Prepare For A Scare!

No, I'm not scared by ghosts, ghouls, vampires or witches. (Remember, I've been married a couple times before.) It's what follows Halloween this year. Barely 48 hours after the doorbell cools off and the candy is distributed, we will sit through the scariest night of this decade: Election Night!

What's so scary about it? Lotsa stuff. Like, if you listen to all the political ads, there is absolutely nobody on either side of the ballot that is qualified to govern. Shady financial deals, personal indescretions, skeletons in the closet, conflicting statements of policy, lies, corruption, legal shenannigans, and so on.

So what will our next set of leaders look like? According to the ads, it doesn't matter who wins... they're all corrupt bed-hopping pinko faggot bedwetters who can't wait to get their hands in our pockets!

Remember 2008? We voted for "change", so we threw the bastards out. It's two years later and what's the battle cry? "Throw the bastards out"! So that's our choice now. Either keep the bastards that are in charge of the mess we're in, or vote in a bunch of new bastards, just like the ones we got rid of last time. There is no real difference. They're all politicians... and that's the real problem!

It's because of one simple fact. We, as a nation, have behaved like a kid with their first credit card... in love with the idea of "buy now, pay later". Well, it's later. And the only way out of the mess we have made of our economy is to make painful decisions and learn to "do without" for a while... just like in our household budget when we buy more than we can afford.

But, as a nation, our decisions are made by leaders who are supposed to represent us. Politicians. Politics has evolved from a service field into a career field, the object of which is more about getting elected than what's good for the country. And no politician can retain their seat by making decisions that are painful to their constituency. Would you vote for someone who promises to make you share the pain of fixing the economy? So guess what's going to happen... no matter who wins!

So I'm not scared of Halloween's hobgobblin high-jinks, when the real thing is looming just a couple of days later!

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Customer Service?

Shortly after moving from NC to upstate New York this summer, I ran out of one of my medications and hadn't chosen a new doctor in this area yet to get a refill. I kept putting it off until finally, one night, I realized I was having a meltdown over something stupid and relatively unimportant. So I went in search of the nearest hospital emergency room to get an emergency supply of medicine and a referral to one of the local doctors.

Vasser Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie was the closest, and they were packed! A nurse a the door asked what I needed, I told her, and she sent me into a waiting room full of people, smells, and probably every germ know to man. This was my environment for about three hours, until I was ushered into an office, had my vitals taken (blood pressure, temperature, and insurance coverage), and led to a curtained cell where I was to wait for a doctor, intern, candystriper, whomever.

Bottom line: I was told they couldn't do a thing for me. They didn't carry the medication, there was nothing they could do, and the only recommendation I got was the name of a buddy of the intern's!

I coughed up my $50 co-pay and left. A couple weeks later I got a notice from the Insurance Co. saying they had paid the balance of the ER bill from Vasser... nearly a thousand dollars!

WHAT?!?! I called Vasser and told them I thought this was an unconscionable exploitation of my insurance company and they should be ashamed of themselves. The ER director assured me that she would look into it and take action.

A week later, a small bouquet of flowers arrived with a card saying how sorry they were that I was unhappy with Vasser. Sheesh!

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In Other Medical News....

Often, moving to a new area brings on new allergies. But eight weeks after moving to New York, my doctor decided that, by then, I should have stopped coughing . It was so bad it was keeping both me and Irene awake nights. I was sent to X-Ray, where they discovered that I've been walking around for more than three months with Pneumonia!

George VanAllen and Bobby Aycock at Chas. Holloman Productions in Charlotte had numerous ISDN recording sessions with me during that time. I'm sure they must've felt like spraying the whole studio with Lysol after each session, even though me and my microphone are 700 miles away!

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By the way, thanks to Bobby A. for sending along this little gem:

During a recent password audit,
it was found that a blonde was using
the following password:

"MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouie-DeweyDonaldGoofySacramento"

When asked why she had such a
long password, she said she was
told that it had to be at least
8 characters long and include
at least one capital.