It’s National Dog Day. Everybody gets a belly rub!
While we’re at it, let me plug a favorite Twitter account, @DogSolutions.
So peace. Such soothe. Deg best antidote to times of hate.
My cell phone rings all the time now. Spam, scams, once in a while someone calling the Tucson Police Department’s seized property division (transpose two digits and you get me instead). This is a new thing: sure, we get spam calls on the landline all the time, but up to now only a few on our cell phones. Suddenly it’s several a day. I don’t answer unless it’s someone I know, but still, what a pain in the ass. Our cell phone numbers are on the national Do Not Call list; obviously they’ve found a way around that.
Yesterday the office landline started ringing. Our old office phone doesn’t have caller ID so I answered. It was a robocall from a credit union. I was about to hang up when I realized the recorded message was from the credit union that handles our car loan. It instructed me to fax an insurance document. What, they couldn’t call in person or send a letter? Am I wrong in thinking that’s not how you conduct business, that if it’s official, you call in person or send a letter by post? In the end I hung up, but made sure to tell Donna about the call. Turns out Donna was on it: they’d sent a real letter last week and the paperwork they wanted was in that day’s stack of outgoing mail.
If I die first, the worst that’ll happen is Donna will have to hire a kid to work the remotes so she can watch Call the Midwife. If Donna dies first the cars will be repossessed, the utilities cut off, and the house foreclosed before I get a handle on the checking account and monthly bills.
Oh, for the life of a dog!
I have an app on my phone called Mr Number. It identifies known spammers and mostly identifies spoofed numbers. Phone rings once and it hangs up on them. If I like I can look at the log and decide if it was a someone I wanted to talk to. Only once did it happen and that was when I agreed to take a survey about a hotel I had where I had just stayed. Being a robocall survey it blocked it.
As far as household finances go, same thing. I couldn’t tell you who I pay and how much. And since she does it all electronically, I wouldn’t even get a bill in the mail. It was natural for her to tend to these things when I was on active duty and deploying regularly. Now that I’m retired I could ask but I’m fairly certain I’d goon it all up.
Figure I can just pay the collection agency when they come to the door…
Running to my iphone to download that app now! Thanks. Next question: how do we make sure we die first?
A sentence you don’t hear everyday nowadays; it “was in that day’s stack of outgoing mail”!