Well, I\’m a Christian and I don\’t crave violence

Dave Farquhar Christianity ,

I saw a particularly ignorant comment on Digg today in regards to Christianity (blaming evangelical Christianity for G. W. Bush’s misguided tortue policies). I know I really shouldn’t dignify ignorant comments on Digg with a response, but this time I have to. I responded there, and I’ll respond with more detail here.Here’s the quote:

Evangelicals love torture, they are taught it in spectacular detail in the Bible, and they are taught from a young age to abhor nudity and sex, but crave blood and sacrifice, any form of violence really, as it signifies the “end times”. So, the logical extension is, a state where torture is encouraged. The real problem is, like a cult being lead by a twisted, violent leader, Evangelical christianity needs to be treated as a sickness in society.

I (somewhat reluctantly) fit the definition of an evangelical Christian and I take issue with this comment. I say reluctantly, because I don’t like being associated with this stereotype.

Bloody, old-testament-style sacrifices have no place in evangelical Christianity, or any Christianity. The ritual of sacrifice pointed toward Christ. It was replaced by Holy Communion (aka the Eucharist, if you come from a Roman Catholic background). The whole idea of Christianity is that GOD shed blood (HIS OWN blood) and suffered himself, so that we wouldn’t have to. Substitution. Period. Ritual sacrifice was just a ritual, because animal blood cannot attone for human sin, any more than cheap wine can. Both the animal blood and the cheap wine remind us of the blood of Christ. (If you’re Lutheran or Roman Catholic, it goes even further and you’re taught that the wine is the blood of Christ.)

A central point in the Bible is this: I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. It appears in the Old Testament in Hosea 6:6, and in Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7, Jesus quotes it when the scholars of his day lose sight of it. I would agree with the statement that many people today have also lost sight of these verses.

Few evangelicals I know look forward to the End Times, because if you actually read the Bible (and I have read it cover-to-cover), there’s nothing pleasant happening in the End Times. It’ll be nice when it’s over, but if we had a choice, most of us would choose for our lives to occur entirely before the End Times happen. Those who would like to live in the End Times generally crave it just because they believe there may be some position of honor in heaven for having lived through the End Times and survived it.

The Bible actually spends more time talking about money than it spends talking about what’s going to happen in the future. But that isn’t its main premise either. Most of what the Bible is talking about is the dual idea of “Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The bad things that happen in the Bible are illustrations of what happens when people don’t do those two things.

The Old Testament started with Adam and Eve having paradise and losing it because they got greedy. And it goes on down the line, telling the stories of people who did good and bad things and what happened to them. Read the newspapers today, and you’ll see that human nature hasn’t changed much since the time these books were written.

Do I believe that God punishes people, or uses other people as agents of his wrath? Yes, sometimes. But I believe usually there’s no need. The natural consequences of our actions are usually enough. If anything, I think God in his mercy often intervenes and lessens the blow of those consequences. You see it in the Old Testament, and I certainly see it happening today.

I believe the Left Behind books are partially responsible for the stereotype of evangelical Christians as blood-craving, eschatologically obsessed fanatics. But “Left Behind” is based on questionable theology, and the concept of a Rapture originiated in the United States and started to take hold roughly in 1837. It makes for much better sci-fi than traditional interpretations of scripture.

The ads for those books promote co-author Tim LaHaye as a Bible scholar, but he is not universally regarded as such. Sales of his books should not be interpreted as an endorsement for his belief system. From what I understand, Roman Catholics won’t buy them, period. Some Lutherans will buy them, but regard them strictly as fiction, as they would a Tom Clancy novel. Lutheran scholars vigorously oppose the theology.

I won’t get into the details here, because I’m not qualified, but I’ll sum up the problem. Most “End Times”-obsessed theology is based on overemphasizing the books of Revelation and Daniel. Revelation and Daniel are probably the two most difficult books of the Bible to understand. When Jesus was trying to make a point, he generally tried to make it very easy to understand. And when he didn’t, he took the inner circle aside and explained it to them, and the Gospels include that explanation.

The Bible isn’t the only book that’s fuzzy on some details. And what you do when, say, Shakespeare, is unclear is you read the unclear parts in light of the things that are clear.

And this is the reason I left evangelical Christianity for an evangelical-minded Lutheran church. I got tired of having a pastor whose college degree was in math, who had no formal training in theology and who would have difficulty picking out the finer points of Romeo and Juliet, telling me how to read the Bible. I hate to say this, but many evangelical preachers are in over their head, teaching on subjects that they have limited understanding of themselves.

It’s interesting to me that the most evangelical-minded denominations have too many pastors, so their ordained pastors have to have another full-time job. Meanwhile, the Lutherans and Catholics don’t have enough. One reason for this is that it’s really hard to get through Lutheran and Catholic seminary. While I’m painfully aware that the ability to pass all the tests doesn’t mean you have any people skills (and I’ll risk enraging some people by saying many people who make it through Lutheran seminary have no business whatsoever running churches), the fact is that if you manage to make it through a Lutheran or Catholic seminary, in the end you really do have a thorough understanding of the Bible.

I believe some of the backlash against Christianity is due to the unpopular wars that this country is waging. Most Christians I know oppose this war too. We don’t necessarily talk about it a lot. But it’s about as easy to find a Christian who thinks this war is illegal as it is a non-Christian. I know some evangelical Christians who were bailing on Bush in 2004, voting for third-party candidates who had some of the same ideas as Ron Paul. My pastor certainly distanced himself from Bush, and any presidential candidate who ran on Christianity. He said that when things go wrong (and it will, because something goes wrong with every presidency), people will blame it on Christianity. And for that reason alone, it’s not a good idea to vote for a presidential candidate based solely on the faith he or she professes.

That’s obviously what’s happening here–noting that an unpopular president professes to be an evangelical Christian, and blaming the failings of his administration on his religious beliefs.

I’ll buy the argument that there are people in Arab states who dislike the United States because the majority religion in the United States is Christianity. Maybe they’re fighting an Islam-vs.-Christianity war. But we’re not. If it weren’t for the oil equation, we wouldn’t be in these wars.

Bush is more than happy to trade with China and Japan. They have things we want, and they’re happy to take our money. Neither of them are Christian nations.

Most South American countries don’t think too highly of the United States either. The majority religion in those countries happens to be Roman Catholicism, a form of Christianity. But they also happen to be willing to sell us the coffee and metals that we want at prices that we’re willing to pay. We aren’t actively waging war with them, but that has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with trade.

How to fight the City of St. Louis’ red-light scam

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , ,

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I’ve never had a traffic ticket. I spoke too soon. Thanks to the City of St. Louis’ new red-light camera scam, I have one.

It’s too late for me to fight it. But since I want others to fight it, here’s what I wish I’d known the day I got the ticket.First, when you receive your ticket in the mail, get a lawyer. Immediately. The scam works like this: They get the picture of you allegedly making a traffic violation (in my case, not making a complete stop when turning right at a red light, which is perfectly legal in St. Louis County). Then they dillydally around as long as possible. A few weeks or a month after your alleged violation, you get the ticket in the mail.

And there’s the problem. A lawyer needs at least three weeks to fight one of these things, and you’ll probably get your ticket right about three weeks before the court date. If you wait a day or five to mull over your options, you’re not going to be able to fight.

And here’s why I say "alleged"–do YOU remember what YOU were doing at 8:27 AM on Saturday, August 25? Without a photograph of you at the wheel (which St. Louis doesn’t have), they can’t prove it was you. And by waiting a few weeks after the alleged infraction, you may very well not remember if you were driving in that area on that day, or if you loaned your car to someone, or whatever.

In my case, the infraction happened in an area I rarely go. I can’t prove it wasn’t me behind the wheel, but I also can’t prove it wasn’t Francis Slay either.

That’s the reason St. Louis treats it as a non-moving violation. If it were a moving violation with points assessed, every attorney would fight it by saying the city can’t prove who was driving. And the attorney would win every single time.

In the meantime, if you don’t want to get nailed by cities changing right-turn laws on a whim (or by the car behind you if you stop at a yellow light instead of blowing through it for fear of a ticket), there’s a company that sells a $30 high-gloss clearcoat that supposedly causes the flash on the camera to overexpose, rendering your license plate illegible. I have no idea if the product works, and frankly, $30 seems a high price to pay for the fraction of an ounce of clearcoat it would take to cover four license plates. (Although it seems reasonable next to a $100 fine for not coming to a complete stop on a right turn with no other cars present.)

If you want to try to defeat red-light cameras and you don’t mind trying something that might not work, try taking off your license plates and giving them a couple of coats of either Future Floor Polish (which is really an acrylic clearcoat, not a wax) or Krylon clear gloss. I’d probably go with Krylon Triple-Thick Crystal Clear Glaze, since it’s glossier than the standard spray. A can of Krylon will cost about $5 and give you enough to spray your license plates and all of your friends’ plates also. And if it doesn’t work, you’re only out five bucks instead of thirty.

I hope it does work though. The City of St. Louis needs to find another way to raise revenue, other than making a stupid law, enforcing it by proxy, charging an excessive fine, and then stringing it along to make it as difficult for citizens to defend their records as possible.

I’ll see you at the hardware store.

And if you just got one of these unjust tickets in the mail, contact a lawyer immediately. A lawyer will cost more than the ticket, but the city is counting on honest citizens just paying the ticket because it’s cheaper and less hassle than fighting it.

And if you’re wondering where the red-light cameras are, they’re at the intersections of Hampton and Wilson (the entrance to The Hill) and Hampton and Chippewa.

Why I never kept up with the Joneses

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , , ,

I had a bit of a financial epiphany over the weekend.

I have a well-deserved reputation for being a tightwad. Part of it is in my blood; I’m largely of Scottish descent, and Scots just tend to act that way. But I think part of it is what I observed growing up.My wife and I were sitting at my mom’s kitchen table, and for whatever reason, we were talking about my teenage years. In 1988, we moved to a new subdivision in Fenton, Mo. Fenton is a boomtown today, thanks in part to urban sprawl and also because of its first-rate school district, but in 1988 it was still largely an industrial town. Lots of people worked there, and not many wanted to live there. But in the late 1980s, the McMansions started sprouting up like weeds, and lots of families started moving there, ours included.

We talked about our neighbors, and something immediately occurred to me. Most of them were in their early 30s. They were the same age I am now. Not only were they my age, but they drove new cars, and most of them had at least two kids. Meanwhile they were trying to make payments on houses that cost $125-$150,000 at the time. According to inflation, they should cost a quarter million today. Not only that, though, in 1988, interest rates were a lot higher–10 percent wasn’t uncommon according to my quickie research.

Dad could afford that lifestyle–barely. He was a doctor and had been practicing medicine for 15 years. But even we made sacrifices in order to afford to live in that house.

The problem is, I shouldn’t say "even." Most of our neighbors had nicer furniture than we did. Some of them drove fancier cars. And their kids had bigger, costlier toys.

The absurdity hit me. I wouldn’t even try to compete with the lifestyle of a 45-year-old doctor. Not at 33. I make enough that a bank probably would let me have a mortgage of a quarter mil. I could lease cars that don’t depreciate quickly in order to keep my monthly payments down. But there wouldn’t be much of anything left at the end of the month, and I could probably forget about retiring any earlier than 73 (which is what Social Security is saying my retirement age should be). Just because I could make the payments doesn’t mean I should.

I wondered why so many of them got together every weekend and drank themselves senseless. And I don’t think I consciously ever realized I was living in a neighborhood full of people living way over their means–even the family next door, headed by a young dentist trying to establish his practice with five kids and a wife who insisted they needed a Jaguar.

Suddenly, sitting there at the table, telling old stories, I realized why that woman was such a psycho. She couldn’t pay her bills.

And that was also probably why another neighbor wouldn’t go anywhere without a thermos full of wine, and why another young couple who lived nearby smoked pot every Saturday night.

They had everything any reasonable person could dream of having at 32, but if anything at all ever went wrong–a layoff, an extended illness, or a serious injury–they would be in serious danger of losing it.

For whatever reason, I never measured my lifestyle against them. My first few jobs didn’t make me a lot of money, but they let me do pretty much anything I wanted. I had a nicer apartment than Dad had at a comparable age. I could go out to eat any time I wanted. I could buy a new computer every year if I wanted to, as long as I didn’t go overboard on it, and for a few years I did. I drove small cars, but there were always at least two or three cars in the parking lot that weren’t as nice as mine, so I was content to drive my 1992 Dodge Spirit. When it died, I got a 2000 Dodge Neon. It wasn’t a status symbol, but it had power locks and windows, which were two things Dad’s 1981 Chrysler LeBaron didn’t have. It had a nicer radio too. And that LeBaron was supposed to be a luxury car.

My lifestyle was far ahead of where Dad’s had been at my age. And not only that, I had money left over at the end of every month.

There were two things I wasn’t happy about. At the time, I didn’t have a steady girlfriend. And my apartment rent was going up by about $50 a year but the management company wasn’t taking care of the place. When stuff broke, they fixed it halfheartedly, and I didn’t want to pay $575 a month to live in a slum.

When my rent hit $575, I told them I wasn’t going to pay it. They offered me a seven-month lease at about $550. Conveniently, I had enough in the bank for a down payment on a house, and I figured I could afford to pay a couple hundred more every month for a mortgage. I just didn’t want to throw that kind of money away on rent.

So I bought a house. There was a neighborhood about a mile away that reminded me a lot of the neighborhoods I grew up in. I found a house about the size of the house we lived in before we moved to St. Louis. It cost more than I had planned, but it was big enough that I could get married and have a family there and not have to move again. I hate moving. Plus, it was (and still is) in a good school district, all the schools are close by, and anything I could need was close. I didn’t know it right away, but in an emergency, the nearest grocery store AND the nearest car repair place are both walking distance.

For an extra $100 a month, it just made sense. I bought the house. And every night, I filled up that Dodge Neon with everything that would fit, drove to the house, and unpacked. Several friends with vans or pickup trucks helped me move the stuff that wouldn’t fit in my tiny car.

Even though my 1-bedroom apartment was stuffed to the gills, it wasn’t nearly enough to fill a 3-bedroom house with a living room, family room, a study, and a basement. But it didn’t take long for that problem to solve itself. Several people offered me some nice furniture. They were hand-me-downs, but there wasn’t anything really wrong with any of it. Before I knew it, the house was full.

A couple of years later, the right girl came along too. At first she wanted me to get nicer stuff. The problem was, even though I’d gotten promoted to a server administrator at work, they were still paying me my old desktop support salary. The house had wiped out my savings, and I couldn’t really take on another monthly payment on anything. We fought about it a little. I showed her how little was left at the end of every month, and I argued that everything in the house was nicer than anything my parents had at my age. For that matter, most of it was nicer than the stuff they had when I was a kid.

She relented. I don’t know how happy she was about it then. But she didn’t complain.

A few months after we got engaged, I lost my job. I was mad about it. I was convinced I would lose everything I’d worked for. I guess for a minute I thought I was like those neighbors.

But because I’d lived within my means, I survived and soon I ended up with a job with a competitive salary for the first time in my professional career.

Something else came out of it too. The day we got married, neither of us had a job. We started a small business out of necessity. Our final paychecks made the mortgage payments during that summer, and we used our wedding gift money to get the business going. Soon it was bringing in enough to make our utility payments and buy groceries. When I got a full-time job, she took the business over and I helped out at night and on weekends. It allowed her to not have to work outside the home. There are probably things she could do that would make more money, but she doesn’t have a lot of stress, and she enjoys the flexibility.

The odd thing is, we’ve been able to upgrade our lifestyle on the cheap. For example, there are three light fixtures we’ve been wanting to replace for a long time. This weekend I found two light fixtures at a yard sale for a buck apiece. My sister rolled her eyes when I told the story, but these fixtures don’t fit the yard sale stereotype. A sticker on them says they were made in February 2005. Home Depot still sells the same fixture (or something extremely similar) for about $30. That’s not terribly expensive, but $1 is a lot less than $30. The third fixture we need to replace is smaller. We can get something that will look fine with them, and look much better than what we have, for under $20. The result will be a significant upgrade in how the kitchen and living room look, at well under 1/3 the price.

That $60 savings may not sound like a lot, but we’re constantly finding ways to save a few bucks here and there like that. We’re never the first to have anything, but it seems like we always end up getting whatever it is we want or need, and meanwhile we’re socking money away and whittling down on that house payment.

Judged against the standards of my neighbors in 1988, one could argue I’m a failure. I drive a five-year-old car and most of the time I use a six-year-old computer, and the four shirts I bought in 1998 to comply with my then-employer’s dress code are still in my rotation today.

But let’s look at things another way. Not only do my wife and I have nicer stuff than my parents had when Dad was 32, we also have an easier time finding money for necessities like groceries. She can shop at the health-food stores even though they’re more expensive. As long as nothing unexpected happens, we’ll own everything outright and have absolutely no debt–no student loans, no car payments, no mortgage–well before I turn 40. I stress over some things, but money isn’t one of them.

In my early 20s, I watched some of my friends from high school rack up massive credit card debt. At least it seemed like massive debt at the time. I knew then I didn’t want to be like them, at least not in that regard. Now I know that the average American family has $9,900 in credit card debt. That’s about what one of those friends owed, and about twice what another one owed.

I know who I want to be like. I want to be like my wife’s parents. They paid off all their debt sometime in their late 30s or early 40s. Today, when my mother in law sees something she wants, she doesn’t think about it. She can just buy it. Not only that, she’s retired, and she’s nowhere near 73.

I’m not saying I want to buy anything and everything I see on a whim. But not having to think much at all about money seems really nice.

And I guess on some level I’ve known that for almost 20 years, since I was in my early teens.

Why I like MS Office better than OpenOffice

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , ,

I saw a story on Digg talking about why MS Office is so much better than OpenOffice. The argument was pretty shallow–pretty much everything it said was either untrue or could be simplified to "because it is" or "because it costs money."

I’ve used both. I have both installed on a couple of machines. I generally use MS Office. Here’s why.For virtually everything I do, OpenOffice is fine. There’s no feature in Office 2000 that I actually use that isn’t in recent builds of OpenOffice. None. I wrote a book in Office 97, and the only thing that would keep me from writing the same book again in OpenOffice might be the template I used. If OpenOffice could interpret my old publisher’s template and save it in a format my editor’s copy of Word could understand, I’d be OK.

And honestly, I think during the process of writing that book, I pushed my system a lot harder than most people do. Word 97 would crash hard on me once or twice a month, and I don’t think anyone else has ever done that.

I’ve never crashed Word 2000. I don’t know if it’s because Word 2000 is more stable or if it’s because Windows 2000 is a lot more stable than Windows 98 was. I never ran Office 97 on Windows 2000.

My complaint with OpenOffice is speed. Word launches in five seconds or less, even if I don’t have its quick-launch application in memory. Usually less. OpenOffice components load slowly, sometimes taking 30 seconds to load. If I wanted to wait 30 seconds for my word processor to load, I’d use my Commodore 128.

And while I can’t quantify it, once Word is loaded, it’s faster and more responsive. OpenOffice Writer seems to hesitate just a fraction of a second longer when I pull down a menu or hit a hotkey. There’s not a lot of difference, but it drives me nuts.

I’m spoiled, I know. I used to use a word processor called TransWrite on my Amiga. There were a lot of things TransWrite wouldn’t do, but it was lightning fast. Even on a 7 MHz Amiga, it did everything instantly.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but what I want is something that gives me all the features of, say, Word 95, and runs as fast as TransWrite did. Given that 1 GHz is considered a slow computer nowadays, I don’t think that’s too much to ask. Neither OpenOffice nor Microsoft totally deliver, but Microsoft’s product comes a lot closer.

I absolutely, positively do not buy the argument that MS Office is more capable. Microsoft’s eternal struggle has been figuring out how to get people to upgrade their old versions of Office, because frankly when I started working in desktop support in August 1995, the existing Windows 3.1 versions of Word and Excel did everything that the people I supported wanted, even then. When I became a full-time IT worker in March 1997, one of my first jobs was rolling out Office 97. Its draw was that it was 32-bit and crashed less. It had some new features but aside from the real-time spelling and grammar checking, nobody really talked about them. Some people loved the real-time checks, and other people fell all over themselves turning them off.

Two years later, Office 2000 came out. A hotshot in the accounting department told me how much better it was, but when we really talked about the new features, his opinion was mostly due to the excitement of being the first to have the new version. Outlook was considerably better in Office 2000 than it had been in previous versions, but outside of that the only new feature I ever heard anyone mention was that the font menu displayed font names in the actual font. Access was better, but not a lot of people used it.

I’ve used Office XP and 2003. Outlook was incrementally better in both versions. But aside from Word’s booklet printing capabilities, I’ve never found anything in the newer versions of Office that I miss when I come home and use Office 2000 on my now-ancient computers.

And whenever I shift gears from Office 2000 over into OpenOffice, a few obscure features might be in a different place in the menu structure but I’ve always found what I needed.

But if for some reason I had to ditch MS Office tomorrow, I wouldn’t switch to OpenOffice. I’d load the Windows versions of AbiWord and Gnumeric.

In some regards, AbiWord and Gnumeric are closer to the 1992 versions of Word and Excel when it comes to capabilities. But they’re fast. And I’ve always been willing to sacrifice a few capabilities for a program that can operate as quickly as I can think. My only complaint about those two programs is that I never figured out how to make .doc and .xls the default file format for them.

St. George story seems all too believable

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , ,

I’m sure almost everyone has heard the story about a 20-year-old getting harrassed by a police officer in a commuter lot and being told he could be arrested and he could just make up any old story as an excuse. The story’s been all over Digg and even hit some national news sites, such as USA Today.

It happened in St. George, Missouri. It’s the next town over from me, an obstacle on my way to my favorite hobby shop, pizza place, and batting cage.In high school, teachers actually warned us about that town, since the shortest route to the nearest Interstate takes you right through there. When I was 17, I did some computer work for someone who lived in St. George, and she provided me with a map indicating the precise location of each stop sign and gave me a stern warning to stop for a full five seconds at each sign. She told me a cop would be watching me with a stopwatch.

I did what she said and didn’t have problems.

Usually when someone has a flat tire or other car trouble, if a police officer is nearby and sees it, the officer will pull up behind them, angle the car and flip the lights on to keep passing drivers away from the scene. And it’s not uncommon to see the officer actually help the driver change the tire.

Not in St. George. In St. George the cop just keeps zapping motorists with the radar gun. I’ve seen it more than once.

I’ve been pulled over four times in my life. The first was a combination of factors: I made a U-turn, it was late at night, and my skin was the wrong color to be turning into that particular neighborhood. I was driving a coworker home. The officer let me go with a verbal warning.

The second time I was pulled over, it was by a cop who was notorious for harrassing kids. I know he was lying about the speed I was going because I knew the area and I didn’t like driving it much faster than 35 miles per hour (the posted limit). He said I’d been doing 47, which would have been suicide on that stretch of road. That stretch of road doesn’t even exist anymore, and for good reason. After he ran my record and found absolutely nothing, he let me go, but he said he’d go tell my mother what I’d been doing. I might have been a bit worried, if I’d been doing something wrong.

The third time I was pulled over was near the Lake of the Ozarks. The speed limit is 55 most of the way, but a lot of towns drop it down to ridiculous lows. I didn’t slow down enough, and I got pulled over. I didn’t get a ticket but I got a written warning.

The fourth and last time I’ve been pulled over was in St. George. It was late on a Friday, I was coming home from a Bible study (yes, really), and I was watching my speed carefully because I knew exactly where I was. When I saw the flashing lights behind me, I had no idea why. I pulled over, half expecting him to zoom past me, but he pulled over too. He told me right away why: The light over my license plate was burned out.

Up until then it had never occurred to me that there was a light over your license plate, let alone that it was illegal to drive without one. I’d been rear-ended a couple of weeks before, and that probably was the reason the light was out. He took my license, went back to the car and ran my record (as far as I know, still two words long: “No record”), strolled back to my car, and gave me a second lecture about the light over my plate. I told him I didn’t know the light was out.

“Well you do now,” he bellowed, and threw my license back at me.

So I drove my menace-to-society car out of St. George and back home, wondering all the way how many people have managed to get pulled over there and not get a ticket. Probably not many.

In this local account, the St. George police chief denies being a speed trap. “It’s not true. My officers are told to enforce the law. I want quality, not quantity. I want the drugs, the impaired drivers. Those’re the things that make a difference.”

I’ll believe it when I see it. If there’s any drug trafficking going on, it’s along I-55, just outside the city limits. There’s a small bar a mile or two away at the corner of Mackenzie and Gravois, but it’s not very big. I don’t think it produces many drunk drivers since there’s only room for about five cars in its parking lot.

I think they’re more worried about burned-out headlights, people stopping for less than three seconds at stop signs, and people who look like they might be under 18 violating curfew. I think the latter is the reason Brett Darrow was pulled over and harrassed.

If St. George is indeed cleaning up its act, it’s going to take a long time for the reputation to change. Twenty years ago it had a reputation for being a place where they’d pull you over if you didn’t shave that morning, and reputations like that don’t develop overnight.

Maybe a little national attention will give the cleanup a little more sincerity.

Garage sale adventures: The treadmill

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , ,

Earlier this year my wife asked me to look for a treadmill. So I started keeping an eye out. A month or two ago I spotted one at an estate sale, but everything was wrong about that deal.

Today, I pulled the trigger.Unlike the last one, this one wasn’t a hulking beast of a machine, and it looked like it would come apart fairly willingly. At $45, the price was in the neighborhood of what we were willing to pay, and the owner was willing to let us test it out. I called my wife to ask her to come look at it.

She liked it. Then she tried it out and still liked it. I whipped out a couple of twenties and a five, and the previous owner’s husband and I set about disassembling it enough to fit in the back seat of a Honda Civic.

They had mentioned to another patron a willingness to come down to $35. I didn’t try to talk them down. Why? I knew I’d need his help getting it apart and getting it into the Civic. If I nickel and dimed them, he probably wouldn’t be nearly as willing to help me out.

It wasn’t a good fit. After some manhandling, we raised up the machine, rolled down the window, put a towel over the window, and I drove home with about three inches of treadmill sticking out the rear window.

I reassembled it right after lunch. I wanted to get it back together while the memory of disassembling it was still fresh, since some parts of it weren’t quite obvious, at least not to me.

Once I had it all together I cleaned it up. Sometimes a little dish detergent and an old rag is all it takes, but this one had some black marks that required Purple Power. The Purple Power did a nice job for me for the most part.

But there were a few black marks (probably from shoes) that the Purple Power didn’t do so well on. For those, I pulled out another trick. I rubbed metal polish on them. The polish actually removes a bit of the surface of the plastic, so it can affect the texture or sheen, but the slight difference in texture or sheen will almost definitely look better than the black marks would. I’ve used this trick numerous times to restore old plastic train cars, computer cases, and video game cases.

There are some scratches on the painted surface that would require some touch-up paint if I wanted it to look new, but at least I got it clean. A sunny day, a willingness to either take it apart or drag it outside, and a can of Krylon primer and gloss white paint is all it would take to get the metal parts looking new again. It might be a while before we get that sunny day.

Now we have a machine that should last several years and that I know how to take apart if and when the motor dies. If that happens, a new set of brushes should be all it will take to get it going again. It may be time consuming but the parts will cost less than $5. A new one would probably cost $200 or $250, so I think we got a pretty good deal. And while it doesn’t look completely new, I think it certainly looks presentable now.

How I fought the insurance company and lived to tell about it

Dave Farquhar Health , , , ,

My dad was a doctor. Dad told me on several occasions that if I ever came home and said I wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor too, he’d lock me in my room for seven years. One of the reasons for this was because he hated dealing with insurance companies. I vividly remember going out to the mailbox one day and finding a letter addressed to Dr. Farquhar, with a very angry note written on the front of the envelope: PLS LET THE DR READ THE LTR. I asked what this was about, and Dad said insurance was refusing to pay for a patient’s treatment. He said it happened a lot.

Now I’m 33, and my insurance was refusing to pay for treatment my wife needed. The best-case scenario without her medication would have involved numerous hospitalizations. The worst-case scenario? Coma or stroke if a lot of things went wrong. If everything went wrong, death wasn’t out of the question.

Here’s what I did about it.This isn’t exactly how I wanted to tell everyone, but my wife is pregnant. She’s also diabetic, and diabetes and pregnancy aren’t exactly the best combination. It wasn’t long before she was complaining about nausea. That wasn’t anything new; she can get bad nausea at times even when not pregnant. We try to keep a decent supply of Emetrol (or a generic version) on hand because of it. But we didn’t know if it was safe for her to take that while pregnant, so I suggested she ask her doctor. The doctor put her on a generic version of Zofran, a powerful anti-nausea drug.

The difference was like night and day. Without the drug, she couldn’t be up and around for more than 3-4 hours at a time. With the drug, she could function almost normally.

But after a month, the party was over. The insurance company refused to pay for the drug any longer. The doctor protested, but to no avail. So the doctor prescribed alternative anti-nausea drugs.

None of them worked.

She started a rapid decline. Within days, she couldn’t keep food down. Four days after that, she couldn’t even keep water down. She went to the doctor, and her doctor sent her straight to the hospital where she was admitted and treated for dehydration and severe morning sickness (I don’t remember the medical term). They kept her in the hospital overnight.

When her doctor visited, I asked him what to do. He said insurance companies do this all the time.

"Let me get this straight. This guy with no education, who’s never seen her, knows better than you do what’s best for my wife?" I asked.

He said he sees this every day, and he’s sick of it.

"So do I need to look into getting a lawyer and suing this company for malpractice?" I asked. After all, there was at least one time when Dad said a patient needed one treatment, and a different doctor decided to do a different treatment and the patient died. The patient’s family, based on what Dad said, sued the other doctor for malpractice. If a doctor can be sued for practicing medicine badly, why can’t an insurance company be sued when it practices medicine badly?

He said if I did that I’d probably end up on CNN and he’d love to see the public pay that kind of attention to the insurance industry, but it wouldn’t help my wife any.

So I asked about buying the drug outright, without insurance. It was going to cost more than $400 a month. That’s outside of most budgets. I probably could have made it work, by making some cutbacks on food purchases, taking on some extra work, and if all else failed, borrowing some money, but it shouldn’t be necessary. This is why we get insurance in the first place–to cover these kinds of expenses.

So I looked into what it would cost to import the drug from Canada. The best price I found was $330–not much help.

I called my boss and told him what was going on, originally for no reason other than to provide justification for why I wouldn’t be at work the next day. But the more I told him, the more apparent it became that the situation offended him too–and not just because I was missing work over it. And that gave me an idea.

If the situation offended him, then it probably would offend the decision-makers at the company too. I decided I needed to talk to my boss and ask if I would be going over his head by talking to the higher-ups about the situation.

He gave me the OK, so I wrote a letter to my employer’s upper management. It wasn’t very long. In point by point fashion, I described my wife’s medical needs, what the doctor had done about it, what happened after the insurance company stopped paying for the drug, and what risks were involved with my wife not getting the treatment that she needed. I spelled it all out in lay terms. I also tried to be very matter-of-fact about it. They didn’t need my opinions on the matter–the facts spoke for themselves. Nobody would want their wife or daughter to have to go through what my wife was going through. And that was what I was counting on.

My letter climbed up the corporate ladder and over to HR very quickly. Not long after that, the HR director had the insurance company’s representative on the phone. Before the day was over, my wife had her medicine, and by the next day, she had a case manager assigned to her.

I believe this is the only approach that would have worked, and this is why:

1. I have an acquaintance who once worked for an insurance company, in the IT shop. He told me the majority of insurance adjustors who make decisions about what the insurance company will and won’t pay for are frustrated people with minimal education (sometimes just a GED) and they get their jollies by overruling doctors. It’s a power trip, and it’s what gives their lives meaning. Calling up the 800 number on the back of the card and complaining doesn’t do any good because it just proves to them how much power they hold. And calling the number and treating whoever answers the phone to a profanity-laced tirade (or even just asking the person where he or she went to med school) really drives home how much power they hold.

2. I’m just one customer and I have no control. The insurance company doesn’t care if I leave, because all they lose is a bad customer. Remember, customers who pay into the system and don’t take anything back out cause profits to rise. Customers who take money out of the system cause profits to fall. And besides that, I have no say in where my company buys its insurance anyway. The only way for me to change insurance providers is to change jobs, and that’s not only impracticel, it’s also very difficult.

What I had to do was to take my case to the people who do make that decision, and appeal to them. Working from the assumption that none of them would want the same thing to happen to their wives and daughters, I just presented the facts and let them come to the conclusion that the insurance company would do the same thing to anyone else in that situation too–including them. After all, they’re covered under the same plan I am. And of course they wouldn’t want that. What I basically did was raise the stakes. The insurance company wouldn’t be sorry to see me go, but what insurance company wants to risk losing a whole company’s business?

3. I kept my cool. By my own admission, to call me a loose cannon is an understatement. If I don’t like something, everyone around me knows it. But I wasn’t going to make any friends by saying "You guys are idiots for choosing to buy insurance from [company x] because they’re trying to kill my wife and unborn child." My emotions and opinions were more likely to make them get mad at me, and I needed them to be mad at the insurance company, not me. So I trusted them to be reasonable, rational people and come to the same conclusion I would when presented with the same seven basic facts.

So that’s how I got an insurance company to let my wife have a drug they decided they didn’t want to pay for.

Beware of scammers on Craigslist

Dave Farquhar net.culture

In honor of the three-day weekend being over, here’s some of the negativity I promised last week.

I’ve been on a buying spree lately. I’ve been using Craigslist a lot. But I had one recent experience that was extremely bitter.I bought some Playstation games on Craigslist recently. The price was good and there were several titles I really wanted. The seller was way up in Brighton, Illinois. I didn’t know exactly where that was but I figured I could make the deal work.

It was all downhill from there.

First, the seller insisted I come to her. All the way to her. No meeting halfway or even on the edge of town. When I asked what a good time would be, she said 2 PM on Friday. That should have told me something right there. What kind of person assumes anyone else is free to drive halfway to Springfield in the middle of Friday afternoon?

I said no and suggested she come up with a time on Saturday or Sunday. Saturday at 1, she said. That cramped my style too (that’s estate sale time), but in my deal-lust I took leave of my senses and agreed.

So I drove to Brighton. Google was wrong–it’s more than an hour away from where I live. Making matters worse, I got lost when I got there. That’s not as bad as it sounds, though. I don’t think it’s possible to go more than two miles out of your way in Brighton.

But then when I finally found the road, I couldn’t find the house. I went to the end of the road. I would have called, but my cell phone lost its signal a good 10 miles south of there. For lack of anything other option, I started knocking on doors. There were only three houses on the street, so how far wrong could I be?

One of the people pointed across a grassy lot. That’s right. The road ends abruptly, there’s a long grassy stretch, and then the road picks back up again, and there’s one house on it.

I’ll never understand small towns.

So I got to the door and knocked. A rough-looking guy answered. "I’m Heather’s boyfriend," he said. "She asked me to do this deal." He was holding a plastic bag. He motioned toward the bag. "Thirty dollars."

Lesson #1: Never, ever, ever hand over cash without examining the merchandise first. I always check, but everyone I’ve bought something from on Craigslist up to this point has been very honest and their stuff has generally been exactly what I expected. Or better.

So Deal-Lust Dave handed over the cash without even thinking. I took the bag, he closed the door abruptly, and I turned and walked along the grassy road (bet you never thought you’d see that particular word pair) back to my car.

As I put the key in the ignition, a light bulb went off. I’d better check this stuff over before I drive an hour to get back home.

I opened the bag. Nothing was better than I expected, that was immediately obvious. I pulled out the three games that were the key to the deal and opened the cases. Two of them were multi-disc games, and both were missing disc 1.

At first I didn’t think anything of it. Probably one was still in the Playstation and the other was sitting on top of it. It happens sometimes.

I walked back along the grassy road, up the driveway, and to the front door. I knocked.

Nothing.

A couple of minutes later, I knocked again.

Nothing.

I knew they hadn’t gone anywhere because I’d been no further than 300 feet from the house since he closed the door. I was starting to get mad. This time I didn’t wait two minutes, and I didn’t exactly knock on the door gently, either.

The rough-looking guy answered the door with his equally rough-looking girlfriend in tow.

I held up the two game cases. "These two games are missing discs."

She got a defensive look on her face. "They didn’t come with them."

So much for it being an easy mistake to correct. So much for it being an honest mistake, for that matter.

"It would have been nice if you would have mentioned that earlier," I said. They gave me a how-dare-you look and started to close the door. "You ripped me off!" I managed to blurt out before the door closed.

So I’d wasted $30, two hours of my Saturday, and three or four gallons of gas. The two semi-literate, inbred rednecks got the better of me on that one.

I’ve done a couple of deals since then. They turned out fine. I guess those people had jobs, since they all suggested times well outside of working hours, and neither of them objected to me checking out the item thoroughly before handing over the cash.

Best. Documentary. Ever.

Dave Farquhar Society ,

Tomorrow is Labor Day. If you’re like me, that means you don’t have to work.

If you need a reminder of what you wouldn’t say you’ve been missing, Bob, then you need to watch Office Space.Haven’t seen it? Don’t rent it, buy it. The VHS will cost you about five bucks. The DVD costs about ten. Trust me, this is a movie you’ll watch over and over. I’m sure I’ve seen it more than 14 times and it never gets old.

Of course reality is usually more ridiculous than this movie. For example, I had to sign a document this week where I basically agreed not to rearrange the icons on my desktop without getting approval from upper management. I can’t do anything without prior approval unless it’s in some policies and procedures document. Of course if you could anticipate everything that could happen with computers and write policies and procedures that cover all of it, you wouldn’t need IT people. High-level executives, insurance representatives, semi-trained monkeys, or other unskilled labor could do the work.

There’s something in the film that’s always bothered me. Bill Lumbergh’s parking spot is second-closest to the building, next to the handicap spot. One place I worked, the executive spots were closest to the door. The handicapped and expectant mother spaces were second and third closest, respectively.

Why don’t you share your best Office Space-like story?