More politics

I thought the number of phone calls I got during the presidential election were bad!  I’ve been getting several phone calls every day from the organizations behind the different gubernatorial candidates!  It is very aggravating!  The phone rings, I answer it.  There is a long pause at the other end and then a recording starts off about the upcoming gubernatorial election.  I immediately hang up.  I already know who I am going to vote for, and these calls are not going to change my mind.  I just wish the calls would stop!

Disputing a credit card charge

There used to be a time when the credit card companies backed me up when I made a claim, disputing a payment. Well, those days sure seem to be over! There was a charge on my American Express card last May for $197 for a product that I did order. However I then subsequently cancelled that order and the merchandise was never received. I have proof that I contacted the company and cancelled the order, and I have an email from the company acknowledging the cancellation. Yet American Express keeps telling me that the charge is valid and that I have to pay it! So every month I have to reopen the claim. It is getting very tiring and I am thinking about cancelling that credit card! I have plenty of other credit cards that I can use – I don’t need the aggravation that goes along with this one!

Fruit flies

I understand that fruit flies come into the house via the fresh fruit that we buy at the grocery store, but I don’t understand how they travel from the kitchen area all the way into the bathroom.  It just doesn’t make sense to me that we didn’t have any kind of drain flies in the bathroom until we brought fruit in the house and started seeing fruit flies around the compost bucket!  My wife tells me that they are just fruit flies, and there really isn’t a whole lot we can about them if we want to keep bringing fruit into the house.  That’s really too bad, I enjoy the fresh fruit, but I hate the fruit flies!

Freecycle

I think Freecycle is great, but it has its limitations. We get (and give) some great stuff for free, but there are times when it can be aggravating. For example, when you are trying to negotiate a pickup or dropoff, the other party involved doesn’t seem to want to exchange telephone numbers, they simply state that they are leaving something by the curb for you to pick up at a certain time. But sometimes that certain time is simply impossible to meet, and when you send them an email about it to try to let them know (and renegotiate) they don’t always respond. So it can get quite frustrating!  And if you are trying to give something away and the person doesn’t show up to get it, and doesn’t call you to let you know that they aren’t coming (or got lost) or to renegotiate a different time, that is very frustrating as well!

Maybe they ought to develop a rating/ranking system like e-bay, where feedback is given.  I think that would make it a lot easier to use!

So sad to see

I’ve been trying to mentor some young people on job-hunting. I see how earnest they are, wanting to find work, and I try to help them out as much as I can. Whenever I hear of a job opening somewhere, I fill them in. I know that a lot of jobs are landed through social networking, and many jobs are not even advertised in any form. These folks have been looking for years, and are not on unemployment. It’s a miracle that they have not turned to crime.

I give them pep talks and help them work on their resume, and tell them I have confidence in them. It is so sad to see how hard they are working trying to find a job and they get turned away time and time again. It is very sad to see – they are disillusioned and discouraged. One of the things that upsets me is that these discouraged and disillusioned job-seekers are not even counted as part of the “unemployment figures” that the government releases. So when the government says that the economy is looking up because unemployment is down, that is just a lie. Very sad.