Hey, what’s going on here is way above my pay grade (retired fogy, third class) and, unfortunately, a tad above my ability to grasp.  But, I know it is happening.  There are corporations out there that want ALL of your business and they are competing for it.  I’m talking about Amazon and Verizon and Apple and Walmart.  Amazon will soon be working on something they will call “Amazon Super Duper Prime.”  It’s when you give them all your money and then when you need something, they send it to you with free two-day shipping.  I can’t imagine how Walmart will respond.

It’s this technology thing.  I think they are all planning on being able to adjust the temperature in my house, set my alarm and turn my lights off.  It’s just who can get  there first.  I’m betting on Apple.  Anybody who can sell watches that are so tiny you can’t read what they say is a skilled sales company.  They will probably make a fortune selling Apple magnifying glasses.

The company that scares me is Amazon.  I like Amazon, but I think they are like Big Brother watching over me.  My daughter, Missy, gave me a Kindle and I learned how to purchase books on line.  It really worked well because the Kindle was registered to my grandson, Tyler.  So whenever I ordered anything, he got the bill!  If  I ordered a Western novel, then Amazon would inundate me with emails hyping Western books I might want to buy.  How about a saddle and some chaps?

If you buy hard bound books from Amazon, you can buy new or used books.  I thought that was interesting.  They say the used books are in excellent condition.  I haven’t tried it.  Later, I had to buy some risers to sit our TV’s on and, again, we were inundated with emails offering me all kinds of TV gadgets.  Then I needed some doggy waste bags.  Until  we moved, we always had plastic newspaper bags, but after moving, no bags.  I went on line, not to buy, but to see what Amazon had.  They had lots of doggy waste bags.  Different sizes, different colors.  They even had eco friendly poopy bags.  But here is where it gets weird.  Like with the books, they had new and used bags for sale.  I decided to stop right there.

Now I didn’t buy anything.  I just looked.  But Big Brother Amazon had figured out I had a dog.  Here comes the emails.  Did I need a doggy crate?  How about a doggy door or a doggy door bell?  The doggy rings the door bell to let you know she wants to go out.  If your dog is old, we have a safety ramp for you.

Did you know you could get a dog identification tag in the shape of a bone that lets everyone know you are a Green Bay Packer fan?  Or, any other fan.  If you were a Chicago Blackhawk or Washington Redskin fan, your doggy’s ID will have the face of an indian on it.  That’s a heavy load for a little doggy to be wearing around her neck.  She probably doesn’t know she is being racially insensitive.  Or, is she just a fan?

Getting back to the real issue of global control of our money, I’m afraid the die is cast.  I think each of these mega corporations will have their own colored tee shirts which will clearly identify us as an Amazonian or Applebyte.  We will probably have to wear a medallion around our neck.  I’m going to go with the company that lets me keep my lights on longest.

Written by PJ Rice at www.ricequips.com

Copyright 2015

Life is good.  But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to obtain services from mega-big corporations.  And that can lead to struggles.  Verizon is an example of one of those mega-big corporations.  I like Verizon, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t carried on pitched battles with their billing department.

You know you are dealing with a mega-big when they have you punch a number on the phone to get to Billing and Payments.  Most of the problems occur when you change your plan.  I walked into a Verizon store to ask questions about my IPhone.  While I was waiting, another Verizon representative came over and asked for my phone number (at that time, we had TV, internet, and our phones with Verizon).  He then came back with an offer that would give me more and better service for less dinero!  It had something to do with being a loyal customer.  I took the deal and three days later, my HBO was cut off!

I had this guys first name but it seems that Verizon has more than one employee named John.  No one knew my John, but when I wrote my signature on his screen with my finger, it turned out I was agreeing to buy HBO separately.  After a few hours of fitful discussion, I was given HBO at a much reduced price (for one year).

Nowhere in the FIOS advertisements do they explain they are going to dig up your front yard.  You are a signed, sealed and delivered FIOS customer before the back hoe shows up.

So I have been reasonably pleased with Verizon and FIOS.  Sometimes a router goes kaput or a cable box won’t do what a cable box is supposed to do.  But in those cases, in two or three days a replacement item shows up on an UPS truck.  The instructions for hooking up the item are detailed and Verizon provides a box and label to return the broken item.  There is also a warning that if you don’t return the broken item, they are going to charge you big time.  The first time I returned one, the UPS agent admonished me to hang on to the receipt, just in case.

Well, as I mentioned to you earlier, we sold our home and moved to The Fairfax, a gated military retirement community.  What I didn’t mention was that The Fairfax only has one cable provider and it ain’t Verizon.  We are now part of the Cox family (The jury is still out).  We were able to keep our Verizon internet and phones, but that was it.  When I notified Verizon, they sent me boxes so that I could return one router, one DVR and three cable boxes.  I packed everything and took the boxes to UPS on the packing day of the move.  I got a receipt, but wasn’t real sure where I put it.

Two weeks after our move, we flew to Colorado Springs for our annual reunion with the Retired Army Judge Advocates (RAJA) Association.  It was an opportunity to see old friends, like Del and Jane O’Roark and forget about all the boxes waiting for us to empty.  While reviewing my email, I received a notice from Verizon telling me they had not yet received the stuff I returned and if I didn’t ship it back within 30 days, they would charge me $240 for each item.  I knew I had the receipt, but sinceI was in Colorado Springs, I couldn’t even look for it.  So much for a relaxing trip.

When I got home I found the receipt.  It was smaller than I remembered and I had put it in a small black notebook (which I had with me on the trip)!  I called Verizon and talked to Cindy who advised me that they had received everything that I had shipped.  In fact, that had received everything before they sent me the email.  Left hand, right hand, blah, blah, blah.  She was very sorry.  Then Cindy noticed Verizon had charged me $100 for a bundle early termination fee and $25 for an activation fee.  She took those items off of my bill and thanked me for being a loyal Verizon customer.  So much for June’s bill.  I wish the story ended there.

I have now received July’s bill and Verizon has charged me $720 extra for not returning three items (they didn’t tell me which three).  I was bemused, but annoyed.  I know I won’t have to pay the $720, but it’s the aggravation.  Plus, this months taxes and a number of other items are based upon a percentage of the total bill.  I talked to Valerie and she apologized.  Left hand, right hand again.  As we were speaking, she advised me that the $720 had been removed from the bill.  I then tried to explain the taxes, etc.  It was a lost cause.  She told me to pay the bill less the $720 and that Billing would sort it all out.  You bet.

I can’t wait to see my next bill.  I suspect they will charge me interest for not paying the $720.

Written by PJ Rice at www.ricequips.com

Copyright 2015

I know, I know, I’ve been delinquent in writing.  And you thought something horrible had happened to me.  Well, it has been an ordeal, but not horrible.   Miserable, yes.  Horrible, no.

For the last four months, we have been preparing to move and then moved.  We had been in the same house for 25 years and without any motive or design, we had filled every nook and cranny of that baby.  When we were in the Army and moved every three or so years, we kept track of what we had.  If we bought a new couch, we got rid of the old one.  In this last 25 year episode, if we bought a new couch, we moved the old one downstairs, next to the couch that was replaced 10 years earlier.

Some years back, we decided that we would eventually move to The Fairfax, a very nice military retirement community near Fort Belvoir, Virginia.  Well, with Carole’s health problems and so many steps in our house (you had to go downstairs to visit all our old couches), we decided this would be the year we would move.

So right after Christmas, Carole went through all of her Christmas decorations.  The problem was that an awful lot of them were magnificent.  How do you get rid of beautiful things?  That would be a good topic for Dr. Phil.  Carole reduced the number of her Christmas wreathes from 11 to nine!  We ended up renting a self-storage area to hold our Christmas decorations.

My daughter-in-law, Sandy, showed me how to use Craig’s List.  That went well.  Everybody warned me about the crazy people on Craig’s List that will come into you house and cut you into little pieces.  Well, they must have been busy cutting up other people, because I didn’t have a problem.

I had one rule for Craig’s List that seemed to work well.  I never gave my address out on line.  I insisted the interested person call me.  I had one woman (who knows if he or she was a woman) email me six times asking for information about the item and requesting my address.  Each time I would give her general information on my location and ask her to call me.  She never did.  In her last correspondence she advised me that since I couldn’t give her an address, I must live too far away.  I decided to leave that logic right where it landed.

Then there was a nice Indian couple who showed up to purchase two benches that converted into a picnic table.  Before they left, they had also bought a kitchen table and chairs (downstairs with the couches), a universal weight machine and two porcelain elephants I brought back from Vietnam (BUFEs).  They also bought a lot of little items we had been assembling for a garage sale.  They came back two-days later to disassemble the weight machine (They brought no tools).   I suspect it weighed 800 pounds and after borrowing my tools, they took it out piece by piece.  I have no idea whether they ever put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Pricing is always a problem.  I didn’t know anything about what to ask.  I know what we paid for something 10 or 20 years ago, but that isn’t much help.  Sometimes I asked too much, sometimes too little.  You can remedy the problem when you asked too much, but when you ask too little, you are screwed.  I had two great big JBL speakers.  I thought big was out and these babies were at least 35 years old.  I just wanted to get rid of them.  I offered both of them for $25.  Big mistake.  The phone started ringing off the hook.  An early caller insisted on giving me $50.  I guess he felt sorry for me.

We had two Lexington end tables that cost us about $500, each.  I offered them for $150, each saying we were moving and they had to go.  I received an email from a woman that told me she would pay $30 for both if I needed to get rid of them.  I wrote her back and told her that before I would sell them to her I would use them for kindling.

So now we have moved and The Fairfax is proving to be everything we had hoped for.  But we are still stepping over things.  I have determined that we have approximately 30 hanging items (pictures, plaques, etc.) for each room.  I’m afraid that the vast majority of them are going back into a box.  The problem is we have  to go through all of them to see which ones will make the cut.  “Sorry big guy, but it is back in the box for you.”

We have a few more critical decisions to make.  Like when we put things back in the boxes to store them, where do we store them?  Anybody got an old garage they’re not using?

Written by PJ Rice at www.ricequips.com

Copyright 2015

Sometime, we don’t know when, but sometime, we are going to move.  So there is a need to downsize.  When I walk into a room, I immediately start looking for things that need to disappear.  The whole process stinks.  What I have noticed is that  when I look around, I see clowns.  Pictures of clowns, ceramic clowns, porcelain clowns, toy clowns and clown clowns.

You know the little old lady who likes cats?  So every time she gets a greeting card or a present there’s a kitty somewhere.  Well, I guess I have always been a clown.  I constantly needed attention and clowning around got me what I needed.  I seriously considered whether I could survive in the Army with my “irreverent” attitude.  For years, I had an unrepressed desire to say or do anything that would get me a laugh.  And, fortunately or unfortunately, I am constantly thinking of funny stuff.

The worst thing people can do when I start entertaining is laugh.  That’s the fuel that makes things get more outrageous.  At dinner parties when I was cranking up, my wife, Carole, would reach under the table and squeeze my thigh.  That was my signal that I was getting out of control and needed to shut it down.  At a large gathering in Frankfurt, Germany, Carole was sitting on the other side of the table and some distance away from me.  I got a boisterous laugh out of the crowd and was on my way.  Then suddenly, Barb, the lady sitting next to me, squeezed my thigh.  I looked over and Carole was smiling at me.  Then there’s “Carrie, the Weird.”  She would encourage me until one of us came down with a migraine.  I always secretly hoped it would be her.

Somehow, I survived the Army without being reprimanded for inappropriate behavior.  I had to apologize a few times, but I was usually getting off easy.  While I was the Staff Judge Advocate at Fort Riley, Kansas, in the early 80’s, the post sponsored and hosted a Special Olympics.  Special Services put out an announcement that they would hold classes for those people who wanted to volunteer to be clowns at the Special Olympics.

The G1’s wife, Meg Ionedias, suggested that we sign up for the classes.  We did and it turned out to be four hours every Saturday for six weeks.  I had no idea that clowning took that much preparation.  Anyway, I graduated as a full face Bozo clown.  My instructor said I was a natural.  She said she had met a lot of Bozos, but I was the biggest Bozo she had ever met.

The day of the Special Olympics arrived.  The post had an athletic field with a runner’s track around the outside.  I  had no responsibility except to go around and act silly.  The opening event was a grand march around the track.  Then the “competition” would begin.  It was frenetic getting everyone lined up for the march.  I noticed one young lad in a wheelchair.  He had almost no control of his body and had to be strapped into the wheelchair.  He had to have support to keep his head mobilized.  And with all that was going on, he looked frightened.  My initial thought was that it was a shame that he had been brought out to an event he could not understand.  No one knew what I was thinking because I had a big smile painted on my face.  Then the parade started and I devoted the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon to being a silly, entertaining Bozo clown.

The event was a big success.  I played my small part.  It was fun.  Where else can a senior Army colonel run around flapping his arms and jump in the air while being goosed by another clown?  What made the event special was that late in the day, I again saw the boy strapped in the wheelchair and he was happy and laughing and having a wonderful time.  That sold me on the Special Olympics.

Children love clowns and that made my spirits fly.  But under a certain age, maybe two, maybe one and a half, clowns look strange and scare the hell out of them.  I learned that the hard way.  I never determined the exact age, but when I got around the little ones, I was very tentative until I saw how they reacted.  When they screamed, I’m  not sure who was scared the most.  But the painted smile protected me.

The Fort Riley Officers’ Wives Club was having a bake sale outside the Post Exchange and the asked me to show up as Zippy (every clown should have a name) and entertain.  After about 30 minutes, the PX manager came over and told me that she would like to hire me for certain occasions at $12 an hour.  I told her it took me two hours to change into Zippy.  She told me she would pay me for that time.  Finally I had to tell her that I was the clown who gave her legal advice.  We had a good laugh.

So like the lady who loved cats, I started accumulating clowns.  I even have a cloth one with a large “Z” on the hat for Zippy.  You can imagine how upset I was when a comic strip “Zippy the Clown” showed up.   And he was anything but a happy clown.  I think he is gone now.  Yippee!

I’m no longer in great shape, but I’m a heck of a lot better off than my clown outfit.  The elastic around the neck, sleeves and feet is kaput and the skull cap has rotted away.  I bought a curly red wig, but I’m no longer willing to spend the time painting my face.  That disqualifies me from being a Raider fan.

So most of my clown memorabilia will disappear.  But I will hang on to the suit, wig and the paint.  Who knows, I may be the life of the party at the old folks home.

Written by PJ Rice at www.ricequips.com

Copyright 2015