Trying a New Game in the Bedroom

 
Covid has pushed people to their limits. Stuck in our homes, we all have time that would normally be spent outside our homes, with other people, now in need of filling. By now, 9 moths in, we have cleaned out and cleaned up practically every nook and cranny of our houses. Even the massive library of content offered by numerous providers has started to lose its appeal. So what form of entertainment can fill the void left by social distancing requirements? Last night my husband and I tried a new game called Hunting the Chirping Smoke Alarm.
 
Play started at 2:17 a.m. At this time the magical game piece, the smoke alarm, was activated to chirp in low power mode. There are numerous smoke alarms hard wired in throughout the house for players to choose from that will do this when their battery gets low. The game designers included several elements to add to the difficulty of the game: the CSA’s chirps echo off the walls in our basically open floor plan disguising the true location, and there is no blinking light or longer tone to help locate the low power CSA. Those things would make it too easy. They wanted to make this game challenging.
 
The fun main game piece emits a high-pitched, sleep-awakening sound, but only long enough to wake you, not long enough to help you locate the CSA. The game designers no doubt took a measure of sadistic joy in calculating the exact amount of time the average person would take to fall back asleep, but still be in light enough sleep to hear the subsequent chirp. Inexperienced players might not even realize what woke them up in the first place and foolishly try to go back to sleep.
 
We are not inexperienced players.
 
We were not sure exactly how many chirps there had already been, but both of us were wide awake. Donning enough game gear so as to be properly covered should anyone else in the house wake up to find us playing, we emerged into the hallway. We need not have feared discovery. The other people in the house enter a living-dead like state at night and neither hear nor react to anything. Even if they did, they remain confident that the problem will somehow resolve itself on its own. That left more fun for us.
 
We waited for the next chirp at which point my husband, Player 1, started his chronometer to measure the interval between tones. He is clearly an advanced level player. The subsequent chirp told us how long we had until the next chirp to position ourselves to echo locate the CSA. He took the second floor. I, Player 2, took the first. I can tell you it was quite exciting to be standing still in my pajamas alone in the dark of the first floor waiting for my husband’s count down to the next expected tone, imagining my ears like a fennec fox’s ready to locate the target with just a single 0.5 second pulse. Chirp.  We each made a best guess and repositioned ourselves directly under the smoke alarm we bet was making the noise. 

Like.a scene out of Awakening we both stood silently, motionless, looking up at the ceiling waiting for the next countdown to either confirm or invalidate our guesses. Who would win the point? Chirp And then those ominous words came from the second floor "It's in our bedroom."


I padded back upstairs, my sock covered footsteps barely audible on the carpeted treads.  

Those clever game designers had again added a level of extreme difficulty to keep the game interesting for us more seasoned players. This was not a smoke alarm that could be reached with a chair or simple step stool.  No, this one was at the peak of a 15 foot vaulted ceiling necessitating the use of  the 12 foot ladder - from the garage - the un-insulated garage which was currently a brisk 24 degrees.
 
Like in Jumanji, the game (chirping) will not end until a player reaches the CSA and changes the battery. Player 1 braved the iciness of the garage to bring in the ladder which Player 2 helped carry upstairs in a fashion reminiscent of the game Operation where the goal was to not hit any walls, doors or stair rails while silently snaking 12 feet of fiberglass and aluminum through the house.  

 
As with any decent quest we had to pick up objects along the way to help us so we stopped to grab a 9 volt battery and Player 1’s LED road safety light because, apparently, our mission must be carried out primarily in the dark.
 
Said light, which at full power produces something like 10,000 lumens and is illegal to aim up at the sky because it could literally blind airline pilots, was turned on and quickly shoved in the pocket of Player 1’s athletic pants. The pants immediately lit up with light diffused through the thin blue fabric making him look like a suburban version of a TRON character. This was getting  exhilarating. I just had to remember not to look directly at his leg or I too would be blind making it far more likely that I would let my end of the ladder hit something and cost us points.


Once in the bedroom the ladder was set up and right away began wafting out waves of coldness. Player 1 swiftly climbed it, pulled out the LED light and used it to find a replace the battery. Both players checked the chronometer. It was almost time for another chirp. Was it a dead battery? Was it a dusty sensor? 5...4...3...2...1... Silence. Success! We folded up the ladder. Mission accomplished.  We high-fived each other and got back into bed. Sleep at this point was completely impossible. We were too stoked from the hunt. That was when we noticed the light on the Roku box begin to blink in alternating levels of brightness. Was this another invitation to a game? A sign of poltergeists? Or were we just awake for a random update? We had no idea how busy our house was while we slept.



They say that batteries can last for 4 years in storage which most of these smoke alarm batteries are basically in. We do periodically test them but really, changing the battery too frequently would eliminate the possibility of play. Instead we go to bed each night knowing that at any time the game can decide to wake us up again to go Hunting the CSA.
 
 

The Christmas Flap

There was a blissful period of time, right around Thanksgiving, when outside interests ceased draining our time and attention. Suddenly those little issues around the house that had sat on the back burner, made their way into our consciousness.  One of those things was the slow leak in the first floor powder room toilet.  A simple examination of the toilet tank revealed that the rubber flush flap was leaking, probably due to age. This is the story of how a $3.47 plumbing part became a $2,000 Christmas “present.”  This is the story of the Christmas flap.

Replacing this little piece of red rubber was both simple and inexpensive.  In fact, the job was completed in about 15 minutes, which included a trip to Home Depot who, thankfully, is right behind our neighborhood.  That  should have been the end of the story, but it turns out it was just the beginning. 

As I mentioned,  outside pressures were relieved for all of us, so even my husband started to notice little things around that time that needed attending to.  What he noticed was that I had not reconnected the flush handle chain at EXACTLY the same length as it had been before.  I guess once you get used to the flush handle engaging in a certain spot it is like Chinese water torture to feel it engage a little later. This sent him into the tank to tinker, which then led to a stripped plastic screw on the ballcock causing the tank to now run continuously, and not just a little.  It was flowing a lot - audibly so.

This necessitated a replacement of the entire flush mechanism which, it just so happened, I already had in reserve in the basement.  Accomplishing this transfer should have been another 20-25 minute job.  The first step was to turn the water off to the tank. That is when I realized just how long we had been neglecting this particular toilet.  The water supply valve required a wrench to move it from the position it must have been stuck in for the last 15 years.  The rusted weakened valve, grateful to have been relieved of its duty to control the flow of water, promptly failed.  We now had a toilet with a broken valve in the tank that let water keep flowing in from an on/off supply valve that no longer had an "off" position.

So, after turning off the water to the entire house, I made another trip to Home Depot to see if I could find a replacement supply valve.  It probably would have been a good idea if I had brushed the accumulated fuzzy dust off the valve that was in place when I looked at it before I left. Then I would have known the trip would be wasted. Our supply valve was sweated on to a copper pipe.  We had left the realm of self home improvement  and moved into the field of professional plumber.  While the water was off I put in the new ballcock, following the directions as best I could.  You see, the directions assume you have a working supply valve so that small adjustments do not have to be made between trips to the basement to turn all the water to the house back on.  This would turn out to be a problem later, as you will see.

A confident plumbing  professional was able to come the next day and not only replace my supply valve, but give me one that, should it fail again (and he assured me it would), I could replace myself.  It is nice to meet a professional who recognizes those of us with strong self reliant streaks who would like to not have to wait for them again. Feeling the need to justify the exorbitant figure he  was about to charge me, he gave the toilet a complete check up:  something  like a 75,000 flush maintenance program I guessed. That was when he noticed that the  new ballcock mechanism I had installed was already clogged with sediment, something that would have been avoided if I could have turned the supply valve on slowly as the directions suggested.  He said it was causing the stack to leak.  So basically we were back to the slow leak that started this whole mess.

He also delicately informed us that our commode was the, “cheapest stool a builder can install,”  further noting that this particular brand was especially prone to clogging.  Hah, I thought.  I didn’t need a professional to tell me that.  I was already very familiar with this particular plumbing fixture’s predilection for clogging.  He suggested a complete replacement of said toilet.  I thanked him for his frank appraisal, and sent him on his way, along with $180.

So back to Home Depot, this time with my husband. We were actually there to get a couple strands of Christmas lights for our Christmas hedge, but as long as we were together, we thought we’d see what  was available for the powder room. There we stood, on date night, in the plumbing aisle, staring up at the dozens of gleaming, mostly white, porcelain bowls on display  trying to decide which one would be best.  Until that moment, I had not realized how little I have paid attention to the amenities and abilities of modern indoor flushing technology.  Imagine my surprise to read, on one of the handy features tags that manufacturers supply, “4x more powerful than any human needs.”  Another one promised to flush "10 golf balls in a single flush." Good lord! What has happened to the human digestive tract? Was the country’s current obesity epidemic causing a subsequent engineering challenge to our waste engineers?  Apparently, challenge met.

We selected a mid range toilet that could handle even a week of pork dinners and notable lack of roughage.  My husband then surprised me with his sensitivity when he mused that the new toilet would look rather out of place with the old fashioned towel bars and toiletpaper holder we had. Heaven forbid we have amenities from different eras in the same room.  So, on we went to the bath fixture aisle where we selected three pieces to update the room.

“You know, as long as we are updating the room, we really should get a new faucet,” he said.  Sure, I thought. Why not.  Apparently money, like the water through the ballcock in our  toilet, was flowing freely.  On to the faucet aisle we went to get one that went with the towel bars.

At this point, giddy excitement overtook my normally decorating demure husband.  “As long as we’re doing some updating….”   Updating?  I thought we were fixing a broken toilet!  “We should replace the faucets in the kids’ bath too.”  Ok Bob Villa.  We haven’t yet mastered replacing the one you just put in the cart 3 minutes ago, but  I’m sure we’re just as good as those people on the Do It Yourself shows. Two more faucets went in the cart.  This of course necessitated the purchase of two new towel bars and towel rings to go with them (see comment about matching era items for the powder room.)

School and the holidays loomed ahead, and suddenly we were doing a whole house update. I asked my mate, who usually heads to bed around 9:30, if he was planning to relive his college days and pull an all nighter to install everything in the cart as I was not sure how I, who normally takes care of the shopping, wrapping, shipping, baking, writing, and decorating was going to squeeze in this update before the new year.  Surrounded by boxes that assured the consumer they could install anything themselves, his confidence was buoyed that he could do most of it.  I, however, sensed a conspiracy on the part of the packaging.

We walked out of Home Depot $850 later and tried to load all this stuff into his Mercedes (remember, we just went to get two strands of lights).  Mercedes may be surprised to learn (as I was) that a toilet does indeed fit in the back seat of an E50. 

The next day we began the installations.  The powder room faucet was relatively easy.  The kids’ faucets proved a little more problematic.  They required another trip to Home Depot for some connector hoses.  By now, their employees had begun a pool to see how many more times we would be back. I bought the #8 square. A little adjustment with a dremel saw that, surprisingly, was  not mentioned in the installation instructions, was all that stood between us and the last new faucet. Armed with safety glasses and my conveniently small hands, I sawed off a section of chrome wire that just would not fit with the new faucet set up and, voila, success.

Old towel bars removed. Wall patched. New bars installed. We were just about there. The only thing left was to paint the walls.  

We have painted before, but it has never been fun.  One of us has this thing about really straight lines where the walls meet the ceiling and one of us thinks that as long as you can generally see they are on two different planes it’s fine. Seeing my apprehension, my newly sensitive husband suggested this might be another time to bring in a professional.  I readily agreed.

I expected the painter to be directed to the powder room upon his arrival to give us an estimate.  Well, you can imagine my surprise when my husband first showed him the two story foyer and then asked me what color I thought would be good to paint it.  This update was spreading.  It was starting to get out of control. I told him I didn’t care what color it was.  I just wanted the toilet to stop leaking! This tirade from left field threw him a little.

It also turns out that, like bathroom fixtures, old paint does not like to mingle with new paint.  Not only would the foyer get a new coat, but so would the front door, the interior doors and frames, the master bedroom ceiling  and, oh yes, the powder room.  That room would also get some wainscoating and a new chair rail.  And all of this would occur just days before we had all the neighbors over for a holiday gathering.  It would also start AFTER I had put up all our Christmas decorations which would have to come down, again, for the painters. This update was beginning to have a life of its own and it was severely conflicting with mine.

The painters were wonderfully fast, friendly and competent. They even helped remove the atrocious old toilet from the powder room so they could paint behind where the new one would sit.  They left with $1200 and fumes following them.  I will get around to putting the new toilet in tomorrow, the day before company comes so I better get it right or we will be limiting their drinks to reduce their trips upstairs to use the other bathrooms. That would necessitate cleaning up all the bedrooms and I'm afraid what updating we might find needed to be done there.

And to think it all started with a little Christmas flap.

Toilet Flap           $       3.47

Towel Bars          $   150.00

Faucets                $   290.00

Toilet                   $   320.00

Paint + labor         $1,000.00            

Wainscoating        $   200.00

Plumber               $   180.00

      $2,123.47

The New School Nutrition Law - Blessing or Curse?

Our mothers knew that when they had kids they would have to take care of them. They would have to clothe, shelter and feed them. They learned, if they didn’t already know it from what they saw their mother doing, what it took to get those basic human needs taken care of. When money or time was tight they figured out a way to take care of their kids because they knew it was their responsibility.

Today the President signed into law a measure that takes mothers far down a very different road. The Child Nutrition Act has at its core the assumption that today’s mothers are not capable of providing for their children as our mothers did. They don’t know what foods to provide or how to buy them economically. The law makes the statement that it is not even their responsibility to do so. The reason their children have not eaten well so far is because the entity whose responsibility it is, the government, has fallen down on the job and failed to provide for her children. The bill already has provisions in it that allow additional meals to be provided beyond lunch. Breakfast is currently served in many schools to children from low income homes. And since they are taking money from the food stamp program to fund this law, it is a no brainer that the school system (as a distribution center for government programs) will soon also provide dinner, taking all responsibility from mothers for feeding their children.

This may be seen as a blessing for some mothers struggling to fill this parental role now. They will no doubt be grateful that someone else can do what they don’t think they can. But consider the future parenting of such a mother’s children. They will not even consider that it will be their responsibility to provide sustenance for the children they bring into the world. What is special help in times of adversity will become the norm for these children. They will consider it the government’s responsibility to feed their children and scream if anyone threatens to stop that necessary service. To them and their children it will be necessary because they will have had no example of how it was done and therefore no skills in doing it. They will not know what and how to buy in bulk. The concept of stocking up on sale items with decent shelf life will seem completely foreign. Coupons? Who needs coupons?

Food service providers will be elevated because basic food preparation will no longer be done at home. Preparing food will seem like magic requiring special skills not attainable by the average person. We already have women who say, “I can’t cook.” These are women who can go into any grocery store and buy meals that simply require water and a little heating to prepare. Some cook books provide little guidance into the makings of a meal. Rachel Ray’s cookbooks are loaded with recipes whose ingredients are themselves prepared foods. Instead of giving the measurements for the amounts of cumin, red pepper, garlic, paprika and oregano one needs, she simply calls for a package of taco flavoring. Simple? Yes, but at least one step away from knowing what goes into the food you prepare. I have seen a woman with a full (relatively unused) spice rack give up on a recipe because she did not have chili powder to make chili.

I am a true libertarian and lament the basic survival skills we all have lost. The art of growing and canning our own fruits and vegetables is quickly dying. The closest some people get to growing things is Farmville. Our parents embraced the new conveniences as time savers. Mothers didn’t have to spend as much time thinking about or preparing meals because they could defrost the meat in the microwave if they forgot to take it out of the freezer in the morning. Add a bottle of Thai Peanut sauce and some instant rice and you are feeding the family an exotic meal in 20 minutes. They didn't think about the skill set being lost to the convenience. I have seen people with gas stoves fretting about how they will prepare a meal during a blackout with no microwave or electronic ignition. Figuring out how to cook a meal on a girl scout camp-out seemed a lesson in the impossible with no timer or temperature setting devices available. The girls were completely at a loss to figure out how to make a simple cobbler. The program has sunk so far they are not even taught what my generation knew, that each charcoal briquette adds 30 degrees to the temperature. And even that bit of knowledge is one step removed from trying to cook over a wood fire.

This lack of knowledge is typically not an issue with all the conveniences we currently have. Most information is but a click away on any number of electronic devices. But it leaves us precariously perched. We are only one major blackout, ice storm or trucking strike away from panic. And this is nothing to compared to the breakdown of society from the very real threat of an electro magnetic pulse (EMP) being detonated over the middle of the country. (Read William R. Forstchen’s One Second After for a very realistic look at what the country looks like after an EMP.)

If we were dependent on our elders or our neighbors in such times of crisis I would not be as worried. They had the knowledge from experience or the knowledge of our needs and capabilities. But most of us will be dependent on our government in a crisis and, as far as I can see, they don’t have a very good track record. So, though the school lunch program seems small and almost insignificant, it is a sign of the times and a predictor of what life in the future will be like in this country if we accept these conveniences without also providing the knowledge of the basic skills as well. The exceptions of one generation become the norms of the next.

Ear Ache Overkill

I just practiced being a responsible health care user. Here’s the short back story. Two weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a pretty acute ear ache. I first applied traditional home remedies. I put a hot washcloth over my ear. I put in some homeopathic drops. I took some ibuprofen. 

In the morning the ache was a little diminished but I now also had terrible tinnitus and could hear my own voice echoing in my head. I lived with it for a while but when it didn’t seem to be getting better I figured I needed to take further action. 

 Two days later I tried the low cost option of seeing the nurse practitioner at Walgreens figuring she could prescribe some antibiotics. I assumed it would be a quick trip in, look in my ear, see the inflammation and walk out with some pills. Sure they might ask some medical questions to make sure I had no medication allergies or other symptoms that might mean something other than a simple ear ache. But honestly, other than the deafness and dull ache I had no other symptoms. It seems however that the Walgreens corporate philosophy is that people who don’t have regular health care providers will use them as their main source of health care. That seems the only explanation I can come up with why the nurse also had to listen to my heart, take my blood pressure and palpate my abdomen, for an EAR ACHE. Then there was the computer guided medical history she was required to take that asked, in addition to the health of all my blood relatives, how many people lived at my home, what their ages were and if I had any pets. It was beyond thorough. It was invasive and unnecessary for an EAR ACHE. 

I could not help imagining all this personal data being collected by the newly formed medical panels in DC to create a database about my health. With that in mind, I was not exactly honest in my answers because you don’t need a medical degree to know that your grandmother’s heart disease has no bearing on your ear. So by my answers it would appear that, not only are all my relatives healthy, but in fact none of them have died, ever. We are still waiting to see what kills us. 

Unfortunately for me, 5 days of antibiotics only brought relief from the ache. The deafness and sense that something was plugging up my ear were still ever present. I could no longer locate the source of sounds. I could not hear my clock radio going off in the morning. A simple rubbing of my fingers infront of my left ear and then right ear proved that I was not hearing well on my right side. I had used enough ear wax cleaner at this point to be fairly certain I did not have a giant plug of wax blocking things. I had also taken enough Sudafed to dry up every mucosal lining in my body so I figured there was something else going on and it was time to bring in a real doc. Off to the ENT. 

He looked in both ears and said they looked fine. He listened to my complaint and then sent me to an assistant who did a very thorough hearing test which confirmed I had some loss on the right of the high pitches, but that overall my hearing was good and I did not have any fluid behind my ear drum. Somewhat disappointed that there was not an obvious cause of my symptoms I met again with the doc who concluded my problem was viral and prescribed antiviral meds and steroids to bring down any inflammation I had. He also prescribed an MRI “just to be sure.” Here is where I started becoming suspicious. 

His staff had me scheduled for one in 36 hours and a follow up appointment for another hearing test in a month before I even left the office. By the time I went for the MRI the meds had done their job and I could hear again. I had misgivings about going for the MRI but, not really understanding what was involved in it, I still went to the appointment. Once there I had the usual paperwork which included all the necessary warnings about the procedure. They would inject dye that could cause kidney failure, or could remain in your system and cause “permanent hardening of the tissue”. There also was some increased risk for cancer from the exposure. While the techs answered my questions, they were not bubbling forth with information about what would happen even though I told them I had never had this done before. 

I got as far as laying on the machine and being slid into tunnel when all my misgivings hit me. They said this would be a 45 minute test, not a quick snapshot of what was going on. They would be injecting potentially harmful substances into me. They would have a picture not only of my ear but of my whole brain (again the vision of the DC database came to mind) and all of this could cost more than $1500 for an EAR ACHE that was 95% better! I made them take me out and I walked out of the center. Despite what I mumbled at the time, they thought I left because of claustrophobia from being inside the machine and said I could come back after taking an Adavan if I wanted. I did not tell them that I was suffering more from cost-rophobia and Adavan would not solve that. 

All the way home I kept questioning why a doctor would order such an expensive and potentially risky procedure BEFORE finding out if the medication alone would resolve the problem. I had gone along like a health care sheep with the whole process as I’m sure most people do. I wonder if most people would have had the MRI thinking the doctor knows best. I believe it is this kind of medical practice that leads to such high health care costs and a sense from people that they need all this expensive “health care” treatment. In the end it is entirely possible that if I had been a bit more patient with my aging body that it would have eventually overcome the inflammation that was the source of my problem and I would not have had to spend anything except may $2.98 on a bottle of Advil. I am grateful to have health care that will pay for the nurse and the ENT, but I will be a cost conscious consumer in the future.

Dirty Little Secret

I have a secret. Well at least I did before I posted it on this blog. The secret is: I cannot make dirt. I can buy it, spread it, plant in it, clean it off my clothes, but I cannot make it in the form of compost. I have tried several times with various methods. I have been told it is easy; just combine 50% brown matter with 50% green matter, stir occasionally and voila in three weeks or so you should have compost. I have tried; really, really, tried. Just recently I went all out and bought an official composting bin that spins and collects “green compost tea.” I have nurtured it with kitchen scraps, shredded newspaper and lawn clippings. What I have after three weeks is a blend of newspaper, grass and gunk. Not exactly something I would want to plant in. 

 I don’t get it. I can make beautiful music with my flute. I can make a 20 page newsletter. I can make dinner. Why can’t I make dirt. I mean really. It should be a natural process of decay. How incompetent must I be to fail in overseeing decay? And if it isn’t such a natural process, shouldn’t we be more concerned about what’s in our cemeteries? Is my penchant for cleanliness to blame? (My mother would beg to differ.) Some part of me is convinced there is a farming conspiracy that wants to keep us planting newbies from ever getting nature's gold. Don’t go suggesting special compost additives, earthworm kits or special composting systems. I’m sure they all work. But the basic facts come down to this:

• Humans, under very specific controlled circumstances, can make dirt.
• Nature, under completely uncontrolled and random circumstances, can also make dirt.
• I, under anything less than perfect circumstances, have no hope of ever making dirt.

Perhaps I need not worry. While I cannot seem to make dirt, I am, it turns out, a great accidental gardener. I love dill and have tried for several years to grow dill. I have had trouble starting the seeds. The few scrawny plants that have sprouted have not survived transplant. The one (yes one) plant that did make it to the garden grew moderately but was so sparse I was afraid to harvest any because I feared it would severely compromise the plant’s chlorophyll process and kill it. Suddenly this year, those seeds so casually spread by last year’s weak plant have sprouted an entire field of dill in my garden. I also have new plants from last year’s dropped tomatoes and left over snow pea pods. I thought the seed manufacturers had made seeds that were sterile, in other words, would produce plants that would not produce any other plants. (What a great copyright protection on mother nature.) It seems however, that the myth of sterility is somewhat exaggerated. So I encourage my fellow flora fanatics to go out, plant, hope for the best, prepare for the worst and don’t worry if you can’t make compost either. I think mother nature will fill in where we fail.

“The buck stops here”; the ultimate statement of accountability and one rarely uttered by people anymore. Despite all the bucks flying to Washington, few of them are stopping there. There seems to be a desperate shortage of accountability in DC.

Accountability is a built-in governor to our actions. Trying to live a life without accountability is like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel. Sure, you’re gonna go places but not with any specific direction. It's easy to see how life could become a series of accidents that you are involved in with no understanding of why they occurred and no ability to prevent them in the future. Where accountability has been removed, either through oversight, trickery or a misguided effort to be compassionate, in essence your steering wheel has been taken away.

Perhaps there is an overall misunderstanding about what accountability means. Accountability is not about blame. It is about understanding that your actions have consequences and accepting those consequences. It is a mistake to view those consequences as punishment. They should be a learning experience. They should teach you not to do that again. This is the message we should teach our children about accountability.

Accountabilityand trust are interwtined. The great thing about it is that, when you accept responsibility for your actions, it is much easier for others to trust you going forward. By shirking their accountability, those in DC don't learn to change their actions and thus lose our trust. Alas, accountability seems to be an ephemeral quality.

Consider the credit rating bureaus. Let's ignore for the moment that I neither asked for nor authorized any of them to track my credit information and rate me. Here are three businesses that make money off of me. I have no official relationship with them, and they are not accountable to me. Yet their ability to direct my life is enormous. While there is some official regulation that forces them to have a modicum of accountability to the debtor, they make you painfully aware of how small that is if you ever try to deal with them to get information changed. Let's face it. There is very little trust in this scenario.

On the other side are the creditors who have very little accountability to me with regards to the credit bureaus. They can put in information that they themselves admit is incorrect, and yet they have no incentive to correct it, or at least correct it in a timely manner. Accountability should mean that there would be a negative consequence for them putting in incorrect information and a positive consequence for them correcting it.

I offer for example an error that occurred with us over 20¢ owed to a national tire company. We had paid off a one-year-same-as-cash loan for a set of tires based on the last statement that we got. Their records, for some reason or another, differed by 20¢. During this period of time we happened to move. We never bothered informing them of our new address because as far as we were concerned we were done with that contract and had paid in full. The tire company then proceeded to send us bills for the remaining 20¢. Obviously we were no longer at the address they had on file. Somehow, possibly through the post office’s forwarding system, they incorrectly updated our address to Dover Delaware when we in fact we lived in Dover New Hampshire. That 20¢, as you can imagine, became compounded with interest, late fees and eventually penalties. By the time this came to light, when we applied for a new mortgage, the amount owed had risen to approximately $250. And because of their report to the credit bureaus our ability to get a new mortgage was now somewhat in question.

I contend that we were all accountable for our actions and all of us had some role in making this happen this way. We should have looked for confirmation that our bill was paid in full. The post office should have supplied the correct address (if in fact the error was theirs). The tire company should have attempted to find a correct address when those reminder statements to Dover, Delaware kept getting returned to sender. The problem we discovered, however, was that the only one who was accountable for anything in this was us. We had to contact the tire company to find out what happened. We had to make the effort (5 times) to get them to change our address. We had to follow up with them to make sure that they filed the appropriate revision to the credit report showing that we had taken care of this. Their official statement to the credit bureau simply said that we had finally paid the account in full. There was no mention of their role in the delinquency of it.

If I am going to be fully accountable for my credit, I should be able to select the credit bureau that I would like to use as my main bureau. I would then enter into a contract with that bureau, and they would be accountable to me as a customer. I would have control (to some extent) over the accuracy of my file. If pulling a credit reports is going to count against me, I should have some control over who does it and how often it is pulled. They would not authorize any new credit issuance without my express approval. (Think of what this would do to rates of identity theft.) The credit bureau would become an integral agent in keeping my file accurate and helping to maximize my credit score.

Creditors also would be more accountable for their actions. Much like a series of late payments on a debtor’s part hurts them, a creditor who consistently puts bad information into credit files would be "dinged" by the bureau. Noting that their records indicate the creditor has a bad history of providing incorrect information which they then have to spend a lot of time cleaning up, future credit pulls or notes would be charged to that creditor at a higher rate. The bureau would be accountable to me so that I would not be the victim of a sloppy or lazy creditor. The creditor would be accountable to the bureau for supplying accurate information. And I would finally be truly accountable for my credit rating.

Perhaps all of this is already done, but there is so much cloak and dagger surrounding the bureaus that the average person can not be sure of how they operate. The whole business has the general air of guilt until innocence is proven.

A final note on the tire episode -- we were able to go ahead with the mortgage because the tire company provided us with a letter stating that the account had finally been settled for an amount that was a compromise between the 20¢ of the $250. Six months later, however, they still had not filed the appropriate paperwork with the credit bureaus and we had to follow up with them yet again. We were surprised (although we shouldn't have been at that point) that there was still a note in their records stating that this account was outstanding. The operator who answered the phone asked, in a snotty tone, if we didn't know that we needed to pay our bills. We shot back and asked if she didn't know that her company needed to keep accurate records and needed to change our address, which was still listed as Dover Delaware, to Dover New Hampshire. She got a little flustered, but that was nothing compared to how flustered she got when we asked to speak to the vice president by name since we had his signature on a letter in front of us stating that this account had been paid in full. So much for accountability.

Salaries

My husband and I have had a "disagreement" about salaries for a long time. I have been the one, admittedly, whining that some people make too much money. My pet peeves were celebrities and athletes. I said they didn't do anything that great to warrant the millions of dollars being thrown at them. The former, for the most part, were glorified story tellers. Worse yet, they weren't even the ones writing the stories. They were just giving voice to someone else's idea. The latter were being applauded for basically playing a game. If the game at least resembled something useful in the real world, like the gladiator games did, then I could see some justification. But to me, their value was no greater than my husband's bicep's value if he was too tired from his workout to put out the trash. Impressive to look at but I wouldn't pay a lot for them.


My husband maintains that people are paid what the market will bear. Both celebrities and athletes are more like tools for the companies they work for. If they are popular, they bring in more revenue and therefore can ask a higher price. And as long as fans are willing to pack the ball park and movie theater, their salaries should remain high. Hence - what the market will bear. I was just going to have to wait until people started agreeing with me and stopped going to see films and games before those salaries would come down.


He recently defended the AIG executive salaries saying they are the ones taking all the risk and therefore should be paid for that. And at first I agreed with him, especially since my own 401K benefitted greatly from the risks of Wall Street investment firms which, through their trading and fund management, increased my accounts's value. But then I had to ask, what risk did they really have? It wasn't their money they were working with, it was yours and mine. Their only real risk was losing their job and don't we all have that risk. In terms of effort or time, there are plenty of people who work physically harder or longer hours and are not paid as much. In terms of intelligence, there are plenty of scientists out there who are at least equally smart in their own field who don't get paid nearly what those top execs did.


In terms of importance you could say that what they did was incredibly important. It kept the world's largest economy going. But couldn't you say that the basic researchers who develop the flu vaccine every year, thereby preventing tens of thousands of deaths are even more important. And talk about risk. If they get it wrong you don't just lose money, you lose life.


So you probably think I'm one of those people who think the AIG execs shouldn't get those large salaries. But I'm not. I'd rather live in a world where you are free to set up your own system, be it a company or an economic entity like banking, and make as much money as you can because you thought of the idea, than in one where some external power tells you what you can't do, what is the most you can make and how you are to spend what you do make. If the world was perfect, people wouldn't be super greedy. Or if they did make a lot of money they would use a decent portion of it to better their local community. But I will accept those things not happening as a cost of being free to pursue your dreams.