Scam alert

Okay, given all the DOGE and general Republican shenanigans currently going on in the Social Security Administration, it occurred to me that this email was a bit rich:

I mean—you gonna include yourselves in this?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Working as designed

It’s February, 2025, and I’m grateful my Social Security payment appeared in my account on Friday afternoon.

It’s quite the statement, actually, because a year ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me to be concerned. But for the past 20 days a feral pack of loser incels has been swarming like locusts from federal agency to federal agency, connecting devices to systems holding the most sensitive information in the country, downloading and adding data, and generally whizzing on everything within reach, under the aegis of a ketamine-stoked über willie-waving incel while the Adderall-addled president jerks around the media between rounds of golf and plans to use the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for WWF competitions.

I mean—Pillsbury Spock has tweeted “Death to USAID”, stopped all payments to the National Institutes for Health (thus halting critical scientific and medical research), held up the threat of mass firings and promised to move into the FAA and air traffic control systems (coded in COBOL) to “fix them”.

Like he did to Twitter.

So, yeah—when I didn’t see my monthly retirement payment (reflecting the money I’ve paid into the system for decades), I got green around the gills. And when I finally saw it on Friday, I was relieved. And grateful that—despite their best efforts—some of the government is still working. So far.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Show me the money

Got a notice Sunday that the Social Security Administration was going to deduct 3X of what they’re currently doing monthly to pay for basic Medicare because I earned $XXX…in 2023. Ipso facto, I can afford big bucks for the service, QED.

Well, okay, fine—except that I was employed for part of 2023, ergo the $XXX, but I was laid off in May of that year and so my income is definitely no longer $XXX.

Which they know, because I submitted all the information on the proper form back in February, when they tried the same thing based on my income in 2022.

So yesterday I spent more than an hour waiting on hold for SSA, getting disconnected and then talking with a guy who told me, “You have to do this every year. Probably for several years. We can’t use what you submitted before.”

Swell.

FYSA: When you submit the SSA form, you have to attach documents to substantiate your income claim, “AGI, as used on line 11 of IRS form 1040”. Only, in November I have no 1099s, W-2s and no 1040 for…2024. So I spent another three hours trying to find statements (SSA does not let you pull year-to-date information from their site, yay). I ended up doing a filtered search on my bank site to kludge together that information, which wasn’t easy. Printed everything out and took it over to the local SSA office (thank God they opened one in the People’s Republic).

Last time, it took them three months to agree that I am no longer making $XXX and reduce the premium deductions. I hope it doesn’t take that long this time.

Since they already have all the information.

Anyway, that’s taken care of. For another year. Yippee.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Government intelligence

Yesterday I blew nearly three hours watching the inaptly-named Senate Intelligence Committee question the CEOs of four companies involved in last December’s unveiling of the SolarWinds cyber security breach.

Amazon, which was also involved, declined to appear before the committee. And they consequently got some ‘splaining to do.

But I’m not going to do to you what I did to my colleagues, which was basically live-tweeting it. Instead, I’m giving you a photo of half a head of cabbage, which is still smarter than Marco Rubio.

 

Clearly communicating

Saturday, I had to mail a package to Canada. Since the USPS self-service kiosks won’t let you mail international parcels, I had to go into the main post office in the People’s Republic during working hours.

As I was waiting in line, I noticed the big, splashy electric banners over the service windows, the ones that let you know all the cool things the USPS can do for you:

Um…

 

Bureaucratic polka

Welp, I was hoping that by the time you read this, I’d be street legal, but that Virginia DMV has up its butt is truly wide and deep. Seems that it’s not enough that the name on my California driver’s license and my passport and my Social Security Card should match; the name on my utility bills have to match as well. 

So here’s my yesterday:

Drive a bazillion miles to Shirlington (including paying frickin’ tolls), get in front of a DMV employee and be told that if I want to go home, find some other utility bills that match within an hour, they’ll graciously condescend to allow me back into their appointment-only facility.

(I looked at her and said, “You want me to get Comcast to change my name in their bill in an hour?” All my bills, my mortgage, everything is under the name I’ve been using—and paying taxes under in seven states—for bleedin’ ever.)

Drive a bazillion miles home, realize that I left my tote bag at the counter. My tote bag with my mobile phone. And a book on (wait for it) mindfulness.

Drive a bazilion miles back, get the bag, drive a bazillion miles home and hop on a standup call where I learn that every single time ENG “fix” a problem with the product, they break something else.

Scour the Virginia DMV site for next available appointments and discover that the earliest out there are late December. Across seven or eight DMV locations, which I had to search separately.

(TBF, tho, the DMV both rang me and emailed me to tell me they’d found my bag. Of course, there’s no number for any DMV office where you can ring them. Just that one never-answered number in Richmond.)

So, I’ve got nearly three more months of having to look over my shoulder every time I go two miles over the speed limit. And I have go to the county election place next week to register to vote. That was my whole rationale for getting the license here at all. I am not going through this election without voting.

 

Gratitude Monday: Break in the storm

Today I’m glad that the Kleptocrat caved and that 800,000 federal workers and more than a million contractors are headed back to paid work. Here in the District They Call Columbia, that means that my Metro ride is going to be more crowded, but I’m glad to know that my fellow commuters will have money flowing back into their bank accounts, and they can begin to drive back some of the excruciating anxiety they’ve been experiencing since mid-December.

I’m also grateful that people like José Andres stepped up to the plate with meals, groceries and supplies for the millions (when you factor in whole families) who’ve been living in this Dalìesque nightmare of either banishment from the job or unpaid servitude—people who perform needed functions but were crumpled up and tossed away by 45, McConnell and their cronies. And that I was able to contribute to some of the organizations to help with the effort.

Further—God bless Robert Mueller and his investigators, for continuing to work throughout this shitshow. And special blessings upon the [unpaid, for the moment] FBI team who arrested Klepto-crony Roger Stone on Friday morning on seven felony counts tied to the 2016 election. And on CNN for doing its job and covering that raid. Must-see TV, that.

I’m well aware that we are by no means out of the woods. There’s increasingly hysterical willie-waving posturing emanating from the White House about still needing that useless wall, and threats of another shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for it. Moreover, even if we didn’t have that prospect hanging over us, returning to full government operations after the 35 days of shutdown will probably take months, if not years. Don’t count on receiving whatever tax refund you’re anticipating by return mail. I think about the research projects that have been ruined because scientists were forbidden to continue their work, and I weep.

But even so—huge thanks that Pelosi and her comrades stood firm against the R extortion demands, and that—as reported on SNL—"Our top story tonight: President Trump’s heroic end to the shutdown. It took him 35 days, but he was finally able to get no wall.”

Today I’m glad that the Kleptocrat caved and that 800,000 federal workers and more than a million contractors are headed back to paid work. Here in the District They Call Columbia, that means that my Metro ride is going to be more crowded, but I’m glad to know that my fellow commuters will have money flowing back into their bank accounts, and they can begin to drive back some of the excruciating anxiety they’ve been experiencing since mid-December.

I’m also grateful that people like José Andres stepped up to the plate with meals, groceries and supplies for the millions (when you factor in whole families) who’ve been living in this Dalìesque nightmare of either banishment from the job or unpaid servitude—people who perform needed functions but were crumpled up and tossed away by 45, McConnell and their cronies. And that I was able to contribute to some of the organizations to help with the effort.

Further—God bless Robert Mueller and his investigators, for continuing to work throughout this shitshow. And special blessings upon the [unpaid, for the moment] FBI team who arrested Klepto-crony Roger Stone on Friday morning on seven felony counts tied to the 2016 election. And on CNN for doing its job and covering that raid. Must-see TV, that.

I’m well aware that we are by no means out of the woods. There’s increasingly hysterical willie-waving posturing emanating from the White House about still needing that useless wall, and threats of another shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for it. Moreover, even if we didn’t have that prospect hanging over us, returning to full government operations after the 35 days of shutdown will probably take months, if not years. Don’t count on receiving whatever tax refund you’re anticipating by return mail. I think about the research projects that have been ruined because scientists were forbidden to continue their work, and I weep.

But even so—huge thanks that Pelosi and her comrades stood firm against the R extortion demands, and that—as reported on SNL—"Our top story tonight: President Trump’s heroic end to the shutdown. It took him 35 days, but he was finally able to get no wall.”

Hurting the wrong people

I was on my way home yesterday afternoon, gazing out the Metro window at traffic parked for a couple of miles on the Toll Road (jackknifed truck being hooked up to be hauled away), when I got a text from a friend inviting me out to dinner. Seeing as to how yesterday wasn’t too bad of a day for a Thursday, I jumped at the chance.

Because—aside from dinner with a friend—it kept me well and truly out of danger of stumbling across El Klepto’s primetime televised manufactured hysteria.

I’ve been thinking about his base lately—more than I usually do, on account of the #TrumpShutdown. Someone must have told him that, faced with a choice between building a beautiful wall intended to keep brown people out of a white country and getting tax refunds, his goobers would ditch him like last week’s catfish bait, so furloughed IRS workers are being called back to work to process tax returns, although, of course, they’re still not getting paid.

Last week someone on Twitter posted about one of his MAGAt acquaintances moaning that ordinarily he didn’t give a toss about government shutdowns, but this one is [negatively] affecting him, and he really doesn’t like that. I thought that was the epitome of the red-hatters, but it turned out someone named Crystal Minton, of Marianna, Fla., told him to hold her beer as she jumped right in.

Because lemme just leave this here—the money shot quote from a New York Times story on the double-barreled devastation (hurricane Michael and the #TrumpShutdown) of the economy of the deep-red Florida panhandle. This truly distills the entire I’ve-got-mine/I’m-supposed-to-have-got-mine Republican party down to one simple statement.

If you’d like to read the whole story—there are plenty of others in Minton’s community who are stunned that the Kleptocrat would do this to white people—here it is.

Dinner was great, BTW.

Period of adjustment

At time of writing, we’re closing in on 17 days of partial federal government shutdown, with more than 800,000 workers affected—either furloughed without pay or working without pay. Most of them are likely to be paid eventually, although this is not guaranteed. Additionally, tens of thousands of contract workers—from cleaning staff to software architects—are sidelined with no expectation of recouping their wages. They only get paid for hours worked; lost weeks can’t be made up.

This #TrumpShutdown is all down to the Kleptocrat’s demand for funding his cockamamie wall along the border with Mexico, and down to the Repugnants in the Senate (primarily McConnell, but also Graham and some others) who suddenly are “unable” to vote on a Continuing Resolution they’d previously approved, because they’re afraid of the big baby in the Oval Office. We’re 17 days into it, and we’re told that that baby is willing for it to go on for months until he gets his bloody, useless wall and proves his balls are bigger than Ann Coulter’s.

But here’s the thing—those hundreds of thousands of people who are either working without compensation or involuntarily idled are either dipping into their savings or moving into the red to make the mortgage, buy the groceries or pay the doctor bills that are all due now. The Office of Personnel Management advising furloughed workers to arrange with their landlords to swap repair or maintenance work for rent and Orangina breezily assuring everyone that creditors will “make adjustments—they always do” is just master level fuckwittery, although unsurprising coming from someone who’s spent decades systematically stiffing workers and contractors.

By way of demonstrating, I give two examples from financial institutions with which I have relationships.

My credit union, headquartered in Manhattan Beach, Calif., has a banner across the home page stating that if you’re affected by the shutdown, they’re ready to help. But click through and you’ll see that all the “adjustment” they’re willing to make involves a very limited no-interest 12-month loan ($2000 would not even be a month’s rent in a lot of cities), $5000 credit card limit (with “normal” interest) and two months of deferred existing loan—but interest accrues during that period. (I expect they basically repurposed the accommodation they put up for victims of the California wildfires last autumn.)

They’re still going to make a profit, and this is a credit union.

CapitalOne (where I have a credit card) didn’t have any indicator of “adjustment”, nor did Bank of America. I through no fault of my own have a mortgage with Wells Fargo. If you want to find out what “adjustment” they’re willing to make, you have to call them.

That’ll be deep joy. It’s a wonder to me that WF is even still in business and its entire management structure isn’t in prison after it’s well-documented policy of fraud against its customers that went on for decades.

We the people face another assault this evening: Kleptocrat has announced he’ll “Address the Nation” and expects all the fake media enemies of the people to give him airtime. My fear is that he’ll use the occasion to declare the “state of emergency” he’s threatened as an end run around Congress, and we’ll have something much more serious than a government shutdown.

Can you say Constitutional crisis?

Death and...

Let me start this out by saying I hate preparing taxes; I get more wound up about doing them than just about anything else. There’s something about the complexity of trying to figure out what number goes on which line, and whether you’ve got the right number, the one that’s going to get you the lowest tax due, that just sends me over the edge.

So, I pay someone to do my taxes for much the same reason I pay someone to perform surgery, cut my hair or tune my car’s engine: this is completely beyond my capabilities.

Last year, I was so paralyzed by the prospect that I filed an extension for the 2016 returns and still barely made the 15 October deadline for getting them in. This year, being now a homeowner, I took all my records in to the accountant who used to do my taxes right up until my third year in California. This was in March—a tad late for the April filing deadline, but not the latest I’ve ever been.

My guy looked at what I’d done for 2016. He discovered that my employer had unaccountably withheld taxes for California during that year (I left there in December 2015), so was due a refund for that. Also, he reckoned that there was a big enough delta in the partial reimbursement for my relocation expenses that it was worth filing an amended return to get a refund. Woohoo!

Well, come around 14 April, the firm sent me the completed extension form and told me I should send it in with a check for close to three large. Shortly after that, I got an email and then a letter apologizing that the new tax preparation software they’d got was proving much more challenging than anticipated, and that the staff would get to all client returns in a timely manner.

In past years, I know that Tommy and his team have taken the latter part of April off—it’s like priests after Easter: they need a break following the big push. So I didn’t expect immediate follow-up. However, months passed, and long about mid-September I pinged them, leaving a voicemail on Tommy’s line. A few days later I got a return VM from one of his staff, saying that “they’re going to start working” on my taxes the following week. This was very unsettling because I got the impression that my taxes hadn’t been on anyone’s schedule, and wouldn’t have got on it if I hadn’t reminded them of my existence.

I emailed in response to tell them not to FedEx the returns to me because I was going to be out of town the entire next week and did not want the package just sitting on my doorstep for that period of time.

Silly me. Because on 4 October I got a call from the assistant saying that someone named Hugo had started work on my taxes and all was well.

Let me remind you that the deadline for filing both federal and state taxes is 15 October. I was not charmed. But then it got worse.

Because last Friday I got a call from this Hugo, who was checking on a discrepancy in my driver’s license number. I can’t recall why, but evidently Virginia requires you input your driver’s license number (perhaps for the same reason they require you to show them your Social Security actual card in order to get a driver’s license, which is why I haven’t got one), and mine—being California—is one digit short. For Virginia.

I’m actually grateful for this anomaly, because in the course of our conversation, and after he told me that there’s no change in my 2016 taxes, it transpired that he was only vaguely aware that there was something about my relocation expenses, and he wasn’t sure why there was withholding tax for DC…

So I explained (as I had done back in March to Tommy) that I’d lived in DC for two months in 2016, and the whole reason I was filing an amended 2016 return was because of the deduction for unreimbursed relocation expenses. Again, as discussed with Tommy in March.

As a friend said that evening, “Was no one taking notes?”

Soooo, okay. Late Monday, the assistant called me to say that all my returns were ready, and did I want them to send them to me, or did I want to pick them up. I did not fancy paying a marked-up FedEx fee, so I said I’d go out to Leesburg on Wednesday. It’s occurred in the past that I’ve caught errors in the preparation, so I thought it would be better if I gave them a dekko while at their office, since we’re that close to the deadline.

And thus it was that Tommy, the assistant and I collectively discovered that the wrong state W-2s had been stapled to the California and DC 2016 returns.

But then, as I was gathering everything up, having signed all the forms (for electronic and snailmail submission), I told Tommy that I hadn’t been overjoyed at owing so much un-withheld money for 2017—i.e., not enough money had been withheld during the year—and what strategy should I employ for a more reasonable obligation. He said it depends on what “reasonable” means to me—some people like getting a big refund, after all. I broke in that I’d like it to be a little over-under zero, not having to write a check in four figures.

So he fished around the return and looked at it. (I think, being the owner and chief accountant of the firm, that he was supposed to have checked Hugo’s work before, but…) And that was when he discovered that nearly $5000 of property taxes hadn’t been entered on it (and, clearly, not in the calculation made back in April that dictated what I sent to the IRS with the extension). There followed about 15 minutes of searching through all the papers I’d given him in March before we found the annual statement from my 2017 mortgage holder. Turns out that Mr. Cooper (which rebranded last year from Nationstar after multiple lawsuits and civil/criminal penalties paid to various states, and which has embarked on an ad campaign touting how kind they are to small animals) puts property taxes in an unexpected place on that form, so Hugo hadn’t picked it up.

God give me strength.

As a tax professional, upon seeing an annual mortgage statement, should it not occur to you to expect that there should be property taxes involved somewhere in the year’s activity? And therefore should you not look around until you, you know, found them? Somewhere?

Tommy entered the taxes into my tax forms and re-ran the calculation; I get more than $1000 back now from feds and Virginia. Which is nice, but I can’t help wondering what’s been left out that we didn’t catch in that hurried confab?

I guess I’m in the market for a new tax preparer.

Down for the count

While we’ve been distracted by disgusting displays of hateful rhetoric at rallies that are only missing tiki torches to achieve full effect, and unhinged tweets from golf courses and gold-plated toilets, the Secretary of Commerce (who—as documented in a story in Forbes—has a history of theft that ranges from pilfering artificial sweetener from restaurants to defrauding colleagues and investors to the tune of hundreds of millions in his various financial management jobs) has been perverting the 2020 Census by adding new questions that not only have no bearing on its Constitutional purpose, they are downright terrifying.

You’ll no doubt have heard of the one demanding to know whether the respondent is a citizen. That’s the one that allegedly originated in what is pleased to call itself the Department of Justice, but Ross entered his office with the idea in mind. We’re told that this is in aid of counteracting “voter fraud”, even though it will clearly have no effect whatsoever on the only actual industrial-scale election fraud perpetrated in the United States. That came (and will come again) from the Russians, but since it solidified the GOP hold on the federal government, the Kleptocrat Syndicate (both the Executive and Legislative branches; Judicial is as yet not entirely affected by kompromat) is not interested.

No, asking about citizenship is clearly aimed at intimidating non-citizens (I was about to say “regardless of whether they’re here legally” because legalities do not matter a whit to this lot). It may also help in GOP gerrymandering efforts, although that would be a secondary benefit to Congress.

However, take a look at the question:

It’s not just a binary—are you or aren’t you; it’s got layers of “how many ways can we invalidate your right to be here” embedded in response options 2 and 3. What the everloving does it matter where you were born if you are a citizen by right of birth?

But then we come to naturalization—that’s the chilling one. Well, it wouldn’t be particularly problematic in any other administration. But the present government has quietly been revoking naturalized citizenship and deporting people as a tool of political intimidation. This response is a way of identifying targets for these activities.

And here’s another kicker—if you tick a box under race claiming to be either white or black, you’re required to elaborate on your country of origin.

What on earth has where your (in many cases) distant ancestors came from got to do with anything? And how do you pick a country? If great-great-great-grandpa came from Vilnius, for example, do you put down Russia, Germany, Poland or Lithuania, all of which claimed the city at one time or another? What if the family hung out in Spain, then moved to Italy and on to Libya—which one do you choose? (You know what would be super fun? Say you’re white and then name countries in Africa or Asia, because generations of your ancestors were adventurers or colonists.)

They give you 16 spaces for letters; that’s a joke. What conceivably valid information could be gained by someone whose forebears from Bohemia, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, Morocco, Wales and Lichtenstein mixed and mingled in Pittsburgh or Chicago picking any single one of those points of origin to put in those 16 spaces?

Maybe they’d prefer that we all just send in DNA samples. Yeah, that would be swell. Except that—so far—you can’t be forced to cough up one of those until you’ve been arrested on a felony charge.

I dunno—it’s possible that this crowd of white supremacists may declare US residency a felony and move toward mandatory DNA collection as a way of identifying “undesirables” so they can be culled, whether by deportation or mass graves probably wouldn’t matter to them.

Meanwhile, I left my opinion on these despicable questions on the government comments site, for all the good that will do. And I’m considering how I’ll respond when the time comes. Because I’ll have to cram “You can kiss my [none of your fucking business] ass” into those 16 spaces.

Therapy

This week went to hell pretty much on Wednesday, and I hit the utter nadir (I hope to God) yesterday, between work and the gov’ment*. So I’m closing it out with this:

*It seems that Fairfax County’s Personal Property Tax administrators work only part time, which barely gives them the hours to send you bills for years during which you were not a resident, but not the hours to be at their desks to take your phone calls to remind them you've sent them documentary proof of your non-residence. I hate living in a Confederate state.

"We deliver for you"--NOT

More than two weeks ago I submitted the very-hard-to-get hardcopy Change of Address form to the USPS, setting 22 December as the date they should stop delivering mail to my old place and begin forwarding it to my new one in D.C.

I cleared out the mailbox on the 23^rd, and hoped that that was the end of it. But no—I went by on the 27^th to find five new pieces of mail addressed to me, which had been newly delivered after my cut-off date. Since I’m turning over the keys to the property management company today, I found this frustrating and enraging. They basically just blew off the CoA. So I had to go online and re-submit, in the tenuous hope that at least the computer system will spark some action—like, maybe, automatically pull my mail out of the delivery queue for redirection.

They make the hardcopy form hard to get (it’s not out on their counter with other forms; you have to ask one of their rude and charmless humanoid staff for it) because they clearly want you to go online to submit the change. An online form puts the data immediately into their database and saves them the labor costs of paying someone to translate the postcard details to their system. I get that.

But here’s their business model: they charge you for the privilege of saving them the work and possible data entry error. Yes—you make life easier for them, and save them a few bob, and they hit you up for $1.05.

But get this: they say they have to do this to you, for your security:

Where in the hell does that come from? How does charging you $1.05 have anything to do with security? It’s just another money-sucking scheme. (And I’m sure they hired consultants who arrived at that bizarre price point as the “sweet spot” where people would just fork it over without bitching.)

So, what I wonder is—if you don’t have Internet access, or a credit card—what are you meant to do? I guess you’re just not supposed to get mail. And if you do, you better not be moving, because you’re totally stuffed. They obviously toss out the official-but-non-revenue-generating postcard forms and do whatever they please.

Oh, but here’s the other thing: that unicorn CoA postcard doesn’t come as a single piece of paper any longer. It’s buried in a packet of “moving deals”—from Lowe’s, Best Buy and I don’t know what all. And the online form has the equivalent. Once you agree to let them suck $1.05 from your credit card, here’s the “confirmation” page:

Thanks, USPS, for being a crass, incompetent, lazy-ass organization with attitudinal staff and no discernable value proposition. Because people moving any distance really appreciate the way you put obstacles in their path and add stress to their lives. You continue to set standards for underperformance and don’t-give-a-damn customer service right here in the 21^st Century.

Special delivery

The other day I was checking Staples in Cupertino for something. But before I got into the store, I was astounded to see a USPS truck just pull right into a Handicapped space smack in front of the store.

There were three cars in the entire lot, so it’s not like the letter carrier was strapped for open places to park. In fact, there was a vacant slot right next to him.

And he wasn’t carrying armfuls of packages, so he wasn’t burdened with weight.

No, he was just being a brass-plated, government-issue self-important, arrogant schmuck.

Civic confusion

Tuesday was the day Primary elections were held in the great state of California, and there's nothing like it anywhere else.

I have to say that the method of marking ballots here is passing strange. First of all: paper ballots, no voting machines. In a state that considers itself the vortex of technological innovation. 

And the ballots? No filling in a circle, or—God forbid—punching out a hole with a slender metal prong. (“You’ll poke yer eye out, kid!”. Plus, the two most terrifying words in all of electoral history: hanging chads.) No—we have to connect the front end and the back end of an arrow-like thingie.

But not just any old way—a very specific, singular way, as you can see from this instruction sheet.

Now, I find this quite interesting. For one thing, all the sample candidates are all dead white males. I’m assuming that George Washington, Ben Franklin and Andrew Jackson need no introduction. John B. Weller was the fifth governor of California; can’t imagine how that qualifies to sit in the same company as Washington, Jackson or Franklin. William M. Gwin was one of our first Congressmen; but I imagine his gold-mine wealth propelled both that career and his placement on this sheet.

I always think of John C. Frémont as one of the dreadful political generals of the Union army who held high commands with disastrous results during the early years of the War Between the States. (Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” ran Frémont ragged in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, which in turn frightened the daylights out of the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C.) But he was one of our first U.S. Senators, and a founder of the Republican Party, so what’re ya gonna do?

Anyhow, evidently in our entire 164 years of statehood, there has been no woman and no person of color in the Golden State who has done anything as remarkable as Frémont, Gwin or Weller that would spark the Office of the Secretary of State (which manages election stuff) to use his/her name as an example here.

But the little instruction sheet is overly optimistic, in my opinion. Because I’m pretty sure that people who can’t figure out the right-turn-on-red thing will not be able to pick the correct marking method from among all the options that this thing gives you on marking your ballot. 

Now that I think of it, this may be the reason California does not use voting machines, either.

It's in the mail again

I had one last package to send for the holidays, and I finally got it all suited up to mail on Friday. I went to the USPS Agnew Station in Santa Clara, figuring I’d try for something different from Sunnyvale.

Only it turns out that the US Postal Service basically trains all its customer-facing employees in techniques of idiocy, disdain and general unhelpfulness.

As with both Sunnyvale stations, there was quite a line; and as with every post office I’ve been to in the past several months (Los Altos, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara), they only had two windows open.

I had plenty of time to observe the three staffers (as one came up to serve passport applicants, another just closed her window and walked away) display the maximum of disinterest in their job and the public.

When I finally got up to the counter, the woman threw a hissy fit because my return address had only my street, number and zip code. “You have to have the city! And the state!” “The zip code incorporates not only the city and state, but a specific area within the city; that’s the definitive placer.” “You have to have the city and the state.”

(Which, BTW, I did not on any of the packages I’d mailed three days before. Maybe it’s a Santa Clara thing. Or maybe it’s just a “you have to have something wrong with this package” thing.)

Whatever.

But my packages are sent; they are in the hands of the shipping gods.

And next year I’m going UPS. Enough is freaking enough.

It's in the mail

Following on my post about making candy for holiday presents, let me share with you an experience I’m decidedly not grateful for:

Dealing with the US Postal Service to mail nine packages, five to the UK.

I’d collected some flat-rate Priority Mail boxes from the Sunnyvale Fremont post office (where the guy behind the lobby window looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I asked for them), and had my nine boxes and envelopes in carry bags when I went to the Sunnyvale main station.

I even had Max Hastings’s All Hell Let Loose to read while in line. I figured the 450 pages I still had to go would keep me occupied while I waited.

Well, the adventure began when I pitched up at the counter and the woman informed me that I had the wrong boxes to send things to the UK, and also the wrong customs forms (which I’d filled out beforehand).

Now, I’ll be buggered if I can figure out exactly what the difference is between these two—except for a slight variation in size. But what the difference amounted to was about $20 per package. Plus redoing the customs form.

(Also, let me just say that if I ever come across the ass who designed those self-assembly boxes, I’m going to break all his fingers. You’re welcome.)

However—if all I did was wrap over the boxes, everything would be copacetic. Evidently it’s something to do with the pre-printed markings.

Although, as you understand—every damned one of them is official USPS kit, available for pickup without any explanation of appropriate use. And it made me wonder what the hell is the significance of all the boxes they print—and don’t explain to you until you hit the shipping counter.

I got a bit of a giggle out of her warning me that “You won’t get a tracking number” if I didn’t have…something, not sure what it was.

Because the USPS “tracking” system is pointless. I know for a fact—from multiple experiences as both a sender and recipient of packages they “track”—that their letter carriers often just dump parcels that won’t fit into mail boxes in public places like lobbies instead of hauling their lazy asses up to the actual office or residence. Once so dumped, they log them as “delivered”.

And once “delivered”, the USPS refuses all responsibility.

So, yeah—not worried about having your damned tracking number.

Well, so I went home and wrapped up the offending parcels. Then I took them to the Fremont station (again with All Hell Let Loose), where Mary actually gave me an injured look when she realize I had five packages to send to the UK. It was like I’d asked her to prove Fermat’s last theorem.

“It’s going to take time,” she intoned.

Whatever.

But—with Mary at the helm, it did indeed take time. Because she just couldn’t seem to grasp the whole notion of sending things outside the US. (And before you ask, Mary is not a twenty-something; she’s been around the block a few hundred times.)

She laboriously weighed each package (sighing with each), and painstakingly typed with two fingers something into a computer from the customs forms—are they now adding that sort of crap to the big data miasma? Every single one. She chided me for writing “confections”—what’s that? Candy? She scratched out “confections” and wrote in “candy”, apparently convinced that no one in either the USPS or Royal Mail would understand “confections”.

She also demanded, “How many?” How many what? Candy? What the hell does it matter? I made stuff up.

She was so concerned about that stuff she never once asked me whether my packages contained anything dangerous, flammable, alcohol, perfume, etc. I’d have thought that would have been more germane than how many candies were in each box. But I’d probably have to explain “germane” to her, if I brought it up.

The postage charged wasn’t what the woman at the main station had quoted—I’m guessing that you’d not get two workers across the USPS to come up with the same story.

In the 25 minutes or so I watched Mary go through her painful routine I got a bit of a laugh out of the worker at the next place on the counter—I swear, not one of the people who came to her got away without having to redo something. “You have the wrong form!” “Is this right?” “No!” She was the Queen of Denial, and boy, did she relish it.

Anyhow, eventually I paid a ridiculous amount of money and left. Mary was so dispirited she didn’t even ask if I wanted to buy anything else, which is the big USPS thing—they’re much more interested in upselling you than in doing the transaction you came there for.

One thing I’ll say for the Sunnyvale staff (at both locations) is they’re not as crabby as the Cupertino crowd. I swear—those people are the surliest humans outside a Dostoyevsky novella, even when they’re trying to get you to buy other stuff.

What I learned was that the USPS is still the bastion of the quintessential time-serving government worker, still giving the rest of the public sector a bad name for plodding, indifference and obstructionism. I suppose it’s good to know that there are some things that never change.

Civic duty

I got to my polling place—the fire station down the block—at 0645 yesterday, but it turns out that polls in California don’t open until 0700. Well, blow me—in Virginia they open at 0600. Californians are pikers.

Anyhow, there was one person there ahead of me, a South Asian in motorcycle gear who said he’s a software developer and he doesn’t own a mobile phone. I almost high-fived him. (I have one, but I’ve always told employers I don’t. If they think you have one, they’ll only want to call you and annoy you.) He was carrying his gloves and helmet, and his sample ballot.

We talked about how more than half the ballots cast in this state for this election are expected to be by mail, but he said he likes the experience of voting in person. He’s right—it feels more civic to be handed your ballot by a really old guy with extremely limited English skills (but who I expect is a holy terror in Mandarin), and go mark it in a little plastic boothlet.

The ballot itself (which was actually two sheets, because of all the initiatives and referenda) was in English and Spanish, although the cover sheet was in the other three languages that election materials come in, so I’m assuming that if you’d wanted one in Mandarin, Tagalog or Viet, it would have been produced.

By the time the place opened up, there were maybe five people behind me, and a bunch more arrived before I left—at least 12 or 15, standing there with coffee mugs, babies and briefcases. I was outa there by 0712—all those ballot measures.

That’s one thing I love about California—every election has at least five grass-roots laws or proposed measures referred by the legislature to the electorate for approval. There’s almost always something about marijuana or prisons. This time there was no grass in the grass-roots, but there was the one on the death penalty and one on amending the three-strikes policy, so we had the penal system represented.

Also, there were two competing measures to raise taxes state-wide to pay for services/education that have been gutted by the economic crunch; one sent down from Governor Brown, the other framed and funded by a woman who was, for about 17 minutes, a childhood friend of mine.

When I left the fire station, I slapped that “I Voted” sticker on my shirt and wore it all day. It’s a good day’s work to vote.

Supreme health care

Can I be the only person who finds the juxtaposition over the case currently before the Supreme Court & the news that Dick Cheney had a heart transplant Saturday…well, a little cherce?

I mean—three days of argument around whether all Americans should have access to health care, even if it means government stepping in, versus a 70-year-old guy having no problem getting his health insurance to foot the bill (around $250K for the procedure alone; tens of thousands to follow) for a heart.

Doesn’t it seem like the argument for having universal health care is made by that surgery right there?

I’m leaving aside the issue of why Cheney needs the heart now, since he’s obviously managed to survive 70 years without one.