S.O.S. (sick of shysters!)

Ever feel like you want somebody to stop the world and let you get off? I've been feeling it a lot the past few weeks. It's just one thing after another out there.

The latest... Duller had a little accidental meeting with a truck early last month. The truck was in front of him in the left turn lane at a red light. Light changed, truck started moving, Duller glanced rightwardly to make sure no eejit was running the red... next thing he knew, their bumpers kissed. At first, he wondered how on earth... Finally, it became apparent that the guy in the truck must have rolled back a bit. The other driver insisted on a report, so the police officer came and determined no one was at fault and there were no injuries. The truck had NO damage, as he had a trailer hitch for which Duller's tiny little car was no match. Duller's bumper had a little wrinkle, but no biggie.

OK, so here we are nearly 6 weeks later and our insurance company informs us he is filing a claim for $1600 in damages!!! Say what?!

Backing up just a bit, he owns, or works, for a body shop. His wife, who was a passenger, after saying no one was hurt made a feeble attempt at the old, 'well, my neck kinda hurts...' She said no more about that and they told the officer no one was injured. Oh, and get this, she works for an insurance agency.

Now here is what we think must have happened. This guy has somehow damaged his truck in the past few weeks and doesn't want to pay for the repairs. Hey, I know, we can file an insurance claim and get some other sucker to foot the bill. The really sad part is how eager OUR insurance company seems to be to hand over the money.

NEXT... I was right happy to get an emaill from Amazon today telling me they were giving me $5 credit because I bought a magazine from them in the past. Then I remembered... Once before, I had a GC and as soon as I logged in, the price on the item I wanted got higher. I signed out and, VIOLA!, the price went back down. Sure enough, I looked at my history and the items I've been viewing lately are all $5 more than yesterday. >:\

One last thing... Has anyone else been noticing a lot of little niggling things going wrong lately? Nothing earth-shattering, but one right after another. We keep thinking there's a tea kettle and we're the frogs. Nobody really notices, coz it's all trivialities. I'm just sayin...

Hey, just coz I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.

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Ever have one of those days?

I'm hoping August will follow March's 'in like a lion' example. Sunday afternoon, I had all my lists, coupons, shopping bags, etc, in order. I took my to-dos and handed Duller his. When we both got home, we compared notes. We had had eerily similar experiences... everywhere! Really, literally every store we visited... if it could go wrong, it did. Cashiers all over the area seemed to be completely baffled as to how to enter coupons or handle rain checks. Also, our area is, apparently, unworthy of the lower end of the price range advertised in the flyers. The comedy of errors we each experienced seemed to be never-ending. So we spent quite some time today commenting on web sites and returning to some stores to set things right. For the most part, it went well.



Meanwhile, I've gotten hooked on GoRemy. Ever really start liking a new 'character', then, as you seek out more of his work, it starts going downhill? OK, I really like the guy... he's silly and makes me laugh. But I have to forego some of his clips due to language/subject matter. The real problem is... he's contagious. I've been going around for 2 days putting about 75% of my data intake in hip-hop/rap form. It just kinda flows sometimes. I prob'ly oughta dust off my camcorder and just get it out of my system. OTOH, that might just create a bigger monster, lol!

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Entering the 21st century

Well, it took me 10 years, but I finally made it. On 31 December, I hooked myownself up to DSL. I gotta tell y'all, it's a love-hate relationship so far. At first, it was pretty fast, Then, yesterday, it got slower and slower until it was worse than dial-up! Duller finally called tech support and the guy ended up telling us to unplug every phone in the house, then plug them back in, one at a time. The last one was the culprit. Apparently, there's something wonky in that jack, coz it was kinda like speeding down the autobahn and pulling the emergency brake. The engine was revving to beat the band, but the car wasn't going anywhere. OK, no phone in the family room till it gets fixed. WAHOO! The speed was back and I was zipping along with the rest of the Jetson world. When I had to tear myself away to run some errands, Duller decided to give it a whirl. After a while, he called and said he couldn't get anywhere. The browser refused to display any pages. (This was on the desktop on which I had finally downloaded 57 Windows updates that were collecting for about 2 years). DS finally stepped in and did... er... something and got it working. This afternoon, it pulled the same thing on me. DS tried, but it didn't work this time. I finally did a system restore - back to pre-updates - and now it's working again... BUT - there has to be a but - I can't get Norton to uninstall. I keep downloading their removal tool, saving it to the desktop, but it's not there. Tried just running it and nothing happened... just showed the loading progress box, finished and poufe. Oh, and the connection keeps jumping to local only (as opposed to local and internet). Techie says it's likely a bad card in the desktop... or maybe a virus. *sigh* Right now, I'm running CenturyLink's virus scanner. Looks like I'll have to take it to an expert to get rid of the Norton remnants. I did the same procedure on my laptop and it went like clockwork. Then again, I hadn't tried to uninstall it via add/remove programs first.

Am I having fun yet?!

On the plus side, it no longer takes me an hour to download an mp3 file. And I don't have to go to the lie-berry, which is closed Sundays and Mondays, to view little veejo clips. The first one I saw, BTW, was such a hoot! Check it out here, at the end of the post. And I actually read every couponing/money-saving blog in my list in ONE DAY! WOOHOO!

OK, looks like it just can't be all roses and no thorns. Now I'm trying to print two steenkin' coupons and it says thank you for printing, but nothing happened. Did a test print and the printer worked, but won't print my Betty Crockers. Methinks it's their overzealous security program. Never a dull moment! I'll be seein' y'all soon as I get the kinks out. 8-]

Have a JESUS-filled day! ^i^

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