Apparently, nobody. If it’s Thursday, it must be raining. Likewise, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t mean to exaggerate, but there’s a very old man next door with a BIG pile of wood and nails. Compared to us, Seattle is the Gobi Desert. Wha hoppen? Is it global warning? Is it bad luck? Or is nature just refilling the aquifer? Inquiring minds want to know.
Our yearling field is two-fifths under water. There’s still plenty of room for the horses to clomp about and eat grass but they have decided it would also be fun to slog out into the middle of the newly-arrived Lake Ellison and stand there looking over at us. Maybe they’re pretending to be jolly seamen—after all, it is Talk Like A Pirate Week. I’m not sure it is good for hooves to spend hours underwater—do they get pruney, like ours would? We’re trying to figure out why they like it out there. Are there less mosquitos in the middle of the lake? Seems doubtful.
Anyway, all this mess is delaying the start of training. We can’t get a horse van anywhere close to the yearling barn and are thus unable to head ‘em up and move ‘em out. Usually, we tranquilize the young horses to help load them. Once tranquilized, they are not exactly deft on their feet. Walking them the long distance from the barn to the driveway could be a nightmare. It’s a dilemma. But one we shall have to solve soon. We’ve set ourselves a deadline of October 1 to move them, come hell or—you guessed it—high water. Pray for us, we’ll need it.
Where Have All The Checkers Gone? (long time passing….)
I never liked Walmart to begin with. Their hiring practices, their sexist wage discrepancies and, more important, their passive eradication of tens of thousands of small businesses have made me less than a big fan. Moreover, they are ugly and their mother dresses them funny. When’s the last time you heard someone say, “Oh, that beautiful Walmart certainly adds to the aesthetic beauty of our town?” Even Republicans know better.
Nonetheless, eventually the bottom line comes into play for almost everyone. It seemed like every time we left the Publix market, the tab was higher. With us, when restaurants or horse feed emporiums or, in this case, grocery stores escalate their prices to a degree unacceptable, we quit going there. One day, Siobhan and I took out our clipboards and marched off to Sam’s, Walmart and Publix to compare prices on the goods most purchased. We knew, of course, that Sam’s and Walmart were cheaper but we wanted to see how much cheaper. Shockingly for us, it turned out to be almost one-third less expensive to shop at Walmart than Publix. A $300 purchase became $200. Now, I am not the smartest person in the world but, over the years, I have developed an uncanny ability to add and subtract where cash money is concerned and I can think of a lot of nice things to do with that extra hundred. Two people can get a great meal at the best restaurant in town for $100 and have plenty left over. You can get one great or two mediocre tickets to a Gator football game for $100. You can get an hour-and-a-half massage and still leave a tip. It’s a no-brainer. So we started going to Walmart. With clothespins on our noses, but nonetheless.
Now, in addition to the things already mentioned, Walmart has countless shortcomings. First of all, stuff is scattered all over hell. If you want pharmacy items or dogfood or a raft of other things, you will be enjoying a healthy little walk for yourself. Oh—unless, of course, you are one of the many able-bodied dipwads who commandeer a lovely motorized shopping cart with which to go careening down the aisles, terrorizing pedestrian customers and blocking up the area. And you have to be very careful about criticizing certain of these varmints. Some of them will spit on you.
Walmart will not give you paper bags, either. Only those tiny little plastic things which can hold approximately one—count ‘em, 1—item. This makes for a lot of fun bringing stuff in from the car and organizing the groceries to be put up. Walmart also has a lot of dubious products, particularly in the realm of produce, which we don’t buy much of there. They also seem to be striving mightily to market the smallest grapefruit in the universe if they have any at all. We still get our fish and chicken at Publix. We are chagrined to report that the local Walmart has actually closed its fresh fish department, which is TERRIBLE news for all the people they used to hire from the Florida School For The Deaf And Blind.
Still, we shop there. But maybe not for much longer. Everyone has a breaking point and for us it might be the recent Walmart cashiering of cashiers. In a maximal effort to force customers to use the self-check-out lanes, Walmart has severely reduced the number of living, breathing cashiers in order that their greedy overlords rake in yet more profits than they are already reaping. This has led to longer lines and a lot of customer griping. The self-help lines, difficult enough to negotiate already, have become horrendous roadblocks as customers with 150 items to check in hamper others with 15. Outraged by this barbarian development, I called my Walmart store manager.
“Walmart, how may I direct your call?”
“I have a complaint and I want to talk to the store manager?”
“Well, sir, can you tell me the nature of your complaint?”
“Are YOU going to solve it?”
“No sir, but I have to know where to direct your call.”
“I already told you I want to talk to the manager. Not some flunky at the complaint department. I already know what he’ll say.”
Silence. More silence. I guess they figure if they leave you hanging long enough, you’ll go away. They are wrong. I hung up and recalled.
“This is valued customer Bill, again. I will keep calling until I get the actual store manager so you might as well give up right now.”
“Yes sir, I’m connecting you now.”
“What can we do for you today, Mr. Bill?” the jolly manager wanted to know.
“Well, it’s about the diminishing cashier population. I want my cashiers back. I’m an unreconstructed fogy and I don’t like the self-check-out lanes.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Bill, many of our customers have the same feeling. Unfortunately, this is not something decided on the local level. These decisions come down from on high and we have to adhere to them. There are many reasons our management makes these decisions.”
“Oh, really? And aside from the reason that they’d like to pile more shit in their moneybins, whatever could those reasons be?”
“There is no need to use bad language….”
“You’re right, I’ll rephrase it. Aside from the reason they’d like to pile more shit in their moneybins, whatever could these reasons be?”
He hung up, of course, not an unexpected development. But at least I got my message to the first level. Now, if 750,000 other people would do the same thing, maybe we’d get somewhere. Oh, and when you call—tell them Mr. Bill sent you.
Shopping In The Good Old Days
Remember when you were a kid and went shopping with your mother? This was usually a weekly event and it was a big deal, too. There were no Walmarts, of course, no one store could fill the needs of shoppers in those days. So we walked down Dorchester to South Union street, past the odd, windowless Universalist church—weird guys, those Protestants—past the Nash dealer and Dan Sullivan’s furniture store (if he liked you, Dan would let you play with his snow globe) and Phil’s comic book shop on the corner of Boxford street and, finally, to the fish store, the butcher, the bakery and the First National Store, which was so important the Belt Line buses pulled up right in front. Whatever they didn’t have at the other stores, they had at the First National, especially if it was canned. I guess the First National was the early precursor to Walmart. Anyway, despite the variety of locations, the walking trip was accomplished in jig time, certainly no longer than the drive to Walmart and back today. And we knew all the proprietors and store help and they knew us. Back then, the merchants strove to please. Any problems? They fixed ‘em. Complaints? They seldom arose. The whole notion of a self-check-out lane? Ludicrous and hilarious at the same time. So this is progress, huh? Now we shop at airport-sized chain stores, owned by distant corporations whose idea of friendly customer relations is to station an amiable old codger at the entrance as a Walmart “greeter” and….wait a minute, what did you say? There ARE no more greeters? You know, I think you might be right, I haven’t seen any lately. They seem to have disappeared right along with the people who provided EZ Wipes to clean your carts with. Sigh. I guess it’s really our own fault. We’ve sacrificed everything on the altar of “savings.” We travel ever further into the slough.
Conspiracy Theories—Fun With Dick & Jane
As some of you may remember, I spent a few glorious months in Austin, Texas back in 1962. I have been back only a couple of times since but still retain a great fondness for the place and have a diminishing few friends there. One of them, Fontaine Maverick, invited me to participate in an internet group conversation called the Ghetto Line several months ago. The Ghetto Line is named for a small area in Austin where many of us used to live or, at least, spent considerable time. The current subscribers to the Ghetto Line are almost all remnants of the early sixties so they are getting on in years, not unlike yours truly. Most of them have retained their earlier liberal inclinations, however, and conduct spirited political discussions on a 24-hour-a-day basis, although they do go to bed a little earlier than they used to.
Most, but not all Ghetto Liners are relatively sane people who appreciate the profound difference between the major political parties. They perceive Romney as an imbecile and Obama, despite his plodding progress and abandonment of many liberal causes, the only rational alternative. In addition to politics, GL people help one another with lifestyle problems, medical suggestions, travel plans, etc. Many of them post interesting news and columns they have dredged up, some from the popular press, some from the bowels of obscurity. Others present interesting photography, art, cartoons and music. The whole affair is an ongoing conversation and there is always someone available with a sympathetic ear or a pat on the back. Like any entity with a lot of time on its hands, however, sometimes the conversation descends to absurdity.
Recently, to celebrate the anniversary of 9-11, a few of the GL folk brought forth a slew of conspiracy theories relating to the Great Disaster, many of them asserting U.S. government involvement. It was like a snowball rolling downhill, growing more and more ridiculous with each post. One woman even claimed the owners of the buildings (who apparently possess much greater influence than your average landlord) sponsored it all for the insurance money. The rest of them were firm in their assessment that the Bush administration provoked the whole thing as an excuse to go to war with Iran (I thought all they needed were “weapons of mass destruction”). No disagreements with this opinion would be brooked. Anyone with an alternate view was merely “repeating the government position.” I submitted a couple of over-the-top satirical comments to reflect the folly of the whole thing. These were not well-received. There was no sense of humor in this crew when it came to deriding their pet notions. One peeved fellow decried the “knotheads” out there who were in disagreement. I thought this was genuinely funny and sent back a post signed by myself as President of Knotheads-R-Us. I think my time would have been better spent weeding the garden. Despite my sordid past, I am now thought of by some people as a dupe of the government. Gee. My mother and grandmother would be proud to discover that their little Billy—at long last—had joined the company of the Straight and Narrow. Will wonders never cease?
That’s all, folks….
