a moving company guy coming to give me an estimate. Forget about looking for a job . . . I’m busy![1]

Next up: I prepare for my imminent foreclosure and, perhaps, going to a homeless shelter.

Interpreted as an Invitation

             Yonkers, NY:  State Trooper Chuck Schwartz got a big surprise last Tuesday night when doing a routine speed patrol on the Cross County Parkway.

            “I was waiting in my usual spot, you know, at the bottom of that big hill and after the long curve to the left,” said Schwartz, “when I clocked a guy going 72 miles per hour. It wasn’t ten miles over the speed limit but it was good for a $150 ticket, and it was a slow night so I knew my boss’d be pissed if I didn’t pull him over, so I put on my lights and went after the guy.”

            That’s when things got interesting. An alien spaceship descended rapidly towards the accelerating police car, in what appeared to be amorous advance.

            Scientist Joe Kelly of the Advanced Institute for Somewhat Smart People Who Aren’t Skeptical About Alien Encounters (AISSPWASAAE) said that such occurrences were becoming more and more frequent. “The incredible brightness of the new LED police car warning lights, the color variations and the strobe effect are not only visible in distant galaxies, but apparently they are of a pattern that this particular alien race finds irresistible.”

            “At the Institute we call the lights a ‘summons,’” added Kelly as an aside.

            Attempts of alien spaceships to mate with police cars have been reported throughout the northeast, southeast, Midwest, northwest, and southwest ever since the new high-tech LED warning lights have started to become regular equipment on squad cars. “The aliens must have detected the lights, and, well, we’re assuming that they experienced such a powerful lustful yearning that they sent out spacecraft immediately to meet them,” said Kelly.

            “Our original intent was not to attract amorous aliens,” says State police chief Joseph Plodkintz. “The high-tech super-bright lights and strobe effect were to protect officers in the field, especially at night. The lights are highly visible for several miles, and an arresting officer, busy collecting important revenue for the state by ticketing people who venture even slightly over the speed limit, would be safe from oncoming traffic which would slow when the lights were turned on.”
            State Trooper Schwartz agreed. “I definitely felt safer with the new lights on my squad car,” he said. “Everyone on the road had to slow down because they were practically blinded by the lights. And the strobe effect and the brightness made it look like I was taking up the whole highway, rather than just the shoulder.”

            He chuckled a little. “You know, it was actually sort of enjoyable watching all those assholes have to slow down. They would be backed up for miles! And when I first turned those lights on at night, you know, it was always fun to see the cars swerve. It scared the bejesus out of them, so that always brightened my day. No pun intended.  Ha ha.”

            Schwartz was lucky to be there for this interview. “The spacecraft shot their ray-thingie at me, and the car started to shudder and then rise from the ground,” he said. “I got out just in time.”

            Schwartz suffered some minor abrasions and a bruise on his left buttock when he leapt, screaming like a little girl, from his car.

            The squad car hasn’t been seen since the alien spacecraft beamed it up. But Schwartz says that it has communicated with the station via police radio that it was expecting squadcarlings in about three months, and was hopeful that the police station guys & gals would throw a baby shower.

See it here:

http://thefastertimes.com/financialstress/2010/01/22/“depriving”-my-kids-tv-other-essential-media/

A satire on Xtremetravelstories.com:

http://www.xtremetravelstories.com/index.php/en/latest-stories/60-united-states/68-selling-jfk-long-term-parking-

If you enjoy it, please click the stars to vote for it!  Thanks.

Here’s a link to a list on Spitefulcritic.com

Fashions We Don’t Want to See

Happy New Year!

You can buy Tods loafers at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman for around $400.

 I had bought a pair a while back and thought they would last me a long time. Imagine my dismay when I went to put them on this fall and they felt mushy inside. I looked closer, they seemed to have some sort of deterioration in the sole.

 I took them to the shoe repairman – they are high-end loafers, after all and worth the cost of repair. But he examined them and then showed me by peeling back the rubber sole, the inside of the shoe support was disintegrating into sand.

 “They can’t be repaired,” he said. “Deficient materials.”

Apparently my $400 shoes had suffered irrepreable trauma from resting in my closet (which is a typical closet). The materials used to manufacture the sole of the shoe were simply falling apart. It was not due to overuse or anything else I had done to the shoe. It was faulty manufacturing.

 After spending so much on a pair of shoes, I expected the company to rectify the situation. (A pair similar to mine is on the Neiman Marcus Web site for $425.) I found a Contact Us email address on the Tods official Web site and emailed them about my problem.

 A customer service specialist emailed me back asking me for the product number and other obscure information and demanding a receipt from a Tods store and digital photos of the shoes.

 I emailed several photos of the shoes. I explained that they weren’t new, and that I didn’t have a receipt, but that I had paid full retail and expected that a premium product like my Tods loafers would be repaired or replaced if they inexplicably fell apart.

 The Tods person responded that unless the shoes were bought at a Tods store, they would not be replaced or repaired.

 I emailed back offering to send them the shoes if they had any doubt about their authenticity, and she emailed back saying that they had no doubt, they recognized the shoes in the photo, but Too Bad, since I didn’t have a receipt and hadn’t bought them at a Tods store but at a distributor (like Neiman Marcus), I was out of luck.

 I wrote saying this was a very bad policy and saying I had spent a Lot Of Money on the shoes, and the customer service person responded that lots of companies had that policy.

 I said that just because other companies had the policy didn’t mean it didn’t suck. I was pissed!

 Meanwhile, one wet and rainy day while in New York City, a friend of mine rhapsodized about her (then soggy) Born shoes, which retail around $100 or less. She said that she had had a problem where the sole of a shoe split down the middle. She sent it to Born and they replaced it immediately. They didn’t ask her for obscure product numbers and digital photos and receipts from a Born store.

 In this economy, when you’re charging premium prices, does it make sense to treat your customers badly? I don’t think so.

 No more Tods shoes for me.

This is one of my favorite writings ever, click on the title to read it:

Apocalypse Toy Company, Inc.

Real Toys for Real Boys

. . . my holiday present to you!

I wrote this for Spitefulcritic.com — a bit of humor for you:

Headlines for Stories I Actually Will Read