Category: Annoyances

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You only get one shot

We all get them.

You know, those calls that you answer only to hear dead air.

Since most of us have cell phones instead of hardwired land lines. These calls come in at all hours of the day & night and we, the owners of the cell phones are available to spam or scams 24/7.

Normally, I don’t answer unknown calls, they go straight to voicemail. Then the caller doesn’t leave a message and I block them.

Sometimes I do answer them, especially since my job now days is to look for a job. I hate that I can’t simply direct any call not in my contacts list directly to voice mail and never be troubled by the phone ringing at all.

The trouble is, no HR department from any company ever calls from the company’s published main number. If they did, I could maintain my defenses and any company I was actively applying to would be in my contacts list.

So I have to run with my defenses down. Equally frustrating is that no HR representative ever leaves a message.

That means that if I get a weird call from a number in some state that I remember a company has corporate offices in, I’ll answer. Usually on the first or second ring. Hoping, against all reason and experience, that it’s going to be the golden ticket to a job interview.

But if I answer to dead air, I’ll say “Hello” a few times waiting for the inevitable hiss and clicks saying that the call is being routed either through a slow corporate phone system or that the person is momentarily distracted, I understand that sometimes you’re at your desk and a person walks in to ask a “Quick” question.

If however, all I hear is… nothing.

I’ll hang up and my next move is to hit block and report spam.

This results in a “Blocked” list that is crazy long.

I’ve wondered sometimes if I’m too quick hitting the “Block” button.

Since my “Blocked” list is obscenely long, and spammers eventually move on to a new set of phone numbers, I’ve also wondered if maybe I should occasionally clear my blocked caller list. If I don’t, at some point, at least in theory, I’ll have blocked every single phone number on the planet and then… What reason would there be to have a cell phone at all?

I’ve also noticed that the majority of actual phone calls I receive are complete BS, even if there is a person on the other end. Lately, I’ve wondered how many of those “persons” are actually AI chat bots. It’s getting more difficult to tell all the time.

With changes in our cultural norms most of the time my phone is “dinging” with text messages, a surprisingly high number of those are “Junk” of various forms. I tend to block the junk text messages too.

This reality has made me question the value of having a $1000 phone and phone plan altogether.

In my insane world, the reason to have a phone is to communicate with people I actually have some kind of business or relationship with. If the phone is no longer serving that function, then what’s the point?

I find myself thinking along the lines of getting a land line with an answering machine. If said land line was cheaper than cellular service. It would be simpler. No texts. No expectation to be available 24/7. It might not change the number of spam/scam calls but if it was half the cost of cellular service and I wasn’t having to incur $1000 expenses every few years it might be worth it.

I remembered back to the days when each and every cell phone call cost you. .45 / min during the day, and .20 / min after 7 pm. People were much less likely to be yakking on their cell phones for hours on end. They’d call, say what they had to say, and hang up. That was a time when people had some decorum and brevity was appreciated.

That led me to think maybe a way to curb the spam/scam calls would be to charge the unknown caller .20 / call or text.

If you think about it, since many of these call centers are using automated dialing / texting systems, the expense could rack up very quickly. Once they were spending more to make the calls than they got in payouts, spam/scam texts & phone calls would rapidly become a thing of the past. You can be sure that everyone who was not a scammer would carefully maintain their contacts list. You wouldn’t want your friends to get stuck with a charge just because they weren’t in your contacts.

Getting .20 a call deposited instantly towards my cellphone bill wouldn’t do much to offset the cost, but I’d smile at the monthly bill, if having a cellphone was earning me a couple bucks. I’d smile even more knowing the scammers were being bankrupted.

Before you ask, I’ve been on the national “Do not call” list for at least a decade. I renew my listing every couple of years. It’s made no difference whatsoever.

Since government has failed to control the problem, (big surprise), Maybe a private sector solution is the way to go.

Until someone comes up with a viable solution, I’ll keep up with my philosophy of, “You only get one shot” then you’re blocked.

Maybe I’m not too harsh in my blocking after all.

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Stop Looking at me

Some background.

I’m a big believer that wearable sensor technology can, and should improve life. I think that with the American healthcare system in the shambles it is, essentially we’re going to be on our own for most healthcare.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the difficulties in finding or seeing competent healthcare professionals.

From Dermatology appointments that are booked 6-9 months out, to primary care physicians that can’t book an appointment until well into the future, with doctors that don’t even speak English well enough for the patient to understand their instructions. The medical industry for various reasons is a complete shitshow.

We needn’t talk about the fact that many primary care physicians these days rarely actually touch the patient. Instead they sit or stand behind their computers being data entry clerks. They’re reluctant to even do the rudimentary action of listening to the patient’s heart. Because the data entry is more important than the actual patient. (Except when it comes to insurance billing. Then they want to know about financial responsibility and next of kin so that they can track the patient down in the event that insurance doesn’t pay.)

Hey men, when was the last time your Doctor did the old “Turn & Cough” routine? How many of you even remember what that is?

How is it that America can claim to have the most advanced healthcare in the world, and yet have some of the poorest patient treatment outcomes?

There are some amazing “saves”. I’ve got a friend that is with us because his wife was dialing 911 before he hit the ground.

On the other hand, I’ve got another friend that got put through the medical wringer during COVID. Because of the delay in treatment, and requirements to be vaccinated. In his case a relatively minor skin cancer, ended up metastasizing throughout his system into lung cancer. (Uhh No, He never smoked.)

I myself have found that obtaining medical routine medical care is a “challenge” (Beware of any politician touting Medicare for all as one of their campaign planks.)

Because I believe that we’re going to be on our own, especially if you’re an average genetic male, one viable alternative is wearable sensors and their ability to provide daily medical data that we monitor ourselves. This kind of data gives us a baseline for our particular “Normal” and deviations from our “Normal” state, can guide us to take care of ourselves. At least it gives us a fighting chance to use the 6 minutes that a doctor is going to pay attention to us, wisely.

I picture it something like, “Hey Doc, this and this are out of my normal range, what should be done?”

I also think that having reliable telemetry would reduce overall healthcare costs by helping to reduce unnecessary and wildly expensive tests. Who hasn’t had their doctor demand exploratory testing only to find out that the test or tests were unnecessary?

Because I was a believer and willing to do what I could to advance the technology, I started participating in the Apple Health Research program via the Apple Research App. I’ve been doing this for years. The research app asked simple questions, and requested access to medical telemetry from my Apple Watch or other sensors and honestly was pretty darn simple and non invasive in my body or my life. I’d been enrolled in one study for 537 days.

Note I said “Was” and the other uses of past tense.

50 days ago I received an invitation about another study. This one was a little more involved. Nothing that I wasn’t willing to do, even including the study requesting some blood samples. Fine, I’m willing to bleed for my belief that technology is going to make us more independent of the “Medical Industrial Complex”.

Oh, I use that term with purpose.

By now it’s become painfully obvious that the Medical industry is nothing more than a mechanism for generating obscene profits, and in addition, the medical industry is probably as much about control of a populace that doesn’t ask questions. Those of us who do ask questions in an attempt to understand why a particular treatment is better than another, are listed as “Difficult Patients”. Once designated with this label, you’ll find your overall care is significantly degraded. Independent thought, or questioning the Arch Practitioners of arcane medical arts is seen as heresy. People who question, should be put into camps to die, right? Reference events from 2020 – 2024. There were entertainers, pundits, wags, and even some politicians, who said that kind of thing live, on air. Often to “seal claps” of a wonderfully compliant audience.

That kind of thing made my blood run cold, and fueled my desire to assist any real research. My hope was/is at least the technology could be improved allowing average, and reasonably intelligent people to use it to their advantage, providing hard data about their own bodies to push back against a medical person or establishment trying to railroad them into some treatment that was questionable. Or worse, touted as the only treatment available when there were other equally effective treatments that their physician simply didn’t like.

Oddly, if you look at outcomes, the key differentiator between one treatment and another often boils down to money. Either how much the insurance company will pay, or how much profit the hospital or clinic can derive. Many times, the patient outcome is the same, plus or minus a few percentage points.

So I was in. I signed all their paperwork, I noted that they were willing to pay a small amount for participation but that amount was trivial.

A week or so later I got an email confirming an “On boarding” appointment. That email contained a link to a website. Okay… The link required that I create an account. Hmm it’s just a teleconference appointment. I can set one of those up on FaceTime, or Half a dozen other services wherein only the administrator of the teleconference needs to have an account. The participants don’t have to provide any information whatsoever. All they need is a conference ID number.

Then I thought about it and remembered that because medical data is protected under HIPPA, they might need some kind of more secure conference. Okay, I created an account. I didn’t like it, but for the sake of the research it was probably worth it.

The conference day comes and I’m logged into the video site. The person on the other end of the call asks a bunch of questions and such. None of which were any different than something I’d tell a stranger. They walked me through changing a few settings regarding permissions on my phone so the research app could read that data, then the conference was over, and I was in.

Immediately, my phone started burning 10 – 15% more power per day. This was because the study was accessing my phone’s camera every single time the phone was moved. The theory was that they were trying to capture and process facial expressions and face shape using the onboard AI. I suspect there were two points to this image capture. One, was to insure that the phone was only being accessed by a single person. The second reason was to try to capture data that could be correlated to the mood of that person throughout their average day. (Was the person stressed, depressed, angry, sad, etc.)

The first issue was kind of dumb. If the person was only moving the phone but unable to unlock it, then they weren’t an authorized user. Any additional data captured about the person’s expression or facial shape was therefore moot. It would have to be excluded from the study data.

The second issue might have made more sense if the analysis only happened after the phone was unlocked. Trouble was, the study was burning energy capturing photos of the inside of hand bags, backpacks, ceilings, and back pockets. The analysis literally activated if I slid the phone out of the way to make room for something else on my desk or counter top.

I’m pretty sure the camera was active the entire time the phone was in my back pocket while I was walking the dog. I don’t know for sure, but I can say that the camera was active even before I unlocked the phone to read a text message or answer a phone call. So what valid data was the study actually getting?

How much of that data was going to be fed into some processor to refine the newer generation of cars that supposedly won’t allow you to drive them if an AI in the car decides you’re too angry, stressed or otherwise impaired to operate a vehicle?

I can tell you from experience, that transporting a loved one to an ER I was extremely stressed and very focused (You kind of have to be, doing 90MPH on a Southern California freeway where nobody obeys the “Slower traffic keep right” rule).

The last thing I’d tolerate in that situation was an AI in my car refusing to let me get a person to an ER. I’d be so pissed when I got back from a $300 taxi ride, or paying $500 to an ambulance that I’d go at an AI in my car with sharp objects and a soldering iron. Asinine Federal safety laws be damned!

This realization gave me pause about my participation in the study. I however continued.

Weeks go by and I grudgingly tolerated my phone “looking” at me & draining power no matter the situation.

Then came the email from the study. It was an email, that told me I had an email. You know the kind I’m talking about. We get them from our mortgage companies, insurance companies, and banks all the time. “Oh you have a message, login to your account to read this important message.” Then you log in and the “important” message is that interest rates have changed on your savings account. Duh, we all already knew that because the Prime Interest Rate was changed, or stayed the same, or another quarter closed.

In other words the important message could have been sent via normal email and didn’t require special handling.

I knew what the email from the study was. It was most likely a lab order requesting that I make an appointment to go have some blood drawn for the study. Since the study itself was a double blind study. It’s entirely likely that the name was a number, the billing code was one that belonged to the study, and the requested testing was a standard panel. None of which required security. In fact the message could have been sent to any modern email program fully encrypted if the study had simply provided a PGP or RSA key during the initial setup/onboarding.

To make matters worse, whoever sent the email, didn’t send a link. What they sent was an entire HTTP file that opened a page locally in my browser. Because the page had been opened locally with no connections to the actual server it was supposed to open on, the page failed. My email program had dutifully tossed the entire email into my “Junk Mail” folder because that is exactly the kind of behavior scammers use to trick people into resetting passwords and user names.

I, on the other hand knew what I was looking at, and pulled the file apart until I found that it was supposed to be a link to a secure CISCO Mail delivery program. I accessed the server properly and was presented with… You guessed it, “Hey you need to create another account. Please provide a unique user ID and a 12 character password. Don’t forget, your password must have upper and lower case characters, numbers, and at least 2 special characters.”

I tired using the unique user ID and password from the video conferencing account. No Joy! That was a different format. Then I realized I hadn’t used that conferencing account more than once. I wondered, “just how many accounts am I going to have to create and maintain with forced password changes every 90 days, for this damn study?”

I jiggled my phone on the desk putting down my morning coffee. My phone took a clear unobstructed 45 second long picture of my ceiling.

At that point, I’d had enough.

The research app has communications built in. My email has encrypted communications built in. My phone is burning power to no good end, and I wondered how many pictures they had of my private parts.

I was perfectly willing to be inconvenienced by going and having blood drawn but I wasn’t interested in some unknown number of accounts needing to be created in service of this study. I’m trying to minimize my digital footprint, and all these people were doing was expanding it.

Every single user ID and password these people wanted was another opportunity for some shithead hacker to get information they could use to screw me. And it was painfully clear that the people running the study weren’t particularly good with technology.

So I withdrew from not only the new study, but every study these people were running. If they can’t handle the basics, how can they be relied upon to correlate the data?

Then, I deleted the Research App from my phone.

The next day, I got a call from a lovely lady asking me if I’d gotten their email about my upcoming blood draw. “Uhhh yes I did,” I replied. She asked if she could help me set up the appointment and I said, “Uhh NOPE! Then explained I’d withdrawn from the study.”

She thought I’d withdrawn because I was afraid of the blood work. I explained that wasn’t the problem. Then explained what the problem(s) were. I continued, I as an older person had no interest in multiple accounts just to support their study and that perhaps they’d be better served having a single web page that supported all the necessary functions required by the study. I also pointed out that I was sure they’d gotten some lovely photos of my ceiling, my back pocket, and the inside of my backpack. I added I’m sure that someone was equally thrilled to have pictures of my “Johnson” too since I tended to be nude, surprisingly, in my own home, and my bedroom, in particular.

She was understandably flummoxed.

She recovered well, and pointed out that the call was being recorded. I said, “Great! Then there will be no confusion about why I dropped out.” I asked her to make sure the IT people, in particular those that came up with this insanity rethink their approach. While I’m willing to share information with them, I’m not interested in having my participation in their study become a full time job involving an unknown number of “Surprise” accounts that have to be created, just to deal with the basics.

She said she’d refer the matter to the IT people and that she’d initiate the payout for my contributions to the study.

I said, “That’s fine. The money isn’t important but a clean efficient study is.”

This morning, I got a call from the study payout group. Another lovely lady wanted to verify my email address because they were going to send me a “Virtual” debit card that would be loaded with $70. She went on to tell me that this card could be used anywhere, or that the funds on it could be transferred to my bank account or Apple Pay account.

“Okay, that’s fine,” I said. A minute later I got an email from the study payout group. They directed me to a website where my “Virtual” debit card awaited. Then I got another email saying that the debit card had $70 on it.

Sure enough, there was the card, and it claimed to have $70 loaded on it. But there was no way to transfer the amount anywhere. No matter, I had the number, expiration date, and security number.

I tried to use the card online to pay a couple of subscriptions.

I couldn’t.

While puzzling over why I couldn’t use the funds. I noticed the following in the terms and conditions.

Unless otherwise specified, not redeemable for merchandise, food and beverage. Allpurchases made with this card are subject to the applicable refund and exchange policy and the amount of ClinCard’s any refunds will be placed back on card. Not redeemable for cash except where required by law. Not reloadable. Not a credit or debit card.

There was also a helpful 1-800 phone number.

I called it. It was a Canadian Bank. After navigating through their phone tree I got a helpful person to whom I explained the problem and quoted the text above. Then I asked so what is this card good for?

He didn’t know. He helpfully suggested that I keep trying random sites until it worked.

Either it’s money or it’s not… I didn’t go into that with him.

I asked how I might transfer this cash to a usable platform.

He responded that I could go to their website or download their app, open an account, provide my banking information, and then I’d be able to transfer the cash to another account.

I fired back, “So you’re telling me that to get this $70, I’ll have to give you all the information necessary for you to steal my identity and since you’re in Canada international law applies, meaning that my privacy is not secure under even the most minimal laws of the United States and any disputes will be handled under EU rules or would that be under Canadian rules?”

He had no response.

So ladies & gentlemen, that’s how I made $70 selling my body and how that $70 is in no way real.

Beware virtual debit cards!

I rather suspect they’re nothing more than a mechanism to turn us all into data products to be sold to the highest bidder.

It’s a great scam if you think about it. These people offer you money you can’t access, then tell you to access those funds they’ll just need a little bit more information. When you give them the information they’ll give you the cash. On the back end, they’ll make 1000 times more money selling your information to data brokers.

The thing is, the clinical study could have texted the $70 to my phone number (which they had on file,) and it would have been loaded automatically onto my Apple Cash card. That would have cut out the middleman and provided instant payment.

They could also have sent it to Zelle, or Venmo. The accounting would have been no different. They just had to have yet another corporate entity in the mix.

Here’s the recap of corporations:

Apple
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
GlobalMed
CISCO
SUVODA
ClinCard
Greenphire

Really?

And they turned on my phone camera for hours during the day, while using the devices and sensors I purchased to collect information for their study. They in turn, provided literally nothing but annoyance.

To anyone who might be reading this that is in the medical industry, Do Better!

The study cohort invites you into their lives and their homes. They give you information freely and while you claim to “pay” for that information, the reality appears to be much different.

I might consider joining another research study in the future. But I’ll be far more interested in doing so if that study was geared specifically to Men’s health issues. Right at the moment, I’ll be leaving the Apple Research application off my phone.

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I’ll give them credit, I still think they’re Indian Scammers.

A while back, I responded to a want ad on one of the job search sites.

Within a couple of days, I got an email from a company called Ace IT.

This company is peopled with nothing but Indians and probably owned by Indians as far as I can tell. It’s located in Austin, TX and after much back and forth, several “pre interviews” and their highly unprofessional cancellation of one of their “evaluations”. They finally got round to admitting that the position I’d applied for didn’t actually exist, but for an undefined “Fee” or fees they would accept me into their training after which I’d be sure to get a job, and they’d help…

In other words they wasted a ton of time trying to lure me into plunking out a bunch of cash to them buying “Training” then would in all likelihood not come through with any real position.

Based on my experience with them, I concluded they were a scam and disengaged.

Jump forward 4 months and they call again. They’re routed to voice mail and within seconds of them leaving a voice mail, there’s an email about the Software Quality Assurance position I “recently” applied for.

The email was addressed to “undisclosed recipients” 

Uh huh… 

The sender was a different person but the game was the same. In the intervening time, I have very specifically avoided anything to do with Ace IT so as not to waste my time.

Later in the day, I got another phone call that went to voice mail from yet another person, followed by the exact same email with a new sender’s name. Again the email was addressed to “undisclosed recipients”.

I was mildly annoyed, and again wondered if I should write a letter to the Attorney General of Texas to report these apparent scam artists.

While pondering what I would put in such a letter, I wondered if this sudden resurgence of Ace IT was due to more or less recent moves within the federal government. Specifically those moves concerning H1B visas.

Then my annoyance turned to a big smile.

Staffing firms have in recent years become overwhelmingly Indian, even those that were known for decades in my industry as being useful and reliable.

I haven’t spoken to a native English speaker at any recruitment firm for at least a decade.

Aerotek, who for years was my “Goto” staffing firm during the 1980s, ’90’ & 2000’s has been overrun by Indian workers. Back in the day, I had a particular guy at Aerotek that kept me working with pretty continuous contracts. We’d sometimes have lunch or meet for happy hour in Irvine. He’s long since gone and I haven’t spoken with anyone at Aerotek for at least a decade. I stopped dealing with them because they stopped being able to get me in front of hiring managers.

If Ace IT is desperate, and it appears that they are, it may mean that the Trump administration’s stance on H1B visas is having an impact. I love that.

If they’re not going to be able to funnel low wage, low quality H1B people from India into American jobs, they’re going to have to become a real recruiter or they’re going to have to close their doors.

I vote for the latter. I really hate people playing bait & switch. Especially when their game pollutes the actual hiring pool and creates postings for jobs that aren’t real.

I know I’m sounding more nationalistic, but the fact of the matter is these firms are nothing more than obstructions to the real job market. I’d like to see them all investigated for fraud and where applicable deportation or criminal proceedings.

The H1B system has been abused for decades and I’m all for it being completely reworked.

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Who the Hell is Complex Care Solutions?

I’ve found them to be remarkably annoying!

Who they are is a 3rd party vendor that works with many of the major health insurance companies.

They seem to be a bunch of paper pushers, whose job is to arrange things like in-home nurse assessments. Yeah, their name says it all. Complex Care Solutions, indeed adds complexity to your medical care.

In my case they forced me into some bullshit video assessment with a nurse practitioner.

After that one contact. Then they embarked on a campaign of twice weekly phone calls asking for me to review their service, or their nurse practitioner. They said they were gathering information for the insurance company. But I ask “Why?”

Surely that information was provided by my “Doctor” during our appointment, wherein he played on his computer for the entire appointment, but didn’t really examine me as a patient. In truth the entire appointment could have been handled on a video call and honestly the level of actual “care” I got, was about as impersonal or useful as WebMD.

They called again today mid-morning asking when my next Doctor’s appointment is.

Okay… That’s it!

Why do they, a third party, need to know that bit of information?

The insurance company will find out when they’re billed.

I called the insurance provider and asked what this was about. More importantly, I asked if this bullshit was necessary to the continuance of my policy.

Turns out, Complex Care Solutions can be cut right out of the equation. Which I did!

I explained that I was talking to Complex Care Solutions more than I talk to my own family. Every time I spoke with these people it was like I was talking to  my own personal mother hen. There may come a time when I’ll need their services but not today!

A) I’m not keeping my current Doctor
B) I’m actively researching and investigating new Doctors
C) I’d like to keep my private medical information, oh I don’t know… private.
D) They got real quiet when I mentioned privacy and cited HIPPA rules. Which thankfully I know due to previous employment (quarterly training will do that). They haven’t violated HIPPA, but as a patient, I have the ability to exercise at least some control over my personal information and who has access to it.

I may be over-reacting but it’s like they’re trying to rope me into some endless bullshit loop of living my life around the medical profession, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies.

Again… I’m not to that stage of the game.

But there’s another aspect to all of this. It’s billing. 

I said it to the insurance company. “Just because I’m insured, doesn’t mean that I as The Insured should abdicate my responsibility to control costs.”

I don’t need their service or the attendant annoyance or billing from their phone calls. Believe me when I say, for each time they call me, they’re getting paid.

I also mentioned that I was less than pleased with my (Doctor of record) billing the insurance company almost $1000 for that single appointment. That’s obscene especially since the “physical exam” wasn’t in any way physical.

I mean, what happened to the days when the doctor looked at your eyes, ears, throat, felt the glands in your neck, did a cursory exam of your skin, listened to your heart & breathing, in the case of men, had you drop trou examined your naughty bits, maybe did a DRE, ordered up your blood work, asked if there was any concern you had, then took a look, made some suggestions, told you if there was any issue the blood work uncovered he’d call you, then swatted you on the ass and said, “Go Play!”

(Okay, maybe they didn’t swat you on the ass,) but it was personal and when you left the place you at least felt like you’d been seen. Maybe you felt a little violated, but you at least had some reasonable confidence that a professional who’d seen thousands of bodies, had in fact examined you and didn’t see anything glaringly obvious that needed immediate attention.

Personally, I didn’t mind being buck naked in the exam room and didn’t bother with those silly paper gowns or any pretense of modesty. It was the same mindset as being in the gym locker room. Who cared? The Doc was doing his job and that meant he was gonna see ya, all of you, including parts of your body you probably haven’t seen.

Today What passes for an “exam” might as well be done in a freaking board room.

Human bodies are messy, organic, and sometimes downright disgusting. I think that’s why, when I wrote the check for a yearly exam, I didn’t mind the expense.

That Doctor probably didn’t want to see another naked body by the end of the day. But it was his job, and his education gave him the baseline normal to compare against. The fee I paid was exchanging value for time spent & experience.

My favorite Doctor, spent our first appointment asking me about every scar on my body. “How’d you get that? When?” If I showed up with a new scar, he’d ask what that was about and if I’d had appropriate care when it happened.

That’s an intimacy that’s been lost, it was being seen and it felt like he gave a damn about me, the human standing naked in front of him or his nurse. Granted, if his nurse didn’t need to see me completely nude, he’d say something like, “Pull your boxers on, I’m going to need my nurse to…” do whatever needed doing.

Admittedly, I was comfortable putting my life in his hands because we had a relationship that was personal, and not based on how many billing codes he could tic on a form.

I knew he was a “Cookie Monster” with a fondness for home made chocolate chip cookies, well anything chocolate. I knew he performed in the Pagent of the Masters in Laguna Beach. I knew he was an avid bicyclist, and that often he’d bike to work. I knew he took his profession very seriously and when he lost a patient to illness it was personal to him. I knew his first whole name, and if I encountered him outside his office I never introduced him as “Doctor”. He was Tom. Why? Because if anyone knew he was a “Doctor” there were always people that tried to get free medical advice. If we happened to be at a social event I, among others kept an eye on him and would be rude to someone that had him “cornered” talking shop. He was respected, and he took care of a lot of my friends too. The man referred me when necessary, to other doctors that worked on him. If he trusted them, then so could I.

There’s nothing quite so comforting as coming out of anesthesia and seeing “Your Doctor” at the foot of the bed conferring with “The Doctor” that did a procedure on you. I remember snippets of their conversation. “Wow he’s got a mouth on him!”, “Yeah, but he’s a good guy, anything well need to follow up on?”, “Nah, he’s good, you might want to make a note that he’s cranky with this type of anesthesia.”, “Okay, thanks. I’ll hang out for a few minutes to see he comes out of it okay.”, “Hey thanks, I’m going to check on my next patient, we still on for… RIY&#%*^@ this Sunday?”, “huadiry7%$#3”

Then “My Doctor” prying one of my eyes open, “Hey, there you are… They’ve got you on O2, it’s the good stuff so breathe deep. There you go, nice & slow, trust me it’ll help clear your head. Apparently you were searing like a sailor at some point.”

“Muff uhh, probably like a Marine Doc. My friends… all Marines.”

I still remember his chuckle and the warmth of his hand on my forehead telling me to take it easy before I started moving around. 

He was a healer, a man I trusted and no matter what, I knew he’d see me through.

That bond of trust, and confidence is missing these days. The humanity has been bled out of medical care.

Now it’s about how many different Doctors can get their finger in the insurance scam. How much can be billed and that’s dependent on sheer numbers of patients. At the same time the rates keep going up for less time spent with a patient the insurance companies keep jacking their rates, and plugging in more “services” that add nothing but opportunities to bill.

I’ve digressed, but I think it’s really important to remember what the title “Doctor” once meant. The profession was once about humanity, care, respect, and dignity.

When was the last time you felt like baking, individually wrapping, and labeling 2 dozen cookies with ingredients, then delivering them to your Doctor’s office before a holiday?

When was the last time you had your Doctor compliment you on weight loss, increased musculature, quitting smoking, your baking skills, or a custom holiday card made up of a photo you’d taken?

When was the last time you felt you’d been seen?

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I’m day drinking, I’m so pissed off right now!

I honestly don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people but I’m so over it.

I’m spitting nails and perhaps I’m over reacting. But FUCK!

Way back when Jerry & I moved into the house after the fire. We’d had the fence replaced so the pups could run around in their yard. The fence was bright and shiny, it looked sterile as all galvanized fences look when they’re new. This was the second fence we’d paid for and installed on our property.

By on our property, I mean we’d made sure that the fence was well within our property lines because we didn’t want to have any issues down the road. We literally had the property surveyed twice! Once, when the house was being rebuilt, and the second time, just before the fencing guys came in and reinstalled the fucking fence.

We had a neighbor that didn’t do or like fences at the time, but she understood and agreed that the pups needed a place to run and play where they couldn’t get hurt.

She died. There there was the meth head rental lady. Then there was the cute couple who during the pregnancy with their second child installed a monstrosity of a badly constructed wooden fence. (She kinda went nuts because at the time, the county was widening the wash, in the name of flood control and that forced anyone walking to be close to their property line. She was in momma bear protective mode and was super fearful of someone coming up and taking one of the kids. Likelihood of that was somewhere around .0001% but she would not be dissuaded and eventually her husband capitulated, even though he hated the wooden fence she made him install.) Shortly after they had their second child they sold the place and moved. Leaving behind the poorly built wooden monstrosity. Another couple moved in, they stayed a few years then he was transferred to New Mexico and they moved.

That brings us to the guy currently next door. Honestly, I’ve tolerated him. I’ve always thought he was a bit too arrogant and he always loves to correct anyone. In fact he corrected me during a fire evacuation when I’d taken the time from the road to inform everyone on the neighbor group chat that the primary evacuation route had been closed and that everyone was being turned around to the alternate route. At the time I was literally sitting in traffic on the alternate route and said so in the chat.

But Jerry who I was talking to on the phone at the time because we always remained in communication during an evacuation saw the text and immediately said, “Be nice. Everyone is stressed.” I should have let this guy have it right then and there, but in deference to Jerry I kept my mouth shut.

Anyway, In all the time not one person said a damn thing about the grape vines that Jerry liked and had me plant along the inside of our fence. We tended the vines and every once in a while we’d get a bunch of grapes.

Truth to tell, we spent more in water than the vines ever produced. But Jerry liked the vines and as they spread out along the fence, they softened the fence line and made for a cool shady spot for the pups to relax in.

At the time we planted the grapes, we also planted an overly ambitious apple tree. By overly ambitious, I mean that tree produced apples from the first year. In fact we had to remove some of the apples long before they were ripe because the tree had bent over from the weight.

The past 3 years the grape vine has spread a little bit along the fence and in all 3 years it’s produced some small but very tasty grapes.

There’s a narrow walkway between the fence and my neighbor’s house. He has a gate through the wooden monstrosity of a fence and while he rarely uses that gate, occasionally one of the grape vines will send a tendril out towards the gate. When I’ve seen that happening I’ve trimmed the tendril, or threaded it back through my fence allowing it to grow and in time soften more of the fence line.

Typically, I’ll do this once or twice in a summer, but due to the possibility of snakes taking up residence in the space between the fence and this guy’s house, I’ve also weed whacked the zone. It’s not a big deal for me, it helps him out, and I don’t have to worry about the dog getting bitten by a snake.

A couple of weeks ago he mentioned that he wanted to trim the grape vine on his side of the fence and I thought nothing of it. I figured he’d use his fucking brain and just trim it like a hedge. That wouldn’t hurt the plant so I said, “sure whatever”

This week I noticed that the vines were dying off running the length of my fence. At first I thought, “Well it’s fall and that’s pretty normal.” I went ahead and started giving the vine more water so that It could go to sleep for the winter.

The die off continued. Today I was outside and noticed only the vines extending along the fence were dying off. The central plant was still green and vibrant. “That’s odd,” I thought. Then I examined more closely.

That moronic son of a bitch had cut the vines wrapped through the fucking fence! Then to make matters worse in typical liberal democrat fashion had just left them there to die.

I say typical liberal democrat because A) He is a Hollywood liberal democrat leftist (he’s a voice actor) and B) because that’s so leftist, “Make a mess and expect someone else to clean it up”

I spent the next 45 minutes removing all the formerly productive (grape bearing,) now dying parts of the vine that I’d been training through my fence for literally years.

I don’t know if the plant will survive. It’s going into its winter sleep and without the leaves and additional energy it might not survive the winter because now it’s trying to heal itself and go into winter sleep.

This jackass destroyed a decade of growth and I’m doubting that I’ll get any grapes next year. He did this to a plant growing on my fucking fence. Typically once the plant has gone to sleep, I’ll trim and prune the older dead branches so that when the plant wakes up I’ll get new growth.

I was talking to my brother on the phone when I discovered this while I was cleaning up the mess I’d been left with. My brother who’s not a plant person but had seen the vines was understanding that I’d be pissed off.

He was blown away that someone would do something like that in the first place then leave it like it was nothing.

His response was the usual for him. “Well that’s fucking Californians for you.” Then he asked if I lived in an HOA community, which I don’t. When I told him that, he said just wait for it, that neighbor is probably going to try to start one.

He sold his place in Florida because the HOA wouldn’t let him plant a couple of trees in his fenced in back yard. The HOA made him get rid of potted tomato plants he was growing on his upstairs front deck. They didn’t like the aesthetics of the plants being on the upper deck and then kept hounding him about the plants after he moved them downstairs to his back deck inside a fenced yard. The HOA went so far as to forbid any “food plants” from the community.

His revenge was to find a field of dandelions and collect their seeds plus a ton of crabgrass then liberally distribute both throughout the community, 5 days before the sale of his house closed in springtime. With spring rains in northern Florida I’m betting they’ll have to tear out and re – sod the whole community.

That’s the kind of fuckers we are.

As I said he’s not a plant guy, but he likes tomatoes.

(As an aside, he’s laughing his ass off that DeSantis is likely to sign a law that makes HOAs illegal in Florida.)

I’m furious about what this neighbor did to my grape vine. There are a lot of layers to it.

  1. It’s a plant on my property
  2. it was growing on a fence on my property
  3. It was a plant Jerry liked
  4. It provided a cool shady spot for Jesse
  5. It represented 10 years of work and nurturing
  6. The plant had just consistently begun to provide grapes
  7. I’d actually offered to share the grapes with the fucking neighbor. (It’s not my fault he didn’t get his ass out there to harvest grapes before the birds & squirrels got to them. I had plenty.)
  8. That vine gave me some green along the fence that brought me a sense of peace because in the midst of a mostly grey landscape, (Unless you looked at or walked through the forest above us,) there was a deep green that I enjoyed whenever I was out there.

I guess I feel violated.

This guy has literally removed all of the natural plants from his yard. While overgrown he could simply have trimmed them back. He’s also pretty much destroyed the beautiful Japanese maple that was growing for years in his back yard. That tree was green and watching it change with the seasons was amazing.

He stopped watering it, then pruned the shit out of it, (badly) and is essentially letting it die.

I’ve included pictures of what he left me with. The vine used to extend all the way to the fence post you can see at the left.

Oh and don’t forget, he just cut the vine near the main plant. He left all of the vine threaded through the fence to wither and die making it much more difficult to remove because as it dries out, it’s no longer flexible. The stuff growing up his wall is a bit of Virginia creeper. Why he decided to fuck up my grape vine and leave the creeper is a complete mystery.

I’m tempted to tell him, “If you want to kill a plant, cut it off at the root.”

Now when I go outside I get to look at the side of his house, his shitty gate, and the exhaust ports for his tankless water heater. If you visualize the plant growing up the fence extending all the way to the left you’ll get a sense of the green wall that afforded me some privacy If I was sitting on my lower deck enjoying the sunshine.

As the plant goes to sleep, I’m sure I’ll find more vines he cut through but for the moment I’ve removed all the obviously damaged parts of the plant.

If by some miracle I’m able to stay in the house, come springtime I’m thinking I’ll move the grape to my back fence where it won’t inconvenience the neighbor and I’ll plant something really invasive and fast growing like Virginia creeper along my fence next to his house. He can cut that all he likes, he won’t make a dent in it. I’m thinking I’ll toss some Mexican Sage into the area between the fence and his house and I’m not going to bother cutting down the weeds between his house and the fence. Once the Mexican sage takes hold He’ll have a jungle and a hefty fine every spring from the county for fire abatement.

I think there’s a kind of prickly fence edging I can lay down that snakes aren’t supposed to like crossing. I’ll let him deal with the rattlesnakes that may take up residence on his property.

Thinking about it, he might have heard me talking to my brother. I was using my new AirPods during the conversation while I was cleaning up the mess he left me. I think I recall seeing him wandering around the moonscape his yard is now.

I hope he did hear me talking to my Brother. I hope he heard exactly what I think of him.

Were it not so close to my bedroom, I’d start dumping all of Jesse’s poop on that side of the house too.

I feel like I’ve been too nice. I’ve not said word one about his incessant music, (Oh I’ve thought some bad things, I’ve even played my music loud enough that his was being drowned out,) I’ve not complained about him using a leaf blower on dirt kicking up dust clouds, I’ve not said shit about him running a chain saw in the early morning or in the evening when I sit down to dinner and watch a movie.

I’ve been the ”nice guy” a.k.a. The doormat everyone shits on. The guy that just minds his own business and tries really hard to not make waves.

I’ve got enough on my plate without fighting with the neighbors too. I’ve been too quiet, too forgiving, and in doing so people think they can ignore me or walk all over me. Until they need something… Because, “Hey he’s a nice guy… it’s okay for us to fuck him over.”

Jerry taught me to be nice. What I need to relearn is how to be a raging asshole. That appears to be the only way to survive the liberal fuckers these days.