For years I have watched the holiday shopping insanity with bemusement and some sadness. When and why did Christians become not only okay with the massive commercialization of one of their highest holy days, but the worst offenders of this annual madness?

How is it that I, who knows full well Jesus wasn’t born in winter and doesn’t worship Him anyway, feels so deeply offended at the materialism attached to this holiday, and the Christians in my life knock themselves out perpetuating the greed and financial stress of “holiday gift-giving”?

I must have missed the memo that the Pope sent out telling everyone to forget the old school messages of peace, love, and tolerance, and the proof of your devotion lies in the size of your tree, the lights on your house, and the pile of presents you give away.

Most years I just watch in silence. This year I can’t. A death by trampling in one store; two deaths by shooting in a toy store.

Those of you taking part in this sort of thing have my unending disgust; those of you who don’t only because you can’t have my pity.

This is the year I take my stand and refuse to back down. I am not shopping for presents, and I am not accepting anything purchased. Some one has to point out the Emperor is naked, and in this case, he’s not just naked, he’s a rotting corpse with a death grin, and his poison is spreading faster than plague.

Am I alone in this? It doesn’t matter if I am. I am shut of this whole business of holiday greed.

Jesus, on behalf of the sheep, I apologize. While Your message has been lost to many, I remember, and I keep it in my heart, and I will walk Your steps in serenity. Please help the blinded see their error, and give the weak the strength to share their love instead of baubles and trinkets, and comfort the bereft and hurting in this darkened season of pain and madness. Help us all to remember the joy and promise You gave, and be Your light in this time of need.

So I called tech support about noon yesterday. Ray tells me he sees the problem, it will be fixed, and our connection should be up again within four hours.

Four o’clock, check the connection. No dice. Call tech support again.

Tricia tells me she will expedite the order. Should be up in 30 minutes. I ask her if I’ll need to reset the modem or anything. She assures me I won’t, it should just come on and be fine.

It isn’t. At five-thirty I call again. Another CSR (didn’t catch her name) tells me she sees the calls at 12:04 and 4:10, with the expedite request. *She* says it could take four (more) hours, usually it’s 48, but with an expedite it drops to 24.

Nine last night, still no connection. Call the tech support line. I get a recorded message telling me the “24/7″ office is closed, to call back during normal business hours, or I can go to their website for help and information.

IF I COULD GET TO THE WEBSITE, I WOULDN’T BE HAVING TO CALL TECH SUPPORT, NOW WOULD I?

This morning, call again. Debra tells me that from what she sees, our connection was fine as of 10:25.

I tell her it certainly isn’t, and I want to talk to a supervisor. She tells me she will find one, but the supervisor won’t be able to do anything more than she would be. So I explain to her the repeated calls and the fact that every CSR told me a different time frame, and not a single one of them was right.

When I worked in sales, customer service, and customer retention (ick), I learned the same thing in all three jobs: Under-promise, Over-deliver. It’s not that hard. If you are positive that connection will be fixed in four hours, you tell the customer it will be twelve. They won’t like it. They will bitch and moan. But when they check in five hours, just because they are hopeful and impatient, and the problem is fixed *only* five hours into the time frame, they are happy. They thought they’d have to wait twice as long.

You never, ever, EVER tell the customer “30 minutes” unless you are delivering pizza.

So when I talked to the supervisor, I gave her polite what-for and suggested they give better training to their CSRs. These poor people sit in their cubes all day, having angry, frustrated people like me calling and verbally dancing on the edge of abuse. The last thing they need is shoddy training and craptacular tools making the customers angrier.

She agrees, then advises me she will connect me directly with a tech-support agent instead of just transferring me to their call queue, and suggests I reset the modem and reboot my computer while we wait so that when the tech comes on the line, we can skip that time-consuming part of the process.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “I was told I wouldn’t have to reset the modem.”

“Well, yes you do,” the supervisor informs me. “I apologize for the misinformation, but when the connection is affected like this, you always have to reset the modem from there, we can’t do it from here.”

So. I reset and reboot. By the time the tech comes on the line, I have my connection restored and don’t need to talk to her. But I vent anyway, now completely fed up with the entire mess and as close to profanity as I’ve been in such a situation in a very long time.

“I appreciate you letting me know your concerns and I apologize for any inconvenience,” Maria the tech tells me with the bland, rote-memorization they have all used. And then she twists the knife:

“Thank you for choosing [company] for your Internet service. We appreciate your business. Have a nice day.”

(Acronyms)

I have a simple job I like very much: coordinate enrollment of physicians in health plans. Mostly I create and track paper, a comfortable endeavor for someone like me who probably has OCD (but hesitates to cop to it because it would interfere with my dedication to being lazy). The problem with my lovely job is there are two faces of health plans: HMOs and PPOs. The HMO side is a breeze. The PPO side is nothing less than a nightmare.

PPO Nightmare

So all week I worked on getting an update ready to send out to the health plans. A few new applications, a couple of resubmissions, a change of address, and some terminations. It took longer to do than it should because (1) I am having a hell of a time adjusting to the medication I’m on and (2) all of the applications had expired licenses and I had to wait until I got updated copies from the office managers.

The “temporary” director signs the cover letters for these updates. I had printed them out Thursday afternoon and left them for him to sign. He signed them all, then when I went in this morning to get them, he asks why a particular doctor isn’t listed in the summary of changes. Because of the medication I couldn’t remember off-hand and had to go back to my desk to check the database; meanwhile he’s talking at me about “he’s on staff, he was approved by the Board, why aren’t we sending out his application?”

Finally I get words in edgewise: “Because his license is expired and I haven’t gotten the new one.”

AND THEN he has the GALL to ask me, “Well, did you call them?”

The only reason I didn’t quit right then was because two things tangled on my tongue: “No, dumbass, I figured I’d just throw his application away and pretend I knew nothing about it forevermore,” and “You know what? YOU call them, I quit.”

The PPO doesn’t pay me a cent for the work I do, and easily 85% of my workday is filled with PPO crap. I’m done. Monday I’m talking to the HMO director (the HMO is the side that actually pays the temp agency to have me there) and let her know that either the PPO has to (1) get a director, (2) demand accountability from the health plans if not the doctors and (3) start paying me, or I have to no longer do PPO work there. Otherwise I have to quit. I can’t handle that level of stress at work with everything else I am trying to manage; I’ll be damned if I do it for another week for free.

1. Blogs that have HUGE pictures at the top that fill the entire “first page” of the browser window. I don’t care about your picture, I want to see what you wrote.
2. Blogs that have bad Flash plug-ins that cause the browser to crash or freeze the whole computer.
3. Blogs that are full of other people’s content. If I have to scroll past that stupid “OMG this this so cute kitten scared of RC mouse” video one more time, I am going to blow up the Internet.
4. Blogs that have horrendous typos or grammatic abuse in static modules (the titles, sidebars, etc.). I understand typos and so forth in individual entries, but spelling something wrong in your graphics or blog title is shoddy. (This of course does not apply to those blogs where English is not the natural language of the author.)
5. Blogs that have so many ads in the sidebars it’s an eye-straining nightmare patchwork of conflicting colors, designs, and themes.
6. Blogs that have so many widgets, ads, plug-ins, etc., that they take forever to load.
7. Blogs that say “subscribe to me and I’ll subscribe to you!” If I like your blog I’ll subscribe to it, maybe; or I might just favorite it so I can see the layout instead of just getting the content. And I don’t want to just bulk up my feed subscriber count or inflate my hit counter numbers. I want readers who actually appreciate my efforts, and you should too.
8. Blogs with the “pay me to write about you” ad buttons. I understand the “Pay per post” stuff is nice for some bloggers or whatever … I have no problem, generally speaking, with affiliate programs and sponsored blogs. But, similar to #7, I don’t want to buy your opinion. If some one is going to write about me, I want it to be honest and legit, even if the post isn’t favorable. Own your opinion, don’t let it be rented.
9. Blog layouts in umteen shades of pink. I hate pink. Not only is it an obnoxious color all by itself, too often the people who use it have saccharine content.
10. Blogs participating in the EC program that don’t have fkg EC widgets on their blogs. That’s not fair, guys. Also, EC “cards” that link to sites that are not blogs.
11. Blogs by people selling blog layout templates that have lame layouts for their own blogs. WTF is up with that?
12. Blogs filled with flowers or cats, or both. There is so much more to the Universe, and so many other symbols of peace, simplicity, comfort, humor, earthiness, etc., dare to be a little original. We don’t see nearly enough turtles, platypuses, or loons. Hedgehogs are freakin’ hilarious. Give the cats a a rest already.
13. Blogs that repost “lolcats” from ICanHasCheezBurger.com without mentioning where they “borrowed” the image from. Seriously, give the cats a rest.
14. Blogs that hotlink. Bandwidth theft is not only wrong, if the image gets moved, you get nothing. Host your own darn images. Photobucket is free.
15. EC “cards” that use copyrighted material for their images. Intellectual property theft is still theft.

That being said, please, if your blog includes any of the items on my list, don’t leave angry comments about it or go out of your way to pick on my blog. Everyone is entitled to hir own opinion, and as an American I have the right to share mine fairly freely. If you see items on my list that could apply to your blog, and some one else comments that they agree that attribute is annoying, please, for the love of the blogosphere, consider a change.

Fab system, guys. Truly a wonder.

Let’s review.

The U.S. Senate passed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 18, 1917, and was ratified on January 29, 1919, having been approved by 36 states, and went into effect on a Federal level on January 29, 1920. It lasted until repealed with ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, on December 5, 1933.

You couldn’t legally make, buy or imbibe alcohol in this country from 1920 to 1933. And it worked great! Just ask the mobsters that ran the bootlegging enterprises. They made money “hand over fist,” and fought bloody street wars to protect their empires.

Fast forward 36 years. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, claiming it has “a high potential for abuse and no acceptable medical use.” Suddenly a bunch of relatively harmless potheads are felons, and genuine criminals – much like the bootleg empires of the 1920’s – suddenly have entry to a huge, lucrative (and tax-free!) market.

A few years later, enter, stage right, the “D.A.R.E.” program. Lies, damn lies, and propaganda. I don’t know of anyone personally who avoided drugs because of D.A.R.E., but I do know plenty of people who got so pissed off at being lied to that they DID experiment, and made their own decisions on whether or not to continue using drugs. (For the record, most of them tried many things but stuck with only one: marijuana.)

A few more years, and we get the ridiculous PSAs on TV about “smoking pot supports terrorism.” Wut?! Smoking pot supports the snack industry, that’s for sure, and probably MTV as well. Terrorists know the score, and the smarter criminals can do the math: cocaine and heroin products are more compact to smuggle and give a higher return on investment at street level.

Now a moment for comparison. How many people have been killed by drunk drivers in this country, plus the number of deaths from lung cancer in people who smoked tobacco (alcohol and tobacco being legal and highly taxed commodities), versus the number of people killed by drivers under the influence of marijuana, plus the number of people who have developed lung cancer from smoking marijuana? (I don’t have the figures myself, but we can all estimate that set one is a significantly higher number than set two.)

And then you have incidents like what happened to Rachel Hoffman.

More here, including relevant links:

And now, in the infinite wisdom of our government, we have a ban on contraceptives looming.

Seriously, people, am I the only one who sees something WRONG with this?!

We don’t need MORE government in our lives. We need better education and more personal responsibility. The more freedoms we allow our government to take away, the less able we are to take care of ourselves, which gives the government more opportunity to restrict our freedoms. It’s a cycle we need to break, and it’s not like it’s hard to see. They aren’t doing this in secret. There’s no back-room, clandestine operation here. It’s going on RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU and only by speaking up, raising a fuss, refusing to be quietly complacent out of apathy, fear, or disgust can we stop this.

Please, people of America, if you love what this country should stand for, if you believe what we pledge about “liberty and justice for all,” STOP BEING SO STUPID and take back control of our nation.

But SOME PEOPLE – not mentioning any names – *cough* Dubya *cough* – seem to think the terms are interchangeable and one the same as the other.

In case you are as easily confused as certain Oval Office oafs, let me explain the difference to you: “contraception” is a method – INCLUDING ABSTINENCE – that prevents pregnancy. Abortion is a method, medical or biological, that ends pregnancy.

Some idiots in high places, having solved all of the world’s other problems, want to make it illegal for people – primarily women – to have access to contraceptive devices and drugs.

That’s right. Condoms would be illegal.

Not only that, basically what the idea there is, having sex for any reason other than procreation would be illegal. You know, a sin.

Because, after all, this country is by, for, and of the Christian Bible, and a woman’s worth lies in her ability to reproduce healthy offspring.

No matter what your stance on abortion – and I understand, I really do, the argument against (though I don’t agree) – what person in hir right mind can look at the state of the world and say, “hey, yeah, let’s outlaw contraception”?

Oh, I guess I answered it there, didn’t I? No person in hir *right* mind would. It takes an idiot, a mental defective, or a religious nut (all of which *are* fairly interchangeable terms and conditions) to think that.

“WTF” doesn’t even begin to cover this one.

MoveOn.org clued me in on this latest moronic move by our “elected” officials (more info under the cut). I encourage everyone – no, I beg, demand, plead and insist! – to sign the petition they set up to stop this nonsense before it gets any further.

You can sign the petition here. Already 200,000 people have signed, and MoveOn is hoping for a quarter million signatures before sending it on to the Health and Human Services Secretary, Mike Leavitt.

MoveOn’s emails

I’ve been through this a few times; I felt no dread as I prepared for my journey. That should have been my first clue I was in for a nightmare afternoon.

Keep reading …