Given the name of this blog,
Gentle Reader, you might be justified in thinking the title of this entry would
be a little redundant. You might be
right, but we’re going there, anyway.
Retirement Follies II: Curmie is now four phone calls into the process of actually extracting some of the funds from his retirement account. Everyone at the financial services provider has been very pleasant, and they’ve all provided useful information… but it’s taken all four calls to find out that I can do most of this online; it’s just that the link is hidden well enough to be a secret passage in a mystery/adventure movie. The process is not helped by the fact that two former employers (one of which I left over 20 years ago) still listed me as a current employee (and therefore ineligible to withdraw money) and another requires Beloved Spouse’s signature to allow me access to my own retirement funds.
In the World of COVID. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reports that Georgia’s Regents refuse to require masks on state university campuses,
but do so in their own companies. It’s
even worse in Texas, where mask mandates are not merely not required but
forbidden.
Such is the inevitable result of
having Regents or Trustees or Councilors or WhateverThey’reCalled be hypocritical
political appointees, beholden to especially cretinous governors (Kemp,
Abbott…) BTW, don’t get Curmie started
on Regents in general, given what has recently happened at Curmie’s
university. Only the time-honored dictum
of “don’t shit where you eat” prevents a lengthy
screed about their abrogation of responsibility.
More on Moron Government
Agencies I: Curmie’s department has a long-standing exchange with a British
conservatory. We had two students
scheduled to come last fall, but COVID intervened. Then they were set for spring, but that got delayed,
too. So their arrival was pushed off again
until this fall. We worked out their class schedules in March, and they started the process of getting the appropriate visas
in April. We let them know when we
wanted them to arrive. Sometime in the
middle of the summer, Curmie got an e-mail that there were delays getting a
visa. We finally heard from them: they
couldn’t even get a visa appointment until the day after we needed them here;
they finally arrived over two weeks into the semester. These are student visas. Curiously enough, academic calendars are a
thing. Dear State Department: do your
damned job.
Moron Government Agencies II. The students unsurprisingly looked for the
best rate for their airfare; although there are direct flights, they found a
better deal changing planes in Newark. Then
they got held up by the idiots of HSA (apologies for redundancy), without
explanation… for just long enough to make them miss their connection. Luckily, they were able to get a flight later
that evening… to a different airport, a half-hour further away from here. So instead of being able to move them into
their apartment about 9:00 p.m., it was after 1:00 a.m. Luckily, they’re quite lovely and patient
people.
Unsurprisingly, Curmie had a
flashback to another long night of waiting for HSA to take their thumb out of
their ass. You can read about that one
here.
Obviously False Claims. There’s a commercial that Curmie hears fairly
often on the car radio. It’s for an app
called GetUpside. It claims users can
get “up to 25 cents off every gallon” of gas, and that you can “make up to
$200-300 a month.” How can they get away
with this crap? Let’s be conservative
and say the user gets the full 25¢ a gallon and gets reimbursed “only” $200 a
month. So that’s 800 gallons of gas in a
month. At a conservative 20 mpg, that’s
16,000 miles in a month. Let’s say
someone can average an unlikely 65 mph.
That means driving over 246 hours in a month. A full time job, Monday through Friday: a maximum
of 184 hours in a month. So… uh…
Just Stupid Ads. There’s an ad for one of the ubiquitous
foreign-language programs (Curmie can’t remember which one, having done
everything possible to forget). You know
the kind, Gentle Reader. This one talks
about an upcoming vacation to Paris, so learning French becomes particularly
attractive. At the end, the “student”
cheerfully proclaims that after a mere few weeks he can say “Je suis les
États-Unis.”
Everyone immediately rushes out to
buy the product… except that what he says translates to “I am the United
States.” We’ve had a couple of
Presidents who might think they follow in the footsteps of France’s Louis XIV,
of “L’étât, c’est moi” (“The state is me”) fame. Any democratically inclined American begs to
differ. Note: the lower-case “d” in
“democratically” in the previous sentence is important.
Cable Companies. No one has anything good to say about any of
them. Ours, Suddenlink, seems
particularly inept. Talking to anyone at
the local office is reminiscent of a koi pond, as know-nothing minions exhibit
the latest fashion in carp-like gawping.
But at least they’re pleasant, unlike literally anyone I’ve ever talked
to in their (ahem) “customer service” department. A more rude and condescending collection of
self-important jackasses has seldom been assembled… and Curmie has seen
political conventions.
The internet signal is shaky: rare
is the day Curmie doesn’t get a pop-up on the laptop that internet has been “restored”;
streaming from PBS, BritBox, Acorn, and Netflix generally involves at least a
half dozen pauses while the system buffers, and we get to watch the swirly
wheel.
“It must be raining in Tyler” (an
hour or so away, where Suddenlink’s local headquarters is) is code in my family
for “the internet is out again.” This
happens maybe once a month. We’re not
talking here about actual severe weather—hurricanes or the nasty cold spell
this February—but simply unexplained (and probably unexplainable) outages
occurring with grim regularity.
Usually, we’re talking about an
hour or so, but Chez Curmie was recently without cable, internet, or wifi for well
over 24 hours for no discernible reason.
But you knew that, Gentle Reader. It’s a cable company.
Apparently Suddenlink is trying to expand into the cell phone business. Curmie has been less than thrilled with AT&T, but Suddenlink? In the words of several of Beloved Spouse’s colleagues: Oh. Hell. No.
Final comment: don’t ask about the formatting of this post. It's blogspot.com being blogspot.com.
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