Ten days ago, I bounced another check.

I didn’t even realize I’d done it until today, when I finally got around to plowing through the mound of paperwork I’d been allowing to accumulate for weeks in my inbox.

I. Do. Not. Bounce. Checks.

The guy who is so careless with his finances that he can bounce checks is not me.  The $59 moron tax I paid to the bank for bouncing the checks isn’t even the point.  The point is that, as warped and pitiful as it might seem, keeping control over all the important little things in my life, things like regular finances, is part of who I am.

It’s bad enough that I’ve been so overwhelmed this summer that the yard sale I promised to organize for my wife and the kids hasn’t happened yet and may not happen at all.  It’s bad enough that our gardens and yard have turned into overgrown patches of weeds, because I couldn’t find the time to make a few phone calls to find a landscaper to come clean them up.  No, I had to get so behind in the finances that I bounced two checks.  It’s extraordinarily demoralizing.

It’s clear that I have allowed Jews for Obama to take over too much of my life.  With school starting for the kids next week, and with the High Holidays rapidly approaching, things are only going to get busier, and yet the campaign is going to get much busier at the same time.

Clearly, I need to find a way to spend less time on J4O.  But I feel I am doing the things that I am best at to help a cause which is much larger than any other cause I have ever been involved in.  To convince myself to spend less time on it, I’ll probably have to convince myself that what I’m doing doesn’t really make all that much of a difference.  If I manage to convince myself, then I’ll be depressed about all the time I poured into something that “doesn’t really make all that much of a difference,” so it’s a no-win situation.

“An Israeli attack on Iran—absent an imminent threat of attack from Iran—is a terrible idea for many reasons. It would not succeed in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program but would almost surely prompt Iran to both opt out of the international inspection regime and redouble its efforts to produce a bomb. It would unite Arabs and Muslims against the United States (they know that Israel could not attack Iran without implicit or explicit U.S. approval). It would have a disastrous effect on the American effort next door in Iraq, eliminating recently made gains and endangering 130,000 American troops (this is why Secretary of Defense Gates so vehemently opposes an Israeli attack). And it would end the Arab-Israeli peace process, even putting the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan at risk. And, no small thing, an attack would lead to a deadly Hezbollah missile onslaught against Israel, joined no doubt by Hamas in the south.”

The problem with this ominous litany of negativity is that there is little evidence that any of it is true.

Continue reading at Jewwneric…

Do you throw most of it away?

Do you know how bad for the environment it is?  Cutting down trees, manufacturing paper, manufacturing ink, printing junk, transporting it to its recipients, and disposing of or recycling it all add up to a huge waste.

Do you know what a time-waster it is?  Looking at each piece to decide whether it’s junk, opening the ones that fool you, and discarding it all may take only a few seconds per piece, but when you add up all those seconds, it comes out to quite a lot of wasted time!

I was once in the same boat.  Six days a week, my mailbox was flooded with junk, which far exceeded the useful stuff, and a day without any mail at all was simply unheard of.

But now, I go for weeks without seeing any junk, and our mail carrier is spared the walk up our porch stairs at least once a week.  Putting a stop to the junk isn’t rocket science.  It takes some effort, but it’s worth it.  And I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it.

Go to the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service, right now, and register every member of your family to opt out of all junk.  The DMA’s Web site will try to talk you out of it, but don’t listen.  Tell the DMA’s members loud and clear to take their junk and shove it.

Alas, that’s not the end of it; if only it were that easy!  Many junkers don’t belong to the DMA.  Others think they’re allowed to junk you because you’ve done business with them before.  It’s harder to get rid of these; harder, but not impossible.

But hold on!  Before you do any more to eliminate the junk, wait 90 days after registering your family with the DMA MPS. It takes that long for your registration to kick in, and why should you waste time getting yourself removed from lists that you’ll be removed from automatically within a few months?  Go stick a reminder in your on-line calendar to start the next phase of the battle in three months, and include a link to this article so you know what to do when the time comes.

What to do, in a nutshell, is this: contact every single junker and tell them to remove you from their list.

You probably think that will be pretty time-consuming.  You’re right, it will be, at least at first.  You’ll go from a few seconds per junk piece to anywhere from a couple of minutes to half an hour.  However, in the end it will be worth it.

Over time the junk will slow to a trickle.  There will be days when you don’t receive a single piece of mail.  Your time investment will eventually pay off.

Furthermore, you’re not just doing this to save time — you’re also doing it to save the environment.  If you doubt that it’ll have a significant impact, save the junk you receive for a few months, and you’ll be convinced!

Here, in detail, is how you should proceed with each piece of junk you receive.  Read through the whole thing before you get started, so that you’re familiar with the entire process (in particular, the “Keeping Records” section is important).  It’s easier than it looks, and you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

If you decide to take on the junkers as I describe below, please send me email or post a comment and let me know how it goes!

Step 1: Triage

Have you already asked the junker to remove you from their list?  If not, then proceed to “Step 2: Request”.

Has it been long enough since you asked that they should have complied by now?  if not, then proceed to “Step 3: Return”.

Have you already escalated?  If not, then proceed to “Step 4: Escalate”.

Has it been long enough since you escalated that they should have complied by now?  If not, then proceed to “Step 3: Return”.

Have you already filed a complaint with the BBB?  If not, then proceed to “Step 5: Complain”.

If you’ve already filed a complaint with the BBB, then give up — this particular junker just isn’t going to listen.  Note: I’ve been telling junkers to leave me alone for almost a year, and I have not yet encountered a single junker who persisted after a BBB complaint.

Step 2: Request

The goal is to contact the junker and ask them to remove you from their mailing list, as quickly as possible and without costing you any money.  Here are the methods you can use, in order of preference:

1. Prepaid return mail, if they enclosed a prepaid envelope in their mailing to you
2. Email
3. Web form
4. Fax (if their fax number is toll-free or you don’t pay per minute for long distance)
5. Phone (ditto)

Prepaid return mail

Sending back the junk in a prepaid return mail envelope is the least time-consuming method, because it does not require you to try to figure out how to contact the junker.  It is also the most satisfying, because it actually costs them money.  Therefore, if there is a prepaid return envelope, then write, “Remove me from your mailing list,” on every piece of paper in the junk, especially the ones with your name and address on it; stuff them all in the prepaid return envelope; seal it up; and drop it in the mail.

Email

If you’re lucky, the sender has included an email address somewhere in the junk.  If so, then just fire off an email message to that address.  Include the following:

1. “Please remove me from your postal mailing list and do not give or sell my mailing address to anyone else.”
2. Include your name and address exactly as it appears on the junk.
3. If there’s a customer number or other obviously identifiable code which represents you, then include that as well.
4. If there’s a string of random numbers and characters below or next to your address on the junk, then include that as well.
5. “Please do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this message.”  Yes, you really have to say this.  Yes, some obnoxious organizations will ignore it, and then you’ll have to deal with unsubscribing from their email spam.  If you are concerned about this, then consider using a free, throwaway email account from Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.  When the amount of spam being sent to that account gets to be too much, you can simply close it and create a new one.

If there’s no email address in the junk, then visit the sender’s Web site and try to find one there (the URL is usually included in the junk, but if not, you can Google for it).  Look on the home page, or on the “Contact Us”, “Customer Service” or “Privacy Policy” pages.

If you try to contact the junker using an email address they’ve provided, and it bounces, then proceed as if no email address was available, and mention the invalid address when you complain using a different method.

Web form

If, rather than providing an email address, the sender provides a form on their Web site for you to fill out to contact them, go ahead and use it, providing the information listed above.

Fax

Look for a fax number on the junk or Web site.  Fax a short note to that number with the information listed above.  To save time, consider writing the information on a sticky note, sticking it to the junk in a way that leaves your name, address and customer codes visible, and faxing that instead of a note written completely from scratch.

Phone

Look for a phone number on the junk or Web site.

Complaining by phone is a last resort because it’s time-consuming and unlikely to work.  You’ll end up waiting on hold, getting bounced from person to person or from menu to menu, and having to spell your name and address slowly enough for the droid on the other end of the line to get it right.  In the end, there’s a good chance they’ll mess it up anyway.

If all else fails

If you can’t contact the junker using any of these methods, then proceed to “Step 5: Complain”.

Make sure you mention in your BBB complaint that you’ve been forced to go through the BBB because the sender provided no other way to contact them.

Step 3: Return

Whenever you receive junk mail with a prepaid return envelope, send it back as described above in “Prepaid return mail”.

As noted above, this can serve as your initial unsubscribe request to the junker, but you should do it for every single piece of junk you receive, even if you’ve already done it before, and even if you’re also going to contact the junker in some other way.

Indiscriminate junk mail exists because it is profitable.  If people like you and me do our part to make it less profitable, then we’re helping to eliminate it not just for us, but for everyone.  Sending back junk in its prepaid return envelope is therefore an easy, effective form of civil disobedience.

Step 4: Escalate

When you’ve already asked once for a junker to stop sending you junk, and you’ve waited long enough for the request to kick in (as long as they told you to wait, if they responded to your request, or six weeks otherwise), and you get another piece of junk from them, it’s time to escalate your request.

To do that, follow the procedure described above in “Step 2: Request”, with these changes:

1. Use a different method of contacting them from the one you used before (unless the one you’ve already used is the only one available).
2. Tell them that this is your second request, and give them the details of the last one (exactly how and when you last contacted them).
3. Tell them how many mailings you’ve received since your first request, and when you received them.
4. If you’ve been sending their mailings back in prepaid return envelopes with “please remove me” written on them, then tell them so.

Step 5: Complain

If you’ve asked the sender twice to remove you from their mailing list, and you’ve waited long enough for them to do so after both requests, then it’s time to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau through their complaint site.  Provide the information listed above in “Step 2: Request” and “Step 4: Escalate”, carefully documented all of your interaction with the junker — the dates of their mailings to you, and the dates and methods you’ve used to ask them to stop sending them.

Filing a BBB complaint requires knowing the junker’s address and phone number.  These will almost always be provided somewhere in the junk.  If not, you can find them on the Web site, or you can search the BBB’s database for the junker’s name or telephone number.

Every single junk complaint I have filed with the BBB has been successful at stopping the junk.

Keeping Records

Throughout this process, you should keep detailed records of your interactions with all the junkers.  The easiest way to do this is to keep a text file or spreadsheet on your desktop, and to update it each time you receive junk or take any of the steps described above.  If you’d like, you can use this spreadsheet.

There are several reasons why keeping detailed records is important:

1. When you receive junk, you need to know whether you’ve complained to its junker before and whether it’s been long enough that they should have stopped junking you by now.
2. For all of your complaints to the junker or BBB after the initial request, you need to be able to document your previous requests and exactly when you’ve received junk despite them.  This makes it clear that you are serious about stopping the junk and aren’t going to take no for an answer.
3. If you’re anything like me, you will enjoy watching the frequency of junk go down drastically after you’ve been doing this for a few months.  It’ll be obvious from the daily contents of your mailbox, but you may also enjoy being able to precisely quantify it (and maybe even draw pretty graphs!).

Pretty graph

In October 2007, I started complaining about junk as described above.  Here’s the volume of junk I’ve received since then (with the partial month of October omitted):

The “humps” in December and April are due to the fact that charities do more mailings at those times of year because it’s when people are thinking about donating money to charity to save money on their taxes.

It claimed to be from CapitalOne.  It had a legitimate sender address, a legitimate Subject line (”Please Call Us Regarding Recent Restrictions”), and convincing-looking content that was mostly lifted straight from a real CapitalOne email message.  Most importantly, all of the links in the message were legitimate links pointing at capitalone.com URLs.

The only text in the message that was not boilerplate was this:

Please Call Us Regarding Recent Resctriction [sic]

This is not a promotional e-mail. Please call us immediately at (866) 496-5027 regarding recent activity on your Capital One Card. We’re available 24/7 to take your call.

Please disregard this e-mail if you’ve already call us since the date this e-mail was sent.

We appreciate your prompt attention to this matter.

Thank you
Capital One Card Fraud Prevention Security Department

Here’s what makes this phishing message different from others I’ve seen: the “hook” is the phone number, not the links in the email body.

Here’s what you hear, recited in a female computer-synthesized voice, when you call the number shown above:

Welcome to the the card activation center.  Please remember that we will never ask for your personal information such as your social security number, passwords, card numbers, etc. via email.  Please enter your card number followed by the pound key.

[doesn't matter what you enter here]

Please enter your personal identification number associated with this card followed by the pound key.

Please enter your four-digit expiration number [sic] (months year) followed by the pound key.

Please hold while your card is activated.

The card number, personal identification number or expiration date doesn’t match with our records.

[starts over]

Obviously, whoever set up this toll-free number is collecting card numbers, expiration dates and PINs, which they will then either sell or use to obtain cash advances from ATMs.

I wish there were somewhere I could report this scam to get the toll-free number taken down, but I honestly have no idea who would be interested in doing something about this and able to act quickly.

Hers: “I always get what I want.”
His: “It’s all about me.”

This pair is surely destined for a long, happy life together.

Unfortunately for them, she was not always otherwise engaged, and has been gradually reducing their number.  And thus, we have found a series of little deceased rodents in various locations around the house, sometimes sans cranium.  It seems that the cat does not care for the rest of the mouse.

As of a few months ago, we believed that the entire family had been eliminated, but then a greyish brown straggler was sighted on two occasions (once be me, once by the kids) racing under the door into our butler’s pantry.  Unable to locate the little visitor, we bided our time, contenting ourselves with the knowledge that eventually, the trusty feline would handle the situation.

This evening, while sitting in the living room quietly reading a book (it is quite remarkable how quiet the house can be when Andrea and all the kids are in Cleveland), I suddenly heard the cat scuffling in the dining room, followed by the distinctive sound which she makes in only one circumstance.  “Well, it’s about time she took care of that last mouse,” I said to myself, and got up to see to its disposal.

However, the cat did not wait for me in the dining room.  Instead, she came trotting into the living room, with a little brown bundle in her mouth.  Still moving.

The cat proceeded to drop the mouse and play with it for a minute or two as it tried to escape.  Then, apparently the victim of one too many neck grabs from the cat’s fangs, it stopped moving.  The cat whined at me, upset that its plaything had stopped “playing,” and I went into the kitchen to get a brush and dustpan to deal with it.

I swept the mouse into the dustpan and stood up to throw it away, at which point I realized that it was still breathing.  I concluded that it was playing dead, it was just stunned, or the cat had managed to paralyze it without killing it.  I suppose that if I weren’t a little sissy I would have at this point taken a friend’s recommended approach of fetching a pair of pliers and breaking the mouse’s neck to put it out of its misery, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

So instead, I walked down to the corner of my block and emptied the dustpan into the public trash barrel there, reasoning that if the mouse could still move, it would extricate itself from the trash barrel and find somewhere else to live, and if it couldn’t, I had properly disposed of it.

I cannot say that I am particularly proud of the possibility that I might have left an innocent little creature to spend an indeterminate amount of time lying terrified, unable to move, in a trash barrel, before finally giving up the ghost.

This was not a good way to end Shabbat.

I was dumbfounded.  I was sure that I’d loaded all the bags into the car.  I could imagine only three possible explanations, all of which were unpleasant: (1) I idiotically failed to load my duffel into the car; (2) I removed the duffel from the trunk at some point during the trip while accessing another bag, failed to put it back, and drove away without it; (3) we left the van unlocked and untended at some point during the trip and someone snatched the duffel.

Needless to say, I went into the Sabbath feeling rather grumpy.  I ended up wearing the same clothes, which were decidedly not Sabbath-appropriate, until Sunday evening, at which point I managed to acquire some new clothes from Dillard’s as described in my last blog entry.

Upon my arrival at home last night (I can’t afford to miss work for the entire vacation, so I flew home alone and will fly back to Cleveland next week to spend the weekend and then drive home with the family), I found that the missing duffel was not in the house, which left only options (2) or (3).  Therefore, this morning, I spent over an hour methodically reconstructing our trip so that I could figure out everywhere we stopped and call all of the relevant facilities and local police departments to see if anyone had found our bag.  I ran out of time in the middle of this effort and left for work.

While on my way to work, my wife called my cell phone from Cleveland to inform me that there was a fourth possibility that I hadn’t even counted upon.  My duffel bag was in the van all along, in the storage compartment between the first and second row of seats where I “cleverly” put it before we left Boston, to save space in the trunk.

Looking on the bright side, I got some new clothes, which I needed, out of it.  On the other hand, boy, do I feel like an idiot. *sigh*

To say that I’ve been disappointed by our local Target would be a monumental understatement.

• The store is crowded, with not enough room to pass between many of the racks, crowded aisles with innumerable pillars blocking the way, and boxes of unshelved inventory, pallet movers and various other large objects blocking movement all over the store.
• The selection of merchandise is abysmal.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone to our local Target to buy something seemingly common and straightforward, only to discover that they don’t have it.
• The “team members,” as they call them, are consistently unknowledgeable and unhelpful.

Nevertheless, I clung to my fond memories of Target, choosing to believe that surely the Target stores in the Midwest would live up to my childhood memories.  Alas, I was in for a rude awakening.

On a recent trip to Cleveland to visit the in-laws, I found myself in need of some clothes and other miscellaneous items, so I decided to take a trip to the local Target to see if it would live up to my memories.  Here’s what happened:

• Shoes for my eight-year-old daughter?  Nope.  The shoes in the shoe department were organized neither by style nor by size, thus making it necessary to look at every single pair of shoes on every single shelf ot find out if any of them would do the job.  This we did, wasting a considerable amount of time doing it, and we found not a single pair of shoes worth considering.
• Solid-colored T-shirts for my four-year-old daughter?  Nope, not a single one in the entire store.
• Levi’s Jeans for me with a 34-inch waste and a 30-inch inseam?  Nope, not a single pair in the entire store.
• Infant feeding spoons?  Nope, not a one in sight.

There were other items I needed, but at this point I threw up my hands and went home.  By the way, not a single “team member” approached me to ask if they could help while I was searching for these items.

That evening, I visited the local Dillard’s.  Incidentally, Dillard’s has 326 stores and a market cap of $782 million.  Target, on the other hand, has 1,613 stores and a market cap of $36 billion.

Now, I confess that I didn’t look for the shoes or the spoons at Dillard’s.  But they had a great selection of Jeans, including the ones I wanted, a great selection of 4T clothes, including the shirts that I wanted, and all of the other items I needed, all at reasonable prices.  The place was swarming with salespeople, and the several that I dealt with were all friendly, helpful and competent.

I wish I could say that I’m never going to Target again, but the reality is that it’s all there is near us.  That sucks, just like Target sucks.  What I will be doing is canceling our Target Visa card and mailing them the cut-up cards along with a copy of this blog entry.

Read or link to it here:
http://njdc.typepad.com/njdcs_blog/2008/07/senator-mccain.html

Digg it here:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/McCain_flip_flop_fact_sheet

This is powerful stuff!

At the end of the check-in process, I was asked whether I wanted to pick up my boarding pass at a kiosk, have it emailed to me for printing, or have it faxed to me. I chose email.

A few seconds later, I received an email message with the following headers (slightly tweaked to remove irrelevant and personal information):

Subject: Boarding pass for your flight to Boston
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:46:43 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
	boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C8DB0B.8C9A1310"
X-MS-Has-Attach: yes
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: <4A19CBE00801CF46A49DDEB1987DA69B09829457@nhqsexc15.nam.coair.com>
Content-class: urn:content-classes:message
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5
Thread-Topic: Boarding pass for your flight to Boston
Thread-Index: AcjbC4yEEWhQsv+ySECLeqxRM7dbLQ==
From: "Continental Airlines, Inc." 
X-Brightmail-Tracker: AAAAAA==

Those of you who have worked with the nuts and bolts of how email works and who have had the misfortune to deal with Microsoft’s non-standard “improvements” to email undoubtedly cringed at the site of the acronym “TNEF” in the header above.

For those of you who have had the good luck not to have to deal with this particular Microsoft brain-damage, I will explain. “TNEF” stands for “Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format”. It is a proprietary email attachment format used by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server.

There are no email clients other than Microsoft Outlook (and perhaps Outlook Express, I’m not sure) which understand how to read email messages that have TNEF attachments.

There is absolutely no reason to use TNEF attachments to send boarding passes — they can be attached to email messages perfectly fine using MIME, which is of course an Internet standard (TNEF isn’t) and is understood by pretty much every email reader on the planet (TNEF isn’t).

Continental is emailing boarding passes in a format that will be completely useless to many, many people.