Tag: life

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All I wanted to know is if I paid my Macy’s bill. Pretty simple right. Wrong.

This should be a quick look at the online Macy’s site. Except, for some reason, my browser no longer seems compatible with Macy’s credit card payment information even though it will still show me all the marvelous things I can buy at Macy’s – page after page of sale items but every time I depress the credit card history link — a spinning hourglass. OK. No problem. I will just go to another browser.

The new browser doesn’t have my saved password and user ID. I can, however, see all the marvelous things I can buy at Macy’s but my personal profile which would lead me to my payment information is off limits. OK. A bit of a problem because I rarely use my Macy’s credit card and I don’t have the user ID and password memorized. Contrary to all security recommendations, but absolutely essential because there is no way I can remember all the password and user ID’s I have, I locate these details in a separate Word document.

I attempt to log in. Except the password and user ID don’t match Macy’s records. OK. Maybe I made a typo. I try again. No luck. What to do?

I go back to the old browser that will allow me to log in but will not display my payment history. I go to the log in screen. My password doesn’t display but I can see my user ID but not my password. Now I have one out of two items I need. The password is hidden by *. I can however count the number of * and from that I deduce the correct password. Bingo.

I am in except I can only see the marvelous things I can buy and not the actual amount I owe on my credit card. I eventually, after randomly depressing every link I can find, stumble across the credit card history page. Success.

I paid my bill.

This all could have been handled with a quick phone call to customer service but, as we all know, there is no such think as a quick phone call to customer service. A phone tree will answer with numerous questions about why I would like to talk to customer service and, while I am on hold, frequent reminders that this could all be handled much more quickly if I used the online site. Some of the time, this is true. This wasn’t one of them.

If I can use the online system, I will use the online system. But, sometimes it is easier for me to just talk to someone. The problem isn’t easily routed through phone tree analytics. So, if I am calling, I really need to talk to someone. Any one would do. Just let me talk to someone. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top. It will take them seconds to understand what I want and give me a reply.

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Bob and I have two cats and I sometimes feel like all I do is tell them no. Cisco wants out doors. No. Chloe wants to scratch the furniture. No. Cisco wants to eat the food off of my plate. No. Chloe wants to scavenge the kitchen counter for leftover. All they hear from me is no.

What worries me is that it makes absolutely no sense to them. For example, why can’t Cisco drag the chicken bones across the kitchen counter and then drop it on the floor so he can eat it. I was obviously done with the bones, why can’t he just pick the bones for whatever he can find. Why is he getting all hysterical about it?

Or why is it all right for Chloe to scratch the cat scratchers that Bob has so artfully arrayed around the house but not the couch and the chairs that are just a juicy targets. Why is one scratchable and the other not? And how, a poor cat, supposed to the difference.

They just run and hide when we raise our voices but I am sure they are thinking WTF. This is what animals do why are these two humans such pains in the asses.

I am surprised that they are both still civil with us. But they are.

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A senior moment that keeps recurring in my life is misplacing things. I lose my glasses the most. My eye sight is actually pretty good which enables me to ramble around the house without them. So, unless I have a pressing need for them, like watching television, I go without them.

I try to put them in the same place every night before I go to bed. The problem comes when I take them off earlier in the day for some seemingly benign act like rubbing my itchy eyes and forgetting to put them back on. At this point, they are lost. I go looking for them but without my glasses. This sometimes proves an impediment to finding them because instead of seeing the room clearly, there is a bit of blur obscuring everything.

In the past, I would just get my spare pair of glasses and wear them until I found them.

This worked pretty well until recently. I bought a new pair of glasses. The day I bought my glasses I was overwhelmed with the number of choices I had — there were hundreds of potential frames. This paralyses me. The more choices I have, the more difficult it is for me to come to a decision. So, I thought, well Tom you liked your present frames, just get a pair of frames that looks like the old ones you have. Genius, right? I got the exact same frame.

As we all know, the road to Hell is paid with good intentions, it has actually made it worse for my search for glasses.

Since I misplace my glasses on almost a daily basis, I constantly am putting on my spare pair. When the old pair and the new pair looked different, I could easily determine which pair of glasses I should be wearing when I stumbled across them. I would put on the new pair and return the old pair to my cram packed junk drawer until I need them again.

Now, so I just put on my old glasses which work until I stumble across my new ones. This would work if I also kept better track of my old glasses but I don’t. So, much to my chagrin, I will misplace my glasses and when I go to the junk drawer, the spare pare is missing. Which means instead of wearing my new pair, I was already wearing my spare pair and now, instead of looking for one pair of glasses, I am looking for two pairs of glasses.

Worse still, I don’t know which is my old pair and my new pair when I do find a pair of glasses because I didn’t think to check if there was anything that would differentiate the two pairs, I don’t know which pair I am holding — the old pair or the new pair.

As I am reading this back, I am thinking why am I writing about such a trivial matter. Then I think, wait a minute, this is important. As a Senior Citizen, this is how I spend a large portion of my day — looking for shit I can’t find.

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One of the things I would change about my apartment is the metal sink in the kitchen (seen above). Every time I look at it, I think it is out of place, particularly when you go into the bathrooms with the nicer porcelain ones. I realize that it is probably not real porcelain but it is close enough in look and in touch for me to give it a pass. It looks like how I imagine a bathroom sink should look.

When I look at the metal sinks in the kitchen, my first thought is this is out of place. It looks wrong. I am sorry for being such a snob but when something looks so out of place from everything else in the apartment, there can only be one good reason for it being there — it is cheap. The contractor threw out all design considerations to save a buck. To Hell with how it looks.

Now I am all for keeping costs down but there is a difference between looking cheap and finding inexpensive materials that still give a quality sense and also fit into the general design of the apartment. This isn’t how this kitchen sink makes me feel. It looks cheap and out of place.

Finally, and most importantly, it is more difficult to use. In order to wash and rinse in one step, the sink needs to be divided into two separate parts. One side for washing and the other side for rinsing. This metal sink is one big long deep trench. I guess I am supposed to wash everything and then go back and rinse them afterwards but this seems like a lot of extra work for me when I can do both tasks in one step with the divide sink.

The other problem with it being too deep and too long is I use an inordinate amount of water to fill it for comfortable washing. This becomes an ecological drawback sense we are being told that the Colorado River is running out of water and do everything we can to conserve on water.

The absolute worst aspect is cleaning the fucker out. In an oval sink, I just sprayed water to the sides and the debris fell effortlessly into the drain. With a square sink, the debris is constantly getting caught in the corners so I have to dig out the debris in order to get the sink clean.

In conclusion, I really miss my porcelain, oval and divided sink.

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Hucksters learn faster than any other people how to manipulate new technology to finagle people out of their money. The volume of junk mail, email, and texts I receive as opposed to actual communication from people I know and welcome is amazing. Almost every email I receive is junk — very rarely do I get a legitimate piece of email. Phone and texts are a bit better. I would say about half of what I receive there is legitimate. This is still a lot of junk.

What irritates me about this junk is that I thought laws were passed several years back to help the average citizen stop unwanted communication in what ever form — be it phone, text, letterbox or email. Report the offenders and these nuisances would stop.

But it has not stopped and the junk communications just keep coming. I realize it is complicated. A lot of the problems is the huckster operate outside the national borders so American laws are ineffective. Basically there is nothing we can do. The laws are pointless so the junk will continue to flow. So what if they are trying to sell viagra to lesbians. All they have to do is ignore the message, nobody is hurt.

I disagree. The best case scenario here is that I have to wade through hundreds of unnecessary emails and texts in order to find the ones that I actually need. This takes time. Every day precious minutes are stolen from me as I try to find what really matters to me amongst all this junk. This may be a small problem, but it is a problem. I don’t like it one bit and apparently there is nothing I can do about it because we couldn’t possibly stop hucksters from pursuing their businesses.

Never mind that these businesses are quite often engaged in ways to steal money from naive people. See the huckster has rights. It is the individual’s responsibility to stop the huckster.

It is so ingrained in our belief system of right and wrong that when we hear stories about someone getting bilked out of money, the gut reaction is why were the victims so stupid to fall for the huckster. The victim needs to smarten up because there is nothing wrong with parting a fool from his money. Unfortunately, the fool is in a dog eat dog world and apparently that is the way we like it.

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Why is it that every time I see a new doctor, I have to complete the same questionnaire. This is so irritating. I thought the whole point of having your information on line was every medical professional now has easy access to your data and you won’t need to keep supplying it every time you go to a doctor.

This is not my experience. Every time I walk into a new doctor’s office, I am handed a clipboard with a questionnaire asking for my details. You know name, address, emergency contact, medical history, medications you are taking and why you are visiting the doctor. Yes, I get it that they need to get it right but to see my questionnaire sitting unconsulted on the doctor’s desk while she asks me the same questions yet again is a bit insulting.

Or to have the office hound me with texts and emails too complete the an on line questionnaire before my appointment with the caveat these replies will make it easier and faster for the doctor who is treating me, only to be asked to fill out a paper version of the same questions when I arrive at the doctor’s office.

Sometimes I will be working on the questionnaire and I am called into to see the doctor. I will let the nurse know I haven’t completed the questionnaire yet, only to be told don’t worry about it, she never looks at it in the first place. Then why am I filling it out? Are they giving me busy work to keep me occupied while waiting for the doctor? Quite frankly, I’d rather being perusing the People magazines stacked on the tables than completing yet another form with my medical history.

If I were a smart ass, I would advise them I already given them this information and could they possibly retrieve the data there. Thank God, I am not a smart ass. More of a coward I suppose. I don’t want to look like trouble to the doctor’s front desk staff. They have a lot of power for you, they can offer you an 7:30 AM appointment tomorrow or a 1PM appointment sometime after the first of the year. Neither choice is good. You can keep asking but the choices are never good. Whatever you do keep on the good side of the office staff or else you will never get a decent appointment time.

And keep filling out those damn questionnaires or your chances of seeing the doctor are pretty darn slim.

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Russell Brand recently copped to sleeping with a 16 year old when he was 30. WTF. Thank God he clears up the legality of it all by reminding us that the age of consent in the UK is 16. So, at least, as far as the law is concerned, he is in the clear. Whew. I was concerned.

I think if I was a man under investigation for rape, as Brand is, that I would be a bit more careful about sharing any information about my murky sexual past. That Brand willingly goes there is both surprising and telling.

In this modern Me Too environment, why would someone so stupidly admit to something that he knew would receive a hostile reception? Why would be bring up the age of consent otherwise? This gets him off the hook, sort of, for a morally dubious decision. Unfortunately for Brand, the facts remain the same, he was a 30 year old man and he knowingly took advantage of a 16 year old. The age of consent in the UK only matters to the police and the courts, the rest of us are free to judge him however we want to and, of course, have.

Tellingly, he thought he could explain it away without getting into any real trouble. Once people knew the age of consent, and that the 16 year old girl consented, and he now knows he was wrong to exploit her, he thought people would think what an evolved man Russell Brand is. Instead, people are coming to a different conclusion. Brand is a bit of an asshole and a not very bright asshole at that. How does he know the girl was 16? Did he check her passport details? A 15 year old can look a lot like a 16 year old and that would change his whole consent argument now wouldn’t it?

I’m not trying to encourage criminal activity but the one thing I do know is if you are under criminal investigation, you keep your trap shut and leads me to wonder if Brand had fallen completely under the spell of celebrity culture. He was a spent force in celebrity world and the only way for someone like Brand to grab headlines is to behave outrageously in order to regain that sad perceived glory.

Well, it worked if that was his goal, otherwise what a stupid asshole.

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I think if you want to get plastic surgery and it makes you happy, by all means, get it.

I won’t. Mostly because it won’t make me happy. I just don’t have the time or the energy or the money to keep working on my looks. It is, after a certain age, a losing battle.

No matter how much plastic surgery I get, I am still 68 years old. A 21 year old guy, even just a regular old 21 year old guy, not some super good looking movie star/model type of guy, walks into the room and then I walk into the room. The half way good looking 21 year old guy has me beat. By a mile. By 10 miles. By 100 miles. If I get talked about at all, which, let’s face it, is a very big if, it won’t be about my good looks but on how he has had work done.

Then there is the cost. People who I know investigated plastic surgery are talking thousands of dollars and, with my luck, it will turn out making me look worse. I know some people who have had excellent plastic surgery. I also know people who were disappointed with their surgery (see awful plastic surgery). It is a roll of the dice and if I am rolling the dice, I would much rather be rolling the dice in Las Vegas than rolling it on surgery.

Besides, I am that age where I need procedures and surgeries just to stay healthy. If I were to also get plastic surgery with the other surgeries I need, I might never leave the hospital. I just don’t want to take up residence in a hospital, at least not yet.

At this point in my life, I would rather fall back on my vast supply of charm and joie de vivre than attempt to alter my looks any further.

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As I get older, I am beginning to understand my peculiarities that stumped me before but are beginning to make sense now. I used to think I hated shopping. Any shopping. I did everything in my power to get in and then get out with whatever I thought I needed.

I thought, for the longest time, this hatred of shopping placed me on some superior moral ground. The capitalist overlords failed to entice me into a life of mindless consumerism. Something occurred to me as I was dodging super large shopping carts in Costco the other day. It isn’t so much that I hated shopping, it is more that shopping overwhelms me. I can feel my nerves begin to jangle every time I enter a store.

I can manage shopping if I have a list with specific items to be acquired by the time I return home. I find. I buy. I leave the store as quickly as possible. I rarely, if ever, will buy more than what is on the list. The list is sacrosanct.

On the other hand just lallygagging in a store to kill time almost always ends the same way — me fleeing after a few minutes without purchasing anything.

For example, I love to read so bookstores should be heaven for me. Not by a stretch. I want to purchase almost every book I pick up. Everything sounds like something I would like to buy, so much so that I reach fairly quickly a point of indecision. I can’t choose anything because I want everything which I know that I neither can afford nor will ever find the time to read them. So I punt and buy nothing.

Big ticket items provide a somewhat different problem for me. I don’t have a vision of what I want. If I am buy a car, all I want is something that moves me from place to place with a minimum of problems. A lot of friends I know walk into car lots with a strategy of getting specific things they want, and how to maneuver the salesman into giving them the deal they want. They know all the bells and whistles they want to purchase. All I want is a compact white Ford.

Worst of all, choice just baffles me. The more options I have the more stumped I become. Two or three choices I can manage. More than that I am wondering how I can get out of this showroom without looking like an asshole.

What I am saying is that shopping is overwhelming for me. I don’t so much hate it as all these products and choices leave my mind so overstimulated that I my mind is whirling with all the choices and I become exhausted and all I want to do is go home and take a long nap. This is why I hate shopping.

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I have to give it Donald Trump and his administration. They definitely know how to make a mountain out of mole hill and gain advantage from that little mole hill.

Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, resigned in a wave of resignations that struck the CDC last week. He also wrote a memo using the term “pregnant people” as opposed to the Trump preferred “pregnant women.” People and women are not the important words here, pregnant is. This is a message to advise someone who is pregnant about a health issue. It doesn’t really matter if you call them people or women.

But, of course, I am wrong. It matters greatly and people are hopping mad about it. One side believes pregnant people is more inclusive of trans people and the other side is claiming that only women can get pregnant and it’s ridiculous to use the more inclusive term.

Trans-obsessed lefties want everyone to use the more inclusive people and make no bones about telling people they should. This irritates trans-obsessed righties who think this is a biological question and that only women can get pregnant, so when talking about pregnant people, people should say pregnant women. This is so much cage rattling and of little significance to the majority of Americans.

First, the necessity to use pregnant people over pregnant woman is incredibly stupid. 99.99% of the people who are pregnant are women and like to be called women. Plus there is little chance that a pregnant trans man ( I am assuming about .01% of the population or less) would be confused by what the sentence means and how it might relate to him. But because somebody somewhere might be offended, people should be used instead of woman. This is the mountain they want to die on.

Language is social lubrication. It is there to make our lives easier. If you want me to use specific personal pronouns for you. I have no trouble using them. On the other hand, if I see a person with a beard, I am going to think this is a guy and I will trust my eyeballs and use male pronouns. 99% of the time I will be correct and offend nobody. This makes my life easier and less awkward because a lot more people would be either stumped by your personal pronoun question or unnecessarily angered by it. Why bother making trouble for yourself?

Which means I will continue to use visual cues, like a beard, to guess at someone’s gender identification until I start having trouble with people about it. Right now, I think I will die before having to ask someone their preferred pronouns.

What to do if people say “pregnant people.” I say deal with it. I admit it is a little clunky but perfectly understandable. Someone who says this is talking about pregnancy and want to be inclusive. Let them. Do what is comfortable for you. But no, “pregnant people” has become fighting words, so a fight must ensue.

The worst part is Trump has managed to turn the chaos at the CDC into a problem with politically correct bureaucrats. They have gone after Daskalaskis for being both gay and a satanist. So what should be about how to effectively get health information out to the public has become a witch hunt about being politically correct. And Trump has the advantage here.

I’m not sure this helps pregnant people or pregnant women but public health should be about using the right terms instead of delivering important information about people’s health.