Rant #2,807: Don't Give Up

The last several months in my life have been crazy, and I do mean absolutely crazy.
 
Let’s put the pandemic aside, which has made everyone’s life crazy … my life has been simply an unending tidal wave of craziness.
 
I am happy to say that right after the new year, everything seemed to be resolved, but I had to do a lot of personal leg work to get these things in order.
 
Some were absolutely essential, like getting my health insurance—and before that, my son’s health insurance—in check, leading up to getting Medicare in April.
 
Mistakes were made to my account by the good people at the New York State of Health, and those mistakes—which supposedly were corrected, but really weren’t, unbeknownst to me—threatened my interim health insurance.
 
But I kept at it, didn’t take no for an answer, was told untruths by people who did not know who they were dealing with, and finally, this potential cataclysm went out with a whimper, all having to do with my efforts to fix things.
 
I won’t go into what I had to go through for my son to get his benefits, because I have done that already here, nor will I go through some other hoops I had to jump through to get things the way they are supposed to be, but suffice it to say, I have spent countless hours on the phone, hours that I will never get back, but eventually, all of those efforts paid off.
 
And then we have some “minor” skirmishes that I have had to go through to make things right, and I am going to tell you about the latest one, because it might even help you in the future to make things right when you have been so obviously wronged.
 
Several weeks ago, my family and I were at my sister’s house, and I was talking to my youngest nephew, a good kid who is going to amount to something big someday, I do believe.
 
Anyway, he is very much a member of his generation, as he is into all the proper social causes, has participated in some marches, and really believes in himself and his generation’s beliefs.
 
Anyway, we were talking about one thing or another, and we started to talk about music and records, two of his passions like they are for me.
 
And like his generation, he is very much into owning vinyl records, and, in fact, I have actually bought him one or two records to add to his burgeoning collection.
 
He mentioned to me that he needed a turntable to play them on, because the one that he had was scratching his records, so he couldn’t listen to them.
 
So, as a good uncle, I told him, “Don’t worry about it … I will get you a turntable,” and that was that.
 
Did he believe me? Did he think I was simply talking and there would be no action?
 
No, he knows me better than that … and I went out, and bought him a new turntable.
 
I purchased it through eBay, a source that I have used in the past for many things—including the purchase of this very computer I am typing this Rant on—and I never had much of a problem.
 
I purchased a nice, mid-range-priced turntable for him from the site, it came pretty quickly, and I brought it to him when I received it.
 
He hooked it up, and lo and behold, the turntable did not work.
 
He tried several times, my sister tried to get it going, but it simply would not work.
 
I was told about this, and I came as quickly as I could to pick it up and send it back to the original place of purchase … which began my month-long nightmare.
 
I contacted the seller through eBay that the item did not work and that I wanted a refund, and right in the middle of the Christmas rush, I did not hear back from the seller at all, as I was supposed to.
 
I wrote again, and then again, and nothing.
 
I was forced to contact eBay itself, but not only did I not hear back from them, I continued not to hear back from the seller, and I even got into eBay’s version of hell by doing whatever they said I should do if I was having trouble returning an item and getting embroiled in click after click of not getting anywhere, with each click bringing me back to the same place I had already been to.
 
I did have the address of the seller, so on the very morning I was going to send the item back to them with the postage cost added onto my refund, they finally sent me a mailing slip, so that I could send the item back for free.
 
So I had to find a FedEx site to get rid of this thing, and little did I know that my local Walgreens performed this service, but I found out that they did, and I finally sent the thing back.
 
Through a couple of mishaps with Walgreens—for some reason, they could not send me a confirmation of my action to me right then and there, which I finally received later that day—I finally had the item sent back, and it took a few days to reach its destination, which I know because I did receive a message that the company had the item, even the date and time and person who signed for it, which I received through a Walgreens email to me.
 
And then I waited … and waited … and waited for a refund … and after I had waited enough, contacted the seller asking for a refund but not getting any answer as to when I would receive one … I decided one day to try to contact eBay by phone—
 
Which is akin to trying to talk directly to the president of the United States using yoiur cell phone.
 
At one time when eBay was new, they did have a phone number that anyone could use to talk to them, but that phone number has been out of service for decades.
 
There really is no way to talk to them via the phone about any complaint you have … but then I stumbled onto something on their site, where you can actually speak to a human being about your problem with their service.
 
You first have to do an automated chat with them, and when this chat can’t resolve your problem itself, it will give you a partial phone number and state that if you provided your phone number to them, they will actually call you back in a few minutes.
 
I did just that, spoke to someone—a real person—and via eBay’s item guarantee, I resolved the matter in about a half hour, so on December 31, 2021, after weeks of trying to resolve this, it finally happened—with eBay being the entity to send my refund, not the company I purchased the defective item from.
 
I received the refund on Monday of this week, and in the interim, I purchased another, better turntable for my nephew from another site, and it works and he loves it!
 
Jot this down: https://www.ebay.com/help/contact_us?id=5182&st=10
 
That is eBay customer service, where you can actually speak to someone about your problem with their service, so now, you won’t have to jump through hoops like I did to get to where you want to be to right any wrongs you need to address with eBay.
 
So there you have it.
 
Persistence can lead to prosperity after all!

Rant #2,806: Brain Salad Surgery

… Well, I can say that I told you so, and I did, but I won’t, even though I just did.
 
Another one of those idiotic sexual harassment cases has been dropped against former New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo, and as I said yesterday, the domino has been pushed, and I expect all of these cases to fall, one after the other, in due time.
 
Again, each one of these is a “he said, she said” situation, and sorry, I don’t believe a word that any of these women said about their "sordid" episodes with Cuomo.
 
Did any of this stuff actually happen? Perhaps some of these things did occur, but with the understanding of both parties as to what they were doing.
 
And then others, well, like they say in Brooklyn, fuggedaboudit!

To add to all of this, the current governor of New York, the former governor's lieutenant governor, is supposedly trying to must support for a new state law to put term limits on such offices as governor and lieutenant governor.

If she gets this law passed, then Cuomo can't run for governor again, even if he is absolved of all wrongdoings.

Do I hear political assassination here?

You can't get him on all of the other charges, you know you can't get him on anything, so now, you try to put the final nail in his coffin, because you know that if he could run, he would beat you and everyone else pretty badly.

Hmmmmm ...
 
Now, back to the pandemic …
 
A couple of thoughts crept into my critical mind yesterday, so I figure that I would throw them out to you guys so you can also think about them and give me yoiur opinions on them.
 
Professional basketball, hockey and other sports have been ravaged by the virus as much as the general public has.
 
Yet, somehow, these organizations can get their players to their next games without any delay, and they have enough rapid tests and full tests to last them into the next presidential election.
 
Yet, the public waits and waits for tests on long lines, and many air travelers cannot get home because of delays and cancellations due to the spread of the virus.
 
I have solutions, minor solutions, but it involves these sports teams:
 
• Due to the situation we are in right now, ban any charter flights, making them all commercial flights, which would allow some average Joes to fly and get out of the airports to their destinations.

And I do mean any charter flight, not just those that transport sports teams to their next destination.
 
Open these flights up to the public during this emergency period, and I bet that you rid the airports of at least 50 percent of the holiday travelers that are stranded in airports right now.
 
• Since sports teams seem to have unlimited supplies of tests to use on their players and other personnel, how about distributing some of those test kits to the general public?
 
For instance, each attendee at home games, upon admittance to the game, gets a test kit.
 
Or better yet, allocate however many test kits per day you can afford to distribute and hand them out to the public.
 
Simple as that.
 
Look, these measures won’t totally eradicate what is going on now in our cities and in our airports, but it could make things a little bit easier for some of us.
 
I mean, why should these teams have preference on air travel and testing over the general public?
 
These measures would be temporary, and it would also show goodwill between the teams and the communities that support these teams.
 
Maybe I am being a bit Pollyannaish by even suggesting this, but when I hear that people are waiting five days to fly home, and others are waiting eight hours to get a test, it makes me wonder whether we are unnecessarily putting certain people on a pedestal more so than others, and even though I am a big sports fan myself, it bothers me that we are continuing this type of nonsense, even during a very bad time in this pandemic that we are all supposed to be facing together as a country.
 
Those are my random thoughts of the day.
 
Now onto other things I want to talk about …
 
And unfortunately, they also have to do with the pandemic and the world that we are currently living in.
 
This past Saturday, the WWE had its “Day One” event—and don’t stop reading this if you are not a sports fan there is way more to this than instantly meets the eye—and something transpired that you need to know about.
 
The main event of “Day One” was a championship match between challenger Brock Lesnar and champion Roman Reigns.
 
As was the case in all such matchups, this bout was hyped for weeks to spark interest in this new event that the WWE was trying out this year on the first day of the year … but then, a monkey wrench was thrown into the proceedings.
 
In real life, not WWE fantasy life, Roman Reigns contracted the virus, so the WWE had to quickly manipulate the card to cancel this bout and include Lesnar in another title bout.
 
That is all fine and good, but if you know WWE and you know Roman Reigns, you also know that there is way more to this story.
 
Reigns is a cancer survivor, having had leukemia at least twice in his life, the latest occurrence being about three or so years ago.
 
He is also the top star in professional wrestling right now, so you mix the two things together, and you get a dose or reality that even the WWE can’t disguise.
 
They have to be really careful with the wrestler because of his past bouts with cancer, so I don’t expect Reigns to be back anytime soon.
 
It is just interesting how fantasy meets reality, and reality always seems to win out in the end.
 
Yes, these are strange times we live in right now, aren’t they?

Rant #2,805: You Can Make It If You Try

I don’t know if you heard about this yesterday, particularly, if you live in New York, but the steps toward this final decision had made national news several months ago.
 
And now, it appears to be much ado about very little, and this latest story is kind of being buried.
 
The Manhattan District Attorney's office has decided not to file criminal charges in the handling of coronavirus deaths in New York nursing homes during the tenure of former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
 
According to a spokesman for the former governor of New York, and reported in the press, "I was told that after a thorough investigation--as we have said all along--there was no evidence to suggest that any laws were broken."
 
During the early days of the pandemic, the governor put infected seniors back into nursing homes, which further spread the virus, killing hundreds of those in these facilities.
 
His office also supposedly under-reported the number of COVID-19 deaths at these nursing homes, so the public never received a clear picture of the ravages of the virus on that population—unless they actually had a loved one living in one of these homes,
 
Of course, I am pretty much summarizing what went on with the handling of these senior living facilities and Cuomo during those early days, as things were quite bleaker than I can describe in words.
 
My father in law lived in the Stony Brook, Long Island, VA home, and he passed on from COVID in that home.
 
So, now that Cuomo has been exonerated from any wrongdoing in this regard, has already been exonerated from any legal wrongdoing from at least three of the situations with women—nine more to go—and has had an up and down legal reaction to the book he wrote about handling the crisis in New York State, ordered to pay the money back but vowing to fight it—it seems a different opinion comes weekly on whether what he did was ethical or unethical about using state employees to help him with the book that netted him $5 million—you have to wonder why Cuomo is in the position that he is in, as the state’s former governor, and what his future plans are.
 
He was forced to resign for three reasons: 1) his relations with 12 women, all of whom said that in one way or another, he sexually harassed them; 2) his book dealings, where he supposedly used state employees on state time to help him write and edit the book; and 3) his handling of nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic.
 
Well, at last count, he has been freed of any responsibility for what happened in the nursing homes; three of the 12 women’s stories have been found to be perhaps repugnant but not against the law—and you just know that more are going to come under that heading, if not all of them in the coming days and months ahead—and his book dealings are up and down almost based on the weather.
 
So in due time, he will definitely become the “Teflon Governor,” with absolutely nothing sticking to him, no criminal charges on his back, lots ventured—and lots of money spent on his case—but absolutely nothing gained, other than his not being governor, which was the point of the whole exercise.
 
He evidently rubbed someone the wrong way, and this person—or persons—had the power and the wherewithal to mount a campaign against him to get him out of office, and that included everything he was charged with, and was either exonerated, received a slap on the wrist for, or will be exonerated in time.
 
Among these charges were those made by a group of women who claimed that he sexually harassed them.
 
All of these situations seemed to be twisted and turned to make this guy into a sexual predator of the greatest magnitude, but we are finding out that these women may not have actually lied, but they told tall tales to fit the narrative that was needed to thwart the former governor.
 
What goes on between a man and a woman often is looked at differently between the participants, and sometimes time has a funny way of changing things … and these women at least to me didn’t sound like they were being entirely above board with what they claimed to have happened.
 
And that makes those women who do have real claims of sexual harassment look like they are telling tales too, and that is the sad part of this whole thing.
 
So Cuomo really resigned for nothing, and if he would have stayed in office, he would have been impeached for nothing.
 
His lieutenant governor is now the governor, claiming to not know anything about anything happening in Albany at the time, which doesn’t sound plausible at all.
 
Now that Cuomo doesn’t have much more to worry about legally—those other nine sexual harassment cases are sure to be thrown out too—what are his plans for the future?
 
Well, unless those harassment episodes are quickly thrown out, another run for governor seems to be out of the question for this year.
 
And yes, if he ran as an independent, he would probably win the election—even though he was an egocentric politician if there ever was one, I do believe he would win handily if he would run, in particular against his former lieutenant governor in a widely Democratic state.
 
But could a run in 2026 be counted out if he ends up being charged with nothing?
 
He will be in his late 60s in age, still have a lot of charisma for the electorate that still loves him, and will certainly look at him as an underdog, a wronged politician who really didn’t do anything wrong.
 
Don’t put it past this guy. He is that snarky, wily and ego-driven that it just could happen.
 
People love victims--and comebacks--and as this whole episode unravels, Cuomo, even if you dislike the guy, is looking more like a victim of a political assassination than anything else.
 
Mark my words. If he is fully exonerated, you have not heard the last of Andrew Cuomo in New York politics. 

Rant #2,804: Lazy Day

How was your New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day?
 
Mine was pretty quiet, and it turned out to be the way I liked it to be.
 
Nothing with nothing.
 
On New Year’s Eve Day, my wife and I watched the latest James Bond flick, “No Time To Die,” on Blu-ray.
 
The movie, which was delayed I believe two years from being released to theaters, wasn’t supposed to be out on home video until April, but the movie theaters, being what they are during the pandemic, they rushed released this movie on DVD, Blu-Ray and pay-per-view so they could get the most bang for the buck, I guess.
 
It was a good movie, kept me going for the nearly three hours it ran, but like most Daniel Craig James Bond movies, it just wasn’t one that I will go back to to watch again.
 
The problem with these films is that each one of the Craig Bond movies are interspersed, so they really don’t stand on their own as films that you can just pick one and watch without having seen the others.
 
A new 007 agent makes her debut, but I don’t know where they are going to take this in the future, because her character, at least as how it is portrayed in this film, cannot possibly carry a movie on her own.
 
While others run around during New Year’s Eve, the only running around I did was to pick up Chinese food for my family.
 
In fact, I had to go to the take-out place twice, as they originally left out a good part of our order, but they apologized by giving us two extra egg rolls, so no harm done.
 
And when we ate our food, it was really good.
 
And that was that.
 
I actually watched the first half hour of “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” for the first time in years, watching it with my son as 2021 went into the ether and 2022 came to the fore.
 
They had on the band Journey, never much of my cup of tea to begin with, and with a different lead singer who sounded just like the old one.
 
They played the one Journey song I like, “Any Way You Want It,” and one I never did like, “Don’t Stop Believing,” and that was that.
 
Ryan Seacrest said at about 11:45 pm that the police decided to let anyone in who wanted to see the ball drop, so he stated that "the crowd is larger now than it was."
 
You won't hear the biased press report that about the festivities in Times Square, but that is what Seacrest said … and watching TV news the next day, well, I guess they report on what they want to report on, never giving you the entire picture.
 
How did my family celebrate January 1? By not doing very much.
 
My wife and I went to the supermarket to pick up some stray items, and that was pretty much it.
 
Throughout the weekend, I watched some TV, digitized some more of my records, took naps, and then on New Year’s Day evening, watched with my son the “Day One” event put on by the WWE.
 
The show made big news, as the main event had to be scrapped as one of the participants, Roman Reigns, came down with COVID, and he was pulled from participating.
 
This is not scripted, this is real life. Reigns is a leukemia survivor, and they have to be very careful with him and his health.
 
As the reigning—no pun intended—top star in WWE, this news came as a big blow to the company, but that is the reality of today.
 
The rest of the card was OK, or what little I saw of it was OK, as I took a two-hour nap right in the middle of the show … but my son enjoyed it, and that is all that counts.
 
Sunday was another nothing-much-happening day, so the holiday weekend ended with pretty much a whimper, which was fine with me.
 
Now we go back to the real world, or what amounts to the real world that is being shaped by the pandemic.
 
And as I end this blog entry, I also have to mention the sad news, that during this holiday period, we lost Betty White, and lost her just shy of her 100th birthday.
 
Her career—and her 99-plus years of life—really ran parallel to the history of television, and she was a real-life “Golden Girl” to all of us.
 
What a great lady, and to say she will be missed is an understatement.