Cell Phone Blues

 In general,I hate technology.  As far as I’m concerned, the collective widsom of humanity was outstripped by its collective technological knowhow when someone figured out that you could use gunpowder for stuff  besides fireworks.  I would dearly love to have a few minutes alone in a quiet room, for instance, with the guy who invented the self-flushing toilet.  (He would never be the same, I can promise you that.)  Or  the moron who invented those goddamn pill bottles that you need power tools or a framing axe to get open–but he died already. Or–make that especially–cell phones.

A fw summers ago, I reluctantly made a deal with the devil and got one of the things, mainly because I got tired of risking my life, crossing the busiest highway in the great state of Alaska, to get to to a pay phone to call home and make sure that place hadn’t burned down or blown up in my absence.  I did a bunch of research, found one–a Kyocera–that looked good and didn’t have a lot of stupid bells and whisltles.  Always the rebel, I wanted a phone that would only make phone calls.  Needless to say, the one I wanted was not available in Alaska.  The one I got wasn’t too bad, although to this day, I don’t know how to use the calculator or send text messages or play the games.

After signing up for the service–this really long contract that somehow involved giving up some sort of legal rights to my first-born son–I got the thing, and found out that it doesn’t even work up in the valley where I live.  Seriously, our place in in some sort of major cell black hole, where you can neither send nor receive messages.  It works more or less at my business place outside of Wasilla, but it crackles and makes noises like a robot farting and sometimes cuts off completely every time a an ATV goes by, or the electric heater in my cabin kicks in, or just whenever it feels like showing me who’s boss.  Just as I once knew the location of every good pay phone in town, I faced another learning curve–not only how to work the stinking thing, but where.  Wal-mart is out, for instance–their in-store spyware blocks cell calls.  Fred Meyer is very good, however, as are most places in Wasilla.  In Willow–a mere twenty miles away–I get the “roam” message on the screen–I don’t even want to know about that.

Eventually, I learned pretty much how to work the thing, although I have no wish to play poker with it, or use it to figure out sales tax on the calculator–it is faster and easier to figure out the percentages in my head.  And so it went.

Recently, it developoed a new glitch–it would not let me access my voice mail.  And it would not let me access my credit card accounts or even get an authorization number for making credit card sales at my business.  So basically, the thing was useless.  So after six calls to the serviuce derpartment, and involving five different techies–who ranged from coldly arrogant to almost embarrassingly ingratiating–they finally figured out the phone didn’t work.  (DUH!)  I needed to get a new one.

Well, great–I only used the son of a bitching thing a few times a day for like two years, and it was ready for the scrap heap.  Compare this to the real phone at my mom’s place, a black Bakelite thing that weighs about seven pounds.  It was installed the year we moved in, over forty years ago–it has never failed, never needed service.  Of course, it was made by the phone company FOR the phoe company–my mother doesn’t own it, she just rents it, and has probably paid thousands of dollars for it over the years–but it WORKS!  But I digress.  Back to the present–okay, the near past.

I will spare us all the recounting of all the unpleasant calls to tech support–anyone owning anything more high-tech than a sundial knows about those hassles–and fast-forward to the last one.  The young woman seemed genuinely surprised when I told her that cell phone companies are now the most hated businesses in America, having nosed out credit card companies a few months back.  When she said that I didn’t have to go with their new service, that I could keep the old service, but I would have to find another out-moded phone somewhere.  I groaned, said I was a disabled senoir citizen, really wasn’t up to traipsing all over town looking for an old cell phone to buy which would be compatible with my opresent, out-dated service.  (The service I have now is digital, I forget what fancy name they gave the new one.  Maybe it’s the other way ’round. All I know is, it is supposed to work better.)  Anyway, after I bitched and moaned some more, she offered to give me a month’s free service.  Aftyer bitching and moaning some more, she upped the ante to two motnhs free service, plus she would waive the charge for the new phone itself.  Okay, fine.  Then she said it would be shipped FedEx.  I drivers groaned again.

I explained to her that private services didn’t do well up here–they either got lost, or lost the stuff, or stole it (all of this has actually happened to us).  Well, there was no getting around that, so I gave her my geographical location and the numbers for my old cell plus the landline number.  Now the new service I went with was a little cheaper than the old one–because  it had NO long-distance and NO ulimited minutes during off-hours.  I figured what the heck–mom is getting so old and weird that she stopped answering her phone anyway, and lately, the one sister I talked to is back on heavy drugs and has been incoherant and hositle in her Xanga messages.  And when I talk to Kathy at length, mostly all that happens is that I tell her a bunch of long boring (to her) stuff that is very important to me, then she tells me a lot of long, boring (to me) stuff that is real important to her.  Given our respective memories, anything important usually goes down here, in a private message.  So I was, if not actually happy with the new situtation, at least okay with the idea of saving a few hundred bucks a year,  bucks being being even scarcer than usual these days.

Much to my dismay, she was dismayed .  “There goes our relationship,” she moaned.  She went on to say how much she valued out nightly chats and so on.  I thought she was grossly over-reacting, but we do have different values.  That night–after discovering that my phone would not take a charge–I rather missed our chat myself.  That was a whole other exercise in frustration–I plugged thing in as usual, got nothing.  FInally, a coy little message “will not recharge” popped up and then disappeared.  I tried another outlet, same thing, and gave up.

A day or so later, I tried again and the phone decided to take a charge.  SO at least I have a phone–for the time being–I can use–even though I still  have to go to a pay phone to check my voice messages, authorize credit card sales, or check my account balances–all the important stuff, inother words.

Bah–humbug!

Scrooge got it right.  Christmas sucks.  I hate it, and I hate everything else about this benighted season.  (And benighted is le mot juste–winter solstice, the damn sun doesn’t get above the tree line, stays there maybe four hours to tease us, and then coyly drops back below the horizon.  But I digress.  But while I’m digressing, I want to mention one of the neighbors.  They tried to have a pathetic little yard sale amidst all the ice yesterday.  Put out a rack of clothing, propped some stuffed animals on the hood of an old car.  Had a sign–”Please help us have a Christmas.”  Right.  What they meant was, buy some of our useless old shit so we can get money to buy some useless new shit.  And ice beer. And meth.  I know about this stuff–I root through everyone’s trash.  But on with my own rant.)  Man and boy, most of the worst memories of my  life center around this season.

Ironically, in 12-step meetings I use Christmas as a metaphor–which is all it is really good for.  I often say that since I got clean and sober and relatively sane, every day of my life is like Chirstmas–that is, filled with a joyous sense of hope and anticipation and sure knowledge that wonderful things are in store.  But  if every day of my life was like the REAL Christmas, I would contemplate suicide.

And speaking of suicide–I have been told that folks with the damned disease that Kathy and I share have a much higher rate than average.  Makes sense to me, the ME/CFIS has really been kicking my ass lately, accounts in a large part for my ill humour.  The chronic pain hasn’t been too bad, I’m getting used to the constantly-blurred vision, the muscle spasms have largely been in remission, but the fragility factor seems way worse.  Lately, I can hurt myself putting on my socks or picking up a can of soda.  Due to my hernia, the doc said not to lift over twenty pounds– but the other day I hurt myself badly lifting ten pounds.  TEN fucking pounds.  This would not  be so bad if I had always been puny, but in college, I lifted weights!  And my first full-time job out of college was working as a  laborer in a steel mill–and after eight hours of that, I’d go home and swim laps for a while to soak out  the foundry dust from my pores.  Years after that, until I screwed up a knee, I’d get up at five am and run seven miles.  This business of having to ask a little girl stock clerk to put  ten pounds of kitty litter in my car for me is humilating.  My sympathetic, supportive sweety said “Get over it.”  Sound advice.

I mentioned the dark.  Then there is the weather.   A few weeks ago, we had snow, then rain, then a freeze–the result is that the damn footing is so slick around my place, I can’t even open the lid of the dumpster–after inching my way flatfooted to the thing, I just drop my trash on the ground.  It’s kind of scary–if I fell and broke a hip or something, I would be royally screwed, not having any health insurance.  I couldn’t even get in and out of my cabin, much less work.  I have dumped fifteen pounds of kitty litter on the parking lot around my car  in the last two days–now it is all being covered up with fresh snow.   Because lately, if it isn’t bitterly cold, it is snowing.  I am so very darn sick of driving through snowstorms, I could scream  And, as my neighbors could testify, I have.  I do.  Often, and loudly,  and accompanied with profanity.

Talking about screaming–take Michael Bolton.  Please.  At my last holiday bazaar, they played Chirstmas music all day–over my vehement objections.  As the show was ending, a Michael Bolton Christmas album was playing–over and over and OVER again.  I got so sick of hearing him scream and moan and mangle Christman music that is just barely tolerable even when it is done properly, I found myself yelling at the loudspeakers teling him to “SHUT UP–SHUT UP!!!”  At one point, when he was wrestling “Oh Holy Night” to the ground, I started to laugh hysterically when he got to “fall on your knees.”  A fellow boothie asked me what was so funny.  I told him, that considering that Bolton had been busted for giving some guy a blow job in a public toilet, “fall on your knees” was a pretty ironic thing for him to be singing.  But I made money at the bazaar and luckily, there was nothing else being sold there that was remotely attractive to me, so I didn’t spend any of my hard-earned money.

And speaking of spending my hard-earned money, that brings me to my family, God bless their pointy little heads.  Soemtimes I get so sick of being the bread-winner, so weary of feeling the weight of responsibility, I almost wish they would all just die so I wouldn’t have to deal with any of them.  Instead of pissing away money on groceries and firewood and pet food, I could spend it on important things like a Casio G-Shock Solar-powered Atomic Watch–I REALLY need one of these, I only have five or six watches now.   Or a twenty-inch LCD  HDTV with built-in progressive scan DVD player–shit, my eyesight is so bad, I probably couldn’t tell the difference between that and the old fifteen-inch  TV/VCR I have now. And speaking of groceries, my sweety can’t drink normal milk like the rest of us–nooo, she has to have goat milk at $3.49 a QUART!  I am sure she is just being lactose-intolerant to spite me!

And grocery shopping–what a nightmare!  I feel like one of those woman who goes through the excruciating pain of childbirth and vows never to go through it again–then memory loss and the nurturing thing  sets in and  she decides to have another kid anyway.  The last two times I put myself through this, when it was all over I vowed–okay this is it–never again–then a few weeks later, I am limping and gimping through a box store the size of Vermont looking for this one specific brand of salsa and that one specific brand of peanut butter. Sigh.

I let this whole thing get to me pretty badly this morning while I was wide awake from four to five am–I talked to God about it.  The following is His reply, as well as I can recall:

The way of the householder IS difficult, always trying, often challenging.  And many men and woman do indeed secretly resent their dependents, sometimes to the poin that they kill them.  And even if they don’t act out,  they come to hate themselves as well as their families, and get caught up in guilt and shame.  It is far healthier to own that resentment and let it go. 

But let’s look back at the time before you had this family, when you had the fancy town house filled with toys, the high-paying job that was debasing your soul and destroying  your health. Your life was a veritible orgy of self-indulgence.  Were you happy?  No.  In your more awake moments now, you acknowledge that you have never had less money or more happiness.

In your darkest, saddest moments now, you may think of your family as a dead  weight. but truely, it is both an anchor and a rudder.  It gives your life stability and direction. For all your individual and collective quirks and eccentricities, you have a family unit that is to be envied.  Need I really remind you, how lost you would be without them?  Do you really think you have all the inner resources you need to live without their inspiration and support?  Not a chance.–

Okay, it’s me again.  The Greyfox guy.  The Old Fart.  You know, the guy who is even now blinded with tears of happiness and gratitude.

Life is good. 

Or at least, as good as I choose to make it.

Fie on thee, APFS!!!!

I decided to eschew my usual profanity this time, maybe because I am wearing a cross earring.  (Now there’s irony!)  Anyway, this is another in a series of rants excoriating sleazy business practices–this time, in my own back yard–almost literally.  Just up the hill from my cabin is a new big box store that is destined to fail–Alaska Premium Food Source.  It is inconveniently located , the parking lot has these confounded curbs that make it almost impossible to get into the handicapped spaces (more irony!), the store itself is cavernous and uninviting, and the prices on food are not competitive.

Anyway, they had this big ad in the paper about a rebate deal, where you get a check next year for 2% of your total spending for the year.  This is great for them–it lets them track your buying habits–with the push of a few buttons, they know which of their customers are alcoholics, which have cats or dogs or little kids, and so forth.  Anyway, I figured I might save a few bucks because they do have a few spectacular bargains–generic Xantac for less than 3 cents a dose, for instance.  And Splenda, which everyone in my family uses.

I went in to sign up this morning and gave them the usual information–mailing address, physical address, social security number, PIN, DNA sample, naming rights to my first-born son–the usual post-9/11 stuff.  Then I read the fine print.  There was a $15 annual  fee–the ad did not mention this vital bit of information.  I went no further, said “never mind” to the clerk.  She pointed out that it wasn’t really a charge, but it would be deducted from the rebate check.  I didn’t feel like pointing out to her that meant I would have to spend $750 in order to get nothing, and spending $1000 would give me a whopping five bucks back!

So you can kiss my grits, APFS, and run your scam on someone who needs to remove their shoes to count above ten!