Category Archives: Petty Annoyances

Technology & The Art of Being Poor

Art. No, not really, but it makes for a catchy title. I do not consider being poor “art”, that would be way too petit bourgeois. It just helps, sometimes, to think of my economic situation in different ways, so I don’t let it depress me – too much.

Today was supposed to be grocery-shopping day.

After I had the awful experience (at Martin’s Foods in Duncansville) of having my EBT card declined due to their mistake, I am doubly paranoid about having my card declined, and as I sat on my porch waiting for the van to pick me up, I realized I needed to check my balance.

So I picked up my phone, looked up the EBT Hotline in contacts, and pressed the number.

Nothing.

No ring sound, no “Thank you for calling Pennsylvania EBT customer service. For English, press 1.”

I hung up and tried again.

Nothing.

I went to check all my sound settings. They were all ok. Then I decided to see if any of the sounds played.

No. No “Oye” by Pitbull (default ringtone, heh). No notification sound. No nothing.

Van pulls up. Oh good, I can ask the driver.

The driver is my age. He laughs. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

Uh-oh.

I told him I couldn’t go because I couldn’t call for a pickup, and I couldn’t call to check my EBT balance to make sure I didn’t get declined when it came time to check out. He understood, and left.

In a fit of pique and swearing like a sailor, I stomped up the stairs to my apt.

Cursing Motorola. Cursing Moto. Cursing technology.

Got on the internet and realized 2 things: 1. I could have looked up my balance on the internet, and 2. many people are having this issue with Moto G 1st gen.

The solution? Reboot. So I did.

No. Still no Pit Bull.

Read a few forums and one said to go into developer mode – which I had miraculously unlocked on my phone when I first got it, in order to change some settings to cut down on the amount of space things take up (or something, I forget what, exactly). And change from ART to Dalvik, which apparently messes up your “optimal performance”, but fixes the “no sound” issue.

So I did. And Pit Bull was rapping and singing again!

Called the EBT Hotline. Got my balance. Yay!

Called the van place and booked for tomorrow.

It’s these little things that drive me crazy, and almost all of them are connected in some way to technology. I admit, some of it is my fault, because I have always had one of my kids or someone else (usually a boyfriend) fix my technology problems or at least told me how I could fix them.

Now that I live alone, the only ones I can ask are the cats. And they aren’t telling.

Now nearly everything has technology connected to it. Had I not had a phone or an internet connection – both of which I often think I should get rid of when I am frustrated – I wouldn’t have had any way to check my food stamp balance. Because they aren’t even food stamps anymore, they’re credits on a card.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when was the last time you saw a pay phone? As in, phone booth, put quarter in, make call?

Yeah, I thought so. Me neither.

It was technology that led to the Martin’s Incident, and the same goes for today.

The smallest, seemingly easiest things to do with technology are all way over my head. And it frustrates me to no end that I can’t do stuff that, say, a 12 yr old can do.

I know, I sound like an old bat.

Verizon has a how-to class on Moto G. I would love to take that class, as it is free. But it’s on Saturdays.

Van doesn’t run on Saturdays. So that’s a no-go.

This is where the being poor part intersects the technology dummy part. Too poor to own a car, can’t take classes to use technology.

And it is pretty much this way for most things. Being poor is not only a matter of not being able to afford things, it also makes errands and things people take for granted about 10 times harder than they should be.

Got to do laundry? Two choices: either lug your laundry to the laudromat on foot (which is difficult, try it sometime), or call the van and pay $6 round trip to go do your laundry.

Run out of milk? Catfood? Garbage bags? (I chose those because I frequently run out of them) Got $6 in exact change? No?

Tough shit. Walk to the store that’s 3/4 of a mile one-way from your apt? That’s my new goal. But if I didn’t have the “Rest-n-Roll” cart that comes with a fold-down seat, I wouldn’t even attempt it. Because I would probably need to sit down along the way and…

When was the last time you saw a bench on the street, that wasn’t a bus stop?

Yeah, I thought so. Me neither.

Further compounding things – and preventing me from ever being able to walk to the bank if I had to – is that this area of PA, for some extremely weird reason, has very few crosswalks.

I’m serious. Drive down any street in Altoona and thereabouts, and you will see traffic lights on corners, but signs that indicate you cannot cross the street on foot. Signs with a person on them and a big red slash across it. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve seen here.

And yes, people do get tickets for jaywalking if they try to cross the street. Really.

So, if I need to go someplace that I cannot walk to, it’s $6. The nearest branch of my bank has “no pedestrian” signs, AND no walk-up ATM. Last time I went, they wanted to charge me FOR CASHING A CHECK AT MY OWN BANK!

New policy. “You can use the ATM outside,” she said.

“But I don’t have a car!”

Blank look. Crickets chirp.

So, I got behind a car in the drive-thru ATM. That was really weird and embarrassing, standing out in the drive-thru lane.

And in the car in front of me, the woman who I noticed had seen me standing there, finished her transaction. Then, put on her makeup, put on her seat belt, looked in the glove compartment for something, and basically twiddled around for 5 minutes before she left.

And all the while I am hoping a car doesn’t come up behind me.

Little things. Being poor makes everything unnecessarily hard. Everything you do takes twice as long, usually, too. It makes going to the grocery store an all-day adventure.

And not in a good way, either.

Goddess help you if you’re disabled or frail. (I am disabled, but not frail, thankfully)

I mentioned the lottery to a van driver once. Told him if I ever won, the first thing I would do is buy a car.

“No you won’t,” he said.

“Why not? I asked.

“There’s insurance and gas. You can’t afford those on disability.”

I realized that, if I did win enough to buy a car, and nothing else, he was right. Compounding this would be that SSI would cut me off, and so would the EBT people. Even if I cashed the check immediately and spent it all on a car. Income is income, and even if you are broke the very next day, it would take at least another month to get your benefits back.

“It’s like they want you to stay poor,” many people have remarked to me.

Indeed.

Today’s recommendation for books is….

“The Murder Pit”, by Jeff Shelby. It’s what you call a “cozy mystery”, which are books that feature an amateur sleuth (usually female), are set in a small town (usually), downplay violence and sex, are funny (sometimes), and have a love interest for the sleuth.

Basically, “Murder She Wrote”, in book form.

There is a subgenre that features cats as helpers to the sleuth, or sometimes they solve the crime all by themselves and then get a human to help them.

Those are my favorite kinds of cozies.

As for movies? I highly recommend “The Imitation Game”, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. No, I haven’t seen it but many people tell me it’s good.

I haven’t seen it because the van doesn’t run past 4PM (or thereabouts on weekdays), and not at all on weekends. See? See what I mean?

Be good. Be kind. Don’t get run over in an ATM drive-thru.

Knowledge from a Vending Machine

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You pay someone, you get knowledge/enlightenment. Wheee!

Something that people my age say a lot is, “The older I get, the more I realize how little I know.”

I mean, people my age who are not pompous asses.

Today, I am thinking about…thinking.

I got an email today from a website called “ESkeptic”, announcing their conference in southern California. Well, sure, I know I can’t possibly go but I thought I would see what they’re up to, anyway.

The first thing that caught my attention, actually, wasn’t even the conference itself. The item above the announcement did: “Waking Up” with Sam Harris.

I don’t know who Sam Harris is. I do know that “waking up” is a common phrase used amongst people who want to promote self-awareness, myself included. I ran a group whose main focus was self-awareness, and on the chalkboard in the room I had written, “Wake Up!” So I am familiar with this concept.

I have never, however, heard a skeptic use language like that.

I would love to tell you what he meant by that, but I am not paying $4.99 to rent his lecture, the full title of which is “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” The description reads as follows:

“In these talks, Harris discussed a range of experiences that have traditionally been considered “spiritual”—in particular the phenomenon of self-transcendence. Although such experiences tell us nothing about the origins of the cosmos, they confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and serenity, are teachable skills; and the way we think can profoundly influence our lives and the lives of others. (This video consists of a one-hour lecture and an hour of Q&A.)” (email from Skeptics Society, 2/4/2015)

Our conventional sense of self is an illusion? That’s a truth?

Sounds to me as if the skeptics are kind of desperate for members, and are resorting to promoting their own special brand of woo. Tsk tsk. And charging for it. Just like they scream at others for doing.

So then I went on to read about their conference. It costs a lot of money to attend. Even just the open bar and lecture session is $75 (I assume the bar is extra).

I don’t see any difference between this conference and the myriad of UFO/Bigfoot/Enlightenment conferences that are held on a daily basis somewhere in the world. Except I think the UFO and Bigfoot conferences might at least have entertainment value for the money (and they are usually cheaper).

Nope, the skeptics are after the same snob-appeal crowd that the modern-day gurus are after, except they talk about different subjects.

Do I hate skeptics? Noooooooo. Most of my family are skeptics. Some of my friends are skeptics. I am occasionally skeptical about a great many things, which is why I refer to a lot of things as “woo”.

No, I just hate elitism in any form. I don’t like anyone who thinks he/she has the market cornered on “the truth”. Because, to me, unless you are referring to relating testimony (telling the truth about something/someone), I don’t think ANYONE knows “the truth”.

There are scientific principles, to be sure, and I do not argue against those. I guess that’s “truth” in a sense. But the word “truth” has almost a moralistic ring to it. I would rather say, “It is likely that…”, or “It most probably is….”, or even “with a 95% confidence level” (as is written in peer-reviewed journal articles).

When I see someone charging for content that I often have taught for free, or blog here for free, it makes me mad. Could I ever go on a lecture circuit and talk about things I write about here? Not likely. I could make money at it, for sure. But it would be hard for me to do that without feeling like I was ripping people off.

Self-awareness et al is easy to teach – that part of the quote about Mr. Harris’ lecture is quite accurate. In fact, you can teach it to yourself (in the 60s and 70s, lsd/peyote/psilocybin were used for that sometimes).

You do not have to pay $4.99 to rent a lecture (gee, you can’t even own it, what a ripoff), or pay $20.00 for a book (oh, it’s autographed, I know, but still…), or attend a $75 dinner party, or pay $225 for a Saturday conference session ($199 for Skeptic Society members) in order to become self-aware/learn about pseudoscience/be entertained by magicians with agendas.

If people pay for that, I think it’s much more likely they are paying for the chance to be around others of like-mind, so they can all feel smug and smart. It’s really not like you would learn anything, like, say, you would at an academic conference. And I guess you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy a smug-fest. *cough* elitist asshole *cough*

What’s my point today? I don’t know. Maybe I am just fed up with people ripping off the public. Maybe I am disgusted by elitism in its many forms. Maybe I am appalled that someone would have the nerve to charge for something that’s so basic and so obvious.

Maybe I just feel that, with all their protestations that they are skeptics in order to advance science and educate people, they are still basically people out to make a buck. And these folks do not live at subsistence level – they make quite a wealthy living from this.

I just think that’s shameful.

This week’s weirdness comes again from Gizmag, that wonderful website that clues you in on all the latest technological advances in all kinds of different areas. This article is called “Fungi Mutarium Fuses Plastic and Fungi into Foodstuffs”. Oh, those wacky Austrians at Livin Studios!

And…a recommendation from Hulu. It’s another Hulu-produced series called “The Booth at the End.” A man sits, well……….in a booth at the end (of a diner). People come see him, tell him what they want, and he has them perform a task – then they come back and tell him about what they did and how they got what they wanted. Is he a bad guy? Seems so, at first, as he has people kill other people and what-not. But sometimes people don’t do the task and they get what they want anyway. So is he a good guy who makes people consider their actions and how those affect others? I don’t know yet. But it’s entertaining.

Be good. Be kind. Teach someone something…for free.

Life is Strange Enough – Quit Making Stuff Up!

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I am going to start this entry with a book recommendation, for a change.

It’s a book written by someone who made a decent living as a “medium”, with work on the side as a ghost hunter/house cleanser. Made a lot of money, too, what with TV appearances and book signings, the whole shebang.

She has decided to come out with the truth: she cannot talk to the dead, she’s never been in a haunted house, and now that she’s retired on her considerable wealth she wants to ensure that no one else gets duped. She details how she conducted “cold readings”, how she rigged electronic devices to go off when she was claiming to “sense” a presence, and even how she sometimes had assistants planted in various locations to “make the experience seem more real”.

Emails sent to her, requesting readings, were saved and memorized (on her applications, she states that you need to provide basic details on your reason for a reading) – the rest is something she “fills in” when she meets the person, throws out some generalizations, then runs with whatever information she sees the client react positively to.

At live sessions, she throws statements out that are so general that someone inevitably will think it applies to them. If, during a reading, she says something the person doesn’t relate to, she tells them to “think about it – it will come to you when you get home”. Or sometimes she apologises and says the message is for the person sitting next to them.

She also states she got tired (and a few headaches) from pretending to be possessed by spirits. She apparently has hit her head a few times when her assistants were not paying attention. And, as she is getting older, it’s getting increasingly harder for her to see in the dark, a necessary condition (she says) in order to fool people better.

Additionally, she is getting sick and tired of a select group of clients and hangers-on who, while contributing a lot to her personal wealth, annoy her to the point of “mental exhaustion”.

“It’s as if they cannot make any decisions at all without my advice,” she complains. “Why can’t they just grow up and think for themselves?”

She, of course, doesn’t see that she has fostered this dependence. But hey, no one’s perfect, right?

Aside from the mental and physical exhaustion, she is beginning to worry about her own mortality.

“I don’t know what happens after we die, if anything,” she admits. “And since I was asked to leave church because I was causing so much distraction, I don’t even know where to go to get my own spiritual guidance. I’m getting older, and I’m becoming afraid of old age and death.”

Welcome to the club, idiot. It’s hard to feel sorry for someone like that, isn’t it? And even now, with this admission, she is hurting people because they now have to come to terms with their own belief in something that clearly wasn’t true.

And she’s not even giving their money back.

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Internet Politeness Norms & Alternate…Everything

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Today’s post is about internet politeness norms (there don’t seem to be any), alternative medicine/treatments (aka “woo”), and the general alternative reality that a lot of people seem to be living in (virtual reality in its many forms).

First of all, though, yet another health update: (Skip to Page 2 for My Usual Commentary)

I finished the antibiotics and am still sick. The fevers are fewer and farther between, which is good, but the nausea/dizziness/upper right quadrant pain remain. The fatigue is at bay unless I do something incredibly strenuous like, say, go downstairs to get the mail. Then I’m done for the day, pretty much.

I don’t think people understand what I mean. I don’t mean I am out of breath going up and down stairs – it doesn’t even get to that point. I mean I feel like taking a nap in the foyer after fetching the mail and before returning upstairs. Tired times a zillion and then some.

I have no idea how I am going to grocery shop next month. I barely made it this month and when I got home I was wiped out for days.

And Dr. Wonderful? His last comments to me via email, after I asked him if the lab results indicating I had some kind of atrophied pancreas (and the everpresent gallstones) might be the source of my symptoms, were somewhat terse – he stated that pancreas atrophy does not have symptoms and would not cause upper quadrant pain, and that the best way to “prevent illness” is a good diet, and strength training.

Can’t really disagree with him there. However, it’s not really helpful. My diet now consists of “eat whatever I want as long as I eat 45 g of fiber first” – which, if you have ever tried, leaves no room to eat ANYTHING else, because 45 g is a LOT of fiber and hard to achieve in one day.

Try it. I mean, without pills or fiber drinks. It’s tough.

My diet consists of raw vegetables (usually broccoli and caultiflower), some cooked ones (peas and artichokes, as both are high in fiber), an apple or berries, the occasional free-range happy chicken egg, and 2 c. black beans with bulgur and/or brown rice.

Sometimes I go wild and eat 2 slices of $6/loaf (yes, really) Ezekial bread, which is so high in healthy ingredients it nearly tastes like it. Sorry, but vegetarian/health food has not changed a whole lot (ie, it still tastes a lot like cardboard) since I was a vegetarian in 1969 (I was 13 – an animal, um well not rights person exactly, I just didn’t think killing animals for food was kind or right). I don’t think animals have rights, nor did I then. I just don’t/didn’t think we as humans have to torture them for food/cosmetics/anything else.

They depend on us to not hurt them. Oh, for heaven’s sake, if I was out in the wilderness and had to fend for myself I would maybe fish, as I kind of see that as an equal sporting kind of thing (I have never actually caught a fish, despite my love of bass fishing – them’s some damn smart fish and they always get away, if I am able to hook them at all, which I’m usually not).

But, in general, Americans do not need to hunt for food. And, while even I will admit that McDonald’s burgers taste good (especially those cheddar/carmelized onion ones), they are just not worth the health issues or contributing to McDonald’s global domination. So, I mean I don’t need to eat meat of any kind, for a lot of different reasons.

I digress. What was I talking about? Right, the diet and health. So I have a boring diet and since I am rarely hungry now, I can check the “dietary lifestyle change” off my list.

Exercise, as my doctor clearly knows (because we have discussed it many times), is the tough part. He knows I do not have a car. He also knows I am on disability. He knows that anything that’s not a medical errand (and exercise does not count, I already argued with Pennsylvania Medicaid and Medicare about this) costs me $6 round-trip.

I applied awhile back to the YMCA grant for poor people thing, which I got. The woman told me, “As Christians, we think everyone should at least pay SOMETHING,” when I asked her why there was still a fee of $12/month. “You mean you can’t spare $12 a month??” she asked. I told her, no, but I would be glad to volunteer as anything, and if she had me do counseling volunteer work that was worth at least $25/hour so…”Oh, you have to volunteer on top of paying the fee,” she said.

Ok so that’s $12 plus transportation costs of $18/week, assuming a 3 times/week exercise schedule. And it has to be done between the hours of 9 am and 2 pm, M-F, because those are the times the Blair Senior Services vans run (the $6/round-trip guys).

That’s minimally $84/month. Even if I inexplicably ditched my cell phone (which isn’t practical and no, I do not want an Obamaphone – I had one once and the talk time they provide each month isn’t enough to cover the cost of calls to doctors and other necessary things, let alone call or text my kids and friends), and got rid of my internet (which is $28/month), it still wouldn’t add up to $84/month.

The classes are another issue. The free ones are either not on the days/times I need or they are not suitable (NO Silver Sneakers for me, thanks) or they cost money.

A side issue – one that creeps me out – is that a prominent (and very elderly) doctor I have had contact with is on the YMCA board (in a visible, active, ‘hang-around-the-place’ way), I would not want to run into him. I had heard – through some former clients of mine – that he was into the BDSM scene as a dom, and when I met him he made it creepily clear that this was not a rumor. I was in the middle of an exam for my back at the time. It weirded me out so much, especially when he told me I was a “good girl”, that I left as soon as humanly possible and never went back.

It didn’t particularly shock me that Altoona has an underground dungeon or whatever. I just really don’t want any contact with that group of folks, in any capacity. They seem to be obsessed with sex and that doesn’t sit well with me (no obsessions sit well with me, to be honest).

So, back to the issues of diet and exercise. Diet, check. Exercise, um still figuring that out. I bought a bicycle 3 years ago, and have fallen off it 3 times. Yes, I used to ride bikes a lot as a kid and young adult. I think the falling has to do with the peripheral neuropathy in my legs, which makes it so my legs do not do what I tell them to do, a lot of the time. That relates back to the lower back issue, which was supposed to resolve itself without surgery but the last CT scan last week unintentionally revealed that nothing has changed.

So ends the health update for today. That was the “everything” part of the title.

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Just Stop It. Really.

The Long and the Short of It

Illiteracy or Laziness?

4 Replies

Brief medical update: I feel a bit worse – still have a nightly fever, joint/muscle pain, and all the rest of the recurrent symptoms. Haven’t gotten a call for more tests (to follow up on the 2 that were abnormal), so I guess I will have to wait until my November appointment with the rheumatologist to find out anything more.

Ok, today’s rant is about the frustration involved when trying to communicate with people who either do not have a good understanding of English (and I am not necessarily referring to non-native speakers), or are too cognitively lazy to understand English. In other words, I don’t have an issue with people who live in the US but do not know very much English – I happen to believe that citizens here should be able to speak any language they want, as we are (mostly) a nation full of immigrants.

No, the issue I am having is with people I have been communicating with who require several attempts on my part before they can respond in a way that makes sense. I can tell that they actually DO know English, as their grammar and so on are correct. But I do not understand why even the simplest of (in my case) emails is replied to with irrelevent and sometimes even angry responses that indicate to me that the person had no idea what I just wrote to them.

I will give you an example of an ongoing communication that I just recently gave up on because I was so frustrated that it wasn’t worth the aggravation.

Sometimes I participate in online surveys. More times than I would like, something goes wrong with the survey, usually a technical problem. I will usually note the survey number if I can find it, and then email customer service to tell them their survey isn’t working right. Usually I am just trying to be helpful – rarely is it ever a case of, “Hey I finished this survey and then got an error page, and now I didn’t get my reward points.”

If I did this a lot, I could see why they might get all snippy with me. But it’s usually, “Hey this survey said ‘press this button’ but there was no button, and I got stuck in a loop and had to task-manager out of it. Thought you might want to know about this.”

Sometimes the response I get is a thank you, and a note that they have taken the survey offline to fix it. Most times, however, the exchange goes like this:

Me: I was asked to register for a (name of) community forum through your site, but when I hit “ok” I got redirected to the Google search homepage. So I wasn’t able to even register for the forum. I think there may be a technical problem with this particular survey.

Them: We received your email and are sorry for the inconvenience this issue may have caused, but we are unable to award you any points because we cannot verify that you finished the survey. Please allow until the survey has closed before you contact us again.

Me: But I am not writing you about award points. I am trying to tell you about a problem I had with the survey in case anyone else is having the same problem.

Them: We have looked into this particular survey and do not see that you have participated in it. Please try the link again.

Me: That’s the point – I can’t participate because it kicks me to the Google search homepage before I can even register for it.

Them: What’s the survey number?

Me: I didn’t see one but you just got through telling me you looked it up and couldn’t see my participation in the survey, so surely you must know the survey number?

Them: We will need either a survey number or a screen shot that indicates you completed the survey before points can be awarded.

Usually at this point I would write a long, detailed email explaining things in a numbered list. But I don’t feel well today and I sure don’t feel up to doing this just so I can help some company out. A company who cannot even understand what it is I am writing about, so they just go with the default “customer is bitching about her points” responses.

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