Iron Filings - 73
March 1, 2022
Iron Filings – 73
Sometimes Customer Service Comes Through. This is not a good time of year to be without a snowblower. Holding various parts of my corpus in calm reverence, I no longer shovel snow. Thus, last fall I dutifully sent my snowblower to the shop for maintenance and a checkup: new spark plug, oil change, new paddles, new scraper bar. Then, after our first snow last month I put the machine back in the garage and, next morning, noticed that the garage was filled with gas fumes. It was leaking gas very slowly, just a drip here and there. So – here's a good consumer tip to use when possible – rather than calling them I drove down to the shop. It's not far from here. I explained the situation with a smile and no hint of wondering why they'd screwed up the tune-up, no nastiness (I'm not a Republican). They said they'd see what they could do. This was on a Monday. That afternoon they picked up the machine. The mechanic called on Tuesday and said they'd missed a bit of a "crinkle" in a gasket but it was fixed now. Wednesday the machine was delivered back to my house. No charge.
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Sometimes Customer Service Comes Through – 2: I like to get my taxes done early. First, because I can't stand going for weeks and weeks as the deadline approaches. Second, they say getting them in early is a good way to avoid identity theft. So I spent a few hours getting all the materials ready for the accountant – not a big chore since I keep our finances pretty well ordered throughout the year. Anyway, I took the stuff to the accountant on a Monday. The next day they called and said they were ready. The day after that we went to the office, signed the documents, the accountant e-filed them, and we were done! A week later our modest refund was in the bank. Sweet.
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Went grocery shopping the other day, pushed my cart out to the car, emptied the bags, put the cart in the cart corral and drove off – leaving a pair of glasses on the little shelf in the basket. They were just "cheaters," store-bought reading glasses and not worth going back for so I just wrote it off to being stupid (or old!). Still, when I went back to the store a week later I asked if they had a lost and found and if anyone had happened to turn in a pair of glasses in a brown case. Bingo! Thank you, thoughtful person. Probably should have gone out and bought a lottery ticket.
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I thought the Winter Olympics felt kind of "flat" this year. Maybe it's just me, but some of our brightest stars bombed out, one of our own citizens competed for China, the snow everywhere was man-made, too much was made of a doping thing that should have been a simple disqualification, and I'm beginning to think that curling is way more exciting, if not quite as beautiful, as figure skating. I'm not exactly alone in this since NBC's ratings were apparently dismal. What hurt, too, was the huge time difference between the U.S. and China. It was never quite clear when some event might be on and, even then, if you found it, it was hard to tell if what you were watching was live or recorded. Still, the pageantry was amazing and no one does fireworks quite like the Chinese.
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It was kind of cool to get our free Covid-19 test kits in the mail – thank you, Joe Biden. I'm kind of conflicted, though, between wanting to try one out and hoping I never have a need to.
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For as much as Donald Trump will forever wear the baseball cap reading Greatest Con Man Of All Time, so will Vladimir Putin forever wear the baseball cap reading If Hitler Could Do It, So Can I.
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There's been some skepticism over this notion of sanctions and their effectiveness. Consider: You get your paycheck one day and go to the bank to cash it. The bank, however, says they aren't allowed to cash your check. Then you go to your landlord and give her a check for your rent but she says she can't accept your check, only cash. So you go to someone who knows a guy who knows a guy and he cashes your check – for a forty percent cut. Next month you try the same gambit but your black market guy says no one will cash his checks so he can't cash yours. Are you panicking? Not yet, not until you go to the supermarket and attempt to pay for some groceries with a credit card and the clerk says they can't accept your card, only cash. Same story with your water bill, gas bill, electric bill, cable bill and so on. Only cash, but you can't get cash. Now extrapolate this kind of a scenario to a whole society, both its people and its various institutions and you can begin to see how sanctions – slowly, slowly – can begin to cause real problems for that giant corporation on down to that family down the block.
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G. K. Wuori © 2022
Photoillustration from a sketch by Brendan Herrick