A Confession

I am a Terrible Person. There, I've said it. In the eyes of my neighbors, I've committed the most grievous sin. I have killed my lawn. I could be a wife-beating, incestuous, mass murdering, racist, neo-Nazi serial killer and lived with my neighbors in peace, but this, apparently, is unforgivable.

Yesterday, as we were returning home, ironically from a trip for gas to power the mower, a woman we have never seen before stopped her car in front of the house and asked my better half why we let our lawn go. Bless her, my wife asked why it was any of her business. I have never been prouder of the dear girl.

"Because I drive by it every day and it's an eyesore" was the response. Now please note that we live in the middle of a desert. Shrub steppe, actually, but desert is close enough. If God had intended for grass to grow here, He would have provided more than our annual average of nine inches of rain. Also note that on the other side of the woman's car is an overgrown vacant lot, currently the home of construction equipment for my neighbor's next "good idea" and that apparently caused her no pain. Ah, but I get ahead of myself. The wife's answer was a classic that shall live in family lore forevermore: "Don't look."

"Are you renters?" We've lived here for 15 years and owned it the entire time, but as my wife said, "It's none of your business." You should also know that for someone who drives by every day, she's not very observant. We've made tens of thousands of dollars worth of very visible improvements to the property and have had the same car in the driveway for ten years.

At this point the woman (I'm being polite here. The words hag, harridan, busybody, snoop, and of course, the b-word, all come more readily to mind.) indignantly told us that we were Terrible People, rolled up the window of her POC Buick and left in a huff.

Had I had more time to engage in conversation with her, I might have thanked her for noticing the "white trash" look we were going for, and let her know my plans to put an old transmission in the front yard along with a new bathtub Madonna. I could have also told her that she should be patient because the money from the basement meth lab hasn't started to kick in yet. Or, my personal favorite, I could have told her that I enjoy having the only yard in the neighborhood that can be seen from space. None of these are the truth. (Well, that last one does tickle me a bit.)

The truth is more mundane, and in large measure due to busybody neighbors like the one that accosted us. A number of years ago, when I had a wonderful lawn, my neighbors decided that our previously unincorporated neighborhood should become part of the city of Richland and voted to make that happen.

Not long after that first exercise of power, the same neighbors decided that all of our septic systems had to go because, gee, being on the city sewer system was just so much better. They voted that one in too, and here is where the story really takes off. The contractor they hired to do the job of installing the city sewer lines and hooking us up destroyed my irrigation system. The six grand that job cost, left me without any spare cash to relandscape what had been lush and green a short time before. As noted, without water, grass does not grow here and the lawn died a slow, agonizing death.

Since that time I've helped put two children through college. Between direct cash outlays and loan payments, over thirty grand has left my wallet to date, with expenditures of about $750/mo continuing until the loans are paid off. I suppose that someone who wasn't a Terrible Person would have told the kids to buck up, the lawn must come first, but I failed my neighbors and supported the kids.

The oven, stove, range hood, and even the kitchen sink have all needed to be replaced since the lawn died. A non-Terrible Person, would have sucked it up on hard tack and cold beans like a true Man-of-the-West, but I let putting food on the table come before the lawn. I have no shame.

When the hot water heater died, we could have just saved water by taking short, cold showers. Being a Terrible Person though, I let my family's comfort come before the greening of the lawn. Please, put me in the stocks and throw rotten food at me.

The washing machine also gave up the ghost somewhere in there and joined it's recently departed brother, the dryer, in appliance heaven, and darn if I didn't make the wrong choice again and let money go to their replacements rather than grass seed.

Then there was the 30th high school reunion trip, the trip to DC for a friend's wedding, or the trip to Minneapolis for the wife's step-mom's 100th birthday that a better person would have given up. Oh, and I can't forget the trip to Germany to spend a few days with our daughter. I'm a Terrible Person for giving those things a higher priority than the lawn.

I also mistakenly spent nearly two years out of town and away from the lawn. Someone who wasn't a Terrible Person might have found a way to do yardwork and avoid going when duty called me back into the Navy to command a Personnel Mobilization Team for the Global War on Terrorism.

My truck died while I was gone, and darn if I didn't spring for a used one to replace it. I didn't really need to be coming home to see my family on those weekends anyway.

I almost forgot the eleven grand for a new HVAC system this past winter. Someone who wasn't a Terrible Person would have stoically endured the cold and this summer's heat. Not me, I let my neighbors down again.

Now, adding insult to injury, my dear neighbors have once again decided that they knew best how I should spend my money and have passed another "neighborhood improvement." This time we get curb and gutter and sidewalks. Wow, how has the property ever survived the forty years since the house was built without it? Nine thousand, six hundred this time. Oh, and what if I had done the right thing and replaced the irrigation system? That's right, I'm sacrificing several feet of front yard to the new sidewalk, and would have lost the sprinklers again.

I guess the new roof will have to wait.

Disappointment

This has not been a good day on the electronic devices front. Palm seems to have misplaced the PDA I sent them to repair, and the cell phone I wanted to buy seems to have undergone a last-minute change rendering it unsuitable for us in the good ol' US of A.

My Palm TX has been suffering from greatly reduced battery life for a few weeks now, so I sent it in for repairs. Two days ago, they sent me an email saying that it had shipped:

SRO# - S1-XXXXXXXXX
ORDER TYPE - REPAIR
PART# - 180-10098-00 - Palm TX, Multilingual


Dear XXXX XXXX

Your recent repair order with Palm has been completed. The repaired device has been shipped to you at the following address:

XXXX XXXX
XXXX XXXXXXX XXX
RICHLAND WA 99352


You should be receiving the device within the next three business days via DHL. To check current shipment status, click on the link below.

http://track.dhl-usa.com/atrknav.asp?ShipmentNumber=XXXXXXXXXXX

IMPORTANT:
Package tracking numbers are pre-assigned at our distribution center. After you receive this email, it may take up to the end of the next business day for tracking information to become active in DHL's system. If the link above contains no information, check it again in 24 hours.

Note that it should have been picked up no later than the end of the next business day, i.e., yesterday.

This morning I checked the tracking site at DHL and found no information,
again, so I called them and asked why. The answer was that the package hadn't been turned over to them yet! This did not please me, so I sent an email to Palm. The response was that it had shipped and that I should check DHL's website.

Right. That's what I'd been doing, as I had made clear in my first email. The second email bordered on the uncivil, basically asking, exactly where was my device since neither they nor DHL seemed to have it. Amazingly enough, now that I'm home, DHL shows it was picked up about an hour after my second email, a full day later than promised.

Probably not coincidently, Celestica, the company doing the repair has a location just across the Rio Grand from Pharr, TX, where DHL says the device was to be shipped. Outsourced customer service strikes again. When will companies learn that success means underpromising and overdelivering, not the other way around.

Now, on the HTC MTeoR front: I was on the phone with a vendor this morning when her tech-support folks overheard she was talking with me about the MTeoR. A key selling point with this phone has been that it's a true worldphone with full coverage on all GSM 3G systems both here and abroad. It now seems this isn't quite the case. Being a tri-band GSM/EDGE phone and a 2100 MHz UMTS phone is a deal-breaker for me since Cingular uses both the missing 850 MHz GSM band and the missing 1900 MHz UMTS band. It's a shame, really, because the MTeoR, as described in HTC's literature would have met my needs very, very nicely.

On the plus side of that whole experience though, was a very nice email exchange about Qualcomm chipsets in HTC phones with Dovid at On the Go Solutions. Dovid starts his emails with B"H. I was curious, so I googled it. The Wikipedia entry the popped up says that it means, Baruch hashem (Hebrew "Blessed is God"). I share the sentiment. As I told, Dovid, I didn't get much Hebrew in my Lutheran catechism class.

BTW, if the quality of their sales and tech-support staff is any indication, this is a company worth dealing with, even if their prices are higher than most other vendors.

Have a Nice Day

There are few things in life that instantaneously push my buttons, but being ignored is number one on the list. It's particularly galling when done by people wearing smiley faces and vests that ask how I may be helped as they're walking AWAY from me.

Have a nice day was, therefore, the wrong thing for the poor girl at the local Wally World to say. I'd just been rudely prevented from using a self-service checkout by someone for whom I'm sure the job with America's number one retailer was going to be a career peak, and then told by the same neanderthal (truly an insult to neanderthals, I might add) to go through one of the regular check out lines because all the self-serves were broken with no evidence that this was the case. Normally, I take these things as the patient soul I try to be. Five minutes of backed-up checkout line later, with no additional checkers at any of the dozen or so empty lanes, and several people who should have known better on the staff ignoring the situation, I left the cart and merchandise in the lane and headed for the local Target. When the aforementioned PG wished me a nice day, which it most assuredly had not been, a switch in my head was tripped, and I went off with an improvisational riff on the rudeness and idiocy of the place. Had I spent more time in line, I might have been better rehearsed, but all in all, it was a good effort.

In contrast to Wally World, the staff at Target was polite, the merchandise much more pleasantly displayed, and the prices every bit as appealing. Guess who gets first nod for my future business?