Charity losers

We had a garage sale last weekend, and in typical fashion, much of the leftover stuff was slated to go to a local ever-asking-with-the-hand-out-charity. My first choice was one of those places that rents in a nice strip mail (drop off only), and send postcards in the mail begging for stuff. I'm no saint here, I picked them cause they were closest, a new place so I thought they'd be thrilled to have the traffic, and yeah, I want the write off. Lots of stuff good and bad, and seriously. Who ever really takes inventory of the crap you dump off? They simply give you a blank "receipt" which you could write down anything up to the IRS legal limit and not be questioned. Scammy smelling already. Us being a little more organized (if you can believe it), take pictures and actually make a list.

So rewind to a pet peeve of mine; simply saying Hello or Thanks. If you've been in the support sector, you know what I mean. You're busy working on some stupid budget that is only going to get rejected with "We approve this project, but cut the costs in half" and someone pops their head in to your office and says "Todd! Applied is down. When I alt-click to calculate the state premiums, I get a Windows exception error that DMXFUKU dot DLL has caused an error. "

Oh, let me hop right on that. And how are you?

It's equally annoying in email or chat or at the grocery store when you hold the door open for some old bag who thinks she's still hot who don't say a word, by golly I SHOULD hold the door for her! Ever ignored the phone cause you know who's calling is going to ask you the SAME question again about their computer? Now now, you people reading that have asked my my input on something and I've given it and you've said THANKS, I'm not talking about you. You rock. Most of those people won't ever find my blog any way. Hell, as a total side line, I fixed my neighbors Internet the other day and I got not only cookies, but banana nut bread!!!

OK, back to the local charity. Here it is, Monday morning, the Clampett truck & trailer loaded with all sorts of stuff including a TV, books, computers, clothes, luggage, table & chairs, and tons of misc THINGS. All ready for my local charity to sift through like Christmas and put up for sale to support their little non-profit organization!! Cool, they've got a covered drive though (absolutely necessary in this desert climate):

Me: Hi! How ya doing!? I've uh, got all sorts of STUFF for ya.

GW: We don't take TVs

Me: (I'm fine, how are you?) Why not?

GW: We just don't take them.

Me: OK, well fine. Lots of stuff here anyway. Know who takes TVs?

GW: Fred!?! Who takes TVs?? (Fred says XXX Glendale Avenue. Thanks Fred)

I pop open the back of the truck to help unload. I'm THAT kinda helpful guy. I unload an Apple Macintosh all-in-one PC. I set it on the cart.

GW: We don't take monitors.

It's not a monitor, it's an all in one computer.

We don't take computers.

Me: (slight annoyed laugh) Listen dude, ya gotta take the good with the bad! You quickly unloaded my good table and chairs. I got three computers, if you don't want them, how about you throw them away?

GW shrugs and says "Put them over there"

Me nodding, then grabs a stack of books and puts it on the cart. Uh-Oh, GW sees me:

"FRED?!?!?!?!" Fred comes out. Looks at what I've just done and states "We don't take books"

What? Are you fucking kidding me? I lost it a little and had enough "Tell you what, how about you put all my shit back on the trailer then and I'll take it somewhere else?" And they do. I got one last comment from them about they can't afford to pay for trash haul off. It was very canned and rehearsed. Yeah right I thought, but you can take the good stuff and sell it and pay for this fancy new building and the postcards in the mail begging for garage sale leftovers.

20 minutes later another local place that takes donations for Multiple Sclerosis took it all, did most of the unloading and not only gave me receipts, but gave me a handful of coupons for 20% items in their store. And they said thanks. I'll be going back to them.

I'm fine, how are you?

Rock & Roll Wall man....

Just while THINKING about putting this blog up for Mitch to see pics, I thought of ALL of these damn yard projects that just start to overwhelm me. On the plate:

1. Raised berm area around some pre-existing trees, using rock as a border (see three pictures below). These are all rocks from my yard, the biggest that I can move is about the size of a basketball. HEAVY!
2. Turning the current cinder block pepper garden (CLICK HERE) in to a much larger tomato and pepper garden area surrounded by Pavestones and getting rid of most the block. Maybe this weekend?
3. In the background you can see the huge boxes for the gazebo.
4. Before I do that, I need to make a patio to set it on.
5. Not really a separate project, but making a flagstone pathway from the old patio to the the gazebo.
6. In a fantasy world, all around the new patio would be curbing, sprinkler system and grass.
7. The dogs are getting their own small patio that will be under the faucet (to cool it) made out of a stack of square fabricated pavers. Should be a nice little area for them, if they use it!
8. Off the gazebo I want to build an arbor like area and use the brick I brought from Kansas for a new patio area there, and remove the flat cinder blocks that are in front of the door of the shed.
9. The dry creek beds have near filled in with silt from all the rain washout we've gotten. Needs upgraded and repaired!
10. In the again fantasy world, horseshoe pit, waters/fountain features, and a flat sitting area up on the hill.

See what I mean? I'm sure I forgot 10 things too!

Rain Rain GO away

Highly unusual for us, it's been raining for near a week here. Very cool to hear thunder again, surprised at how much I've missed it. Rain is cool too, but I'm done with it. My backyard is mud, my dry creek beds are now mud beds, lots of THINGS washed away, and I've got plants to get in the ground! Thankfully unlike Kansas, I have no water problems in the house.

Memorial Day rambling

We had a great Memorial Day weekend, doing the kind of outdoor summer stuff we love to do. Lots of grilling, lots of yard work. A few weeks ago we went to an auction and picked up over 40 plants, CHEAP!
We're later than we were last year on getting tomatoes and peppers in the ground, but then again we had some snow just a few weeks ago. All of the above plants are non-edible though, so now we have TWO types of planting to get done. I'm happy to say that we got about 10 in the ground this weekend. Digging holes here sucks.

The grilling this weekend included bratwursts, fish, steak and ribs. Overall satisfied my grilling needs for awhile. Got a lot of other little things done too. Mowed, mounted the TV, turned the compost bin, extended the drip irrigation. Too bad the NASCAR race sucked.

Texas Pinball Festival trip coming up!

Pretty excited about the TPF this coming weekend. We're going to drive and make a little vacation out of it sans dogs. Long trip, should take us 2 1/2 days of driving. The forecast is looking OK for our trip, maybe a little rain when we get there.

But look what I woke up to today!

So much for working on the trailer....

Todd Likes to.....

The urge to blog is constant, but procrastinating is super easy, so when I ran across something easy and silly to blog about, here I am! Go to Google and type in your name in quotes like this following sentence, and simply report the results: "Todd likes to".

1. Todd likes to ride things!
2. Todd likes to dance
3. Todd likes to bowl
4. Todd likes to socialize
   
5. Todd likes to spend time with his wife
6. Todd likes to play with his children
7. Todd likes to work hard and play hard
8. Todd likes to make up characters
9. Todd likes to take the law into his own hands
   
10. Todd likes to eat grasshoppers

I say I scored a 7/10, assuming my dogs are my children. For those interested, there's a video of #10 <Click Here>

I do it to myself....

It's my fault. Why oh why do I torture myself!? The reveling in the sale of the project Bally Draw Poker game Friday (at a small $50 profit even!) was short lived. By Sunday, I had my sites on another project pinball machine, and a fairly nice Super Pac-Man video game. To top it off, my friend Jed calls and says "Ya want some books?". Uh, sure? How many? "I dunno, a couple hundred." So on my way home from getting the two games, I stopped by Jed's for the books:



Couple hundred? Try 600-650!! Sheesh. It took me a half hour JUST to unload! Hopefully some gems in this lot. I except that half will be donation or thrown away.

Tracy's gonna love me when she gets home tonight!!!

The Kansas Garden Rocket is finally home!

Yeah!!! Only gone for 18 months, finally at it's proper home!

Pinball Fun in Kansas

Wow, sure did hit me hard last night how much I miss my KC Pinball buddies. Brutha Burt had a small get together/pinball tournament and set up a web cam so I could enjoy the show. Was really nice to see, hear, and chat with some old friends, and relive the past when pinball parties were a lot more common than they are for me now. (Sniff). It was a late thought to grab pictures, and I only managed to get a few:


I hear Don won. Big surprise........

Seven hours in the corner

I festered all afternoon, and tried not to be bitchy to my lovely wife, but when they proactively held back my funds from the weekend (totaling over $400), I lost it. In all seriousness, I sent this:

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I am appalled that after selling on Amazon since 2004, that after a few refunds for justified reasons, and a few negative feedbacks, that not only is my account under review and my funds held for 30 days, within a few hours my account was SUSPENDED without a valid reason. I'm shocked and angered that your policy only looks at 30 days of activity and then treats sellers in such a rude manner. Unless my account suspension is lifted immediately, I will be removing my inventory from Amazon (now at close to 1800 unique items) and selling elsewhere.

----------------------------

At 10:52PM my suspension was lifted, and my funds released. I'm not exactly certain it had anything to do with the above email, but they weren't going to lift it unless I gave SOME response. To quote them, they said: "In order to reinstate your listings, please write and provide a detailed account of the steps you will undertake to bring your performance up to our standards. ".

I wrote, but I certainly didn't give them a plan on how I was going to improve!

Sigh. Corporate drama. I miss it not.

Sorry, you apparently didn't behave.

Amazon must be teaming up with eBay and PayPal with their corporate policies. Today, for no good reason (that I agree with anyway), my Amazon seller account was suspended. Why? Well, the form letters are pretty vague, but it appears that a combination of lower sales in the past month, three non positive feedbacks, and four refunds were enough to do it. So let's analyze:

1. One negative feedback for a damaged package, the buyer is irate with me and there was no calming him down. He even called me a crook, multiple times!

2. One neutral feedback: "Everything was good, except the game won't save. And I know it's not my memory card because i can save other games on it." Certainly my fault. I'll talk to Sony.

3. One negative because I accidentally sent the wrong item, and his replacement isn't there yet. Guess he felt it was his job to leave me a negative for making a mistake. Thanks asshole.

4. A refund cause the customer returned the item (without my approval but that's besides the point). This counts against me?

5. One refund cause the customer changed their mind. Her husband bought it elsewhere. Again my fault.

6. One refund cause I miscounted items, WHOOPS! I make mistakes!! It's TRUE!

7. One cause I sold it to a local guy and couldn't remove it quick enough on Amazon and it sold so I had to refund.

All this resulted in:

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We are writing to let you know that your listings have been suspended and are currently unavailable for sale. The feedback, claims, and/or refunds submitted to your seller account profile indicate that a number of buyers have been dissatisfied with the service you have provided.

Amazon sellers should maintain refund rates and negative feedback rates of less than 5% of orders, as well as A-to-z Guarantee rates of less than 0.5% of orders.

Your seller account will remain accessible to you. Please take steps to resolve your pending sales.

We encourage you to review your processes in order to identify any operational deficiencies that may have contributed to increased negative feedback, guarantee claims or returns submitted by your transaction partners. In order to reinstate your listings, please write to seller-performance@amazon.com and provide a detailed account of the steps you will undertake to bring your performance up to our standards.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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Blame me to be grumpy?

We'll miss you Amber....

Sad day Saturday, Amber went to the land of incredibly huge and colorful Frisbees. Her fight with cancer was super short, and apparently surgery didn't help. We'll miss her. Plenty of tears in Reno.....

Something you didn't know

Cat pukes stains concrete. I'm not trying to follow a theme or anything, just making an observation.

Before

And after!

Welcome to my mansion. Watch your step.

Believe it or not, I was taking a whiz the other day when it struck me about something I've been meaning to blog about for a long time, and now enough time has passed since I left "my old job", I think it's safe. In the days where I did a lot of hand-holding computer work (downloading pictures from the camera, how to burn a CD, cleaning up spyware), I ran in to a lot of disgusting, weird or just wrong things. A lot of these people lived in very expensive multimillion homes, but money doesn't make you normal or smart, that's for sure. The following memories are from a half dozen people over the course of a few years:

1. In one home, the teenager's toilet was jammed very close to the tub & shower. The white shower curtain was pulled back towards the toilet, I couldn't help but notice it was yellowed at the bottom. You figure it out.
2. In the same mansion downstairs, one of their two retrievers (I assume) had taken a big dump in the middle of the oriental rug, it looked like it had been there for awhile.
3. Same house, different kid about 12 years old, had a porn DVD (and a rental to boot) in his non working PC. Don't ask me what I did with it, it's a secret.
4. You know those Folgers pre-measured coffee-in-a-filter packs they sell, for the people that have the money and are too lazy to measure their own coffee and put in their own filter? Convenient? Sure! So when I was asked if I wanted some coffee, she got out the filters, got out the pre-measured coffee packs, slowly tore one open and dumped the contents in to the new filter....
5. A week later on a follow up visit, the turd was still there.
6. Oh, and they put their old nice golden retriever down, why? "Well, we were going on vacation..." Nice.
7. Once at another mansion, I was called because the printer didn't work. It made no sense, that it would just stop working, but it seems like I was always being called to this house to fix weird problems. And not for the first time, the young bratty son who obviously had his dad's prick like attitude is saying to Mom as I'm standing right there: "Mom! We don't NEED him. We need to get a new computer! How much is he going to charge anyway?!". From what I could surmise, yeah, he wanted a new PC. One that downloads porn faster I bet! In this case I found the problem. The printer port had been disabled. Huh!? Wonder how THAT happened!?!?!?!
8. I once had a nightmare virus cleanup at a house with three PCs. They had twins, and their PCs were side by side, and the third was on another floor. They all got one of those damn pop up virus programs that make using your PC impossible. I was able to spend about 3-4 hours and cleaned it all up, and was even thanked with a bottle of expensive wine. I sent in my bill, and I did get paid, but with it was a note that said "Todd, here's your money. We paid a neighborhood kid about $25 to fix the email problem that you did not. He fixed everything and more in about 20 minutes".
9. I had this one lady who was well, just dumber than rocks. To make her feel important I guess, she scheduled "Lessons" with me. I'm not teacher, and I'm not always patient, especially with DUMBASS people, but I tried. These lessons involved me standing behind her for an hour or so while I instructed her where to click on the screen while the PC prompted her. Sometimes I even had to take her hand and move the mouse for her. We're talking copying pictures off her camera people, not complex Excel pivot tables! And not one lesson on this, MANY lessons. She didn't read the screen, and didn't seem to retain anything. I also set up her stereo while there once, and sometimes spent a lot of time cleaning up her Internet messes. The last call I spent there actually was challenging, seems like a driver update made her new HP printer stop working properly. She refused to pay $150 of the bill I sent. Why? I was told by her husband's secretary that she felt I didn't do the work, that I should have known better about the problem since I was a computer guy.
10. One job I had to do was simply to set up an online stock portfolio in Yahoo, and then teach the same secretary how to update it. Picture this now, I'm given his entire investment data, worth in excess of 5 million, and later his wife doesn't pay me $150. I always wanted to send him a thank you card.
    
11. I informed one lady (I mostly dealt with the wives ya know) that I had family over Thanksgiving and thus would be unavailable. Do you think that mattered? Cell phone rings, few minutes later home phone rings, then a few later cell phone rings (sigh!). So I answer. It would have been just a WEE bit nicer to get "Sorry to bother you" but the conversation from the adult son went something like this: "Todd. I forgot my password. I need to get online".... "Uh, OK, but you don't have a PC password?"... "No, no, to SPORTSGAMBLING.COM, I gotta put in a bet for the Denver game". Whatever dude, thanks for bothering me.
12. Not computer work, I was hired to set up a pinball machine is a restaurant owner's newly remodeled basement bar/gameroom. This area musta been 4000 square feet, and it was really cool. To be polite, I took off my shoes. While on my hands and knees under the pinball machine leveling it, the unmistakable smell of piss in the corner was overwhelming. This came to be known as "The Cat Piss House"
    
13. That seems to be a pattern too, pinball machines in the corner, new houses and piss or pooh. Setting up a pinball machine at another time, in another new house up at a new golf course, I asked for a coupla paper towels to clean up the mini-pooh Barky Von Schnauzer left in the corner. Little dogs are like cats dontcha know!
    

Ahh, the goood old days. I did have a coupla good customers that I was always happy to see, but I gotta admit, I'm glad I'm out of that business. It wasn't worth the hassle.

Mover update again

So I got an anonymous post today asking about a move update... WHO ARE YOU!?!?!?!?!

Regardless, here's the update. NOT MUCH!

Once again I thought they'd gone away and written it off. Nearly a month has gone by since my last rebuttal to them, and I hoped it was over. The last email I sent was the first time I mentioned that we would sue it it was pursued, their response last Friday (they LOVE ruining my weekends) was pretty much 'too bad' and gave me until the 24th to pay up.

There is more though. Saturday I picked up the phone and called my so called friend, the branch manager there that promised to take care of me. I've not heard from him since I moved, he's never returned my calls, never emailed. My message wasn't nasty, but it was to the point: Thanks alot BUDDY! I wasn't sure if I'd get a response, but I did. A page back Sunday at 3AM Central Time. Maybe someone else couldn't sleep.

So, there's more to come. Today we actually talked, and from what I can gather, he's never taken the time to read any of the emails or really has much clue as to what is going on. So for now, I wait.....

Garden Patience...

...I really didn't have much. Seems like it took forever for stuff to grow, but in the end, unless it freezes here in the next few weeks (not likely), WE'VE GOT TOMS! I mean honestly though, it's almost October, talk about slow! I've been picking tiny cherry toms for a coupla months, but it's not the same as a thick sweet red Brandywine. Here's a coupla shots of the whole mess of toms.


Peppers have been AWESOME, the pics below are even after I picked a few dozen. Last year they were not so prolific, this year we have tons. What I'm going to likely to is pick them, grill and chop them up and freeze.

Crap in my yard

And by this, I don't mean Dog Logs, I've got plenty of those. What kind of crap do you find in your yard? Mine?!? Me?? It's tons of nails, staples, screws and nuts as seen below. That handful took me 2 minutes of looking around. The staples I'm not sure of, maybe used to put up insulation? The nuts are from the foundation, and I've literally tossed hundreds of them. Why can't the reuse them? Why can't they throw them away. Nah, much to easy to just leave them. Good thing we don't run around barefoot much.

Mover update

Just again when we thought it had gone away, Friday afternoon came and there's an email from the moving company. (See, they like to do this, send an email about mid afternoon Friday to make us worry all weekend. I am not kidding, every single email from them comes on Monday, or Friday, it's the Friday ones that are after a silent period of weeks.) This time it's been since Friday 8/1, and they are making an addition "goodwill adjustment" for $300.

Three Hundred?

We have already told them they owe *US* near Three Thousand, and they are now only wanting us to pay THEM a little more than that. They make it sound like they are losing money, with no regard for how much we've paid, much, much more than they ever told us we would. All the areas we point out are us paying for their mistakes, but that doesn't seem to matter. Once again I outlined how we were overcharged, and Friday is just around the corner. Man it's lovely.

eBay stock sell off

eBay announced another change the others day, and again not in the Sellers best interest. They are no longer going to permit the Sellers to accept money orders, cash, checks or cashiers checks, ONLY PayPal. Get this: eBay *owns* PayPal! This means when you list an item, they are guaranteed basically double commissions, because eBay charges 5% and PayPal gets 3%!!! Now, on one hand I prefer PayPal over money orders, especially for small items, but when I list an expensive item like I have in the past, say a $4000 game, why should I be FORCED to pay an additional $120 to have Big Brother eBay launder the money? In this case, it's only better for eBay, not the Buyer, not the Seller. This doesn't mean the Buyer has to have a PayPal account either, they can use a credit card and it's filtered to the Seller via their PayPal account, still with the same fees. I can tell you this isn't great. A customer of mine didn't recognize my name that showed up on their credit card statement, and thus they filed a dispute, my money was seized instantly. I do mean wham bam gone. $93 in limbo. When I emailed the customer, they realized the mistake and retracted the dispute, but here it is almost 30 days later and it's still pending, PayPal says it can take up to 90 days. They blame the credit card company.

Bull SHIT people!! You should put my money back as fast as you took it.

Just another example folks. I'm getting out. eBay can stick it up their ass.

Gimmee Dat STICK!

Super shorty, Abby got the stick. Last month in the heat in the Truckee River. RRrrrrrrroooooooowwww