January’s getting all, well, January on us. New year, same old song.
It’s been chilly, but not so much so that a fella can’t ride his bike for 90 minutes with three or four layers of 30-year-old cycling kit, adding and removing same as conditions indicate while awaiting the fabled Snowpocalypse, which by noon Thursday was as you see.
Betimes we are reminded that rich people, politicians, and rich politicians can be insufferable, twisted, lying, featherbedding assholes. This is not an annual or even seasonal event.
Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, evildoers found a back door to our credit card while Herself was in an personal-electronics-free secure area and I was out on the bike, oblivious to my my own digital alerts as I removed and added layers of this and that while rolling around to no particular purpose beyond taking pix of the Sandias.
So, once I had been made aware of the breach in our fiscal defenses, I had to race home, doublecheck my receipts, mumble several filthy words, block the attempted piracy and croak that card over the phone, go get two new cards from a local branch, and then go back to get two even newer ones because the Top Secret Your Eyes Only Three-Digit Security Code was buggered on the first batch.
Now I get to work my way down the long list of bills set to autopay in order that we do not suddenly find ourselves freezing to death in the dark with no Innertubes and The Blog up on blocks.
It should go without saying that today was the day I had to drop Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster at Reincarnation for its semiannual pulse check. I did not ride a bike home from the shop and will not be riding one back there to pick up the wee beastie.
Thirty-three, feels like 25°? No thank you, please. I’ve seen the way Burqueños drive under warm and sunny skies. There aren’t enough layers in my winter drawer and none of them are Kevlar.
Mad Blog Media 
Happened to us 3 years ago. Card and email address stolen right after I bought a guitar on line from a reputable dealer in Michigan. A $400 charge popped up for baby hangers bought on ebay using a paypal account. Paypal customer service was hostile and uncooperative, never used them and never will. Because of them, BofA refused to cancel the charge. I still use B of A because I can pay my bills electronically through their website, and I can also lock my credit card on their website. We only have one credit card and I monitor it twice a day. We are slowly moving money and accounts to a locally owned credit union. They also sold our email address, and I went from no spam to 15 or more every day.
Such an annoyance. Seems like we just went through one of these episodes recently too, like in the past one or two years. I liked the sequence of numbers on this last card, too — very easy to remember, even for the senile. The new one, not so much.
I’ve been waiting for it but so far the only credit card debacle is of our own making in leaving them in a card reader or having a waitperson “forget” to give back to us causing an anxious call back to the establishment. Yeah, I know….the cool kids use Apple Pay etc and forego the Credit Card Cha-Cha. This spam you speak of POB has been coming to me since summer by the goddamn train-car load daily. I’ve tried everything short of croaking my email addresses which as you point out, are on file with auto-pay accounts etc.
Still NO SNOW in the lower half of the Mitten State and my snowshoes are wondering what the hell is the use and begging for me to put on eBay. Or maybe the keening and wailing I heard from the gear room was my xc skis? But it finally slipped below freezing so hell, maybe I’ll take up hockey and see how many bones I can fracture.
I hear from Apple Pay about 1,029,305 times daily. Not interested. And now there are palm scanners and eye readers and bot-operated telepathic self-checkouts and Christ knows what all. Remember when you could pay cash for things? If you didn’t have any you did without, or wrote a check. This had its own problems, of course.
“I can’t be overdrawn, I still have checks.”
Don’t get me started on spam. My favorite email address has become useless. Rules I’ve set up in preferences divert hundreds of garbage mails daily to the shit-can.
Eighty percent of the email in the ole United (untied?) States are spam. And pretty soon they will take your footprints then chip you like a pup at the shelter. That way if you get lost, they can charge your parents for finding your ass. There isn’t a single part of your entire life that rich folks don’t see as a business opportunity. Assholes want to steal your vote and rob you blind at the same time. And the head asshole will find a way to take whatever is left.
Sorry, rants have to wait til Friday, right?
Chip us? Didn’t they chip us already, with the vaccines? I’m so confused. …
Meanwhile, going forward, comments will cost $9.99 apiece. Please forward your credit-card information to nigerian_prince_no_really (at) larceny (dot) com.
Our card got electronically pinched a few years back when I made some Nashbar orders and Nashbar was hacked. Was soooo much fun. Hope you got things straightened out. Great way to start a new year, with a new fiasco.
Oy. The dispatches from various Capitalists Denied are already pouring in like deep-cover Hamas sleeper agents across our southern border. I long for the days when one could simply mail the utilities check to the phone company and the phone check to the utility and in the ensuing confusion and outrage acquire a little breathing room to get one’s fiscal ducks in a row.
Oh, and Happy New Year. Sorta, I guess.
Speaking of New Year…..after a 40 year layoff I made a resolution in ‘24 to use the bike as pack mule to 3 of my most frequent re-supply establishments. Turns out not one of them has a suitable place to lock the bike up let alone a damn bike rack. I suppose at the hardware store I could cable it to a row of wheelbarrows when outside, or crawl under a pallet of softener salt to hook up. Screw it….the local brewery will let me bring my bike inside if’n it’s not muddy-wet so I’m changing said resolution to “drink more beer”. BTW have you ever experienced that many municipal bike racks are either useless or likely to tear all the paint off your frame or torque your wheels?
Also, have you noticed that if there is a bike rack it’s in some dark, obscure, unobservable portion of the strip mall where the crackheads with their battery-powered angle grinders can work their magic unseen on the 80 pounds of chains you used to lock a 20-pound bike?
A funeral home down on Lomas has a bike rack out front. I’m not sure how I feel about that. …
You have my sympathy and sense of outrage. Our local medical conglomerate and the state of Montana have the cyber security of a kindergarten. The hospital was hacked and “Your information may or may not have been exposed.” Here is your two-year subscription to Kroll monitoring. The same hospital gave the state of Montana information for god only knows what purpose and the Mutts promptly had a security breach and the message went out “Your information may or may not have been exposed.” Here is your two-year subscription to Experian credit monitoring service. So I go to each website twice a month and pray to whichever heathen, pagan, or holy deity there is to look out for this poor dumb ass. Hope you get it resolved in a hurry.
My thoughts and sympathies to your security breach and the heads of those electronic security guards that will suffer. Isn’t it delightful that in our modern world we are so much more secure. I’m sure glad that big brother is watching me. It’s becoming more and more that I do with less. “What do you need my name for?” “You don’t need my SS#.” “You don’t seem to understand, you do not need to know my email address to serve me a cup of coffee”. Recently one of my area grocery stores started requiring customers to scan in their driver’s licenses to purchase beer and wine. I forget about this and have left several 6-packs behind with the store cashier because I don’t abide by this policy. They don’t need a scan of my license to check my age.
My $9.99 check is in the mail. Yep. Uh huh.
Such fun. We just found out that the pirates had three goes at us and only one has been deflected (as far as we know, anyway; it can take up to 48 hours for us to see whether our digital drawers have been pulled down). The Boss had to get on the horn again this morning to holler at some A.I. as I work my way down the list of vendors who want to know, “Where’s the money, Lebowski?”
“It’s uh … uh … it’s down there somewhere, let me take another look.”
Grocery stores have gone the social media route with their cards. The main purpose is to collect data about you and sell it to the highest bidder. Nobody really know what the price of something is because of store card discounts, sale prices, and coupons. The whole business model is so complex, I doubt the CEO of these mega grocery chains could explain how it works. Let me call my IT and data science guys and maybe they can help you understand it. You know, kinda like derivatives or credit default swaps.
It can’t be much longer before you’re pushing your cart through the grocery and various items on the shelves text you as you pass.
“Hello, sailor. …”
“Hey, don’t forget me. …”
“And me!”
“I’m on sale! One for the price of two!”