[Elspode]

Nope. My truck is 11 years old and has nearly a quarter million miles on the clock. However, it is sturdy, reliable and not even slightly rusty. But - I only carry liability, and that doesn't cover glass. My homeowners might cover it, but my deductible is higher than the replacement cost, which was $230, done on site by Safelite on two hours notice. Now, $230 is real money in my book, and I could have done a lot of things with that money, but it certainly could have been worse. It was almost certainly vandalism for Halloween (although I don't think we rated any tricks - we gave out huge handfuls of candy to everyone because we have so few trick or treaters, and we were open for business until Midnight).

All in all, this has been one Hell of a fucked up day. I had to deal with month end closing for starters. My boss likes to make it as challenging as possible. We used to have until 5:00 local time to close. Corporate changed that to Noon a few months ago. When they did that, for some totally inexplicable reason, my boss decided that it would also be a dandy idea to have a staff meeting on closing mornings, which means 30 to 45 minutes less than the four hours we now have instead of the nine we used to have.

I'm tough...I got through that with two minutes to spare. In the meantime, I had to line up the glass company, deal with the loan refinancing on the Grandview house, produce paperwork for the writeoff of over $40k worth of inventory caused by our going out of the fireplace business (three times, because the fireplace guy is a doofus and kept thinking of things he'd sold without posting them), cope with trying to get payroll done (a task made more challenging by the fact that we have a crew out of town who faxed in their completed work orders only to discover that the fax failed before completion), get funds for the staff lunch, and about fifty other things that had people standing in front of my desk every two minutes for three hours straight.

The piece' de resistance was when I stopped by the house on my way to TF's to pick up my computer, and Kaleigh ran down the stairs saying, "Oh, good, you're home! Call the gas company, they shut us off today even though we paid the bill over the automated system yesterday."

Fuck. So, twenty minutes on hold with them (while I listened to a song to which the lyrics, no shit, included the words "You're always calling me, always calling me..." set to a light R&B score. That's COLD) Well, come to find out, despite all of the technology available to corporations these days, it seems that, if you pay your bill via the automated system on one day, and your shutoff date is the next day, you have to call the company and tell them you paid it, give them your confirmation number, so that they'll call off the dude with the gas meter boot.

Now, call me cynical, but I know damn good and well that, if they didn't *want* this situation to exist, it wouldn't. Why does it exist? Because they charge you $45 to come and turn it back on, of course; a procedure that takes about ten minutes that is performed by a guy who probably does thirty of these things a day at a hard total cost of maybe $10 per house. So he costs the gas company $300, and rakes in $1350, leaving a net profit of over $1k per day.

What possible motivation would they have to fix a situation that makes them $1k a day for basically doing nothing? And what are you gonna do if you don't like it? Get a different gas company?

I plan to write a more lengthy treatise on why the Almighty Dollar is destroying society before too much longer. I'm no commie. I believe in Capitalism, but I don't believe that abandoning morality, common sense and humanity in pursuit of profit is a Capitalist tenet. In fact, they taught me that this was what the Commies did...