2004-04-24 - 7:51 p.m.
It's pretty amazing to have somebody care enough about ones writing (or the points one makes) to actually seriously discuss it the way wench does! And if you will answer any of her surveys, she will seriously discuss some of your answers with you and will share some points of view of her own. It kind of makes it all worthwhile. Imagine, actual give and take on the Internet, just like in real life (instead of everybody hiding out in their little holes)! If there's anyone else reading this besides wench (which I seriously doubt), why don't you go over to wench's site and try her out?
Is it clear that I am a real fan of wench? Well, I am!
In my entry yesterday, I said that when I called Apple, concerned about their shipping my stuff to me via Federal Express (my concern based on my real-life bad experiences with Federal Express), the customer service guy I spoke to said in no uncertain terms that Federal Express would HAVE to obtain my signature or they would NOT release my package, they would NOT give the package to the apartment manager as my agent, they did NOT have Saturday delivery, and they did NOT have a place where I could go pick up my undelivered package. Therefore, I had to cancel my order that was being shipped to my home address, because without my actually being there to sign for the package, it would never be delivered to me.
Well, when I got home from work yesterday, sure enough, there was the Federal Express notice telling me that they had tried to deliver my package (in this case, the package was the extended warranty plan for the computer), but guess what, they had several different options that I could choose:
1. I could wait for them to redeliver on Monday. That one would not work, because I still would not be there.
2. I could sign the notice and they would then leave the package. However, that option would absolve Federal Express of any liability in case the package was lost. Since I knew of no way to ensure that after I signed the notice they would leave the package with the manager instead of simply leaving it outside the front door of an urban apartment building, that option was not a good one either.
3. I could go to their pick-up facility and retrieve the package myself that evening, or
4. I could go to their pick-up facility and retrieve the package myself on Saturday between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M.
I guess I can't blame Apple customer service for not really having any idea what actually goes on after the package is shipped, because the truth is that Federal Express was just about as accommodating and helpful as a company could possibly be. But gee, some accurate information would have been nice. Too bad I had cancelled this order and was now getting everything shipped to me at my work address.
I went to the pick-up facility, which was extremely conveniently located pretty near where I lived and had lots of easy parking. I went there only for the purpose of asking the very nice woman there (and I didn't even have to wait in line!) to simply return the package. I explained why, saying it wasn't their fault at all, but that Apple had given me all the wrong information, blah blah blah, and so I had to refuse the package and wait for my new order to be delivered whenever Apple was going to ship it to my work address. The whole thing was very frustrating, because all these shenanigans wasted me a whole week in getting this computer that I am now chomping on the bit (or "byte", ha ha ha) to get to working on.
But some good things did come out of it, though. I no longer need to be afraid of Federal Express, and I now know where that very convenient pick-up place is and can go there after work, or on Saturday, whenever some company ships me something via them again. It's not quite as nice as having the package there when I arrive at home, but it's still acceptable.
Okay, wench, here are a couple of easy answers or responses to some of your recent questions or points. I'll tackle your comments regarding births, child raising, and the eskimos in another post when I have more energy.
Regarding Hazel, the cook for the smoke jumpers, the government would pay her a certain amount of money per head or per individual meal. I suppose somebody kept a record of how many fire fighters there were on the line and so if 347 people consumed three meals a day for 17 days, Hazel would get paid whatever the rate was, such as, say $10 a meal, times 347 x 3 x 17, or $176,970. Of course, out of that she had to buy the food and pay her staff of preparers and cooks and dishwashers, etc. It's a business, like running a restaurant, except it's up in the middle of nowhere on the edge of a raging forest fire. Hazel knew what she was doing, because in her lifetime she had started and successfully run over seven different restaurants, so she knew the business inside and out. Having this business for the forestry service, though, was a built-in success, because it was guaranteed that the fire fighters were going to eat! She didn't have to worry about getting customers, or losing them as the fickle finger of dining fashion moved over to some other trendy new establishment.
The point was that her profits were the difference between what the government paid and whatever food she served. Most others in her situation increased their personal take by giving the fire fighters cheaper or inferior food, and Hazel was famous for not doing that, but instead gave them the best.
Her good karma came back to her, though, over the issue of the traveling kitchen (the semi-trailer). It used to be that she had to lease the unit from the government, so it was part of her overhead. Ultimately, the government decided to sell it to her at a government auction. What they did for her was to padlock it shut during the pre-inspection phase, so nobody but Hazel actually knew what it was. From the outside it simply looked like a well-used trailer, but inside it was loaded with stoves, ovens, refrigerators and freezers, sinks, preparation counters, and so on...it was a complete restaurant kitchen. So Hazel bought this extremely valuable kitchen for practically nothing--no one else even bid on it. She would park it on her ranch (she and husband also raised sheep, geese, and rabbits) until it was needed for a fire, and when there was a fire, the government (at government expense) would haul it up to the fire site for her.
You mentioned Federal Express shipping things to the "wilds" of Wisconsin and leaving the packages in the greenhouse. That brings a twinge of nostalia to my heart, because I used to be in love with a guy who moved to Wisconsin to manage a nursery and the last time I saw him (before he got married) was in one of the greenhouses. Wisconsin and greenhouses...he wasn't in the "wilds," though, but in Milwaukee!
I want to talk a little bit about the "wilds" where I really did live. I lived in a place called "French Corral", which was historically famous in that the world's first long distance telephone call was made there. (I lived just up the hill beyond this, and right next door to this, and right across the road from this old Gold Rush era cemetary.) When the telephone was first invented, virtually nobody had a telephone, because who would they call? The invention was so new that unless other people had one, the thing was useless.
Well, like most things, it's the rich people who start getting all the new-fangled things and who had a telephone line was a large gold mining operation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Right near French Corral was a town called Nevada City, and more gold was pulled out of the Nevada City region than in all the other gold mining regions of California combined.
They used hydraulic mining up there to get the gold, which meant that they blasted the cliff sides with high-pressure hoses to get at the gold underneath. The problem with this was that all the dirt that was washed off the mountain sides got into the rivers that flowed down out of the hills and ultimately silted San Francisco Bay. The country's first environmental protection law was passed, outlawing hydraulic mining. However, just because it was outlawed didn't mean that it was stopped--the mining companies made just too much money by that technique, so they would do it anyway. How they kept from getting caught was that spies down the mountain would look out for the federal inspector and when they'd see him, they'd telephone up the mountain to the various mining sites and warn them to stop the hydraulic hoses and they'd go back to digging with picks and shovels. It's kind of interesting that the first use of long distance telephoning was to support something illegal and anti-environment.
But that place up there was lawless from the start and it's lawless today. Not exactly where I was, which was a peaceful community of cattle and sheep ranchers. But just beyond the town of North San Juan, which was my mailing address, up further into the mountains, was a place where the law never goes.
You can still go claim yourself a gold mining claim up there, but it's not a way to get free land...you have to actually be mining and getting gold, or you lose your claim. And people do get gold, no mistake about that. I learned scuba diving when I lived there and while I wanted my certification in order to dive in Fiji and at the Great Barrier Reef, everybody else in the class wanted to use scuba to vaccuum up gold nuggets in the various creeks and rivers after the big rains. In the town of Grass Valley, right next to Nevada City, miners would walk into gold dealerships with their nuggets or gold dust, the dealers would weigh the gold on pan scales, and pay them for their gold, just like in the 1800s.
Naturally these people are very protective of their mining claims and don't cotton to strangers roaming around. I made the mistake one day of going for a drive through that wild region, to a place called Allegheny. There are others like that, too, North Columbia, North Bloomfield, Washington, Graniteville, Forest, those are some scary places, let me tell you, all dirt roads, you drive along the edge of cliffs, and everybody you see stops and stares at you like they are zombies or eaters of the dead. Frankly, I was glad to get out of there alive.
One of my mother's best friends is a public health nurse operating out of Sacramento, and she told me that sometimes she has to go up into those regions to provide medical care. She is required by county law to leave word when she leaves to go in there and must be out in two hours or a rescue team will be dispatched to go looking for her.
My house was burglarized one time and when the sheriff came out to take some fingerprints, he told me he had to look on the map to see if he could even come to me. "You're just this side of North San Juan," he told me, "which is still in our jurisdiction. Beyond that, we will not go investigate." He explained that it's all "the Hatfields and the McCoys" up there, you're liable to be shot on sight and your body would never be found. Even in North San Juan, he told me, (where I'd go to the post office, vote, and sometimes get food at a convenience store), I could be sitting at a bar having a drink and somebody might walk in and shoot a guy sitting next to me. "He'd be avenging the death of his grandpa," the sheriff told me. "They have all kinds of feuds going on up there and we just leave it all alone. You best stay clear of it."
Hazel and Les would tell me of worse dangers than the gold miners and the feuding families...the marijuana growers. They cautioned me against going on any hikes in those mountains, "don't go off any trails," because I was likely to stumble into somebody's hidden marijuana field. They were all booby-trapped with hazards such as trip-wired rifles or, the ones that scared me, fish hooks hanging at eye level on invisible fishing line from the trees in the dense woods. "That'll keep you from seein' what they don't want you to see," laughed Les. I didn't join him in the hilarity, though.
Living as I do, now, in the most dense city in the United States, it's hard to believe I once lived in a region that Federal Express felt was too wild to send their trucks into, and which the county sheriffs considered to be off-limits for any criminal investigations. And even the fact that my "next ranch neighbors" were sheep ranchers who also ran a restaurant that they'd have trucked up into the mountains for forest fire fighters, there's just so much going on the world that we just can't contemplate it all. And people worry about getting old? I don't regret any of it. I rather suspect that for the second half of my life (assuming that the first 21 years were just a time for getting ones sea legs, that means I've only lived 35 productive years as an adult, and 35 more would take me to my current life expectancy of 91), I'll be living in places, doing things, and meeting people even more unusual. Outer Mongolia, anybody? Gawd, they've got cell phones there, now. At least, I could probably use my i-Book there. I knew I wanted a laptop for a reason!
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