Tuesday, 12 Dec 2006

Advertisement for an old school gaming console game called Paperboy .  [warning: link is to a large utube video]

Monday, 11 Dec 2006

xmas gift cards have started arriving from my newspaper customers, some people are generous, some aren’t - expecially why you start dividing a $5 gift (note, it’s not a tip, it’s a non-taxable GIFT) by 365 days a year and realize they are tipping about 1.5 cents per day I deliver their paper, but anything is better than customers who don’t give anything. And while feeling the occassional resentment that I am in such dire financial straits that I have to work a 2nd job and get up at 2:30AM every morning so I sometimes sound cranky at the world and at my customers, I do recognize that my financial troubles are not the responsibility of the people I deliver papers to - they are mine and mostly mine alone, and even the parts that aren’t solely my fault are in no way related to the people I deliver newspapers to. And most of the time at least I remember/realize that people have their own financial difficulties, I am sure many people have as little or less than I do - so I try to remember that everyone’s house looks greener on the outside. So, I treat my customers pleasantly and try to laugh at myself when I throw a paper up 2 flights of stairs and it just misses the landing and does the slow motion kalump down from one step to the next like a rigid slinky until it finally lands at my feet .

My favorite paper delivery card so far is from a grizzled old guy I met one time when delivering on Sunday morning - I had left a note because he hadn’t paid in 8 weeks or so. He came to the door with the money and said “How come you didn’t just come to the door? I would have paid yah”. He looked like the kind of person who lived alone and who might spend considerable time in bars. When I went to drop his paper off on Sunday morning there was an envelope taped to the door that was addressed to “paperboy”.  Granted he is probably 20+ years my senior, but at my age am I really a ‘boy’ to him?  I opened his card and it had a $10 bill inside and in in _very_ shaky handwriting he had written:

Monday, 11 Dec 2006

Finally delivered all my xmas cards to the homes I deliver papers too. Since I naively like to think people might tip more or less depending on how often I deliver a paper to their door I didn’t want to just give a card with my name on it - I thought it might be better if I let people know that I am for example both their daily AND their sunday delivery person.
So I at the bottom of most of the cards I planned to put something like ’Daily and Sunday Journal’ or ’Saturday Journal’ or ’Daily Journal’. That’s what I was thinking I was going to do.

The problem I had was that there are more unique sets of customers than I realized. There are for example the following types of subscribers.
Daily (MoTuWeThFrSa)
Daily & Sunday (MoTuWeThFrSa)
Saturday and Sunday (SaSu)
Saturday Only (Sa)
Sunday Only (Su)

Of course these groups are not mutually exclusive, so the lists of customers I have contain more than one group of people. For example of the 200+ customers I deliver the paper to on weekdays( M-F) some of those people  only get the paper on weekdays, some people who get the paper on weekdays AND on Saturday, and to some people who get the paper all seven days a week. Similarly, when I deliver papers to 300+ people on Saturday I am delivering to some
people who get the paper Monday thru Saturday, some who only get it on Saturday, and some who get it on Saturday and Sunday.

So I included cards in papers in the following order:

Monday: All daily(and daily-saturday) only customers (daily-saturday is one person)
Wednesday: All daily AND Sunday customers
Saturday: All Saturday only customers
Sunday: All Sunday only and Saturday-Sunday customers

Now I wait for the generosity of the human spirit to shine or for people’s conscience to make them feel guilty for not leaving a tip all year to someone who gets up at 3:00AM to deliver their paper by 6AM 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year…and hope I didn’t inadvertently forget to give a card to someone who would have sent a gift.  [I know technically since I don't have to deliver weekend papers until 8AM I don't deliver them by 6AM, but you get the idea]

Friday, 8 Dec 2006

My new favorite quote of Prez Bush that I heard just yesterday? [Note: this isn't the "liberal press" twisting Bush's words or taking him out of context, I heard the whole answer Bush gave to the reporter that this quote is taken from]

“Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die.” — NPR

Let’s review.

He said “I talk to families who die”.

“I talk to families who die”? Who does he think he is, Jennifer Love Hewitt? or that kid in “The 6th Sense”? Or does he mean that he talks to families who mysteriously die after he talks to them? Is he the carrier of some deadly contagion which kills people on contact? Is he a human manifestation of such vile evil that it can’t be contained in human form so that just being in his presence is so toxic that the evil inside him leaks out and wipes out entire families at a time? Is he some mysterious harbinger of death or does extended upclose exposure to his inability to talk coherently just make people’s heads explode in frustration and uncomprehension?

[By the way, if you need me to tell you that a link entitled 'heads explode' is going to be bloody and graphic there are all kinds of observations I could make about your intelligence but I won't because none of them are very nice and they wouldn't sound anywhere near as clever in print as they would in my mind. But if you did click on it and were suprised, consider yourself cleverly chastized.]

[sigh] I know he probably MEANT that he has visited with families who have had a family MEMBERS DIE IN THE WAR IN IRAQ“, but why can’t the man put together a coherent sentence or at least talk in a way that doesn’t make him sound like an idiot?

Tuesday, 5 Dec 2006

I was talking to a co-worker (job#2) whom I had seen at court the same day I was there. She was there for a similar reason (Driving with a suspended license vs my driving with an expired license).   My license had expired without my knowing because I had moved since the last time I got my license renewed and the registry has two address databases-systems, one for licenses and one for registrations so when I renewed my registration and gave them my new address they did not update my license record so when they sent the renewal notice they sent it to my old address.

Turns out my co-worker had a similar though compounded problem. She had been in an accident and had filled out a police report at the scene. Several months passed and she was stopped for something and when they ran her license it turns out her license had been suspended. Eventually she discovered that the reason her license had been suspended was because the damage to the vehicles in the accident was over $1000 which requires a SEPERATE accident report be made, in person at a State Police station.  Having never been in this situation she did not know this, the police officer with whom she filled out the local accident report did not tell her this, neither did her insurance company tell her this when she filed her claim. (one or both of these parties should have let her know about this).

Because she too had moved since getting her license and had let the registry know of her new address when her registration was renewed the registry sent the notice of her license suspension to her previous address, which she did not receive.

In my case, I was out the cost of towing my car, getting my license renewed (normal), and a lost day of work. In her case she was out the cost of towing her car, getting her license renewed, 3 days of lost work, AND she had to pay court costs of @100.

The system is really out of whack when it is designed to make it easiest and cheapest to just plead “no contest” rather than actually have a day in court to explain what happened and why.