IS IT TIME TO TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?

Where is everybody? Have you deserted me?

I couldn’t help but notice the decreasing amount of comments lately and, since that’s the only way I can tell you’re reading my stuff, I have to assume people aren’t reading it like they used to. At first I thought this was caused by the reduction in frequency of my posts, but I put a stop to that quite a while ago.

So what is it? Have my tirades grown tiresome? Do I no longer bring up interesting topics? Have you moved on to, as they say in the workplace when someone quits in disgust, new adventures?

Maybe it’s a combination of all three. It saddens me to think that. I put a lot of work into this thing and have always attempted to entertain in the process of getting my thoughts out. It saddens me to think my three and a half year blogging experience is over.

Of course, when I write “over” I don’t mean it with the ringing sense of finality it implies. I do, after all, have a “professional” blog bearing my real name and a few other blogs to which I contribute. But this was the first and, let’s be honest here, best of them. Sure it’s now called “Redux” and I started it over last year, but those who have been reading Organized Chaos from the beginning remember the original one.

So what is it? I know I lost some people when I deleted the old blog, people I couldn’t locate via email. Newer readers seemed to be more fair-weather, stopping by briefly before fading again into the background of the so-called blogosphere. Thus my core readership, my “vultures” as I good-naturedly dubbed them in the early days, became even more important. With them now disappearing, I don’t think I have the energy, patience or time to recruit new ones.

Maybe it’s me, then. I don’t really seek out new blogs and new civilizations these days. I do comment on the blogs of my regular readers but that’s about it.

Some of those bloggers are MIA lately. They have lives and responsibilities and other pesky nuisances that prevent them from enjoying themselves. I understand. Only an idiot wouldn’t.

So what is it? Is it the subtle shift in tone? I was once told that the angrier, more miserable Scribe was more interesting. That kind’ve hurts. It implies that I was some kind of sideshow freak whose pain provided amusement. Now that I don’t seem so unhappy, the trained monkey is being ignored.

Honestly, I don’t know why I’ve been deserted. Unlike some, I’m not planning to stop blogging. This is something I’ve come to need, both as a writer and as a person who often feels unnoticed because of his real-life demeanor. But I might de-emphasize this blog’s importance. Maybe it’s time to move to those new adventures like the bitter ex-employees.

I wish I could say that filled me with anything resembling positive feelings. But I miss the days when a post of mine would receive so much response that the comments could reach 30 or more in a single day. These days I’m lucky to get six for the week.

What will happen when even those people stop reading?

THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF "DUDE", WORLD'S STUPIDEST WUS- part 2

Brief recap- The continuing story of Dude has more wrinkles in it than Joan Rivers’ original face. In a nutshell, his much younger Canadian wife cheated on him after one year of marriage with an illegal Mexican son of a taco restaurant owner and wound up carrying his child. She’s now back in Canada but the divorce court judge is insisting on DNA testing despite a signed statement from her regarding the infidelity and won’t grant the divorce or waive Dude’s responsibility for a child that isn’t his unless she submits, which she won’t.

Now, on with the show. As mentioned in the previous episode, Dude developed an online addiction and started spending way too much time on MySpace. He eventually met an “older woman” who is five years older than him. I don’t want to bog this down in rehashing, so in brief she is a person with severe medical issues and a supposedly evil set of children. Dude’s all about rescuing women in worse situations than his own, so it sounded like a match made in slacker-heaven.

However, instead of getting to know this woman and maybe even meeting her in person, he decided he’d cart her all the way from Florida back to his home in Michigan as a way to help her out and avoid potential foreclosure on his home. People told him he was insane but he was hell-bent on driving there and picking her up. Then something weird happened.

Older Lady started flaking out on him. It started with her sending enraged text messages when Dude forgot to add “you” to the end of “Love” in a text regarding getting a good job to support them both. Two days later she still wasn’t answering his texts and voicemail messages. Unlike most rational people, he was still planning to go. It was only a matter of time before he called me to get my opinion.

The first time he called I let it go to voicemail. I was watching “Stepbrothers” and laughing too hard to answer. After his third call and after the movie was over, I called him back. Things had changed by the time we talked.

Dude had reached an epiphany of sorts. After two days, he and Older Lady talked, she grew angry again, and the silent treatment started all over again. He was understandably upset because he still didn’t know her address and was supposed to be coming to get her in a few days. Eventually they did talk again and she confessed her reluctance to make his life more complicated.

That’s admirable, considering what I now know about her life. Dude told me he realized how insane this whole thing was and wouldn’t be bringing her here no matter what. Then he started telling me about her.

As he described Older Lady’s life for me, I realized Dude is incapable of objectivity when he thinks he cares about someone. His descriptions sounded woefully one-sided to me, forcing my mind to fill in the blanks as he spoke. I will refrain from doing so now because I want you to experience it the same way I did.

Dude spun a fascinating tale of Springer-esque dysfunction. Older Lady has two adult children, one girl and one boy. The girl has a Cuban boyfriend. During Older Lady’s struggle with cancer, her daughter decided to introduce her boyfriend’s father to her. They wound up getting married despite his inability to speak English. Per Dude, the daughter pushed this relationship as a way to control her mother. Why? The mother came into some money based on a settlement regarding her medical care.

If this sounds like an episode of “Hillbilly Dynasty” to you, you’re not alone. Older Lady married the Cuban who cheated on her constantly. One time he dropped her off at the drugstore so she could pick up her medication and was gone for an hour. It turned out he was parked on the other side of the building, having a phone conversation with his girlfriend. Understandable. Nothing sucks worse than some annoying, cancerous wife interfering with your other woman situation.

When she wound up in the hospital, her kids stood over her bed, assuming she was unconscious, and discussed how they were going to divide up her things. Her attorney came in, heard this, and told them to get the fuck out.

Is it all starting to make more sense now? This woman whose husband and children mistreated her meets a guy whose wife cheated on him. The common thread here is Hispanic men. He despises them, especially now, and it seems to me he’d love to rescue a woman from their evil clutches.

But give Dude credit for one thing: Even he knows this was a bad idea. Like I told him, what’s to stop her family from blaming you if anything happens to make her medical situation worse? Can you imagine the life you’d lead?

“I never even thought of that! That’s a good point!” he yelled.

So Dude’s right back where he started financially. His day job in real estate isn’t paying off much and his afternoon job doesn’t pay the bills. At night he drinks beer and goes online. His divorce won’t go through until the DNA test occurs and his would-be ex-wife has no intention of traveling back to the U.S., supposedly because of the cost.

Something doesn’t seem right about that. In fact, something about Dude’s entire story seems off. He is a man on the verge of mental collapse, angry, bitter, and dejected. It wouldn’t surprise me if he took some people with him when he blew.

He proved this the other day when he told his supervisor, formerly known as EFB, to fuck off.

But let’s not get into that just yet…

***IN BRIEFS***

Wait. I mean, "Brief." No "S." I write these things el fresco.

As regular readers (all two of the remaining ones I seem to have these days) know, I often refrain from jumping on the subject matter bandwagon. So I gently waited my turn to say something simple and to the point on this particular topic, and here goes:

Would someone mind loaning me one of their feet so I can properly

KICK THIS HIDEOUS, CRAZY BITCH'S INCONSIDERATE, FANATICAL ASS ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE SEWER GRATING FROM WHICH SHE EMERGED???

RUDE PEOPLE

Why do people feel so free to swear at people over the phone that they’ve never met whenever they hear something they don’t like? More accurately, why do women feel so comfortable and justified when it comes to this?

This is not a call of the week, it is merely a brief pondering. I wasn't rasied to show my ass in public…unless a distinguished gentleman with a Porsche was in the vicinity. I also wasn’t raised to swear at people doing their jobs or, for that matter, those who got disrespectful or snippy.

Actually, I was raised to keep a pretty tight reign on my emotions whenever possible and to reason objectively whenever capable. I never once remember seeing my mom lose it on the phone with someone representing a company. Like most if not all, I’ve had my share of negative experiences with customer service and financial departments. I’ve grown angry and raised my voice and demanded the useless supervisor who, except where I work, is every bit as powerless as his or her direct subordinate.

But those are extreme scenarios, cases where the person on the other end of the phone was a bitch or an asshole so inflexible or unconcerned or hostile that it created a like response. That’s not what this post is about. Let everybody else piss and moan about that. I’m focusing instead on minor inconveniences engendering such responses.

As has been noted throughout history, people often have a tough time distinguishing between fact and fiction. By the same token, they also seem to have difficulty distinguishing between corporations and those paid to enforce their policies.

We all know there are immature people in the world who still reason like angry teenagers. A certain percentage of human beings will always be clueless and without sense. And, sadly, I have to say it is often a symptom of class and the significant lack thereof. Lower class, lesser-educated people tend to be the culprits. This isn’t exclusive to them, though. An underserved sense of entitlement on the part of wealthy and middle class types can be equally as obnoxious.

If you’re wondering what my major bone of contention is, I’ll share it with you. Where I work, we have a strict verification policy. If the account is started in your name, you are the only person authorized to discuss it or make changes to it unless you authorize someone else to do so. There has been entirely too much fraud committed in the cellular industry for it to be any other way.

It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter that you have a cell phone on the account holder’s family plan. It doesn’t matter that the account holder lives in another state or is vacationing at a brothel in Amsterdam and you can’t reach them. It doesn’t even matter that you are his or her spouse and have seen him or her nekkid. A cell phone is not a utility. Say it with me, please: A cell phone is not a utility.

It is, however, a small computer that is also licensing airtime from the FCC. As such, it cannot be treated like your electrical or heating bill. Being married to someone does not entitle you to have access to the account unless the account holder either authorizes you or you have subpoena in you hand.

Naturally, the process to ensure all the appropriate have access is a simple one, and just a naturally people make it needlessly complicated. Just getting the person name don the account is half the battle. Once that occurs, the account holder provides them with a password so they can verify themselves when they call in. How many of these people do you think remember or bother to write down this password?

When these people call in and can’t remember the password, it’s my job to ask for the account holder so I can verify other info with him or her and get them to change it if they don’t remember it either. Here’s where we separate the intelligent from the overly emotional. Instead of being grateful for the fact that some stranger can’t call in with the social security number and enable to phones to call Zimbabwe, these people grow furious when I can’t assist them beyond general information. Here are a few examples:

* The woman whose husband was a graveyard digger. Her husband dropped the phone in a grave and wisely decided against exhuming the corpse to reclaim it. His wife, country gal that she was, started yelling at me because I couldn’t go over replacement options with her. I offered to call the gravedigger and get her added to the account and she yelled, “He works for a living-uh!” After he hung up, ready to cancel service, I called her husband, nice guy, and had her added.

* The man who called in for info who I advised we needed to have authorized by his wife the account holder before we could discuss anything and he started yelling, “NOT TRUE! NOT TRUE!” because some idiot had assisted him once before. We went round & round until I finally said, “Look, What that other rep did was against company policy and could have lost their job.” Only then did he realize I wasn’t going to budge.

* The most recent and typical example, yet another hillbilly female, screaming the popular slogan, "This is bullshit!” These are the ones that start throwing out incorrect passwords and the account holder’s social security number thinking they can bombard us with info until we just cave in. Not I. This one I calmly advised we were just going in circles when we could have already resolved this by contacting the account holder. She grew angry and hung up.

* My favorite happened last week. This woman kept yelling that it was her phone and she pays the bills, None of that matters. She also claimed she received help at the stores without being authorized which is against company policy. I advised her the named account holder must authorize her, she employed the original, “This is bullshit” slogan and threatened to cancel service before hanging up. I just checked that account as of this writing nothing has taken place. It rarely does.

I like to think these people think about their behavior after they hang up. I like to think they realize how silly and childish they were. Sometimes I even allow myself to believe they understood the reason for what happened and are glad we are so protective of their privacy. Certainly some customers have expressed gratitude and understanding.

But the original point of this post was why people feel so comfy being verbally abusive to customer service folk? Maybe it’s the faceless quality of the interaction. Surely it’s easier to be a bad-ass when no one can see you. Maybe there’s a sense of superiority involved here people can feel bigger and more important than the person servicing them. Or maybe they’re so provincial that nobody they don’t know personally matters. I suppose it could be all of the above and more I haven’t thought of.

I’m a pretty thick-skinned guy and I keep my cool in most situations. But even I have a limit when it comes to being mistreated for doing nothing wrong. So, consider this me letting off a little steam.

Thanks for “listening.” You can start yelling at me now~

THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT BEGGARS

Did you know there are people in this world who borrow money as a means of survival? I’m not talking about homeless beggars or those who view credit card debt as a source of income, either. I mean everyday people.

Amounts are relative, of course. Some people borrow large sums while others subsist on tiny amounts sprinkled throughout the month.

Somehow these people are always able to find someone willing to loan or give them cash when they need it. This often takes place even when the person doing the loaning doesn’t have it to spare. There are no statistics on this, of course, but I’d venture to guess less than 50% of those who loan the cash will ever see it again. But I’ll also bet 80% or higher will loan that person money at least once more.


So what’s the deal? What do these begging bastards have and how can we get some cross coronation going so we can get our piece of the handout pie? Your guess is as a good as mine…well, no. My guesses are always better than yours but I was trying to be nice.

You might be wondering why I bring up such an odd topic. It’s very simple: It’s just another symptom of the unfairness that seems to keep the universe going. I hate to liken the beggars to cockroaches, but their finely honed survival instincts and ability to overcome all obstacles thrown at them makes the comparison unavoidable. To add insult to put-down, there doesn’t seem to be any element of balance to the situation

In other words, if you’re not one of them, you will never be able to do what they do. Right now you’re probably wondering why anyone would want to do what they do. It depends. If the goal is to survive by borrowing money you’ll most likely never pay back, you want to be leech and are beneath contempt and just right for the Jerry Springer Show. However, if the concern is more along the lines of, “When is somebody gonna help me out when I need it most?” you’re on the right track.

I’ll be honest with you, when it came to money I was a born sucker throughout my twenties and only stopped being one because practicality overcame stupidity. Basically, I wound up broke and nobody who took advantage of my surplus was there to help through the recession.

I’m a rare type of person, though. I don’t give money with the intent of reclaiming it at a later date. I’m not a miser. I know I come across as some kind of cavalier, disinterested deity, but I too have my soft side. When I love someone, for instance, I do what I can to make his or her lives more bearable. I don’t expect them to return the favor, but I do hope they will.

They haven’t always. I’m sure you can relate. Therein, I suspect, lies the problem at the heart of it all. I have a conscience. Like all of you, I tried for many years to rid myself of this hindrance and devote my life to the pursuit of my own pleasures heedless of the consequences to others. Sadly, without an undeserved sense of entitlement, this cannot be done. So I failed.

For someone to actually survive on borrowing or taking money from others, that person can’t have much of a conscience. To place one’s own desires or needs above those of others requires a childlike mentality indicating a lack of emotional development. This is even truer when we consider the financial situations of many of the people being hit up for money on a regular basis.

What I’ve been trying to explain to a certain someone who can’t understand why “evil people” seem to do ok in life while the rest of us suffer is that these people are supported by others. They’re manipulative, cunning and devious. They are the perfect matches for the world in which we live and they harness their natural abilities to ensure their own survival. We as the rationalizing, feeling counter-parts, are little more than a resource to them. Sometimes we get angry and attack the beggars but so many of us don’t that it makes little difference.

Besides, the argument could be made that anyone who resorts to violence against a beggar is a beggar himself; he just doesn’t know it.

When the time comes and I need something, anything, it is rarely available. Forget about money. I am fortunate enough to have friends similar to me when it comes to doing for others, so there are a few people I can still count on. But I feel like shit asking them. If I were one of the beggars, I’d exploit them for all they’re worth. Yes, this has happened to them too.

I cannot beg to survive. It’s not in my DNA. But I’m not going to allow myself to be the victim of those who can anymore~

ONE SHOT, MANY LIVES.

He'd always been a dependable guy. Back when he was living with his best friend, he paid half the rent every month with a few exceptions. During those months when he couldn't or didn't pay the rent, he felt so bad that he would pay two months' worth the following month. He refused to ask his live-in girlfriend for any help financially and tried his best to help out his junkie sister whose interests seemed to run more toward gangstas and pissing off her parents.

He'd always been a moody guy. He was one of those people who'd look up at a sunny day and agree it was beautiful but damaging to the irises. His world seemed to consist of an unfulfilled purgatory where the only constant was his pride in handling his personal affairs without needing help from anyone else.

Then, like many living in Michigan these days, he lost his job of twenty-seven years. He was fifty years old and identified himself as much by what he was able to handle on his own as the job he'd done for nearly three decades. Realizing he might need to ask someone else for help, realizing the purgatory in which he lived had just become less than he could control, he came up with a plan.

He casually asked a friend if he could see that shotgun they'd talked about before. The friend, thinking nothing of it, handed it to him.

One day when his live-in girlfriend wasn't home, he decided it was time. He grabbed sheets and other things and made sure he covered everything in the room so she wouldn't come home to a mess. He then dressed in several layers for the same reason.

Nobody knows how long he waited after that or what he thought about, but at some point after he covered everything, he placed the shotgun to his heart and pulled the trigger.

His best friend, also fifty but by appearance and behavior much younger, was despondent. He felt responsible, as if he should have somehow intuited this and stopped it. The sister didn't help. She called the best friend and started telling him he should have known her brother was this suicidal and could have stopped it if he hadn't been so occupied with his own girlfriend. The resulting conversation wasn't pleasant, nor should it have been...

I have been thinking about this since I heard about it yesterday. The best friend, the survivor if you will, has always been the jokester type, finding any and everything funny. I've never heard a serious word come out of his mouth that wasn't followed by sarcasm. But I always knew there was a serious component to him. The person who related the story did not and, considering the best friend's tendencies toward manic depressiveness, has decided to maintain a quasi-suicide watch.

I can't help thinking about how we see ourselves and how we maintain our sanity. Most of us have such a tenuous grasp on our senses of self that the slightest setback can be devastating. Was he weak? Yeah, probably. But I won't judge his actions or his decision. Until the gun is pressed against a major organ, neither should you.

But let's all think about him from time to time. Maybe it will help us think about someone else we don't take quite as seriously as we should. Maybe we will be there when their moment of weakness and doubt overtakes them.

Maybe it will be us~

THE STORY I HELD BACK FROM TELLING UNTIL NOW

I had one of them there epiphanies the other day and, as usual, it didn’t fill me with anything resembling positive feelings. I realized, with no small measure of reluctance, that I often overlook a person’s glaringly obvious negative traits if I think they are reasonably intelligent. If they are pleasing to the eye, even more so.

This was something I honestly didn’t know about myself, although upon reflection I see now I’ve always done this. I know this isn’t a rare thing but it bothers me nonetheless.

The sad reality of the situation is that these people, Oh let’s just say women since they aren’t men, always let me down in some way. IN some recent cases, the letting down occurs on regular basis in-between intervals of likeability.

It’s amazing what a little time and distance can achieve. Had you asked me about this same individual a year ago, I would have said nearly all the opposite things of what’s in this post. In fact, I might have grown defensive and hostile if you’d even broached the subject, so convinced was I that I was right. But things changed from 2007 to 2008.

I wish I could go into more details but I am already running the risk of “saying” too much. You’ll have to be satisfied with the vague references I make, I’m afraid.

Let’s just say that someone I know asked me to assist in something that isn’t necessarily considered legal. Let’s also say that person was required to advance a certain sum to insure it would actually take place. I felt pressured into arranging this and the only reason I agreed to it was because while not strictly legal, it wasn’t for anything nefarious and because, frankly, I had a hard time saying no to this person.

What resulted from that bout of sheer stupidity and a desire to please on my part was a tension-filled nightmare that lasted for five months and sent me into weird mood swings. Basically my contact was a middleman whose contact couldn’t say no to the money. Sadly, he is a small-timer and didn’t have ready access to the materials, and so had to enlist my contact’s aid in jetting around half the state acquiring it in small quantities.

In the process, they wound up getting into a car accident. My contact has terrible night vision and the other one is paralyzed from the neck down. Supposedly he had a bag filled with the materials when the accident occurred. The car was towed away from the scene and both of them wound up in the hospital.

At this point it had been about a month and a half since this arrangement was supposed to bear fruit. In that time, my contacts son became deathly ill and she had to leave Michigan for a few weeks at a time. The subject of this piece only saw the fact that one-hundred dollars was now floating around out there. Instead of seeing this as the cost of doing business – shady business at that where there are no guarantees – they started asking em repeatedly what was going on. I had no idea; I was one of two middlemen in this and wasn’t getting anything out of it except trying to help a friend.

As time went on, this person began to hear dissenting viewpoints on my sincerity. One person said he knew I wasn’t involved in some type of scam while another whose “profession” mirrored the paralyzed guy’s was sure I was scamming. At this point the person started demanding info on my contact, including name, residence, etc. Keep in mind, this was someone who was doing me a favor. Someone I’ve known for years.

So now my good intentions were biting me in the ass. Because I’d been begged, literally begged, to find a way to make this happen, I was now enduring periodic demands to know what was going on. Perfectly understandable. I’d be pissed if my 100 bucks vanished, too, but I’m also in possession of enough class and maturity to realize that sometimes the underworld doesn’t honor its commitments. Go figure. Somebody who deals in illegal goods might not be on the up and up.

Where I come from, and please correct me if I’m wrong, we practice the old you gets what you pays for philosophy. In other words, unless some crook stole from you while you weren’t doing anything against the law, you take your lumps and learn from your mistake unless you wanna become a crook, too. And in all truthfulness, this person seemed to feel that way in the beginning. However, like I said, other voices intruded upon common sense. Loud voices.

Suddenly there was another contact who could get what was needed sooner and without all the fuss. Suddenly the loud voice was yelling, “Oh, you gonna get your money back!”
The result of this statement and this moment was a surrealist’s foray into bad moviemaking. Now that the loud voice and its equally attitudinal shady comrade were involved, threats of violence and house fires started.

As if that weren't psychotic and street rabblish enough, the warning was delivered to me with a deadpan facial expression and a slightly amused, "I won't be able to stop it" attitude. In other words, they were OK with it.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't there an inequity involved in torching someone's house over a hundred bucks? When you add to that the fact this person has nothing and in fact lives in a house that could be condemned at any moment because they have nowhere else to do, does that sound like a rational or intelligent response to you? Me neither.

What really offended me was the other contact's assertions that I was somehow involved. And when the friend finally had to inform their significant other, he questioned my judgment as far as friends, wondering if I knew she was this "kind of person."

What the fuck does that even mean? Isn't it pretty much a foregone conclusion that if you know someone who can help you do some illegal shit they probably aren't exactly in line to be the next Dalai Lama?

Since that experience, my eyes have opened and, more recently, a good friend opened them even wider with an off-hand comment that resonated inside me like a small calibre bullet pinging off my bones.

"You were hoping she was a woman of substance," he said.

Yeah, I was. 'Cause I'm a dumb ass.

Now, who still thinks I think I'm the smartest guy in the room?