JZ and I went to Shorty's for ribs. I find their famous barb sauce a little to tangy for my tastes. The time was used to discuss an upcoming trip, maybe to the Keys. JZ is far more likely to go out to a restaurant than to get out of town for a few days. Too bad, we work well with the women as a team, in that he is too shy to hit on the same babes I do. I go after the best in the room, he goes after the easiest. But he's not a jock, so he does not go after the sleaziest.
Here are the dotted dunes of Mars, taken today way up there. The dots are caused by uneven thawing.
[Author’s note 2017: this was the day of the now-famous “T-34” lady that tried to wrestle me for my resume. Also the time of the fat girl who plunked her cell phone on the table in case her son “called from jail again”. ]
I’m going to break down and get a cell phone, fully remembering how I got ripped off on my last two Florida attempts at doing similar things. One, I got faked out by Bell South. I asked how much a phone would cost me, and they lied by the old trick of not telling me the whole truth. They said service was $11.70 a month, knowing as it turned out later, that I had not asked them that question—I’d asked how much the phone was going to cost me in total.
The phone “service” would cost me closer to twice that price, for to them, the “service” is a separate charge.. And in 19 months, I made less than twenty calls. My pager was worse, the sign said $24 a year, but it was actually $58 a year. Then, they would cut you off a month early if you didn’t sign up and pay up for another year in advance. That was also the place that I made the staff put people on hold when I was at the counter. I’d never seen that before I got to Florida; you are there in person, but if the phone rings they answer it and start talking. No, no, lady, I got here first, you put them on hold.
Florida has really been pretty much of a small scale ripoff ever since I’ve known the place. I recall when I put my resume in at a two dozen places when I first arrived. They all said they were “free’, but in fact, resumes are not free to give away, none of the agencies were on bus routes, none had free parking, and basically it cost me close to $45 for each application. But free, my eye. How about that place in Fort Lauderdale? I phoned several times about the ad for an office manager accountant, during which they denied several times that they were an agency.
I’d learned my lesson about agencies. I took time off work to drive all the way up there, only to meet this incredibly ugly fat old lady “built like a T-34” who wanted me to fill out an application first. I wanted to talk about the job first. Turns out there was not job, they were “collecting resumes”, and I had to wrestle my copy out of her hands. She even called the security guard. My god, she was ugly. It turns out they “like to keep a few hundred resumes on hand in case something comes up in a year or two”. Again, I was the first person in Florida history they ever had tell them to stick it up their asses.
Another one I liked was right in Brickell Plaza, in among several real employment agencies. It was billed as for professionals only. I got suspicious when they would not tell me how many applicants they place each month. It turns out they were only a front for a marketing agency selling mailing lists of “very specific research on well-to-do candidates”. Think of the damage they can do selling your resume with basically your life history on it. I reported them, but [was told] they were doing nothing illegal in the state of Florida. In the end, all these “free” services cost me $1,350 before I got a job.
How about the women? In late ‘01, Space Hippie and I went to a Unitarian Church gig. I didn’t have a clue what that [church] was, but we met a lot of ladies, one was very friendly and said she was looking for a friend. Another ripoff, what she had in mind was that you and her be friends only, and you go out places together, see. Now you pay for everything because you are the man. She already had a live-in boyfriend, unemployed after some 15 years, whom she was “faithful” to, but he was boring. That’s where you (and your money) came in. Her plan was you take her out and spend all the cash on her that he can’t, then she goes home to him. I found out after a forty dollar first date, when we stopped for a drink after a chick-flick and she pulled out her cell phone and placed it on the table between us. In case her son “had to call for bail money”.
I never asked her out again, and a month later she e-mailed me saying she was sorry I didn’t have what it takes to “deal with the complexities” of her life, and that she would pray for me. She was, oddly, nice enough that if she had simply told the truth up front and paid for her half, I might have gone for it. But for some reason she specifically said, while it was okay for her boyfriend to call while we were on a date, that she considered it rude if I would ever look at another lady while we were out. She also completely checked me out the evening we met to make sure I didn’t have a girlfriend I was “cheating on”. Good-bye.
I’d like to say that no woman has gotten any money out of me for bull after that, but one did. I met her at the corner by the laundromat on a Sunday, driving a sports car. I had a café con leche sin azucar and she was waiting for her order at the counter, and we struck up a convo. She was 33, never married, pretty, and a lot of what I was looking for. Alas, it was not to be. I wanted to drive to the Homestead Swap Meet and asked her along.
How did she get my $60? In pieces. First she said she was on her way home to get more money to finish her laundry. (Oh, here, I’ll get it.) She wanted to take her car but did not have enough gas to go that far. (Well, here’s ten for gas since we’re taking your car.) She had also promised her roommate (who turned out to be a 62 year old retired and very broke ex-boxer who wanted her to do ‘lez-acts’) she would pick up some milk and eggs, but forgot the money on the kitchen table. Also, she had not planned on taking a trip and needed to put “just $15” on her cell phone bill so they wouldn’t cut it off.
It quickly surfaced that it was not her car, but a loaner behind on the payments. She had no insurance or money for insurance. She was unemployed, permanently. But she nickel and dimed me out of sixty bucks and we never did get to Homestead. She did not realize she had done all this until I pointed it out as I was leaving, and in a shocked way she said, “You’re right. I guess I really screwed things up.” This is not unusual behavior in Miami, but I was still learning that. I knew what was going on, I just didn’t know it was so prevelant.
So that brings me back to the cell phone. The worst ripoff I saw today was AT&T with an ad that said unlimited evenings, weekends, long distance and same-subscriber for $34.99 a month. It is hard to believe such a huge corporation would stoop to outright lies to trick you, but that $34.99 based on a commitment of $1,679 to $1,903 over 24 months. (You had buy one $59.99 monthly service and a $9.99 for a second line, go figure the $34.99.) That is a lot of money for phone service, people. Their marketing departments are plainly staffed by aluminum siding salesmen.
Evenings and weekends are my bag, so that has not changed since I threw my Nokia out the window in 1993 after running a stop sign. That phone cost me $600. Now, it is the service that is a ripoff. I despise that kind of advertising, not because it is new. It is not new, it is just that nobody was enough of a bastard to actually do it before. I despise the people that do it for fancying themselves clever. That and the way they insinuate your credit isn’t “good enough” when you say the price is too high. They can get someone to “help you” for 24%, see.
Otherwise, a quiet day, entering payroll. I’m working on pseudocode for the Excel input, and the news is a massive hurricane is on the way this weekend. I’ll stock up in case it lasts longer. Frances, Hurricane Frances, from off the coast of Puerto Rico. Julie had it on satellite, with a blurb that said the first hurricane was tracked in 1902. I would like to know how they tracked it, since there were no airplanes or rockets, and the ships of the day, if they survived, had no radios. Then I noticed there is indeed a way one could come in a gentle curve all the way up the Caribbean and hit every major island in its turn. If it went along Cuba lengthwise, that is enough to get a good picture of the route, as it made landfall in Texas. The next hurricane tracked was not until 1928. How quickly each generation forgets; there was an internet article how Americans had to rely on “nothing more than a few satellite images” and were deprived of “reliable” information until the weather bureau flew an airplane into the storm!
Some little girl walked up to me in the conference room today and said I must be who I am. Yes, but who are you, little girl? (And, how does she have any idea who I am in the first place?) She does something a lot of children don’t, introduces herself not by name, but as Dayami’s daughter. Does this sound like a setup? Is the pope Polish? My guess is eight or nine years old, cute, some mild family resemblance only. Ha, send your kid to see show the single dude how cute ready-made families are.
I wonder what all that is about, but most likely to see if I had the fathering instinct. Since that’s obvious, I get to ask my obvious question, “Why do women have to get themselves screwed up before they appreciate a guy like me?” To balance this, I defrosted that stew I took out of the kettle before the main batch was finished. It was far better than the real thing, alas again I have no recipe. I’m taking another look at apartment rentals.
Later. I awoke at 4:00 AM with a bad head cold, my first illness this year. It is also the day after I gave Julie, who has a kid, a ride to work in my car, but I am not saying there is any connection. I have not been really out of action for more than a day or two from any disease in thirty years. This one is draining me already, something is definitely different. At least I have lots of extra vapo-rub. By different I mean where cold used to slow me down through stiffness and ache, this time it saps my strength. I guess I should be more thankful my hobby turned out to be reading. Thinking ahead, I only need 11 more points, somewhat less than three years work, to qualify for Social Security. Around my birthday in 2007. My goal is to retire running a used book store, but also my paradise. Naples is not such a good idea, everything there is really less than twenty years old, there is no “old town” at all to it. The waterfront property sells for six million each.
[Author’s note 2017: of course, had I known Naples was going to explode into a west-coast Miami, I would have bought something. I had looked at some of the million-dollar properties back when they were $40,000. I still have not abandoned the idea of a book store, but only if I really slow down, which I haven’t really yet.]
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