A Guy's Gotta Eat

 Truly, madly, deeply, I like to eat. To do that, I occasionally need to get a service to deliver me food. The ones that come the closest to delivering you your choice of foods for a sawbuck, and getting mostly what you ordered from them, is Sobey's Voilà and Longo's Grocery Gateway. I'm mad at the first for the most recent deliveryman's ability to spread my delivery all the way to the far end of the porch and for Grocery Gateway for their creative use of the phrase, pricing.

But here's what you can expect from neither company, is a surprise on the payment page under the heading TIP.

I LOATHE the idea for tipping, have long come around to the view that restaurants pay their workers a living wage and leave the customers to look at the prices in the menu and quickly tote up how much longer the kids will have to wait to go to college in order to order from the menu. In fact, I still think tipping can be added, since service above and beyond should be appreciated. By a single bill, not a percentage. 

So, why the Scrooge act?? Well, let's start with a lady I called Sunshine in the days when once a week (or sometimes twice), I'd end up in a local bar playing NTN, which stood for Network Trivia Network, or somesuch silly thing. I played in Brampton ON where the trivia competing was actually pretty tough. My team, the BUMMS (Brampton Union of Marvelous Mugford Sympathizers) and a team of teachers from one of my alma maters, Balmoral Public School, were regulars in the North American top ten. More them than us, but we had our moments. I was offered the chance to jump ship (from my OWN team, which would have simply been The Bums, but the network wouldn't allow that name), but being overly competitive decline with malice aforethought. Occasionally, I'd show up at their bar and give a good accounting of myself, all by myself, just to be contrary. 

Sunshine was our waitress at Tom O'Malley's bar. She was a pretty, young lady who didn't smile nearly enough. She HATED being called Sunshine and I was too immature to care. I never tried in the least to get flirty, personal or touchy. And I tipped well. I could afford to since my share of the bill was always as close to peanuts as I could get. Basket of french fries, one or two orange sodas. That was the fullness that the restaurant/bar got out of me. I could afford to tip better than 30 percent and I did. But I admit, one thing she said to me bugged me till the day I retired from active trivia competition (concurrent with Tom selling the bar). According to her, TIPS was short of To Insure Prompt Service.

And that bugs the heck of me, still, after all those years. It's NOT my responsibility to insure Tom paid Sunshine well. That was between him and her. Off-loading paying her enough onto the shoulders of the customers MIGHT have been all right, but honestly, TIPPING has ALWAYS been a bad system made worse in SOOOOO many ways. Tip sharing is common. Why should hard-working Sunshine share with one of her co-workers who spent most of her time flirting with well-dressed customers than doing her job? Or the other workers?? Well, because they all assumed tipping was off-setting the wages Tom was NOT paying them. And I don't want to single Tom out. That was the way the bar/restaurant biz ran back then. And still does for all I know. 

But shaming customers into paying to avoid some spittle in the drinks? NO. Just NO. Paying is what I do at the cash register, not looking over my shoulder to see that no customer or worker or owner helps themselves to the money meant for the single person it was meant for. 

And I THOUGHT about my tips. I have tipped a single penny to a particularly rude and incompetent server. And on that occasion I went over to the owner, or manager, I didn't know which, and said that I wouldn't be back and the server I was pointing at was why. Mean?? You betch'em Red Ryder. Everybody has a bad day and incompetency's happen. Being rude for something that is essentially your fault?? Not on my watch. EXCUSING that behaviour is how it happens again. And again. And again. You owe it to your fellow diners and drinkers to stop the boorishness now. A word to the manager, commiserating without being nasty, should be the reward for a server who apologizes for lack of good service. But tick me off, then blame me?? Well, reap the wind. 

So, imagine my surprise earlier this year when I got to the payment page trying out Real Canadian Superstore and saw a TIP in place. Fifteen percent no less. And I had neither met the shopper from Insta Cart doing my shopping, nor had a lick of service from them to adjudge a tip. And oh, it gets worse. The instructions on my order for NO replacements didn't mean much to my ad hoc replacement. That shopper was getting a PERCENTAGE of my bill as a tip. So, ignoring my no-replacements comment, the shopper merrily replaced a whole lot of stuff. I have allergies. Wrong trust and I could be in hospital assuming I could dial 911. So, the food bank did well with my groceries that day. 

I still paid the TIP I'd promised. Later, I found the despicable amongst us, most of whom could laughingly be described as the well-to-do, rich slimeballs, would log in after the fact and CANCEL THE TIP!?!?! And why would these (frequently rich) jerks do this?? Well, the tip wasn't a pedestrian ten or 15 percent. No, the number would be in excess of 60, sometimes even 100 percent. They weren't going to pay it, so why not promise the moon??

Why?? Because the highest tip got the best treatment by the shopper. None of this queue business with first in, first shopped for. No, the orders get prioritized. That means shopping first, getting to the customer domicile first. Freshest food, items to those early in the priority, items not necessarily being available at the tail end of the queue. Survival of the richest. And to that, a plague on all your houses. Delivered as is, thank you. 

So, a guy like me with my modest tip, well I get what's left over. Literally. And to my shopper, no schadenfreude from me when you get bamboozled. Your integrity should be to ALL your customers,  not to the robber barons first, but to the customers who have ordered through the web, through apps, however. 

Of course, that ignores one thing. A guy's gotta eat. Should I come down on the shoulders of somebody willing to risk his or her life out in a pandemic to do what I won't do? Honestly, I'm housebound. I don't have much in the way of choice. Shoppers have a choice. I don't want to enforce a choice on them, but if they take the job, then playing favourites isn't the way to conduct yourself doing that job. And to the company that once again avoids paying its workers a living wage, SHAME ON YOU. 

This past week, still seething at the latest delivery from Voilà and the smacking around my credit card got from Grocery Gateway, I decided to try CornerShop. I'd looked at their site in the summer and seen emblazoned there-on, "NO TIPPING, WE PAY OUR SHOPPERS A GOOD WAGE!" So, imagine my disconcert when there, on the payment page, was a five percent tip already sitting there with options to make it bigger. I shook my head and decided to finish the order out, having wasted an hour 'shopping.' The food would be here in less than six hours. 

The shopper called me and asked me about no replacement. "None," I said. He argued anyways. The potato chips were available in the half-as-large size (for sixty percent of the price). "Okay," too tired to argue. I sat ten feet from my front door waiting for the delivery, which had the instructions, "Knock on door, Ring Doorbell, Phone in advance."

He was zero for three. I only noticed the groceries sitting on the porch when I got up to do something I do once a decade, look behind my TV. 

When I was finished hauling in the groceries I got on-line and made an attempt to cancel my account with the organization. I got one of those RATE OUR SERVICE emails and in a fit of blind fury, stabbed at the single star (zero not being available) and when faced with yet another TIP field, zeroed THAT out. Only later, I realized it might NOT have been an extra tip, it might have been the ONLY tip, And then, freshly revitalized at raging, I thought to myself that zero was more than he deserved. What if the order had been hot food on the very cold morning?? Or cold food in the midst of July?? The sheer callousness to deliver food and NOT let the customer know is ... well callous is about the right word. I didn't get my full order (which included fresh-baked bread) which was because my tip screwed my queue emplacement. My shopper didn't earn my money. Didn't earn his employer's money either. Cost them a customer. But the company that proudly proclaimed paying people a living wage, no longer bothers to do so. It would be a lie. 

I'll probably place an early spring order with Grocery Gateway. I've made my point. After a couple of months after that, I'll probably do a Voilà order again. Voilà does the best job of providing you with an order without resorting to unrequested replacements. I won't ever use a surrogate shopper service again. I have friends and extended family who regularly want to do it for me and I refrain during these troubled times. I love them too much to send them out into the cold, cruel world, with me having a LARGE WELL-FILLED PANTRY. It's NOT like I'm belt-tightening. So, I will wait until the Pandemic eliminates the excuses for these shopping services doing odious things in the future.

And yes, I understand I'm choosing their lives to endanger over those of my loved ones. And I'm being callous. But I'm not going to support the failure of organizations to pay their workers either. That day is done.

If you are a user of VPNs, check the fine print ... Especially if you consider PIA

 I am a dupe with a preference to using Windows 7 despite it ending being supported by Microsoft in January. Since I employ both a firewall and a decent anti-virus, I continue to use a system I have setup to my preferences a decade ago. It's a familiar piece of equipment that keeps me contributing to the companies I'm involved with. I  understand Microsoft feels that Windows 10 is sooooo superior that they were willing to sunset the most popular desktop computing operating system in the world. 

And I DO have a Win10 box that was built to my specs. I originally tried to buy a fan-less system out of Israel that was more than three times the price of any computer I've ever bought. Turns out the pandemic got in the way of that deal, so I had Patrick build a system that will eventually be something I'm happy to be using. 

Some day.

I have to find time to spend seven weeks (roughly) to customize the new machine so that I can transfer my day to day work over to it. SEVEN WEEKS.  That makes Microsoft's gunpoint assault on my Windows 7 system more costly to me than the hardware. So, a raspberry to Microsoft.

Now, let me introduce you to Personal Internet Access, aka PIA. It's a VPN. And in case you don't have your three-letter dictionary handy, that's a Virtual Private Network. While a number of critics would point at a VPN user as a person with elicit secret activities to hide, the truth is that bad guys are getting better and better at finding innocent bystanders at home and invading their privacy. For the cost of a cup of coffee, it's possible to have another layer of protection.

And yes, if I want to watch a US-only video on YouTube, it's nice to be able to do that. I have to remember to switch it off when looking at SportsNet and TSN videos here because if I don't, I get that same off-putting notice about the video not being available in 'your' country. 

I did the due diligence and found PIA was a mid-level performer at the lower end of the pricing tiers. The decider in my matrix was the fact that the service supported up to 10 devices. Given that I have six eligible devices within my sight at this moment, having 10 covered seemed like a good idea. So, in the middle of the year, I bought a year's subscription to the service. It cost a few coffees, but that's not the point. I paid for a year for ALL of my devices, not the least being the main machine, which was running Win 7 then as it does now. 

There was some growing pains. The Win 10 machine had a tumble over the Hosts file on the computer. I asked for some help from PIA to help get by that problem. The response was the usual boilerplate pablum. I eventually resolved the issue by wiping the machine and restoring a two-week old machine image backup. This time I found what program was diddling with Hosts as I re-installed and upgraded programs.  All of that without PIA's help. Was it their responsibility to solve the problem?? No. But help, hell yeah!!

Then, in September, PIA decided unilaterally with no notice to me that it would no longer support Win 7, which was within their rights, given the weasel words in the fine print. These Licence Agreements don't hold up all that well when challenged by well-heeled victims of bad software or bad management of good software. The managers at PIA decided to pull the plug on Windows 7 support, hiding behind the sunsetting of the OS by Microsoft. 

But here's the gigantic hole in their fig leaf defence. I bought this product FIVE months after end of life and I used it for more than three months WITH PIA's continued support of the non-supported operating system. Then PIA decided manpower in a pandemic dictated that they throw the Win7 Users overboard. But they did something still worse than selling me a product they wouldn't support after I'd used the product for more than a month. They cancelled the support WITH NO NOTICE to me and the others in my situation. And the service worked intermittently for weeks after. All it took was cycling through servers all over the world, to occasionally get a connection. That was until this month when no amount of fiddling made things worked.

That's when I went to the website and found the now two-month old notice. I contacted support. All I wanted was the half-year I wasn't going to be using the service (I certainly couldn't trust a devious organization, moving forward). The support person politely pointed out the refund policy was specific about when it expired and that she'd be happy to put a stop on my automatic renewal. You can imagine the words that crossed my mind, especially after the legal eagles pointed out that I'd win the case (worth 20 bucks) here in town, but travelling elsewhere might result in a loss (lawyer's fees to be included) and the travel costs. And in a different jurisdiction, their crappy, one-sided licence could be upheld. Even though they no longer offered the service they sold me! 

So, the best I could do is to cost PIA future sales. I hope readers, however few they might be here, will share and, of course, avoid PIA like the plague (a joke that is immediately stale, but true nonetheless). I'm telling all my friends and family. Somebody, somewhere, will believe me and will shop for a VPN elsewhere. And I whole-heartedly recommend VPNs. I know some of you are either current or will be future users of NordVPN.. Not the worst choice, but I urge you to do your due diligence.. Heck, you might even be a non-Windows 7 user and think the dreadful support from PIA is worth the price savings. YMMV.

To me, PIA represents the worst of the pandemic responses. They can't support the work for a key section of their customer base and just cast the workers AND the customers adrift, without returning money taken WHILE IN THE PANDEMIC, thus without the ability to claim they didn't know. The company made no effort to contact me that they were doing that. And when contacted, they didn't respond with a decent effort to split amicably. They said your money is ours and we'll do the right thing and not automatically try to take your money again NEXT year. 

Not good enough. Not close. Not part of my life moving forward.

And not a single creative slur in the whole rant. Mom, I AM mellowing.

Be safe, Even you PIA folks.

You Don't Buy A Name, You Buy A Computer

This is another case of Trust being abused. Wasn't me this time. It was just a friend operating on my advice. And I failed him. And because of the circumstances on depending on a store and of the product they sold, my credentials as a computer consultant can be called into dispute.

Just because I know the phone number for my hardware guy Patrick does NOT make me a computer consultant. Knowing a bit about the hardware I buy and letting Patrick make it fast and reliable supposedly does.

Back in the summer of 2018, almost two years ago, I was asked to recommend where and what to purchase a replacement for a now-ancient Mac laptop. My friend's budget was in the low two-grand area. I snorted. I could quarter that and let him continue doing what he had been doing, which was writing, a bit of web-browsing and watching movies and TV shows on the laptop. Didn't need to bother Patrick this time at all.

Really, he was describing a low-end Windows laptop. But for him, I wanted some quality in the recommendation and maybe I wouldn't hit the quarter mark, but a third was certainly in play. I recommended a computer shop and told him to go buy a Lenovo.

Lenovo has been my go-to laptop for most of YOUR lives. I'm old, so it's less than half my life that I've been recommending Lenovo's all the way back to when IBM was making them. They had the unique j-pointer nub that served as a short, stubby and always available mousing device ACTUALLY ON the keyboard, negating the need for all those that had touchpads, which I hate with a loathing that eclipses that of the Oleaginous Orange Oaf infesting the Oval Office for a few more months. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate touchpads, which are always TOO touchy or TOO inert to actually do anything. Touchpads are the last resort. Maybe, it's not worth having a computer at all if you are forced to resort to a touchpad. Surely a pencil and writing paper is better (You can scan it later and turn it into text). Touchpads are hardware non grata.

Lenovo's, even since the product line got bought by Chinese concerns and moved to Asia, are still, generally speaking, solid, reliable machines. They are not the best at all things. Far from being the best at this or that, they are the second or third choice. And at the same time, when all those other laptops with the better graphics, or sound, or chassis or ... well you get the drift ... fail badly at something other than their starring feature, the Lenovo rarely has a down side that makes them place low on the ratings of a single feature.

UNTIL that fateful day in 2018 when I recommended a Lenovo that came with Windows 10 ... and just four gigs of memory. That's right, in 2018, SEVEN long years since Microsoft stopped merely saying Windows 10 would run on a machine with just 4G of memory, but that the recommended minimum was EIGHT gigabytes of memory. The INDUSTRY STANDARD for new computers SINCE Windows came out has been 8G since Justin Trudeau wasn't yet Prime Minister.

And of course, there's a reason why the minimum is weasel-ese for "Yeah, it'll do SOME things, one at a time, as long as you are careful" while the actual WORKING minimum is twice as much so that you can write a letter, have the web-browser running to grab a picture of the internet and maybe playing some music in the background. The kind of thing EVERYBODY does with their computer. Or a variation of the same.

When you install Windows 10 on a Lenovo with it's stuff and boot it up, you can check your memory resources and you will be astonished to find it THREE-QUARTERS used up!!!!! What then happens is sort of like a busy working professional working at the desk of their elementary school child with all the deskspace he or she has, versus sitting at their desk at work where the desktop holds everything they need for their job. Instead of storing everything under the chair at school and pulling out various resources as the teacher requests them to, the professional has all the files over in one corner, pictures of their loved ones in another, the phone and computer screen somewhere else and a daily planner, notebook in front of them. Everything in easy reach quickly. No grabbing the backpack and searching through it for particular papers and textbooks. And purses?? I'll leave that topic alone.

The way the four-gigabyte computer works is that it fills up the remaining gig of working memory with program code and data until the overflow mark gets hit. Then it off loads what it thinks is currently unneeded code and data and grabs more off the hard drive. Swaps it in and out. And this swapping goes on as needed, allowing Microsoft to claim Windows 10 WILL WORK in 4G of memory. It's legally true. But it ain't practical. Not by a long shot.

I was having a bad day that day. I screwed up at an epic level. I let my friend, no, I GUIDED my friend into buying a computer with an inadequate amount of memory. And he ended up paying a little over a THOUSAND DOLLARS for this computer and a few gewgaws I insisted were absolutely necessary to having a laptop these days ... external storage, a powered USB hub, etc. I SAVED him a grand, but not the 1500 hard-earned dollars I sort of promised I would. I FAILED my friend now. And later.

My friend endured this slow hunk a junk for more than 18 months (long after the warranty had worn out). He asked me to take a look at it. I was confused and went down the wrong way a couple of times. Eventually I found the memory issue and had a meltdown. I was furious. I was sure there was bait and switch involved. Nope, they sold him what they said they would sell him AND WERE STILL SELLING LENOVO's with only 4G of memory IN THIS WEEK'S SALES FLYER!!!!!! In 2020!!!

They WERE doing a bait and switch with a novel twist. Sell rubes the computer and then wait for the inevitable return by the customer asking why the computer was so slow. Offer to fix if for between 70 and 140 dollars and suddenly, a computer worth MAYBE 500 bucks, being sold on sale for  759 marked down from 850, turns into a one thousand dollar sale. I had actually contacted the store chain in question (the local store wouldn't answer any of my four calls mid-afternoon on a Saturday) so I had to phone one of the other branches to ascertain the cost of adding memory to the Lenovo. Thiry bucks for the technician, 40-110 for the memory, depending on model and desires for how much memory. Off I sent him A SECOND TIME, to do one last bit of business with these crooks.

I had already canceled my account with the store chain and told Patrick that I would never pay an invoice from them ever again. HIS choice of where to buy the hardware for me, but it had to be behind my back. Yeah, it's cheating in a way, but I HONESTLY never want to see a CENT of my money ever go to these amoral, unethical, crooked, (the list of adjectives runs on for 21 more words,, which I will spare you at this point) SOBs.

And of course, feeling immensely worse, the situation actually got worse. On his way to buying more memory to cure the laptop's performance issue, he ran into two techs who figured out there was not going to be any more money in this customer. So, they told him it wasn't a MEMORY situation, he had to get a new solid-state, all memory drive to cure his problem. Only 220 dollars of his money, rather than the 95 I had figured for the fair acquisition and installation of the memory. And my friend, remembering why his old Mac ground to a halt (storage space completely consumed) and some of my ramblings when I was searching for the lack of speed on his new Lenovo, thought to himself, okay, experts all agree. Time to pull out the plastic and solve the problem right there and then.

He was robbed. Pure and simple. The rolled him like thugs in a blackened alley. Mugford's recommended shop mugged my friend. I am ashamed of myself. Of them, contempt close to Mount Mugford erupting. And my lawyer recommends against that. So do my doctors. And based on the advice of the legal eagle, I can't named this well-known chain of Computer stores in Ontario that seem to be a national brand. ALL I can do, is to warn shoppers that if a store is WILLING to sell you name-brand computers with only 4G of memory, they are willing to screw you over time and time again until you catch on.

Patrick, as slow to anger as any non-Zen Buddhist monk, got angry. Not like me, but he was upset. He hardly tried to tamp me down. 

He found that the computer with the added SSD (and the old drive stuck in a bitlocker protected case that couldn't be plugged in to the new system and all the original installation and data was missing as an old Windows 10 image is what was installed on the SSD ... crooks AND LAZY, what a wonderful combination), was about 15 percent faster than the mechanical hard drive the SSD replaced. Granted, with Windows updated, all the drivers updated and obvious settings changed to take advantage of the SSD, Patrick was able to bump up the speed benefit for the new SSD to something approaching 30 percent. He also installed two new memory strips (I gave him a hundred bucks and told him that was the budget for the memory AND HIS TIME), quadrupling the original amount of memory. And he fiddled with the drive unit he'd been given to house the old drive and turned it into something usable by my friend, meaning he now had a hardly-used 256G drive he could put into a shirt pocket. My friend will finally be well-served.

NOTE: It is accepted wisdom that users ONLY start to notice a speed increase when it passes 10 percent.

What those two techs did crossed the line I'm sure the lawyers for this bandit organization vetted as being legal. I think they committed actual fraud. But my friend is joining me in putting the store chain in the rear view mirror. It's just too bad that they old saw of buying a name brand means safety and basic levels of performance.

You aren't buying the name any more, you are buying what you get. Caveat Emptor indeed.

Trust and How Metro.ca Misplaced Mine

Trust.

Big topic. Everybody wants services and goods around them to be trustworthy. To not have to look at the invoice, because you've trusted somebody or somebodies that they have done right by you.

I NEED people around me to be trustworthy. I'm house-bound, leaving every couple of months to see doctors or a series of doctors. So, I have my prescriptions delivered (shoutout to the BramQueen PharmaSave and their phenomenal staff who I discovered after 50 years of trusting Shopper's DrugMart ... which was maybe 10 years too long). I have my friend Marilyn, with help from my friends James and Mark, help out with food and transportation. When there's a blank spot in their calendars, I've been able to mostly trust GroceryGateway for, well, groceries.

But not all groceries. There were some products Marilyn found hard to find and that GG just didn't have. Marilyn reported that Metro.ca was now competing with GG. And there was a deal that meant free delivery for three orders over a three-week span AND a bag of random goodies on the first order. So, I gleefully filled my Metro.ca shopping cart with all the items I had had problems getting (Cavendish played a big part here, with their Onion Rings and Restaurant-Style French Fries, and Metro.ca also carried the Selection brand of products, including the nectar of the gods, the indispensable Mandarin Orange soda). So, I ordered the goods to be delivered the following afternoon.

I was downstairs waiting for delivery when the delivery person called to inform me that they were outside my front door. I plodded my way over to the door, opened it, and peered out at an empty drive way. I called back, using the call return feature of my phone, and informed the driver that he was at the wrong address. I gave him my address. At the time, I didn't know who's driveway he was parked in.

Leaning out the door, I peered up and down my road, waiting to see the truck as it came into view. I watched as the driver (who I now knew to be ... as directionally-impaired as I was, and I get lost as soon as I get outside my front door. I'm LEGENDARILY bad with directions), as he pulled his truck into the driveway ... of my next door neighbour. Sigh. God save us from ... directionally-impaired people. I am SO proud of my calm and patience writing this. It'll end soon. But I've got this far without any nasty jibes. Stay tuned.

I yelled out the door at the cretin (see, my limit for not going ballistic lasted six paragraphs), "NO, over here!" shouting at him my address. Again. So, once again, said idiot, pulled out of the wrong address and finally got it right on the third try. I'd refrained from any name-calling, but I was thinking them, and adding adjectives to more accurately describe the level of stupidity I was witnessing. (As Mom will say, "beware name-calling, you might deserve some yelling at too." Too true).

The driver said a quick, "Sorry, sorry," and then went about the business of delivering the goods. I proffered the required identification the website had warned me of, but he just waived me off and started hauling the groceries into the house. No good sturdy boxes like GG (who, admittedly, had started using lots of green plastic bags and only a few boxes, of late). No, the whole delivery was in bright red bags, a contrast that I'm sure is nowhere close to coincidence. Some of the bags were dropped at the front closet (where do YOU store your soda??) and the rest in the kitchen. I signed the electronic device he thrust at me and they departed. Without much furtherance of the apologies, other than saying it was HQ's fault. I was okay with that. Recently, I've gotten into an apology war, fit for Alphonse and Gaston. It's awfully tiring. I think both sides of a discussion should be allowed a maximum of one sorry per week.

The food ran the gamut from good to great for the items I ordered. Except the small case of Coca-Cola with orange. This was a mistake on my part and I vow NEVER EVER to order flavoured Coca-Cola ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again. May Marilyn hit me about the head. The freebies almost completely ended up with Marilyn, who seemed to derive some enjoyment from them. I split the very, very green bananas with here and kept a wonderful loaf of artisanal bread. I burbled with happiness when Marilyn came over to get her share of the haul.

I wasn't forgetting the delivery snafu. I did the on-line survey as requested by email and let them know the delivery to the wrong house was a mistake that needed correcting. I also had a LOT of issues with the shopping interface on the web-site. 'Course, I have major grievances against GG's site too. And given I write POS (Point of Sale) software, my opinion is not exactly uninformed.

I had three orders with free delivery coming up. On Thursday night, I decided to take advantage of the first of them. I put in an order that would have been bigger, but a limit on ordering the Mandarin soda showed up without warning. The interface didn't allow me to merely type in 36 and be done. No, I had to hit the Plus button and wait for the interface to update with each click. Horrible, time-consuming and unlike better shopper carts, no expectation of a limit until I tried to add a 13th bottle. Arrrrggghhh!!!!! I don't drink alcohol. Don't (mostly) do sugared soda either. This is sugar-free, calory-free stuff that doesn't taste like Engine Cleaner (not that I know what that actually tastes like). When trying to self-motivate, I hold a bottle of the stuff in the fridge out as a reward. And here, they were limiting me without warning. Fill in your guess at what string of epithets I used. You're short a word or three.

Okay, let's get this delivered between six and eight tomorrow, which by this time, was actually today, I think.

Come the supper hour, I hauled butt downstairs and sat in my TV chair waiting. I watched an hour of CNN and the ever-present Friday Foul-up of the Week (Trademark pending). The Obstructionist Orange Oleaginous Oaf of the Oval Office doing his best to create a new lower limit for rating humanity. Not a good mood inducer. Then an hour of the Toronto Blue Jay game. It made things worse. Five minutes past eight, I went to my tablet to get the phone number for Metro.ca customer support.

And there it was, an email, asking me to fill out a new survey. The groceries had been delivered a half-hour ago. Immediately, I assumed the village idiot had done a Comrade Donald-like quadrupling down of something stupid and failed to ring the VERY LOUD doorbell and had merely piled the groceries on my front step and did a runner. I stumbled my way to the front door, opened it, expecting a sea of red, and found ... nothing. Nada. Zilch. President Small Hand's most recent score for mental acuity.

Back to the chair to call Metro.ca. After a moderately long wait, I got somebody named Donna. At least I think it was Donna. Obviously, future events were to question my hearing. Donna, regrettably, was soon to be subjected to my wrath. I think I apologized three times in all for yelling at her. Still feel bad about doing that to a lady. I know it's sexist, but I would have rather been yelling at Brad. Or Raj. Or Juan. Or Orlando. Or Herschel (my Aunt Dorothy's life-long nickname for me). Or Ian. But it was Donna. I think.

I explained the situation and heard her furiously typing in notes. Her silence after the first apology when I was being polite spoke loudly. Even she was shocked by what had went on. She asked for time to talk to a superior over remedies. I graciously, truly, I was gracious, thanked her for looking into this. She put me on hold and I examined the emails I hadn't bothered reading (indeed, commercial stuff that's 95 percent sales come-ons, gets automatically shunted to my "Ignore unless needed" folder). There, right on the two emails announcing my order and then the warning it was coming, was the wrong address. Yep. The wrong address.

This could have been a major oopsie on my part and a tail-between-the-legs moment on the phone. But no, I was still on morally upper ground. The driver obviously knew of the address mistake. One would have assumed he would have complained to management. I'd told the survey LEAVING MY PHONE NUMBER. Which nobody called. But I had made a second order with the auto wrong-address being used without looking at it. And truth be told, the differences between the two numbers was maybe two small pixels. And I'm at an age where it might be good to get my eyesight checked. I've been ducking the Drs. Thompson because I don't want new glasses. I'd prefer a new computer.

So, when Donna returned, I copped to being complicit in this idiocy. But, as I informed her again, I had told the driver, who I would have assumed told his management, and the survey. Further, the thieves at the other address had signed as GARY MUGFORD (I assumed) for the delivery of groceries they'd never ordered. That's fraud from where I stand and I hope a detective from the local constabulary visits. I want a pound of flesh from those thieving souls. A broken kneecap might suffice. I wish a plague of horrors upon all the inhabitants of the house.

Now, at some point SOMEBODY had to have said to the driver, "I/We didn't order anything." Said driver had to have asked himself, let me verify this. And whatever happened next, the driver and the thieves conspired to take the groceries I HAD PAID FOR! All of this was shouted into the phone.

I apologized for the second time to Donna. Not to Metro.ca. But to Donna. Then she informed me NOTHING could be done tonight to fix things. Tomorrow morning. Which was going to be better than replacing the order with an order with GroceryGateway. The soonest I could get stuff from them would be Sunday. I told Donna that morning would be fine, as long as it was 11 AM or later. Preferably 1 PM. Oh, and I wanted an apology from Metro.ca. I'd lost it again. So, a third apology was in the offing.

And that ended the phone call. Right now, as I write this, before the inevitable edits, it's closer to 3 PM. The deadline for resolution of this mess is daylight's end today. I don't want a delivery in the dark. Too easy for this merry band of fools to get it wrong. I am sanguine of getting the food (and soda, sadly for the last time). The apology?? Of that, I figure my odds are roughly equivalent with winning the lottery. These clowns are going to replace my food, knowing my cancellation of our association is almost automatic.

And the story continues...

Not long after writing the first three-quarters of this long-winded rant for this blog, I called the comically-misnamed Customer Support again. Patrick answered. In a half-hour of talking to him, nothing. Nothing was accomplished. I wasn't allowed to talk to a supervisor (His supervisor was new, having replaced PATRICK in the job a week ago ... yep, I was talking to The Demoted) and, miraculously, nobody 'there' had ever heard of Donna. Yet, just as miraculously, my address info had miraculously been corrected. But no magic, however powerful, could compel him to have my groceries delivered that day (or any day). A waste of time. I did apologize to him twice, once after SCREAMING into his ear after he told me to, in effect, hurry up and finish my story. I have that problem. I like all the details when I am faced with trying to resolve a problem. I foolishly think others, who work in the support sector, have the same detail-oriented approach. So, I treated Patrick the same as Donna. Somebody not deserving of being yelled at. I was wrong. Wrong as in, he deserved not to be yelled at.

Sunday? Shawn/Sean or something in-between. This lowest-level on the evolutionary support scale categorically refused to let me talk to a supervisor. He, like the other two, put me on hold to talk to somebody with higher authority than him ... I believe the word you're thinking is, Supervisor, then came back on the phone and told me, and this shocked me, "No, you can't talk to a supervisor. Somebody will call you in the next 24-48 hours." Head, palm, smack. Epithet. I'm proud I never let a curse pass through my lips in three separate half-hour phone calls. Didn't even engage in any name-calling. Which was INCREDIBLY stressful. Which my doctors REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate. This carbuncle on the back-side of customer support wouldn't last a day at any company I worked with. It'd be him or me and I write the systems software. Bye-bye. The company's better off without you. This blithering idiot said, seven times, cuz I counted, "I understand your frustration." No, he didn't. No, he didn't at all.

So, I called the cops. After talking to a retired detective friend who told me it was likely the case was a civil one. But a winning one. On the other hand, if the criminals at the other address had signed my name ...

The officers who came to talk to me were polite, empathetic and almost ready to get involved. But I was not the aggrieved party. The crooks five doors down had stolen from Metro.ca, not me. And with lawyer bills being what they are, the likelihood was that Metro.ca would not swear out a complaint, just absorb the cost of doing business. But if they did, the officers would be back to talk to me as a (WILLING) witness. I tried to get them to call Metro.ca, if only to say that. They smiled, an shook their head. I think they respected me for trying to get them to engage Metro.ca, but  stuck to non-involvement in what to them was a civil matter. A nice interaction with the local constabulary. And despite not getting the wrath of the law on my side, I can't complain.

Hmmm, it's now Monday. Late afternoon. That idiot Shawn's prediction of a response coming on Tuesday seems pretty solid.

Then the phone rang. A gentlemen introduced himself as being from Metro. I didn't catch the name. Didn't want to. I knew where the conversation was going, so why add one more name to the list of people I hope to haunt from the dead as soon as I get interred or crisped up beyond all redemption. I'll still be busy with the Shawn's of the world.

The call came in about 5 PM. I asked him at one point in the conversation whether if I'd agreed to it, whether I would have had groceries Monday evening. "No." So, the supervisorly response from Metro.ca was not to deliver my paid-for groceries on the Friday, the Saturday, the Sunday, the Monday but maybe by the Tuesday. Please pause for an epithet break. He started, I believe, to tell me the groceries would be delivered eventually and that any charges would be withdrawn. Maybe offer me some inducement. Free delivery on my next order? Ten free deliveries? A million deliveries. Free for life? Don't know. I cut him off. I despise people who complain in order to get something free in exchange for silencing their opinion. Too much of an ego. My honor is worth more than most companies would even dream of offering. I admit, there's been times where I've taken inducements. I then hate myself for a decade before my failing memory lets me do it again.

Marilyn and I had discussed it. She'd suggested I ask for two cases of my beloved Mandarin soda every month, delivered for free, for a year. Which would have been good. After all, I was dealing with Metro.ca in large part so that I wasn't asking her every week to break her back lugging soda from the store to my house. She's an angel. Time I repaid that kindness in small part when and where I can.

Nope. I went for the cut my nose off to spite my face response. "Gimme my money back and I never want to deal with Metro.ca or Metro ever again." And when he used the lawyerly, "Let me get this clear..." I cut him off again, "I know you are taping this phone call. For the lawyers who are listening, I want my money returned and then I never want to hear from Metro again." Which ended my fourth and final interaction with 'Customer Support' at Metro.ca. And I will never order from them, allow Marilyn to buy product there on my behalf or ever drink another bottle of Mandarin  soda again. Well, after I empty the closet. I wasn't going to accept any freebies from this empathy-deprived organization that had caused me no end of stress for four days and thought bribery might appease me. They were wrong.

Because in the end, you can't trust Metro.ca.

NOTE: I have used the real names, albeit with guessed-at spelling here. To the best of my hearing. I will point out some ironies. My best friend's name is Patrick. His wife's name is Dawna. Shawn is my more-than-helpful neighbour from the other side from James. NONE of those three were the Donna, Patrick or Shawn I talked to.

This Week's Amazon Delivery - A Failure Rant - AGAIN!

On Tuesday night, I ordered stuff I needed. I've been a little out of it lately and it was time to re-enter the land of the living. So I ordered seven items. I could have had Thursday delivery for half of them, but since one package could only arrive on Friday, I accepted Friday for both. By that time, I would need what I ordered and it gave me a couple more days to get sorted out health-wise.

Two of the products, chiefly a new bath mat for the one I tore up in the aftermath of my bathtub misadventure, were not Amazon.ca products. The others were. Including another product I needed (and had needed for about ten days). But those two-non Amazon products were in different packages.

Why couldn't Amazon put everything in one box? Ask them. I dunno. This is a company that routinely fires warehouse and driver personnel for not working at the pace of robots. But putting everything in one box was asking too much. Oh by the way, I'm still a Prime customer against my will (see other posts) AND I live less than three miles from an Amazon distribution centre AND I requested everything arrive the same day.

You can see where this is going.

I got a box on Friday. Delivered before noon and with a smile and some patience by THE AMAZON DRIVER!!! Yeah!!!!

The other box? With the needed stuff?

Not so much. (insert whatever 13-word curse-laden phrase you think I said out loud. You're probably right. And if not so, then it's milder than the language I used)

The ... let's call them zombies, again, I use stronger words, but Mom might read this ... delivered my package to the post office in the next town over. Not to the post office a block from the end of my street. The NEXT BLINKETY-BLANK TOWN AWAY. Not the post office Amazon and I share. THE NEXT TOWN OVER!

And we don't have Saturday delivery in our area from the Post Office.

So, NOW, the track parcel page for my order from Amazon now PROUDLY PROCLAIMS, "Your parcel can still arrive 27 April-30 April." And oh ya, "Was expected Friday 26 April."

Further curse words, blah, blah, blah.

THIS is what having Prime gets you. The same Prime Amazon has recently said will change to One-Day delivery for all Prime customers, down from the Two-Day GUARANTEE.

More curse words, more blah, more blah, and I almost typed the big one to finish it off.

Amazon. Another word for ... well ... cursing. Amazoning. Just try it. Use Amazon in place of every naughty word you know. It'll make you feel good and nobody who might be offended will even notice.

'Cept Jeff Bezos. But I'm the last thing THAT adulterer is thinking about.

By the way, why did I order IMPORTANT stuff from Amazon? I needed it and I needed it quickly, which being house-bound makes difficult. I also thought it was such a small order (although 130-plus dollars after taxes and shipping) that they could simply NOT Amazon it up.

I was wrong.

The End

I took a bath a little less than three hours ago. It will be my last.

No, I'm not dying.

At least in the next few minutes, hours, days or hopefully even months. Dying is a constant. But nobody, including me, is hurrying that along any faster than yesterday. But I've had my last bath and will now only be able to take showers from this point forward. Well, unassisted. And I haven't seen hide nor hair of a nurse in almost three years at this point. And I'd like to extend that streak some. Eventually, a nurse and sponge baths will not be within my purview to decline. But I can now, and I do.

No, the reason the bathtub, my prison of the last almost three hours, is finally never to be used for it's designed purpose is that I faced my mortality tonight and it was ugly.

I needed a bath. Not a shower. I needed to work out some muscle kinks and the best way for that to happen traditionally was to fire up the bathtub, get it as hot as allowed and dump in two fingers of Radox Muscle Relaxant Bath Soak. Grab my reading glasses and Kindle and luxuriate away those things that have contrived to tense me up. I have loved hot baths for all of the life that I can remember. No cold baths, not even in the hottest of summers. No, I liked it hot. 110 degrees Fahrenheit. 112 if I could get away with it.

But then Doc V doused me with cold water. My medical problems ... COMPLETELY self-created, were not conducive to hot baths. First I was downgraded to 108 but managed to scald myself Easter of seven years ago. Because I have Diabetes Type 2 (Darwin's proof of Natural Selection) and the resulting Diabetic Neuropathy. I didn't realize I was scalding myself. My nerve endings below the shin are dead, shut down in permanently on mode ... as in permanently indicating pain. You learn to ignore it as best you can. Man is not meant to do that. Pain is nature's way of saying STOP DOING THAT!

And of course, the dying nerve ends just didn't get to the shin and declare the campaign of war on my body finished. No, the campaign continues. I haven't been able to crawl on my hands and knees for more than a body length in two decades. For the last decade, the pain of merely kneeling is indescribably painful. If a baby spotted me two body lengths and I was more than ten feet away from the child's mother, the race wouldn't be close. The kid would leave me in the dust.

I'll throw in one more gotcha. My left shoulder, the one nearest escape from the bathtub, is shot. I fractured it a couple of decades ago, surfing down the stairs (involuntarily). Drove the forearm up into my shoulder socket and made a mess of it. Developed bursitis, which the odd horse-sized needle of cortisone would alleviate. Finally managed to fray my rotator cuff enough to give me several options, NONE of which was cortisone, the boogey man of diabetics. Does something awful to your blood sugar levels. I could pay (and yes, even here in Canada, non-essential surgery is not free) and have various things done to my shoulder. I could even get the Diabetic's Version of Cortisone, again at a price I couldn't afford (and eat ... for a year). Or I could suffer. You can guess which I chose. So, a bum shoulder for the big fat guy sitting in the drained bathtub wondering how he was going to get out of the damned thing.

It was only last Hallowe'en that I'd found myself stuck in the reclined chair I spend most evenings in. I was tipped back 30 degrees and bounded on both sides by tables stacked with unhelpful things. And the power was off. In the dark. For more than a half-hour, I was calm and considering ways to doze off again. Then nature's call arrived and I was faced with a need to escape the chair. I thought that fifteen minutes was as bad as it could get. I was wrong. Although I did protect myself against its re-occurrence with an uninterruptible power supply the next day.

You have to learn to make concessions to your own frailties. They are not going away. It's stupid to be stupidly optimistic.

Which leads me to my decision to get into the bathtub. I knew it was wrong. A shower was indicated. In fact, as Doc V left me with cooler and cooler baths ... and the reminder that five minutes after a soak starts, you are sitting in dirty water ... I could take refuge in the hot shower. I had no way to know what temperature the shower spray was. Not like with a bath where my little yellow ducky ... what, you thought you could take the boy out of the old boy??? ... couldn't tattle on me with the tell-tale colour-coded temperature indicator. But I WANTED a soak. I imagine some junkies felt the same way about THEIR last (too potent) fix.

My bath wasn't long. I think I read three short chapters in the book I was reading, Becky Chambers I think. Third book in the Wayfarers' series. Too lazy to look up the title. A decent book, not as good as her first, on a par with the second. I finished the chapter and turned off the Kindle. Tossed the glasses over on top of it. And then I sat.

And sat.

I was already aware of how much trouble I was in. The tub was too narrow, my bulk too enormous, to haul butt and get out. I couldn't turn without exerting pressure on my blistered feet (forgot to mention the other delightful side effect of Diabetes, blisters where you put pressure). Or more importantly, my knees. And the shoulder weakness made my left arm utterly useless.

So, I sat some more.

The tub slowly dried around me. Faster than I remembered, but this was the first winter I had not run the humidifier on central heating. I used a small manual one where I slept. The whole house was as dry as a wasp nest that had been abandoned. Parts of my anatomy were still soggy. All parts of me were ready to vacate the prison. But I couldn't figure a way out to do it.

So, I sat some more.

Some dirty clothes were within reach and I kept grabbing them to stick under my keister. I was thinking of building an off-ramp of sorts, one crumpled up piece of clothing at a time. Turns out, if you weigh closer to 240 pounds than you would like, you can pile a lot of clothes beneath you and not appreciable rise up very much. I didn't have enough dirty clothes handy, that a couple of fluffy towels helped enough. I was still below the lip of the bathtub.

So, I sat some more.

I tried to turn on my side, thinking, I might sleep a bit, stuck in the fetal position. Nope. I could twist a bit at the hips and climb the far wall with my feet. But the position wasn't comfortable for longer than about five seconds. I went back to my semi-sitting position, feet planted firmly against the far side of the tub, my backside on top of the clothes pyramid and no hope for immediate succor. Despair was starting to really set in. The bathroom phone was over on the far side of the bathroom. I couldn't even call for help. Not next door to my friends, the McDonalds. Not to 911. Not even to Mom, just to do some whimpering. It was the middle of the night for them ... and the reason I hadn't placed the phone within easy reach when I got into the tub.

So, I sat some more.

And finally, the disgust I was feeling for myself gave me enough strength to flip over onto my hands and knees. Slowly, I stood up. Slower still, I placed my right foot outside the tub and then lugged over the left (my weaker side). I was out. I brushed off pebbles of the old rubber mat from my knees. The mat inhabited the floor of the tub and most of it now lay bunched down towards the drain. I was trembling and it wasn't from the cold. The house is kept at 72 all year round. But I trembled because of what might have been.

I plopped down on the cushioned toilet seat and thought about the last 150 minutes of my life and realized a time had passed. The bathtub was now just a shower stall. The shower seat I had bought weeks ago and left in the box it came in downstairs, was now going to have to be setup and used.  I thought many other things, none of them printable here. But I didn't think much about moving.

So, I sat some more.

I could feel the tenseness in my shoulders that I'd sought to eradicate had come back. Bile raised in my gorge, anger at coming full circle. But only long enough to realize that whatever had happened, I had survived it. That I had learned a new truth to my existence. That I wouldn't ever place myself in this position again.

So, I stopped sitting, left the bathroom and came here to mourn the passing of something I loved. A reminder to all who read this: a bathtub can be a dangerous place.

Give Him the Money for the Wall

And by HIM, I mean the Orange Buffoon who will become the first ex-President to eventually get to wear orange jumpsuits at the pleasure of the government he once misled.

I've become convinced that the Democrats should only commit to impeachment if they get evidence of treason that is strong enough that even blinkered Republicans can't deny it. And that requires IMMEDIATE ACTION. Otherwise, leave him in place as the punching dummy he is in actual life. NOTE: #FakeNews will be replaced by #PelosiPummelsPresident as the most popular political hashtag of the year.

Now to the wall. Here's the deal I offer. You commit to a half billion or so for feasibility studies that will be intended to schedule building of the 'wall'/metal barrier in one-mile lengths and in what order the actual construction should be built. Say, build a hundred mile stretch in Texas, then 125 in Arizona, etc. Plus, the Democrats throw in EXACTLY the money he's asking for, for enhanced security along sea walls, ports of entry and tunnel-making. Plus money for agents and judges, etc. Make it 5.700000001 dollars so that it is a buck MORE than what Comrade Donald is asking for.

Now the catnip for the grabber. Add 50 BILLION in actual construction costs, held in escrow, with actual construction released to start the day after Inauguration Day in January 2021. Throw in a position that the President HAS to ratify any spending (Extension) bill that garners FIFTY-FIVE percent of each chamber of Congress, down from sixty, And you have a deal. And he can't shut down government ever again this way and he gets his wall money and it'll never happen. Cuz the first thing the new President does on Inauguration Day is to cancel the wall, pending investigation as to where extending barriers, repairing barriers and replacing barriers is indicated as wise policy. There WILL be spots where that will be true.

President Small Hands gets painted into a corner of betting on himself, just as he did before the many bankruptcies and the idea that he could get away discriminating against minority renters back in the day (twice, resulting in huge fines to avoid a criminal record ... a case of fighting off inevitability if there ever was a better case!). He claims the majority of Americans are with him on the wall. He makes the election a one-issue contest and he'll lose by spectacular amounts. S.P.E.C.T.A.C.U.L.A.R. He'll be lucky to get fourty percent nationally. He won't get Reagan'd by Harris or Booker or whoever comes at him from the right side of history. But he'll only carry the states with the dumbest white nationalists and the spectacularly uniformed Southerners. Let's call the over/under eight and a half. And I'll take the under.

The Democrat slogan ... NO! to the Monument to Stupidity and NO! to four more years with no leadership!!! And point out the wall will cost EACH AMERICAN, children included, $150 bucks a head. And I'm guessing that the wall won't cost any where NEAR that little of money. I've seen guesstimations of near 75 Billion and real life should make that a small hole in the large hole he wants built as a place to hang his name again.

Look, populism led we Ontarians to the unwise decision to elect our own fool of a premier. Hatred for staid policies from entrenched Liberals (plus stupidity and/or criminality) prompted the electorate of the province to forego the smart move of minority government (aka, no king-making rule by fiat) and put a city bumpkin of Pumpkin's proportions in power for five long years. It'll get corrected as the teeter-totter of Canadian politics rights itself. So, I feel for my friends in America. You get to fix the "What have you got to lose?" mistake sooner than we do.

Just promise the pig-eyed Prince of the SpaceForce the moon for 2021. He ego will force him to accept and call it a HUUUUUUGE win for him. Fool that he is.

He won't be President two years from today. The question is, will he be wearing that clashing shade of orange by then? The over/under on that is less than four years from today.

Take the under.

I Don't Heart Amazon

In fact, to be honest, I loathe being an Amazon customer. Or I loathe myself. One of the other or both.

Let's face it, Jeff Bezos has conquered the world and other than not having the nuclear Football to play with, he is in position to outlast that pig-eyed over-stuffed prig in the White House and be an international power all by himself. He can force cities all across North America to spend lavishly wining and dining he and his decision staff in the (as it turns out, foolish) belief they could be the new OTHER HQ for Amazon, when all along Bezos was going to pick a town (or two, as it turns out) where he could hop to work in a helicopter from his home, whether it be in New York or Washington, where he maintains East Coast homes. Toronto, a mile or two up the road from where I sit, was particularly lead on.

This from a man who pays his workers low wages, runs them like dogs at a racetrack that PETA should be working to shut down rather than imperiously demanding folks stop using phrases like Bringing Home the Bacon, in favour of the ridiculous Bringing Home the Bagels. Isn't the latter culturally insensitive to non-Jews??? (Of course not, it's just ridiculous stupidity from a group with a good message that has transmorphed into a parody of a cult).

And Amazon's face, the one that people at home see when a package arrives at the door, are as poorly treated by Amazon as the warehouse staffs. Maybe more so. Doesn't excuse the stupidity I've found rampant for these last mile Amazon employees. But it should be said, so that I acknowledge that time is money and delivery drivers get paid to deliver, not to chin wag with customers. Still, the rules Amazon imposes and the monetary realities facing the drivers, make most deliveries a case of drop and run. The needs of the customers getting the deliveries are completely and utterly ignored. I know, because I'm a fairly large Amazon customer for a private citizen.

I have to. I'm a shut-in. I can't move around all that well and the only time I leave the house these days is to go to the doctors. And if I'm going out, I like to combine as many doctors visits as possible because I know the following day is going to be wasted in bed, trying to cope with the pain in my legs from doing as little walking as I do. It's taking my fully-prescribed load of pills and trying to sleep my way through it.

So, I need some compassionate delivery. Like I get from my pharmacy or my on-line grocers. Both of which call me in advance before showing up because, as the sign on my front door says, I take some time getting to the front door. But Amazon has a different approach. No phone call. No waiting for me to get there. And if they see the opportunity to put the box or boxes inconveniently as possible, they snatch that opportunity up with relish. Whether it's Amazon delivery personnel, the Post Office or one of their hired-out delivery companies. It's become so bad of late that last month I tried to cancel my Amazon membership.

Before talking about the details of the delivery problems, let me say that I'm a published Amazon author with more books on the way. That's right, I make money from Amazon, yet I wanted to be rid of Amazon from my life. That is how absolutely furious I've become with Amazon of late.

And as it turns out, getting out of Amazon is only slightly less difficult that retiring alive from the mob. In fact, I was successful in canceling my Prime membership, which has always been a scam up here in Canada, although the Prime Video was finally added a while back. Prior to that, Prime did mean quicker than usual delivery, given that you were paying for delivery up front. But even that was and still is a scam. First, most orders are big enough to qualify for free standard delivery anyways. Secondly, during the last two months of this year, every delivery gets that standard. Amazon's gift to the Christmas/Chanukah gift-giving world. And a kick in the face of we idiots who paid for Prime. Second, the fact is that most deliveries are going to get to the customer quicker because Amazon always promises an extra day or two and then delivers (early) on time and the customer feels like that's wonderful service. It's like holding a sale by first raising the prices and then discounting back to their regular prices, leaving customers conned into thinking they are getting bargains. It's a loathsome, evil, vile little way to screw with people's minds and make them think Amazon is the best retailer in the world.

So, I could cancel Prime. Effective August of next year. No canceling and getting back the three-quarters of the money. That money was now Amazon's money. So, I have Prime whether I want it or not. And as for canceling my actual account ... which I can't do because I need it to run my book publishing mini-empire (joking, it's one book for the time being), well, you try and do it. The passive-aggressive threats you'll get will sicken you. Included is the loss of my books, the ones I bought for my Kindle. That's right. They would disappear if I ever accidentally or otherwise, deleted them from my Kindle. I could only access my owned book again ... if I bought it again after setting up a new account with ... Amazon. Now, I've actually been aware of that threat ever since the great George Orwell misadventures from Amazon a few years back where Amazon just didn't benignly keep your Kindle books updated, if the circumstances warranted it from Amazon's perspective they could (and did in the case of one of Orwell's books) reach into your Kindle and delete it. So, I've always taken delivery of Kindle books to my computer and then side-loaded them. That way, I always had a copy of what I paid for. So, when I canceled my Amazon account early this decade because I had both an Amazon.com and Amazon.ca account, the only way to clear up the mess Amazon had created for me was to cancel both and start anew. The loss of the books would have been a deal-breaker (and I did loose updates on the books, which I accepted as a loss I could live with), but I was prepared.

Still, reading through the emails warning me of the dire consequences of canceling my account would stop most people from even starting up an account. Like the fact that all my reviews would be deleted too. Meaning that an inevitable return to Amazon would mean my reviewing rep-building would start anew. And why's that important? Well, prodigious reviewers often score free swag to review, building up a pyramid of review a lot, get a lot, review more, get more, etc. and etc. and etc. Suddenly, you're an Amazon employee. I review stuff when asked politely by the company. I rarely hand out five stars because five stars should mean Amazing! It doesn't for most folks. And of course, you can't hand out zero stars (I tried). Which is what some product scams are worth. And I remember that the product I wanted to zero star was actually rated something like 1.5 stars. A star less than average. yet the product was a complete ripoff, NEVER working for anybody who actually bought the product from what I could see. It was a repackaged item that said it was one thing when it was a worthless hunk of junk that never worked, being something else entirely. Yet 1.5 stars. Because paid-for reviewers would rate it two stars. STUPID people who reviewed before using would rate it two stars. So it sold, to dopes like me who were so entranced by the price-point versus what it promised, that it was worth a few bucks to see if it was a bargain by mistake. it wasn't. And I had to go through the process of returning the product to Amazon. Make no mistake, this was a case of buyer beware pricing blindness. But you know, that product is still for sale on Amazon.

I get daily emails from Chinese trolls trying to get me to review iPhone cases and other such stuff. Never had an iDevice from Apple and will probably go the grave still being able to say that. (And yet, I was a low, low-serial number buyer of the Apple ][ computer back in the 70's. Wrote for Apple-oriented magazines. Was there for the launch of the Lisa and then the Macintosh. You know, the ones in the Jobs movie. But I never bought another Apple after the ][c. I had professionally switched over to the Evil Empire by then, working with IBM computers and something called MS-DOS from a little outfit in Albuquerque New Mexico called Micro-soft. When Jobs completed the transformation of Apple into a boutique computer manufacturer who started building high-end devices, I was lost to the Apple world. Still, a whole series of come-ons that are probably scams arrive in my in-box. Amazon won't say which is which. Which is peculiar since they gather data from me with such gusto, that I have to re-read the privacy policy weekly to keep up. So, I refuse to even read the pitches. I imagine others go the other way and wait for their swag to arrive. And obviously, some of it does. Good reviews are forth-coming. And, I presume, once you've shown your value as a reviewer of knick knacks, the trolls upgrade you to better swag. The problem is, I'm not interested in giving all my personal data to just anybody who offers me a free iPhone case for review with my non-existent iPhone.

So, there is a LOT of stink to the Amazon carcass. I could happily miss out on it if I had an alternative. I've found a bit. My next door neighbour visits Canadian Tire for me. Walmart's on-line stock isn't half of what I can get AT Walmart, but I haven't stepped foot into one since I almost stroked out (heat stroke) in the parking lot of one late in the Aughts. And the free shipping is a bit hit and miss. But it's getting better and I will soon have an Amazon alternative for the day-to-day stuff I need. And Marilyn has become my personal shopper, meaning if I am willing to abuse my friendship of more than 30 years, I could have her running all over Brampton on my behalf. I have enough integrity left over to try and minimize my requests. Barely. Still feels like I'm imposing on her.

At one point, I started taking Amazon up on their subscription services. I was ordering enough Ketchup for the average ten-person family each month, lots of Kraft Dinner original and things like pens, markers, tissues, paper towels, spices, water flavourings and medications, the list was, at it's peak, about 40 items in total and represented hundreds of dollars monthly. Then I got a notice from Amazon limiting me to one pack of Kraft Dinner a month. The next day, the other shoe dropped ... and this was long before President Small Hands forced a Ketchup tariff into place ... Amazon would only ship me one bottle of the Ambrosia of the Gods (Heinz, of course). I asked why, got no answers. At least they didn't TRY to say it was because the biggest retailer in the world had suddenly been given quotas by Kraft and Heinz. I canceled all my subs immediately. Turns out, a lot of people did that. No more 15 percent discounts. Amazon emerged weeks later with a new subscription scheme, topping out at 10 percent. I'd been gaslighted to save Amazon five percent. I was not alone. But it left me asking why I wanted to continue doing business with this greedy, rapacious outfit.

Which FINALLY brings me to the delivery issues. Let's start with Amazon policy to HIDE the boxes in the bushes. Not wait till somebody comes to the door and hand it to them, only leaving the boxes if there's nobody there in a minute or two. Just delicately brush your knuckles lightly over the door (it looks better from the street) and then dump the boxes in the bushes and run. That's POLICY. Time is money, but Porch Pirates require SOME semblance of not leaving the packages out in the wide open. So, HIDE the box. The problem is, I live in Canada and most of my deliveries come in a time when the bushes around my front door HAVE NO LEAVES. Furthermore, my bushes are a full level lower than my front porch/stoop. I walk with a cane and try to avoid it at the best of times. IF the box is in the bushes, even at the best of times, I have to don slippers, grab my cane, go out my door and bend over to pick up a package that is BELOW the level of my feet AND is always heavier than I would like. In effect, Amazon is doing it's unlevel best to kill me.

So, I've asked, politely and not so politely (rudely to be honest) to stop trying to hide the boxes in the bushes. The immediate response was to hide the boxes in the runway between my fence and my garage,behind the back gate. The last time I saw THAT space was when I had raccoons removed from the garage ... a decade ago. If I didn't have my back yard attended to regularly, I would NEVER HAVE KNOWN of the boxes. They would have lay there moldering until the next owners of this house moved in. I was ... unhappy with Amazon. And shared it.

Still, Amazon delivery personnel became adept at stupid placement of the boxes. I have a door that opens towards the north. They'd put it on the south side where I would never look for anything. I got one delivery of a big box and the decision on that one was to place it directly in front of the door. A heavy box that I could not budge sufficiently to leave my own home. I called a neighbour to help move it three feet north and then into the house. I hope that driver doesn't procreate. And worse things. Another driver came close to doing the right thing. He put the box between my outer screen door and my inner door. Too big to close the outer door, but a good try, if it hadn't been on a seriously windy day coming from the north. My box was found five doors down and returned to me. Wind has driven my deliveries north and south. The best effort was at the end of my street to the north. A total of 20 houses. Sometimes, I don't get deliveries and theorize it's more likely it was delivered, but blew away, than it was delivered to the wrong address. Not that that THAT hasn't happened. Twice, in fact. Not everybody on the street knows me, although I have lived here for more than fifty years.

I acquired a chair with a porous bottom so water and snow wouldn't pool. I had it chained backwards to the street so that it would serve as the defacto hiding place. It's right beside the door, under the mailbox. Any rational person delivering a box to the address and NOT waiting for me to come to the door, would put the package on the chair and be happy it was hidden from the street, meeting Amazon policy. So, last month, in one week, I had single delivery I had checked off to arrive on the Friday, start arriving piece meal, beginning on the Wednesday. Three separate deliveries on Thursday and one, that finished off one of the Thursday deliveries, came on the expected Friday. Of the deliveries, one was on the south side of the door. One, the big one, directly in front of the door, one in the mailbox, one in the space between my doors and one UNDERNEATH MY CHAIR. Not ON the chair, UNDERNEATH IT. I discovered that one on Saturday. Number of packages ON the chair: Zero.

Because Amazon gives you tracking websites for your deliveries, I knew that agreed-to Friday shipments were coming on other days. So, for Wednesday and Thursday, I didn't go to my office on the second floor, I did some paperwork and napped on the bottom floor approximately twenty feet from the front door. Never once did I hear a knock on the door. I'm old, but my hearing is decent enough to hear a rap when it comes. Not once. In fact, in the past half-decade, I can count the number of times I heard a knock on the door (and my doorbell is a video doorbell with a rather loud chime, so that is not the alternative they can claim) on one hand. Out of dozens of deliveries, approaching hundreds. Never mind the disruption to my work day and my sleeping habits, Amazon's deliveries are never ON-TIME.

For at least the last two sets of deliveries, I have ordered shipments to arrive on the same day. It's a new feature Amazon is testing out BECAUSE too many customers are complaining about unexpected deliveries or having to re-arrange their lives for multiple days when the deal was to get them all on the same day. Last month it was three days of deliveries for the one that was on the agreed-to day. This month, ALL of the deliveries will occur on days other than this Friday. The one I ticked off to receive all the boxes, even though I could have had same-day delivery for half of them on Tuesday. I live a two-minute drive from an Amazon distribution centre!!! But I CHOSE to get them all on Friday to minimize disruption of my day waiting for the delivery. The number of packages I will get on the agreed-to day? NONE. How very serviceable Amazon is. Taking the savings they give me in delivery costs by wasting two afternoons and early evenings of my life. By my calculations, if I hadn't been charged for what I bought at all, meaning free stuff delivered for free, Amazon still owes me a few hundred dollars based on my billable rate.

And when I bought this up with Amazon support last month, one of the idiot managers had the temerity to say, well there's a line you can fill in for instructions. Which is a bald-faced lie. There is no such line. There's a security code space. If she thinks that's adequate, you try and fill in instructions with 25 characters to fill. "Knock on the door, ring the doorbell and wait at least one minute for the customer, who has health issues. If the customer is not there in a minute, leave the package on the chair beside the door." Yeah, doesn't fit. Should be on my file. Been told it is. I've been lied to.

So, THIS month, I resorted to once again choosing to get all the packages on Friday. Which is stupid of me. But I added a second address line. RingBell,KnockOnDoor,LeavePkg-Chair That's my full 35-character limit for that line. My delivery yesterday? No bell, no knock, the package between the doors, where it didn't fit. Congratulations Amazon. You've kept a screwing up streak intact that would embarrass most companies.

But not one Jeff Bezos runs. The package was early. Nothing else matters.

And because I disagree, but am one of millions of Amazon thralls, I can loathe Amazon, myself for using Amazon and everybody at the support desk who have two answers to ALL complaints once you can find a way to contact them: Replace the shipment for free (which works unless it was time sensitive) or pass along the complaints/suggestions to the department in charge. That's the two answers. Placate and move on. The whole Amazon Customer Service playbook. Not fix, just wait for cheap prices, ease of ordering, large selection and that ever-present early delivery to wash away whatever today's problems are.

Amazon is heading for government regulation. The company will be split up with Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services inevitably becoming separate companies. Both run in an ethos developed by Jeff Bezos. Not much will change, but politicians in the USA will puff out their chests and proclaim to one and all that they were doing their job regulating mega-monoliths like Bezos. And nothing will actually change. Deliveries will continue to be early and disrupting and hidden in bushes. Bezos will be indifferent to all of this citing his monopolistic power in many vertical market niches is for the good of the customer ... which he determines to be price-point dependent above all else.

And I will loathe Amazon, because I will still be a customer and author. And I will come to loathe AWS because somehow that relationship will sour over something or other. Did I mention my cloud backup service is Amazon Glacier?

No, I don't heart Amazon. I did once. But the love affair is over. And it will never come back. Amazon is a group of largely good, hard-working (over-worked) people who work for a loathsome organization. A plague on Bezos' houses, all three of them.

POSTSCRIPT: Today, the driver knocked and rang the bell and left the package on the chair. In other news the world stopped spinning to allow me to recover.

Heinz Ketchup, Canada and Comrade Donald

I skipped publishing 2017's Top 25 (or so) TV shows last year because I got to the Worst of the Worst and ended up writing 1500+ words on CNN's aiding of the election of the UnGreat Pumpkin, his worst self. I was enraged that the TV channel had abrogated its journalistic responsibilities for the (easy) good ratings letting that overgrown Enfant terrible spout lie after lie, virtually unchallenged so as to ensure he would appear on the channel. Don Lemon, a guy I like and who I think IS a good journalist, didn't come to Jesus until it was too late. He lambasts President Small Hands regularly and doesn't let lies go unchallenged... now. 18 months too late. He wasn't the only CNN journalist to do this, just the one I was most disappointed in. Sigh, I'm stressing myself again just typing about it.

Thanks to CNN and the depressed Midwesterners reaching out for any lifeline in the absence of the belief in the Democrat promises, voters formed the opinion that a vote for Doofus J. Terrible was a case of "What have you got to lose?" Turns out, the American soul.

And moderately priced Heinz Ketchup here in Canada.

The Blithering Idiot-in-Chief has started a trade war. Reasonable to a certain extent if that war had been with China. But that was only Act II. First, he had to shove it up the backsides of the countries that have historically been American allies. You know, the GOOD guys, the neighbours boasting the world's longest undefended border, the folks that died in large numbers so that American soldiers could take Berlin eight decades ago. We've been the polite wingman, consumers of American media and goods and services. And that Tub-o-Turd has fouled this neat agreement amongst gentlemen and gentlewomen. It has been assumed that the Democrats will de-fang The Monster come November and then sweep him out with the rest of the garbage he institutionalized in his not-so-brief four years of Caligula/Nero-like rule from his bully pulpit.

But what if the damage he does is harder to overturn simply with Presidential fiat to sign orders decreeing the country forget everything the dog-whistling Racist has done to the country. One which I truly love, down to the single woman I've ever tried to complete a life with. I wonder if "Oops, we won't do that again," will be good enough for the rest of the world. Ask Germany how long international memories are. What if the Autocrat-In-Wanting won't leave? Bill Maher keeps reminding us he saw a victory for the Orangutan Look-A-Like and that he is increasingly alarmed at the idea that we might have an Emperor (with no clues) in the making. Hopefully, his Delphic Oracle impression is wrong. For the world's sake.

There will be a swell in Canada to stop buying made-in-the-US Ketchup ... really Heinz Ketchup. The tit-for-tat tariff Canada attaches to Ketchup in July to respond in part to this cowardly stabbing in the back trade war The Filibustering Fool started, will prompt MANY Canadians to look at the price of buying USA. Boycotting Heinz.

But not me. I consider the stuff ambrosia, the gift of the gods. I am addicted to the stuff. I eat a LOT of it. I have type II Diabetes. Those two things are not unrelated. Like most addicts, I have no control over how I spend my money. I MUST have Heinz Ketchup. Simple as that.

YOU LYING SACK OF BOVINE EXCREMENT, YOU'VE DRIVEN UP MY COST OF LIVING WITH YOUR CAPRICIOUS REMINDERS THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT SAVANT, AN EXPERT AT BULLYING AND BARELY COHERENT AT ANY OTHER TIME. I HOPE YOU ....

Sigh, I'm Canadian. I'm not allowed to complete the rant. Civility demands I recognize my own failings and stop blaming others for those failings. I will continue to buy Heinz Ketchup. In quantities that drive my doctors to despair and my bankers to lower my credit score. But without saying it, you REALLY know I'm thinking it. And I hope whatever he chokes on is covered in the red stuff.

Heinz red stuff.