Random Reflections Pt5

11.I’m going to come across sounding like an evil, racist young cuss and I don’t care.

In another life, I sold cellphones. Without fail, once a day, we got several Latino persons or families in the store, either looking to pay off their bill (Sprint will let you buy what amounts to a gift card, and once a month you present this card to someone like me, we punch a few buttons on the register, you hand me cash enough to cover your bill, and voila! you’re paid up for another month) or buy a cellphone. And also without fail, at least one person per day had absolutely no command of the English language. I’m not talking about poor grammar or a thick accent – I mean they SPOKE NO ENGLISH. They’d go up to each person in the store and say “Spanish?” If you said no, they’d try every other employee. If you said yes, or I’ll try, you spent the next 4 hours working out a cellphone deal caveman style.

Here’s the thing though – never once did I see one of these people have anything less than a $150 dollar cash deposit on their phone. They bought phones with a minimum $30 per month contract (usually $50+, to tell the truth) and a load of taxes, activation fees, and sundry expenses. Not counting the price of the phone, buying and activating a cellphone is EXPENSIVE. And they bought decent cellphones. Middle of the road, not crap phones, not top of the line phones, but solid, reasonably performing phones. And they paid in cash.

I remember this one transaction vividly, this family of Latinos come in, a husband, wife, older daughter and two to five kids between the ages of fifteen and five, and ALL of them have cellphones clipped to their belts or waistbands. Every single one of them. None of them spoke any English while they were there, and the husband understood barely enough to indicate which one of my inquiries (buy a phone, pay a bill, etc) was correct. He paid me nearly $250 in twenty dollar bills to cover his phone bill for the month.

Now maybe I’m just dense, but how does someone who speaks not a lick of English get enough cash to pay for a four or five hundred dollar cellphone package outright, and then keep coming back each month to pay a (usually) hundred and fifty dollar bill in cash? How? I wanna know – I want that job!

12.The benighted governor of my fair state recently proposed and passed two laws benefiting military veterans. One allowed veterans or their families to cancel their cellphone coverage at any time without monetary penalty. For the rest of us, that penalty after an average of one week is around $200. The second measure allows veterans and their families to attend any state university for no or little cost. What the hell, over?

We’ll pick these apart one by one. The first law is directly screwing with a private company, an act of government specifically targeting certain companies to give government employees better business than everyone else. Government legislating business practices, not to make them more fair (which is in itself a travesty) but to get their own employees better treatment…what…how…I’m speechless.

The second law may or may not be worse than the first. It’s of greater monetary value, but it doesn’t screw with private companies for selfish reasons. No one knows how we’re going to pay for the education of every “taker” vet and their family in the state. Even the governor admits he’s flying by the seat of his pants, though in far more eloquent and duplicitous terms. He’s taking money from every other person in this state to give government employees better treatment than anyone else gets.

Not that I’m complaining that everyone else doesn’t get this treatment. No one should get a free or partially free ride on anything, for anything, to anywhere. There’s no faster way to bankrupt something than to start offering free stuff to everyone and their brother’s cousin.

No, what I’m complaining about is interference in private companies’ business for the benefit of only certain people, and sticking you and me with the bill for someone else’s expensive education, based only on who they choose to associate with. This is tyranny. This is the creation of a new “landed” class of people, a fostering of the “Us Vs Them” mentality that’s going through society. Government has NO right to determine who gets special treatment, better perks, hell, they don’t have the right determining who gets average treatment or ANY perks.

13.9mm is a perfectly acceptable defensive caliber. I don’t want to get shot with it. Anything over a pellet gun is a perfectly acceptable defensive caliber, but only if you use decent hollowpoints, and can hit your target multiple times. If someone could build a reliable semi-automatic handgun that held 25-30 rounds of .22LR or .22MAG, I’d think long and hard about carrying it. Capacity is to a gun what endurance is to a runner. When it’s on, you want to stay in the game as long as possible. That said, .44AMP will put a guy on his back faster than .17HMR. Doesn’t mean we should all carry Automags though, it means we should puzzle and puzzle till our puzzlers are sore about what we want in a gun. I want rounds at least a third of an inch wide, and a lot of them, and I want them to come out of the gun as fast as I can pull the trigger. Make your own decision about what you want to shoot defensively.

14.More on clothes. Kohl’s department store has a pair of pants the tag of which proudly proclaims “Two legged pants.” Even amputees wear two legged pants, they just pin one leg up. Would pants with one leg be called a pant? Has anyone ever see three legged pants? I fail to see where having the same number of legs to your pants as everyone else is a selling point.
Why do socks come in Ziploc bags advertised as “easily resealable?” Does anyone buy a bag of socks, put them in the closet, and remove a pair and then reseal as necessary?

15.Some people are going to accuse me of being disrespectful after reading this one. I’m not. I’m just fed up with this public official adoration stuff. Just about any death is a tragedy. Being on the government dole does not elevate your death to a national crisis.

A firefighter died in my city a few days ago. He wasn’t doing anything particularly heroic at the time (carrying infants out of a burning building, giving mouth-to-mouth to a cat, that sort of thing), he was just walking through a flaming house, spraying water. He fell through the floor and rescue crews were unable to retrieve him. This is bad. His surviving family has my condolences. He is not, however, any more important than anyone else who dies in this town, at the rate of five or six a day.

He was on the front page of every local newspaper for, well, since he died. That’s been about a week. Today was his funeral, and boy, was it a doozy. Televised on four channels. Cameras dedicated to his wife and son. Coverage of the funeral from the first car pulling up to the last swing of the incense burner. THEN, he gets driven through the city by about half the police force. The city’s rented several super-duper hook-and-ladder trucks and set them up two-by-two along the route, with huge custom flags hanging from each. I bet the coffin doesn’t go more than three feet without passing under at least two flags. Firefighters from New York, that he DIDN’T even know, have been flown in for the event.

This guy was just a man. Just folk as Capt. Reynolds says. He ate, drank, slept, shopped, put his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. But Suzy Q. Public doesn’t get laid to rest with all the pomp and splendor that a firefighter or police officer does, because she’s not paid by the government.

Our firefighter didn’t NOT know that his job was dangerous. He accepted, of his own volition and without coercion, a job that paid him well in exchange for going into places the rest of us would rather flee. He was paid well to do dangerous stuff and try and outrun the numbers. The numbers caught up to him, as he was perfectly aware that they might.

Yes, his death is a tragedy, but there is positively no need for the city to blow several thousand of yours and my dollars (probably tens or hundreds of thousands, to tell the truth) to make sure that his coffin is protected from sun during its trip to the graveyard by flags hung from outrageously expensive rented firetrucks, or that there are men he didn’t know from New “Remind us incessantly of 9/11” York there to be visible at his funeral.

Let the man rest in peace.