Rockstar Debtors

Really, masters of ridiculous indebtedness whose journeys I simply MUST follow along with?

We all know the types: a guy borrowed his way through six years of English upstate, now he has a book; a forty-something homemaker and her rich husband kept up with the Joneses a bit too long, now she’s on Oprah; a twenty-year-old mom whose husband is serving in Afghanistan, you just HAVE to read her blog. They’re all flat broke.

More accurately, and honestly like so many of us, they’re all deeply in the negative.

But they’re all toootally unique, mind you! Young Brian’s $254,000 Master’s of the Unemployed Arts is as new and exciting as Mrs. and Mr. Emptied-Moneybags’ four repossessed Jaguars and the 400,000 square yard home they’re now squatting in. And both pale in comparison to the emotional beauty of the story of young Janie Bad-at-saying-no’s marriage to Corporal Poor-Planning over here with their five kids born before the two of them turned a combined age of 46.

Instead of living in shame on the run, leading collectors on a breadcrumb trail of BS and small, sporadic payments as is tradition, these alleged winners-to-be aim to drag us through every awkward phone call, each painful admission, and every unlearned-from regret.

Their failure to correct their own course is as infuriating as their self-righteous tone. They are not like experts I know and love for creative methods of staying *ahead* through clever means of better buying, saving, and budgeting. Instead it is with much agony that you will listen to great sacrifices like cutting the daily Starbucks budget down to $20 daily, firing one of the maids, and maybe not having three more kids before DCFS decides how to proceed.

Let alone their more direct money managing blunders. Want an indication of how little someone is committed to handling debt correctly? Gauge their love for Dave Ramsey’s “Snowball Effect.” For those of you who haven’t had the displeasure: this means totally ignoring your own interest rates while paying off your lowest bills first. The term “snowball,” of course, refers to the exorbitant sums you’ll waste on interest this way. Yes indeed, bringing up the Snowball is a surefire method for identifying someone who would not likely be paying any bills at all if it didn’t feel good. My disdain for Dave is cemented by his unflinching references to all forms of video game tolerance as “child abuse.”

But are these folks really worth the Really? I believe they are, and the reasons are threefold.

First, they have typically made wild judgement errors yet they expect us to forgivingly take their side and, worse yet, follow their lead.

Second, some of them are completely BSing you. Make no mistake, they are looking to cash in and that typically puts you in bullcrap’s way. Think extra hard about downloads, meetups, appearances, consultancies, books, and anything else you can’t freely highlight with your mouse.

Finally, they have done serious damage to themselves, often their families, and just as often their communities. But now that they’ve put together a plan (ten years late) they’re deserving of your attention, your love, and usually your money.

Ask why, as Enron would have. More importantly, ask: Really?

Post-Bankruptcy Blockbuster

Ladies and Gentlemen, in recognition of the bold, continuous failure to regroup even after the bar was dropped completely on, nay, BURIED under the soil, it is with great confusion that I award the first R?otD Triple Crown for Botched Execution, Failure to Care, and Balls-Before-Brains Marketing to the age-old champions of “Making it a Blockbuster Night.”

Really? Ruh-eeally? And, oh, REALLY?!

While I can’t seem to pinpoint your overall approach to not disappearing already, I suspect you stick to an order of operations something like:

Offer something
Do it wrong
Not care
Bring up how well things are going and, while you’re at it, offer something

We’ll use your Blockbuster-by-Mail service as the example for tonight’s ceremony.

“Oh hey, you offer video game rental through the mail for half the price of a GameFly subscription? Hey that sounds swell!”

Except you add at least a day to the mailing process by comparison to NetFlix somehow (that’s the ONLY time you’ll be afforded such a side-by-side) and yet both of you use the reg’lar old postal service.

“No matter!” I would assure myself, confident that you would deliver my latest installment of the Splinter Cell series into my hands in good time.

Wrong! You didn’t even carry this game when it was sent to me so I naturally took it as a personal attack.

I e-mailed to politely ask REALLY? and received an e-mail too clever to be from one of your programming projects yet somehow too disjointed to be one of your employees (perhaps it was your dying spirit?).

In any event, you used this medium not to apologize in any way but to remind me to keep a full queue. Although I had well over 80 titles queued up I can only assume the strategy was to send me mislabeled discs until I found something I wanted.

By this time I was content to pay about 9 bucks per month to gamble on your Grab-Bag-By-Horse service so long as you didn’t say anything further to irritate me. After all, in the end, that seems to be all business is.

That didn’t last more than a month before this act of curious courage:

Really? Where do I start? Was I not going to fly into a rage and pull up my account upon seeing this? 147 games isn’t enough in my queue to play one at a time when it takes you about four days to get one to me? Really?

In conclusion, before you go join Circuit City at the after party, let me look back fondly on testing out the Virtual Boy with you (foreshadowing?), competing in your brackets against NBA Jam players the world over, and walking in 100+ degree Tuesday heat just to see which Nintendo 64 games you’d picked up.

And now, by the power vested in me by myself and my colleagues in criticism, I do present you with this season’s R?otD Triple Crown and a big

R-R-Really?

Internet-Based Library Catalogue

Really, otherwise-handy internet-based method of perusing the local city library catalogue and placing things on hold?

All of a sudden, between certain undisclosed nighttime hours, you just decide not to operate?  Is there a switch that someone flips at the library HQ before leaving, and/or sometime around midnight (as best as I can tell) such that the catalogue doesn’t work in these arbitrary “after hours”?

I’m just about sure: you don’t have any items in your catalogue that match with the word “see.”  Nope, not a single title with that combination of letters within.  Surely this has nothing to do with the fact that it’s around 4:00AM.  Surely.

Who programmed this thing?  Because, fire him or her.  There’s another library in town whose catalogue I can look at (and from which I can request things to be put on hold) via the internet 24 hours a day, without fail.  You’re better than this.  Hire the ones that made that other library’s catalogue.  It’s a smart move.

Update your primitive, or at least inconvenient, system.  Or, face the Really?

Band On A Social Networking Site

The name of your band is “That’s What She Said.”

Clearly you’ve never read this, not that you should have to in order to know what a crappy band name that is, and what a crummy sense of humor your collective outfit has.

Much like you don’t have to have read our earlier entry to know how idiotic you appear (on the internet, of all places!), I don’t have to listen to your music to know I don’t like it.  By “it,” of course, I mean “you.”

Friend request DENIED.

And Really?‘d.

Sears Tower

Really, Sears Tower?

Of course, I refer to you by your real name, because you can hardly expect anyone to start calling you something else after all this time.

While we’re at it, why not start renaming some of our national monuments, our landmark court cases, and our former Presidents?

Really?

British Person

I live in the United States of America, and every once in awhile, I’m interested in knowing what the weather is, or will be, like.

This first statement clearly doesn’t apply to you, British person, but I figured this second was pretty much a worldwide given regardless of living situation, class, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, or shoe size.  The weather affects humans whether we humans like it or not.

I don’t live in the United Kingdom, though, and the United Kingdom is just wacky enough that I’m unsure as to whether they typically speak of temperatures in terms of Fahrenheit or Celsius (or heck, both). After all, they do use miles to measure distances sometimes (right?).

Here in the United States of America, most of us understand Fahrenheit best, and you rarely, if ever, see weather forecasts in degrees Celsius as a default (or even a supplement).

So today, when I say that the local temperature will reach about 75˚F on the high side, and translate that to approximately 24˚C, then proceed to ask which scale you typically see/understand temperatures in, “I’m not really sure” doesn’t seem to be an acceptable answer.

Ya try to learn somethin’ about the world, and instead you get a hundred-degree (but is that Celsius, or Fahrenheit?) “Really?”

People I Haven’t Heard From In Awhile

Aren’t I in your address book somewhere?  No?  Then why are you even contacting me?

Good work, sifting through old E-Mails to find the last one I sent you, so you can reply to that, rather than just starting afresh with a brand new subject/thread, which would have both been easier and made more sense otherwise.

Save the “RE:”s for actual responses to issues addressed.  For yourself, though, save the Really?

Guy That I Somehow Still Consider A Friend

Really, guy I see and invite to social occasions with regularity and frequency?

I admit, most of our correspondence that isn’t face-to-face is via E-Mail.

Still, I have called you on the telephone a great number of times.  Every time I do so, you seem not to know who is calling (e.g. “Megan?  Which Megan?”).  Is it so hard to save my number one of these times to save yourself the confusion (and me the offense taken) next time?

While we’re talking about you specifically, why would you think a social networking message was the best way to get back in touch with me when I’ve sent you countless E-Mails?

I’ve changed your identity in my own address book.  From now on, my caller ID will respond to calls from you with a visible-only-to-me “Really?”

Broke Banker

Really, Banker Who Is “Broker Than The Ten Commandments”?

I don’t know much about banking, but I’ve played more than one game of OREGON TRAIL in my day, and I know that any banker worth his or her salt has at least $600 on his or her person at all times.  And that’s in mid-nineteenth-century Boston dollars!

Get with the times.  Like, the times of 1843.  Else you’re bound certain for a grave, thus:

Friend And Mobile Phone User

I’d be lying if I pretended that this was too much more than an indictment on the better part of the mobile-phone-using public (everyone), who seem to have forgotten what it means to make and keep plans.  Anyway…

Really, Buddy Who Was Supposed To Meet Us At The Restaurant Last Night?

We just made these plans earlier that day.  Certainly if they were to be canceled or changed, I’d have told you.  You called me, and I didn’t answer–about 45 minutes before our prescribed meeting time, mind you–and you just drove the half-hour home, without any intention of coming back out.

Is there a good reason (there isn’t) that you couldn’t just do as we had planned to do, not six hours before?  In the days before mobile phones, people made plans and then stuck with them.  You didn’t have to call or text someone every seven minutes to make sure the plans were still on, because you assumed they would be, since they were, you know, agreed upon at some point, and if they were off, you’d be notified, and if you weren’t, it wasn’t that big of a deal anyway.  As it wouldn’t have been in this case.  Especially since the plans went forth as discussed, without a hitch (except for your failure to show).

Good one.  Of course, by “good one,” I mean “Really?”