Paul's Comments

I have discovered what it is like to suffer a severe power loss. As a result of the massive blizzard that started Friday we had a power failure. It happened around 9am Saturday morning.

Well, what can you do? I had been watching some of the extended snow coverage and watching some of the details. As it turned out, by sheer luck I had just recharged my cell phone. So I want to call PEPCO and report the outage to be on the safe side that it was reported. Well, I don't have the automated number. Oh yeah, I have it in my other phone, the one I don't put any minutes on since my sister loaned me one of the spare ones they have. But that one was left on and never recharged. So I have to call 411 (at probably over $1 a call I hate having to pay for Directory Assistance calls, however I know from prior attempts that neither Free 411 nor toll free DA ever gives the correct number for PEPCO, I don't have a choice).

So I get their automated system and need either the phone number the account was set up under or the account number. I don't have either and because of the emergency the voice mail to record a message is full. So I call the landlord and I get the phone number and I call it in. Well, at least I discover that there already was a report so we were covered.

So what can I do? Can't go out, the walk isn't shoveled and we don't have a shovel anyway, plus all bus service is suspended. No electronic toys so can't use computer or watch TV. So I do what I often do on weekends: sleep.

There is a problem,. however; even with the place kept closed it's still getting colder. Eventually, in addition to the Snuggies and blankets I have on, I have to put on my new winter coat that I got for Christmas. So it's slightly uncomfortable due to the cold, but at least it's not dangerous yet.

So, anyway I get hungry. We are fortunate to have a gas stove, unfortunately the oven uses a computer to operate it, so without power the gas oven can't be used! But the range can be, if I can find matches, since the automatic starter uses power. Someone has matches.

Okay, what do I have that I can cook on the stove? Well, I have two cans of clam chowder that, fortunately, I'd been saving for emergency rations. And they're pull-top so I don't need the electric can opener. So I have one and that gets me through lunch. Back to sleep for a while.

By the time it gets dark I realize that this is the darkest dark I've ever seen in the place. Many times I leave my computer monitor on or the TV on because I have it for background noise, but occasionally I'll turn everything significant off. This means the TV, the cable box, my computer monitor and the lights. But at that, the cable modem indicator lights, my computer's power light on the front, the on-off light on the front of the converter box, and the surge suppression and power indicators on the wall socket are still on. Here, there's nothing but the light of the snow on the ground from outside reflecting the light of the moon; even the streetlights are out.

Later in the evening I get hungry again. I don't want to have to eat the other can of soup so I look what I have. I didn't buy much the other day because (1) I only had $20 and (2) I expected to go the next day to the credit union where my disability check is deposited. So I had only bought enough food for a couple of days. In the interim the huge snowstorm was announced so I couldn't go, I might have been stuck.

So, I have hot pockets. Oops, microwave or oven. A pizza; oven. Taquitos: oh, great, they can be pan-fried. But they're supposed to be thawed, first. Oh please; I know that if you leave a freezer closed the food will stay cold for many hours; thawing the food was what I did not want to happen! So what I did was to put some water on, boil it, then use the plastic bag to heat up the taquitos enough to make them not frozen. Seemed to work only I'm supposed to have oil or butter to cook them in. It's going to be too much trouble to find some as I'm working by flashlight, so I'll just wing it as best I can.

It works. They actually were pretty good, and slightly crispier than when microwaved, I may have to try it this way again. I turn the (non working) light on in the kitchen so I'll be able to see when the power comes back on.

In doing this, somehow I am reminded of a scene in the movie Hotel New Hampshire where the two kids of the owners decide to turn every light in the building on after a storm knocks out the power. The sheriff of the small town they are in stops by, and is in the parking lot, turns the knob on his radio to turn it on, when the power is restored at that moment and the entire building lights up like a Christmas tree. He's so shocked that he has a heart attack and dies!

So anyway, back in bed I try really hard to do something to keep me a bit warmer, and I end up with the condition where - this was going on all day - you sleep for a while - maybe a couple of hours - until either the cold disturbs you or you have to pee. So you never really get good, solid sleep.

I'm awakened again and I notice the outside, and I realize there's a streetlight on. Yes! I turn around and I can see through my glass door that the kitchen light is on. I go out and discover that it's exactly matching, the clock on the stove - which resets to 12:00 when power comes back on - now reads 12:45. As it turns out, that's exactly when power came back on. As an exercise for the reader, now figure out what time it is when I'm looking at this clock.

The heat is back on plus I turn my space heater on. It takes most of Sunday before it's back to being comfortably warm again.

So one of the things I'm putting on my list to pick up next time I go shopping is more canned goods so I have at least enough for a week.

The History Channel has a series called Life After People that runs every Tuesday night at 10pm, in which it gives an idea of what could be expected to occur if people suddenly vanished from the earth (for whatever reason).

A couple of comments I found were very funny. The first concerned a painting by Leonardo DaVinci on a church wall, which has required regular retouching over the centuries including dehumidifiers. Since people are no longer around to keep up these protective actions, "How long will it be before nature finishes off The Last Supper?"

They also take a look at the 2nd tallest building in the world. "Taipei 101 is considered by some to look like a series of [Chinese Food] take out boxes. How long before nature takes out Taipei 101?"

I thought that maybe 2007 - when I moved out on my own for essentially the first time - or maybe 2008 when I had to move a second time, would be big years for me, but I think 2009 was the biggest.

I moved, ended up in a place that was foreclosed, had to run a house that had problems, made a bunch of mistakes trusting people, got a power wheelchair, got evicted, lose almost everything I own, ended up in a homeless shelter, find that something damaged the power wheelchair and it only operates at 1/2 of the amount of time it did when I got it, got an eye infection, and finally move to another place.

And this was only over a period of about 10 months, from the middle of December 2008 through September 2009.

But as I said in my video [a link to the entry on this blog appears here], I'm coming back, and I'm coming back stronger than I was. I have to learn a few things because I'm going to open a new business. I also need to try to find out what to do about this eye infection that makes one eye weep all the time and causes the other to have light sensitivity. The eye drops my original doctor gave me didn't seem to help - I apparently got dizzy from them and had to stop using them - and he recommends I go see an opthamologist. Now all I have to do is find the money.

Other things I need to do as well, there are a bunch of people who owe me money who ripped me off, and I think I'm going to sue them. Have to do some of this quickly before the statute of limitations runs out. I have a post office box so I don't have to give any of the slime who stole from me my home address. This is part of the same thing that I've had to learn to be hard about, I am sick of being ignored because I'm a disabled man in a wheelchair and people think I'm an easy mark. And you know what, they've been right. I've been too nice, but the problem - if we can call it that - is that I've generally been a nice guy because I've never been good at being a bastard. But I'm learning that I may have to be if I want to get people to treat me with respect.

I hate having to consider the question once asked of a criminal in a movie: "Is it better to be loved or feared?" I've found that when you deal with people personally, the former works better; when people like you and respect you because you're a decent sort, but occasionally that means some of them treat you badly because, in part, they can get away with it. So I may be involuntarily forced to become harder and more ruthless because of mistreatment by others. I hate having to go that way, but it looks like I have no choice or some people who rip me off are going to continue to get away with it.

Suing people is not going to be fun but I'm probably going to have to go that route. I'm sick of some people treating me like a Welcome mat. (I have some nastier terms to describe how I've sometimes been treated but I think I'll go the high road and not mention them here.)

On June 28, the mortgage company got an "order of posession" (the equivalent of a court-ordered eviction) for the property I was living at and was paying rent until the landlord got foreclosed upon, whereupon I was then paying utilities and repairs on the place which essentially ran more than I had been paying in rent. The morgage company never told me or anyone here anything; they never even sent me a postcard. I'm not going to ignore or disregard a court order; they could have had the place clean and without the extra expense of a dispossession, but obviously they don't care. I was paying a guy a monthly fee to warn me about such things. He also failed me.

On August 4, 2009 at about 11:30 in the morning, deputies from the Prince George's County Sheriff's department came out and evicted me and everyone else in the building. I salvaged a few things over the next few days but essentially I lost everything. This wasn't supposed to happen; my expectation was that I would have notice of this happening and had time to act, to have my posessions put into storage, to find another place, etc.

What a mess.

One "advantage" to being handicapped is that the Sheriff can't just dump me on the street; they had to find me a place and can't just leave me, they had to wait until Metro Access - surprisingly on only two hours notice, not a day in advance as is usual - came and got me to take me to a homeless shelter that had space and could accomodate a wheelchair client.

A deputy sheriff - Paula Henderson - called Prince George's County Social Services. The people on the phone didn't particularly like having to get off their ass and do something for a change, and basically kept trying to dump the problem on someone else, because apparently they have considerable trouble understanding "plain ol' Galveston English" when I kept explaining that I did not have any one who could help me, until finally I gave them my sister's phone number and they put her on three-way conference call with me and she confirmed that it was not possible for her to help me.

Which ended up getting me to Prince George's House on Addison Road South, a few blocks from the Addison Road Metro station. It's not a bad place. A little heavy on the religious aspects of trying to use God as a means to solve the problems of the clients - like myself - who end up stuck there for a time.

If the Sheriff's office hadn't hit the place just after I had paid a number of bills that left me with very little money, there are a number of things I could have done to salvage the situation.

Well, anyway, so Metro Access comes gets me and takes me over to the shelter. In the mean time the vultures in the neighborhood came and feasted on whatever I had that they could cart off and steal. Actually, that's incorrect; vultures only feed on the dead. So, in the mean time the hyenas in the neighborhood came and feasted on whatever I had that they could cart off and steal.

I salvaged a working laptop, which is what I'm using to write this, and I would like to acknowledge the very generous availability of free wireless Internet access from the Martin Luther King (main) branch of the District of Columbia Public Library.

There will be more news later as I tell about some of the things that have happened over the last (almost) three weeks, including two unsuccessful trips to MVA to convert my license over from Virginia to Maryland; a trip to Baltimore where I got chewed out by the train crew for trying to take the elevator from the station to the train; how I almost converted from agnostic to atheist until I gave the universe an ultimatum; and handling various paperwork to try to find substitute housing which someone in a wheelchair can use.

I decided to split this entry off from the one about the Office Max catalog as I realized this is really a totally separate article.

Looking at the Office Max catalog, I see that they are selling Lexmark laser printers, basically at the typical full price of a printer, around $400-800 depending on features. Based on what Lexmark cartridges cost, they should be giving the printers away. Let's see what a Lexmark cartridge costs. The C543dn is a color laser, costs $399.99, will do a 35,000 page per month duty cycle, has 128mb of memory, and uses the 21724528 black cartridge, which I am having trouble finding. That number is an Office Max SKU and I can't find the cartridge for the C543dn, which frightens me even worse about what it would cost. I'll go to their website - or someone's - and see if I can find the cartridges for the Lexmark C543dn. Well, something is wrong because Office Max's website doesn't even list a cartridge for a C543dn. And the printer itself is there on the catalog and web pages.

Their website doesn't have the cartridge when I tried that SKU. So this is amazing; Office Max will sell me a $400 color laser printer that as soon as I run out of toner, it's a boat anchor! This is so funny as to be absolutely tragic. So I'll try Lexmark's own website. Oh, Lexmark will sell me this printer directly at the same price as Office Max, $399.99.

Well, I am surprised to find that the cartridges sold by Lexmark are the C540 series, which is $44.99 for black and $58.99 for each of cyan, magenta or yellow. I am really surprised that they're not as expensive as I expected. Oh yeah, they're the "prebate" cartridges where you're only supposed to use them once, then send them back to Lexmark for remanufacture. Yeah, right, if I buy your cartridge, it's mine; once it's empty, it's going to Staples or whoever else is offering the best return deal. You want it back that bad, pony up some rebate cash. Staples offers $3 apiece in store credit for all ink cartridges, up to $30 a month. Or that might just be inkjet, maybe they offer a little more for laser cartridges.

One time I had my brother go in and turn in a cartridge for the - what I thought was - cash rebate, but they weren't offering that. What they were offering was a free package of paper. Oh, let's see, a $3 cash refund or a package of paper - which I can use and will still eventually need anyway - that will cost me $4 to buy? Hmm, okay, I'll be happy to take that instead.

It doesn't tell me the estimated page count for the C540 cartridge. Oh, the specs page does: 2,500. But the color is only estimated for about 1,000 pages. Okay. Now let me try a comparison to a competitor.

Brother HL4040CN, same $399 price, but their cartridge price is actually more than the Lexmark at $59.49 for black and $69.49 for each of the three colors. Estimate 2500 black/1500 color pages.

So Lexmark's price per page is 1.7c for black, 5.9c for color; Brother's price is 2.3c for black, 4.6c for color. So it basically means that you're still better off with Brother over Lexmark as presumably you purchase a color laser because you regularly use color in your documents more than just occasional spot color.

So maybe Lexmark has realized that they can't be the high-price leader, and have become more reasonable on printer pricing. Or maybe it's just on inkjet printing that they're outrageously expensive. Hmmm, Office Max does not have any injet printers from Lexmark, maybe it means they realize they can't be competitive in that market and they've moved on to laser exclusively.