Doggone it

Last night when I responded for a medical call, I locked Kona up in his cage, figuring that my forty minute absence should be a good test of how he was going to do for the remainder of the week when I had to be gone for class each day.
When I got home, I found the cage door open and no dog in sight. Turns out that he figured out how to push the latch up and open the door. Half hoping that he would come back, and half hoping that he would just find his way to somewhere else (but completely hoping that he wouldn’t get injured by traffic on Whittaker), I left the porch light on and finished my dinner. About an hour later, I stepped outside to find him sitting on the porch. So I was half relieved and half dismayed. Either way, he was still my problem.
This morning, I locked him up again… this time securing the door to the pen so that even if he got the latch to release, the door wouldn’t swing open. Two hours later I pulled in the drive to find him waiting for me, and a dog-sized hole in a new section of the chain link fence.

For those keeping count (ie. me), that makes six escapes from the pen, all taking less that an hour, and all by driving his body *through* the cage. The “last straw” was about four fence-repairs ago, and while we were in fact making progress with desensitizing him to our absence (up to twenty minutes recently), I finally conceeded defeat. With Marie gone, and me having to work and go to class, there was just no way to even temporarily contain him, and we certainly were not going to simply allow him to do hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of damage to the inside of the house. I could have extended his stay by coordinating with the neighbors, Murrays, and friends who could have watched him while I was gone, but even this was an impossibility when I had emergency calls to respond to.
“Sorry sir, I couldn’t respond to that medical, or accident, or fire… because my dog has separation anxiety.” I know what *I’d* think if one of the guys on the department used that as an excuse.

So, options exhausted, I loaded him in the back of the Jeep, drove back to the Humane Society, and returned him to the staff in the hopes that he will find a home with someone who can give him the time and attention that he needs. And truthfully, it was just a matter of time before he escaped one last time to end up as a hood ornament. The odds are much more in his favor back at the shelter.

I feel like a horrible person.

JCats Show

Here’s the unedited/unmixed live recording of the JCats show last thursday. I realized that some of the folks who read the blog haven’t seen a show in a while, so I’ll bring the show to them!

_start()

Need to scare ‘em again

Well. That was about as predictable as a grey day in winter.
1) Our President, “Leader of the Free World” authorizes illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying on American citizens without judiciary oversight, thereby violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and the Fourth Amendment.
2) When news leaks to the press about the ongoing wiretapping, rather than explain and justify the action, the President promptly proclaims that whoever leaked the information would be brought to justice. Great. I feel much better that the President’s first order of business is to make sure that no one dares let the American public know about illegal policies and activities of the administration.
3) As public pressure increases, he changes his tune about not releasing any information on the action and starts to divulge more details.
4) And finally, as the public becomes more aware of the extent of the wiretapping and noteable lack of oversight and review, he pulls out the old 9/11 ace-in-the-hole and reminds us all that we’re supposed to be cowering in fear of the bad guys, appreciatively tossing our rights on the alter of “executive priviledge”. I particularly like how he brought up a foiled October 2001 terrorist plot at LAX that had nothing to do with wiretapping or domestic spying.

And then there’s the old, “we haven’t been attacked domestically since 9/11.” Great. Wonderful. I’m thankful, really. But I can’t help wondering how far executive priviledge can go before the President should be referred to as, “Leader of the Safe World”, instead of the “Free World”. You can’t always have it both ways, and this country needs to decide which it cherishes more.
I know how our founding fathers would answer.

Hadean Suburbs

That special neighborhood in Hades just keeps growing, and it looks like the credit card companies and spammers will be close neighbors. Besides essentially being a business of extortion… always offering you more credit and more ways to get into debt more easily… they try to sell you everything under the sun as accessories for that credit. What bugs me is that since you’re a mark customer, their calls aren’t subject to the DoNotCall Registry restrictions, because it’s a “courtesy” call.

After declining their rediculous credit protection scam several times already, they called again tonight with a new tactic. The caller stated up front that she was not going to sign me up for anything over the phone. When I stupidly agreed to confirm my name and address [ding! Why would they need it? I'm already a customer.], she announced that she was now recording the conversation and shifted into high gear. She read off the spiel faster than an auctioneer, verifying my info, and by the time she asked me if I understood for the third time, instead of answering yes, I started to clue in. My answer was “Can you go back a bit. I think I may have missed something.” In fact, I had almost missed something. I had actually managed to catch, “… and by enrolling in this program…” So I asked, “Wait. So you *are* actually enrolling me in the program.” Her response: “Only so we can get the information out to you. You can call anytime and cancel within the first thirty days.”
Yeah. You bet. One of two things will happen. Marie or I will see the junk mail from the credit card company and throw it out, losing the phone number and enrollment agreement, and thinking that since we’ve thrown it out, we don’t have to worry about it anymore. Or, I’ll waste my time on the phone waiting forever to speak with a customer service rep who is going to give me the same baloney over the phone as this person.
So my answer was, “I see. Please do not enroll me. I’m declining right now.”
[Click]
EDIT: I forgot to mention that this was the sound of the telemarketer hanging up on me.
I’ll feel so much better about hanging up on the next solicitor from Citi.

The real insidious part of this is that they flat out lie to you at the beginning, and then start a recording of the part of the conversation where you accidentally agree to something. Later, when you try to file a complaint or lawsuit against them for deceptive business practices, they have a recording of you agreeing to the program. And you have nothing.

Vonage, SunRocket… are you guys listening? Give the power back to the consumers. Let us record those annoying telemarketing calls with a single push of a button. The beauty of Voice-Over-IP is that this could easily piggyback on the already-existing digital voicemail systems.