Long Week

I had my interview yesterday.  It went well, and as far as I could tell he hadn't read my blog.  He had been told to call me "Rasputin," but he didn't.  I got to see some old co-workers and had lunch with Mike (Happy Birthday, btw) so it was a good day.  It's not going to change my blogging style, and that's all I have to say about that.

I thought of something to blog about while driving home, but damned if I can remember it now.  So this might be it.  It's been a long week.

I have 961 days until I can retire, and you kids get off my lawn.

Just Sayin'

I can retire in 968 days.

I said in an earlier blog (56 days ago) that "I have a job ... that I don't hate (which I know makes me extremely lucky)...."

Even though I like the job I have now, for an assortment of reasons I needn't go into here, I've been looking for another for quite some time.  So along the way I've read many Internet articles on finding a job.  There is much advice out there, most of which I routinely ignore.

One of the most common pieces of advice is, to paraphrase, be careful of your online presence.  The guy doing your interview will have seen your Facebook page.  He knows how you ladies got all those Mardi Gras beads.  He reads your blog.

I bring this up because I have an interview next week.  In a major deviation from my usual pattern of behavior, I'm going to heed (somewhat) the prevailing wisdom, and on the off chance that my interviewer stumbles across this,  try to destroy the image I have deliberately concocted of a guy who's counting down the 968 days he has left, so he can bolt at the earliest opportunity.

Of course I'll cover that in the interview, and I'm not going to try to interview here.  I will try to "sell" myself, and point out the advantages of hiring a short-timer.  But I guess I need to make sure it can be seen here that I'm not married to that 2/15/15 date.  A new job, with new challenges (and new opportunities) would bring with it a new attitude.  Just sayin'.

(Alright, YOU.  Whaddaya mean it's gettin' deep?)

Like I say, I'll save the selling for the interview itself.  Until then, you kids get off my lawn.

(Oh, I forgot to mention: Operation Barbarossa began 71 years ago today.  Why?  Who knows.)

The Dog, Part 2

Last week I made this statement:  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "IDENTITY THEFT."

First, let's examine the concept of "theft."  If I steal your car, then I have the car and you don't.  I'm driving it around and you're walking.  I cannot steal your identity.  If I could, then I would be you, and you wouldn't.  What we have here is FRAUD.  I haven't "stolen" your "identity."  I have defrauded someone by saying that I'm you.

So let me tell you a story.  (Allegory warning!)

I go to an ATM in a bad part of town.  (Anyone who knows me can easily visualize this.)  I take out a hundred bucks and turn around, and there stands a guy with his hand in his pocket, who appears to have a gun.  He says "give me your money," I hand him the hundred bucks, and he runs off.

Now I start to stew on this, then I see you coming.  I step into the alley and watch you take your money out of the ATM.  I stick my hand in my pocket, point my finger and step out and say "Give me a hundred bucks."  You say "Here!  Take it all!"  I say "No, I just want a hundred bucks" and hand you back the rest.

Who robbed you?

(I did, in case you haven't figured that out.)  What we have here is a "transfer of victimhood."  What the banks have labeled "Identity theft" is in fact bank fraud, and they are the victims.  The reason they are victims it that they have failed in their duty to properly identify the people they do business with.  Rather than fix their problem, they have convinced their customer that he is in fact the "victim" of a crime that they have made up and called "identity theft."  Now I hear commercials asking you to pay about $400 a year for a "service" called "Identity Protection."

But I feel like I'm beating a dead horse.  I'll try to think of something interesting to blog about next week.  But for now I have 975 days until I can retire, and you kids get off my lawn.

The Dog

You know, the one the tail keeps wagging.  After long deliberation I have arrived at the conclusion that people are both stupid and lazy.  (Once again, I'm not talking about you.  I am however talking about me.  Not me alone, or necessarily in this regard but I am stupid and lazy.)  More particularly, people tend to miss the point.  Whatever the point may be.

For example, years ago, in the dim ages of another century, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and music was recorded on vinyl (as God intended,)  if you had money in the bank but not in your pocket, and you wanted to spend it you wrote a check.  For the benefit of any young people unfortunate enough to have stumbled on this blog, this was before the days of debit cards, even before ATMs.  Credit cards did exist (for rich people) but checks were like little, paper, one transaction at a time debit cards.  You'd fill it out, the store would take it, and the bank would give the store your money for it.  All in a mysterious banker sort of magic.

The problem was, anybody could write your name on a check.  This was a dilema for the store.  On the one hand, they didn't want to give their merchandise away for a worthless piece of paper, but on the other they didn't want to miss out on making a sale.  So they figured out ways to minimize their risk.  One of the things they did to make sure that the person writing the check was actually the person named on the check was to ask their minimum wage cashiers to look at a picture ID.  Since we're talking about high school kids making $2.10 an hour (less if you go back far enough) they needed a way to confirm that, so they asked the cashiers to write the customer's drivers' license number on the check.

Remember now, the store didn't want the number, they wanted to insure that the cashier looked at the license.  But, as I have already observed PEOPLE ARE LAZY!  First they would just recite the number from memory because they didn't want to get the license out, but soon, in a stroke of ABSOLUTE GENIUS they began to have the number actually PRINTED ON THEIR CHECKS.  I'm even more bewildered that the bank, equally concerned about worthless paper, actually printed those checks for these geniuses.  Now we're back to where we started.

Back then, signing someone elses name to a check was called forgery.  The concept of "identity theft" was still in the future.  And all of the foregoing is a setup for next weeks rant: 

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "IDENTITY THEFT."

And now I earnestly solicit your feedback on this post, before I proceed to solve the rest of the world's problems.  That said let me take care of a little housekeeping:  I still haven't "cleaned up" my Dark Shadows review.  As of right now I plan to retire in 982 days. 

Now get off my lawn.

I got nothin'

Not that there's nothing I want to blog on this week, but I will uncharacteristically allow my better judgment to prevail.

I have, however, enabled comments starting with this blog.  Not that I'm particularly interested in what the average web surfer has to say, but anybody reading this now is at least my Facebook friend.  I'm also moderating everything, so if I think you're an idiot ..., (no, not YOU, him over there) ... nobody else will ever see your comment anyway.

Feel free to comment on anything I've written so far.  I'm going to try to clean up the Dark Shadows "review" this week.

Other than that, I have 989 days to retirement, and you kids get off my lawn.