While driving along Coon Ridge Road early this afternoon enjoying my ’04 Mustang GT even as I tended to business, it struck me that no matter how tough you think you have it, others have it tougher.
This thought was prompted by seeing a turkey vulture eating his/her (I certainly don’t want to risk offending a gay buzzard with an incorrect pronoun) lunch. It was scorching hot and on the menu was a ripe, dead skunk, literally in the middle of the road, just like the novelty record by Loudon Wainwright from my youthful years, in this case 1972.
The skunk did not, as in the song, stink to High Heaven. Perhaps the buzzard already had gulped down the scent glands that, fittingly, are located around a skunk’s anus. And this reminds me of a former co-worker who was fond of saying he was so hungry he could eat the anus (he didn’t say anus) out of a skunk.
I can’t recall ever being that hungry. Perhaps this buzzard was.
I slowed down and moved to the other lane. The bird, seeing that I was being considerate, stopped moving away from the dinner table in mid-step and pushed back in for another bite.
Sure, I was having another of those frustrating days that are the price one pays for being alive, but at least I wasn’t having dead skunk for lunch.
My sad tale of today began with the Saturday mail, which brought notice from my ITU pension people that not only did I need to send them a signature, the annual proof I still am alive, this time it had to be notarized.
It was convenient that this would arrive on a day they were not in the office to hear my protest. As it turns out, that is true for any day that ends with a Y. More on that later.
Calling the ITU office to express my unhappiness topped today’s to-do list. I mean, my wife and I both collect Social Security and not once have either of us been required to prove we still are alive. I also have two other pensions that I earned and now collect, without proving annually that I still draw breath.
You legal-minded people probably already know that collecting Social Security benefits for dead people – pension benefits, too – is decidedly illegal and if your name happens to be Sam instead of Juan or Mohammed, you likely will see jail time for doing this.
Calling the ITU people was an exercise in futility. I got to listen to the phone menu three full times, twice with the promise that someone would be right with me, and finally with the demand that I leave my name and phone number and someone would get back to me in the next 24 hours. Pardon me if I do not hold my breath.
That item having been checked off, sort of, I paid my huge semi-annual sewage-garbage payment of $370-plus to Southmont Borough. Then it was on to the West End to have my signature notarized.
I left there $20 lighter in the wallet. Doing some basic math here, $20 for five minutes of work comes to a rate of $240 an hour. I wasted a lot of time, apparently, as a sportswriter.
It was not her fault. Like lawyers, who have the government, the legal system, and private industry conspire to insure virtually every act one might commit requires a lawyer, so it is that notaries also are on the make-work list.
I have, or had, the $20, so I’m not pleading poverty. It is the concept that bothers me.
It is the equivalent of being forced to prove you are not committing a crime. That is the sort of thing our Constitution is supposed to prevent.
This is the stuff of totalitarian regimes, with their mantra, show me the man and I will show you (make up) the crime.
The man also behind the counter at the notary operation, presumably the owner, was defending this sort of thing. I guess I also would defend such if I could find a niche where likely the majority of that $20 for five minutes of work flowed directly into my pocket.
Before I go, here is some more basic math to be considered. That ITU pension plan has been on the financial rocks for years, in various stages of distress as defined for such things. Supposedly they are not as distressed as they once were, perhaps residue from getting enough people to refuse to jump through ever more onerous types of arbitrary hoops just to get the money they have earned and so forfeit the payments.
My exceedingly generous pension from the ITU is $74.26 a month. So, if they hit me for a $20 notary charge annually, not to mention the ever-increasing postage – currently 82 cents for the letter – and factoring in gasoline costs and time spent attending to such drivel, if I have the fortune to live another 10 years, they will have cost me the equivalent easily of three months of pension and likely four months of that pension.
Thanks, guys!
What I would like to do – but won’t – is to go back to Coon Ridge Road, battle that buzzard for the remains of the dead skunk, and send it to ITU headquarters as a ridiculous gesture like theirs.
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