The Assist

In the Safeway I noticed the encounter of a middle-aged man with an elderly, frail woman at the checkout counter when the cashier ringing up the woman casually handed her a light bag of groceries and the elderly lady almost pitched over as she placed it in her cart. The man in line behind her started to reach out to steady her but discretely stepped back when she successfully regained her equilibrium.

The woman handed the cashier a fistful of coupons and then learned that she couldn't use her best one, a ten-dollars-off coupon if the grocery bill was $50. Her total was $49.

She fumblingly put her credit card in the card reader and lamented her loss of ten dollars off but also spoke of her good fortune as well.  "It's too bad I can't use the ten dollar coupon, I counted up my purchases carefully but I gave you too many lesser coupons and now my total is too small.  But this is my first shopping trip in eighteen months after the fracture so I guess I'm doing okay.  I'll just use it the next time I come, if I can get over $50 then."

You and I both know what we would do.  Look anywhere for a one dollar item, a candy bar or anything, so we could then benefit from the ten dollar coupon to achieve a nine dollar savings.  But the lady was evidencing a trace of confusion as she said she didn't want to delay the checkout line.

The man behind her was surveying his items on the conveyor belt and then, handing her two of his four yogurt cups, said, "These are seventy cents each, Ma'am.  If you added these to your purchase, then you could then use your ten dollar coupon because it would put your total over fifty dollars.  I don't know if you like yogurt but it would save you almost nine dollars off your current bill."

She gratefully accepted the two small containers and handed them to the cashier who rang them up. Her total dropped from $49 to forty dollars and change.  The lady helpfully added to the man that she liked yogurt, she spread it on toast, using it like peanut butter.

North America

It was my usual daily call with my friend who is mere weeks from her most beneficial retirement date from federal service who said, "Your example [of retirement] is no template or encouragement for me, because when you retire you die and you haven't shown me anything that leads me to want to retire."  Well, I retired involuntarily from federal service (yes Chris, I'm talking to you, BMOC) two years ago and I haven't died yet and I lamely said, "For six months I ran several miles every day until I got double hernia surgery and then suffered an achilles strain when I returned from that, and now in the last two months I'm back to trying to return to running, and I read every day and I can tell you with virtual certainty that the Allies are still looking like they're going to win WW2 no matter how bad it looks."

She scoffed and I told her my favorite humorous anecdote from my most recent book, Operation Sea Lion, "A nobleman was talking to Britain's defense minister in the summer of 1940, complaining that when the German paratroopers dropped into England in the coming invasion they'd be in London within 24 hours 'unless of course they tried to take the trains.'"  This droll inclusion in the book detailing the Brits' preparation for a likely Nazi invasion of their isle after the fall of France to me is hilarious, but not getting laughter in return to my sustained laughing as I related the passage confirmed to me the reason why I only got into the UVA law school oh-so-many-years-ago and she went to Stanford.

Anyway, retirement is a scary thing and there's never a good time to marry, have a child, buy a first home or retire.  It just happens when it does, and it works out because it has to.

Tomorrow I hope to run two miles, read from my three or four books for a few hours, manage my inadequate retirement account and plan towards my circumvention around North America by car later this year, a land I love.  I have never been outside of it.

When we grow up, we must put aside our Toys.

As I pondered having two pick-ups, my new (used) massive 4X4 traveling truck and my beloved Toyota Tacoma 2000 PU with 99,900 miles on it, good for 150,000 more I was told, since I'm involuntarily retired now, I must trim costs. Two ownership windshield stickers ($40 each), two vehicle property tax bills (hundreds, remember No More Car Tax?--that didn't get done), double insurance (almost a thousand), and maintenance costs.

I called up my buddy John in AZ and offered to sell my stick-shift PU to him at a fair price. He recently got married and made the mistake of teaching his wife to drive, so now he needs a second car for himself.

The fact that the Toyota has a stick-shift, which I love, is a limiting factor in selling a vehicle because many people with operator's licenses can't drive a manual transmission. (Do you even know what I'm talking about?) All I had to do was drive to AZ to deliver it to John, 2,000 miles away, in the winter.

Hmm. The morning I was going to leave on my cross-country trip arrived, and I lolled in bed thinking about a series of Motel-6's across the country, gasoline and toll costs and whether I had enough books-on-tape to last the trip. My thoughts turned to the used-car lot a stone's throw from my back yard where I had purchased my new (used) truck a few weeks earlier... .

Running From The Dentist

Because my dentist is retiring this month, I decided to take care of all of my dental problems before she leaves.  She's excellent, and how could I trust anyone else?

Got an extra six grand this year?  Send it to me.

There's a reason that I don't go to the dentist, unbidden by an actual problem.   My dentist wryly commented that my pattern of dental health was emergency management.

Well, yeah.  It hurts and it's expensive.

Yet Another Dental Visit

The new crown didn't fit no matter how much the dentist examined it, buffed it, drilled it.  "There's a distortion in it," she finally said.  "We'll send it back to be redone and you'll have to return when it comes back."

Then she got to work shaving down the other two crown candidates, after administering copious amounts of Novocaine to the left side of my jaw.  Perhaps you know the experience--mouth wide open, head pushed way back in the chair, eyes focused somewhere on the lights overhead, the drill screaming, a scorched smell in the air, water rushing into your mouth from a tiny jet and being sucked back out again by a small nozzle.

The work was done, the two new molds were created and three temporary caps were emplaced, two on the left side and one on the right side.  "For the next two weeks, try not to use either side of your mouth to chew with," the dentist joked.

Perhaps the end is now in sight.  Besides what I had already paid, the fresh bill was $3,618.

Dental Work

By enduring a few pure-rush-of-pain jabs from my dentist's drill as she ground down a troublesome tooth which couldn't be totally deadened at the point of the crack in the tooth, the tooth was shaped enough to be molded for a permanent crown.  The product to cap the cracked tooth came back from the lab two weeks later and I returned for its insertion and to have, gulp, two more cracked teeth shaped for crowns.

On that day, as I wormed my way into the back of the dental chair and the sweat started to collect on my brow, the tech yanked off the temporary crown over the sensitive tooth and used her prong tool to clear cement off the tooth.  I jerked when she touched the point of the crack in the tooth with her wicked implement.

That hurt.  She didn't touch the spot again.

The dentist came in and tried to place the lab product on the troublesome tooth.  It didn't, wouldn't, fit.

Another Dentist Visit

I came back a week later for another round with the dentist after a painful session the week before.  My posture in the chair was anticipatory, my body was rigid, my mind was focused on the event at hand, more drilling of the bad tooth.

I had taken an Advil the night before and the morning of, and I had eschewed any coffee that morning. The drilling went, well, okay.

Round and round the drill went on the deadened tooth until it actually touched on the point of the crack.  Jolt!

"Hmm," she said.  My dentist now had the lay of the land.  "Your sensitive spot is right on top of the crack in the tooth."

Round and round the drill went on the deadened tooth and again it touched on the point of the crack.  Jolt!

I was far back in the chair now, my knuckles white.  I hadn't started sweating yet, though.

Round and round the drill went on the deadened tooth until it touched on the point of the crack.  Jolt!

Round and round the drill went on the deadened tooth but this time it didn't touch on the point of the crack.  "All done," my dentist said.

I happily paid a large part of my mounting bill, which now was well over $3,000 for the year to date, with at least two more procedures to come within the next 45 days.  But we weren't done yet with that troublesome tooth.

A Dentist

So I came in for some major dental work before my trusted dentist retired, and she deadened my mouth so she could shave down the tooth in the lower right corner of my mouth.  Meanwhile she jabbed the other side of my mouth with novocain as well so she could drill out those two old fillings and refill them.

I could tell things were not progressing nicely when she muttered, "Oh, God," when the first filling was removed.  She was silent when the second filling was drilled out but amidst the smell of scorching teeth and the suction required to keep me from drooling as the second filling came out, I noticed the lack of any encouraging salutation when she finished on that side.

Cha-ching!  She took photos, which she showed me, disclosing cracks in both teeth, hidden for decades under the old fillings, running across the floor of the two teeth and which were bad.

She told me that both of those teeth also needed crowns before one or the other shattered under some awkward bite.  And then she set to work on shaving down the tooth she was going to fit for a crown that day, and that's when the real trouble started.

Dentists

So now I was into a dental bill for the current year of a coupla hundred dollars prompted by my dentist having to cement an old crown back in which had been wrenched out by, for heaven's sake, eating a salmon fillet.  As I lay in the chair, my dentist's professional eye saw a cavity.

Gotta take care of that, right?  So I came back the next month to get it filled.

For the first time, my best-ever dentist hurt me.  After administering novocain, she waited, drilled and I jerked.

"Did you feel that?" she asked rhetorically.  "Uh huh," I indicated miserably out of a wide-open mouth.

She administered another ampule of novocain and left to attend to another patient while it took effect.  While I waited for her to come back, I checked the dentist's chair for for its back exit but couldn't locate one.

The dentist came back and finished the drilling and filling with no further pain to me beyond my great anxiety waiting for a jolt of electricity to sear in when the tooth nerve came alive, which sensation didn't repeat itself.  "We'll have to watch that tooth for a possible root canal down the road," she said as she finished up.

Government Shutdown

I'm out of work for the first time since I was 14, excepting for those times when I was in school, thanks to Ted Crud and his ilk in the Party of No (PON) as they try to bring down the country.  I'm disgusted to say that that guy worked at my agency at one time.

I'm embarrassed to be a federal worker (I'm "nonessential") and disappointed to be an American.  After all, who was it who sent these clowns to Congress, where they seem to be fixated on keeping access to affordable health care from the sick, the poor and the unemployed?  I guess it was you and I (although, truth be told, it's been a really long time since I last voted for anyone in the PON).

I'm disheartened by the reactions of people I know elsewhere.  When I called up a relative out west and glumly said I'm out of work and told this pious person that I was going to church on Sunday to pray for forgiveness for the PON members responsible (they want to extra-judicially overturn the last two presidential elections and the notorious Supremes decision), this relative disputed the responsibility I iterated in knee-jerk fashion by saying it's the president's fault.  That's empathy for ya, a quick dismissal of anything I might know or think I know from being one of the ones most intimately affected by the PON's irresponsible reckless actions or from living in DC where these, ahem, people reside most of the time.

Now they have their eyes set on the debt ceiling fight in two weeks, drooling over the prospect of roiling the global economy.  They're like an awakening little sleeper cell, quiescent since 2008-2009, determined to finish the stymied job of world ruination.

Windows 8, I'm leaving you, forever

I'm a Mac user now, and in my first hour, I'm enjoying it already.  I think I can figure this Apple-part out.

Last month, my notebook which performed fine service for three years, died.  It was everything I wanted from a home computer, dependable, predictable and useful.

When I went to replace it the folks at Best Buy foisted off upon me an Acer Notebook with Windows 8.  What a miserable two months I have had!

Windows 8 is an unholy mess.  I don't know what's wrong with Acer but always, always, it would take the opportunity to either start inserting my typed letters into the middle of a prior sentence at random times (I don't look at the screed as I type) or slowing down to glacial slowness for no particular reason, to where I frequently had to turn off my computer and restart it.

Windows 8 is tile-driven or tile-centric or something and things would come in from the sides randomly or else I couldn't find anything.  I found myself using the Microsoft key constantly, as my only known route to get out of whatever screen I had been randomly placed in to get back to the desktop.

Somehow, when I lost my tool bars for 3 days and was really at sea, I transformed my screensaver button or refresh button (who knows?) to one minute.  So forevermore the screen would turn to gibberish (tiles) if I didn't move the cursor every 60 seconds.

Do you know how maddening that is?  I spent days, unsuccessfully, looking for the app or process or control that modifies this and never found it because the system was evidentially designed by a bunch of 2d grader idiot savants sitting in a sandbox clutching a pet/wish list with no adult supervision and no regard for consumer use.   .

So today I got rid of my $800 investment in Microsoft and went out and bought a Mac system, for even more money.  I could no longer tolerate that Windows 8 system in my home and I got rid of it!

Already I like my Mac, even though it's different from what I am used to, it's elegant and seemingly intuitive in a manner like I tend to be.  Microsoft threw each next system operating version in your face and if it blinded you, well, they didn't care one whit.

Have A Nice Corporate Life, SunTrust Bank!

Remember when banks and S&Ls were your friends? When as a child you brought in a quarter a week for deposit into your Christmas club account and the tellers smiled and acted like they were glad to see you?

I went into a SunTrust branch near Union Station last week to buy some loose dollar coins for use in parking meters. They said they had unrolled dollar coins in their change drawer alright, did I have a SunTrust account?

"No."  Smiling broadly, the teller said she couldn't (wouldn't) help me.  Would I like to open an account?

I merely commented that I hoped CapitalOne branches treated SunTrust account holders the same way.  Smiling as broadly as the teller, a man in a suit seated at a nearby desk wished me a nice day as I headed for the door.

Do you use a film camera?

I am one of those old-fashioned people who still uses a film camera.  You can buy great cameras with phenomenal lenses for $4.99 at the thrift stores.

Usually I just carry a disposable camera around, although this bothers some people, especially younger people.  They just get annoyed that I don't have a digital camera, and when I snap a picture, they often say, "Oh, really?"

When people snap a photo with their cell phone, no one says, "Oh, really?"  That's normal apparently.

This means I have a contract with a mail-order photo-developer.  I snap pictures and two weeks later, when the developed pictures come back in the mail, I re-live the moment all over again.

Sometimes I don't know what the picture is about or where or when it was taken.  I'm not the greatest picture-taker.

Pursuant to my mail-in account, obviously, I received by mistake somebody else's pictures last week.  Nice to know there are other film picture takers out there, although their snapshots sucked as bad as mine.

I sent the pictures to the intended recipients, without asking for reimbursement for postage or anything.  Today I received in the mail a letter from them enclosing the $2.30 postage in cash in the envelope.

My kind of people.  Linda wrote,

Dear Mr. Lamberton, Thank you so much for taking the time and and money to mail our pictures to us. We have been wondering where they got to.  Enclosed is $2.30 to pay for the shipping.  It's good to know that there are still some people out there who have time to think of others.  Again, thank you so much.  [Signature.]

No, thank you, Linda!  There are still some of us people out there.

 
.

Staying together...

I'm happy to report that we've decided to stay together after all. I'm glad because we've been together for almost a decade.

Being a bachelor, I don't do ironing. My work shirts get laundered by a dry cleaners down the street while I merely shake out and fold the rest of my clothes after washing them, once they dry on the clothesline in my basement.

Recently I paid $6.25 to pick up my shirts, which seemed to be too much because I didn't remember dropping off five shirts. I dimly recalled bringing in only three shirts.

I could immediately tell the shirts I received weren't mine because they were of a color other than merely white or oxford blue. But each time I handed the bundled shirts back to the clerk, whom I have known for years, she showed me that the work order stapled to the completed job bore my telephone number and that each shirt had a ticket that matched the work order fastened to a buttonhole.

We definitely had a translation problem going and finally I just shrugged, left the five laundered shirts behind and departed. I was most puzzled that I couldn't get a refund but neither the money nor the missing shirts were worth a big hassle.

I despaired that my sense of loyalty was being sorely tested though. How come the laundress just didn't immediately act like I was right, being a long-standing customer?

This happened on the very same day that I had an overcharging dispute with my favorite coffee shop near work (see my last post, Breaking Up). I was thinking that I'd have to locate a new shirt laundry as well as a new morning place, in addition to changing my typically understated and quiet interaction with service personnel.

You know, start raising a little hell. Changes.

But me 'n my shirt laundry are back on. I went in one last time to ask about my shirts, and they had found them.

Smiling profusely and expressing apologies, the clerk handed over my shirts, all washed and ironed. We even got the money issue straightened out without any trouble.

Making up is something that's better than breaking up.

Breaking up...

My office is a two-block walk, or a six-block walk from a Metro Station, depending on which stop I get off at. Almost all of my co-workers alight at Union Station, two blocks from the office, and either get their morning coffee there or at a delicatessen halfway to my building.

I usually opt for the six-block walk, even though it goes right past two different homeless shelters and sometimes I have to work my way through knots of people gathering outside of each place in the morning and fend off their requests for spare change. It is the sooner stop, so I make up a little bit of the lost time the further walk entails by getting off the train two minutes earlier and occasionally I would even jog it, although I feel self-conscious running along the sidewalk, even easily, in work clothes.

I always got my coffee at a crowded convenience store along the way which is run by hard-working immigrants who don’t speak English all that well. In this establishment they sell coffee, bananas (three for a dollar, very ripe) and lots and lots of scratch-off and weekly drawing lottery tickets.

The store is always crowded each morning with dreamers, hard-luck people picking strings of numbers that they hope will make them fabulously rich in the weekly games and scratching off chances in the instant games. Us coffee drinkers have to work our way with brimming cups to the cash registers through knots of people calling out numbers to impassive clerks feeding the logarithms into whirring lottery ticket printing machines.

I like this store, as it gives me a little immersion into the soul of the city, and perhaps the nation, each morning before I ensconce myself into my job as a federal bureaucrat. The store is also cheaper, by a lot, than the tony shops around Union Station.

Today I looked in my wallet when the cashier rang up $1.75 for a medium coffee, and all I had in it were a single and several twenties. Thinking it was a shame they’d have to make so much change for such a small purchase, I gave her a twenty, took my change and moved aside to let the next customer be rung up.

But something wasn’t right. I had received some coins, which I slipped into my pocket, and a slight cluster of bills which started with a single and ended with a sawbuck. As I looked more closely at the small stack of bills, the rest were singles except for the last five-dollar bill.

I had received change for a ten, not a twenty. I held out the handful of bills and said, "I gave you a twenty."

The clerk pointed to the cash register tape which showed $1.55 being subtracted from $10, leaving $8.25, which is what I received back. It was obviously what she had punched into the machine during our transaction.

"But I gave you a twenty," I repeated. "And you only gave me change for a ten."

"No, no," she said, pointing again to the printout. "Look here, it says ten dollars."

I tried again, saying, "I didn’t give you a ten, I gave you a twenty. You owe me ten more dollars in change."

I thought about the several years that I had been coming in here three of four times each week, spending a couple of dollars each trip. I knew or thought I knew from having looked at my wallet a few seconds earlier that the only thing in it that morning besides the still-present solitary single had been some twenties.

As I held out the bills for her to see, the cashier, who had taken my money each morning ever since I had started coming in years earlier, looked impassively me. My words hung in the air.

After a pause, I said quietly, "I’ll never come back here again, thanks." I took my coffee and left.

Breaking up is so hard to do. I hate it that now I have to find a new coffee outlet, because the old one felt like an old brown shoe.