Trust the Tech

Trust the technology. That’s all you hear when something new comes out. “Trust the technology” can make your life easier.

I’m a map kind of guy. Squinting at small print on paper is a thing I kind of dig. I don’t normally use them for planning. I use them to figure out where I’m at when hopelessly lost.

I’m all about personal growth, so I decided to use GPS to travel. It’s a well established technology that all of the sissies that can’t read maps have used for years.

I found GPS to be pretty cool and effective. I only had to type my destination in my phone and it did the rest. It even had a pleasant female voice telling me what to do. It was kind of like a wife but in a good mood. You know what I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard rumors of a wife in a good mood. Let’s call her Trixie.

So we took off and followed Trixie for a long time. She was nice, I was nice, and everything was nice. Then it went badly and stayed that way.
I was deep in Missouri and spied something interesting near our path. I veered away, and Trixie said, “Make a u-turn in 200 feet”. I didn’t. Trixie re-calculated, instructed me to turn around, and I again ignored her.

I’ve never thought a computer could get angry, but Trixie definitely did just that. She became loud and venomous. My response was what any good married man aspires to do. I turned her off. I later learned that was a mistake.

We traveled a long time on the open road without the help of Trixie. Figuring I needed help getting through Baton Rouge, I opened the GPS program and entered the address of our destination, which was in New Orleans.

We were traveling at the advertised speed on I-10 when Trixie spoke up in what seemed to be a soothing, almost seductive voice. “Exit in 200 feet” she crooned. I complied, though it didn’t make sense. “Turn left” Trixie said. I turned and I thought the phone giggled. As I drove the street got narrower and rougher. The neighborhood has cars on blocks and lots of gang graffiti. I swore a little and wondered if my will was updated.

After a few miles and several brushes with death Trixie sent us back to the interstate. My wife and I looked at each other and shared an unspoken, “What was that?”

Trixie stayed on and happy. We made good time to New Orleans. Trixie started instructing us to the RV Park. Her instructions didn’t seem to jive with what I remembered from the map but I played along.

The neighborhood began mimicking the one we’d seen in Baton Rouge. We wedged the RV between fetid canals and dozing winos. Finally, Trixie announced we were at our destination.

Trixie took us to a run-of-the-mill, post- apocalyptic toxic waste dump. Smart money would bet that it was never an RV park.
Trixie definitely laughed.

Using map, compass, and luck we eventually found our RV Park. We were still a little shaken over our close call, but we calmed down eventually and even got a little sleep.

The next day was sunny with the promise of new adventures. We set out for the French Quarter and naively turned Trixie on.

I was pretty sure we were going the wrong way, but for some stupid reason I followed Trixie. We ended up facing a levee. She chuckled. I turned around and Trixie recomputed her instructions. She directed me and viola, another levee, and another and another levee. The GPS was laughing out loud now. I know, it sounds impossible but I heard it. So did my wife.

I finally gave up and parked the truck in the middle of the street near a large wino.

Eventually a mail man came up and peered in my window. He had a bemused look on his face. I pulled myself out of my depression enough to ask how to get to the French Quarter. His instruction revealed we were many miles away from it.

We eventually got there. We left the GPS off for the remainder of the trip. I don’t think I’ll ever turn it on again.

What’s the moral of the story? Trust your technology unless you’ve made it mad. If you have, you’d better get rid of it. It may send you over a cliff. I’m sure it’ll laugh when it does.

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A Real Man Can

MacGyver, MacGyver, MacGyver. I’m sick and tired of this MacGyver crap. Now that TV ran out of ideas and is rebooting that series, you hear it all of the time. Even thinking the name makes my jaws clench. I really want to kick something whenever someone compliments me by calling me that name. There’re several reasons why the name makes me want to kick something.

MacGyver ain’t all that. First of all they make a big deal about his stupid Swiss Army knife. It isn’t even American. Here you have a hero that is supposed to be the epitome of Yankee know-how and tenacity and you give him a foreign knife? All I can say is “traitor”. If he was a real American he’d use a Buck or Case. Every guy knows that those are much better knifes than the sissified foreign knifes. If he was a real American guy he’d have one of those or even a Leatherman, which has more tools on it than he knows how to use.

MacGyver ain’t all that because he doesn’t do stuff like a real guy. For example, I remember an episode when MacGyver was locked in a freezer. To get out before he froze, he devised a fancy way to bust the lock. That’s just stupid. He never looked to see what there was to eat in the freezer. It could have been full of ice cream or frozen pies, but he’ll never know. Besides that, if he was a real guy he’d kick the crap out of the door until it opened. That may not be worthy of a prime-time drama, but it’s realistic.

MacGyver ain’t all that because he ain’t from here. That sounds a little cocky, but it’s true. A guy around here can do things. I’ve seen a guy replace a u-joint on his car with #9 wire and an old inner tube. MacGyver wouldn’t do that because he’d screw up his girlie little manicure. I’ve seen a guy throw a chain around a stump and yank it out of the ground with his truck. MacGyver would have to hack a space laser to remove a stump. I doubt if he could even get a truck into gear, let alone work a chain. He’d probably spend all day trying to push the chain instead of pull it.

MacGyver ain’t all that because he carries a “man-bag”. That’s a purse. It’s also called a messenger bag. Guys don’t carry them. Look around, you won’t see any real guys carrying one. If you go to the hippie quadrant of any city you’ll see guys with purses and man-buns. They can’t fix stuff like a regular guy and neither can MG.

MacGyver ain’t all that because of his hair. I know it was the 80’s, but jeez. If it was a proper mullet, it’d be OK. A lot of guys had mullets. No guy I ever knew had hair like MacGyver. I’m pretty sure he had mousse or some other metro-sexual product in it. I’ve known a lot of guys that can build and fix a lot of stuff, and none of them looked like they used product in their hair. Even if they had hair, most rarely combed it. It is just another indicator that MacGyver is a fraud.

So when you see a guy rigging something up or doing an unorthodox fix, don’t call him “MacGyver”. That’s an insult. Call him a fixer, or a problem solver, or a “good old boy”. Mostly you can call him a “Man”. Never curse a man by calling him the MG word or he may throw a chain around you and yank you right out of the ground.

Next time I’ll lay bare the grizzly facts about that Grills guy.

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How to Not Die

I think I remember everything my Grandmother ever said or did. She’s been gone a long time, but I can almost see her sitting there with her green ceramic cup of Tasters’ Choice and a pack of Tareyton 100s.

She taught me many things, but mostly Grandmother taught me how to not die. She had a million lessons in how to not die.
Don’t act up or the gypsies will come and take you and you’ll die. It was always the gypsies, and not boogiemen or monsters that would get you. I guess the gypsy fortune tellers employed some sort of video surveillance system of kids everywhere. They must have alerted a gypsy SWAT team that swooped into homes in the middle of the night to kidnap rowdy and unruly kids. This bit of advice gave me nightmares and a fear of horse drawn wagons. I think it’s called Nomadicpsychicdanceraphobia.

Don’t plant an evergreen tree in the front yard or you’ll die. Well you might not die, but someone you want to not die will, in fact, die. It didn’t matter when kind of conifer went in the front yard, it’d still kill somebody. I always wondered if planting a small evergreen bush in the front yard would be a weaker curse and would only make you sick. I never had the guts to try it.

Don’t take anything out of a graveyard or you’ll die. The logic of this rule is sound. If you assume that the graveyard has some sort of supernatural electrical charge then removing something will put it out of balance and make it suck something in to balance it out. I could find a gold nugget the size of my head with a sign on it that says “take me home” and I won’t touch it. If you lay a $10,000 dollar bill on the ground in the cemetery it’ll be there when you return because I’m not taking it through the gate. I intend to continue to not die.

Do obey your Grandmother or it will be bad. She knows everything, as opposed to your parents who don’t know anything. Ignoring her advice is bad. Listen to her and you will not die. I did ignore her once and it was bad. I didn’t die but Grandma cried because I was bad. That was worse than die. It was horrible. I never did that again.

Even if you do everything correctly, someone may die. You can behave, remove the spruce from the front of the house, and respect the cemeteries and still die. Fortune tellers can predict this, Grandma always said. She talked to a gypsy woman who said someone in the family was going to die and 6 or 7 years later they did. That is just scary.

Grandma had a definite opinion of men in the Armed Forces. They were all orphans without families of any sort. They went in the military because they were all alone in the world, without a chance of any kind of life and a dark, lonely future. When I enlisted she was horrified. I might as well have told her I was having my left arm cut off and made into a lamp. She told me I would die far away from home and become a ghost wandering lonely places for all eternity. I went against her wishes and went to the Air Force. It will probably cost me my life. If I draw my last breath and achieve room temperature when I’m 107, from heaven she’ll say, “I told you the military would kill you”.

I’m sure your very own, individualized Grandma had her own rules and advice. The wisdom is a result of living through successfully raising he own kids without killing them. I believe when their last child reaches the age of majority they get a telegram from the International Grandma Council with the location of the secret meeting that imparts wisdom. I think that they all assemble and reach an agreement on how to preserve humanity for another generation. They may even draw rules from a hat that they have to convey to the kids. It’s sort of senior citizen illuminati. Without their secret society we’d suffer. Because of the society we are able to not die.

Make sure you listen to Grandma. If you don’t have one, ask around. There’s probably one you can borrow. It’s best to be safe. We all need to not die.

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Be Nice, or Else

Is courtesy common? No, no it’s not.

We’re on a road trip that culminates in dinner at that famous place in Missouri that hires people to throw bread at you. If you’ve ever been there you know there are always hundreds of people waiting to eat some good food and get hit in the head by yeast rolls. We sign up and get number 954. They call number 7, so we have a few minutes to wait. The 14,000 people ahead of us are milling around the 9 seats in the lobby. I notice that the median age of the seated patrons is 22. The median age of the dining hopefuls that are standing is 63.7, give or take a decade.

Notice the seated patrons are young. The standing patrons are not young. Exactly 3 of the older unseated hungry are on oxygen. Several are on canes. Some are using walkers.

I stand near a seated young man wearing athletic shoes and 18 inch biceps. When he looks up from his copy of “Young and Rude Monthly” I point to a one legged octogenarian balancing on a single arthritic foot. He looks, then looks back at me, and resumes reading.If not for the bulging biceps and an aversion to being jailed in a strange land, I would have smacked him in the back of the head. He obviously needed it. More importantly, his parents should be smacked for not smacking him when he was rude. The lack of parental attention to manners must be an epidemic, because no one else offers a seat to anyone.

Later on we stop at a Wallyworld in the Missouri Badlands. My wife whips out her newly endowed handicapped placard. I motor up to the head of the parking rows, but there are no empty spaces for handicapped. Most of the cars parked in handicapped spots don’t have any documentation that allows them to park there. There is even a motorcycle parked there. I grumble and park miles away. Near the end of my 5 mile hike to the door I see a couple of largish young men in their truck talking to other Neanderthals while parked in the handicapped space. I’m pretty steamed so I approach the linebackers and educate them on the law and common courtesy. They find me funny. I fail to see the humor. This situation is exactly why I don’t carry a high pressure fire hose when I go out.

I’m not advocating smacking young adults in the back of the head. That’s very wrong. I’m not advocating lecturing large males about parking etiquette. I’m advocating an age old educational technique. I’m advocating willow switches to the lower body. I’ll have to get back to you on whether or not it’s legal, so don’t start using them yet.

Let’s look at the situations again. Look at waiting for a table. The young couple is sitting while an elderly couple stands. The elderly man shuffles over and says,” Get up. We need your seats.” If they don’t comply quickly, Grandma brings out the switch and smacks them on the shins. What’re they going to do? They probably wouldn’t dare hit a senior citizen. They’ll probably just get up and grumble like a scolded child. On the outside chance they bring the police in, educate him as well. When arrested, the judge may need educated, though it may be harder to smack him in the legs when he’s behind that big bench. When you go to jail for being an educator of the young, you may not have access to a switch, so come up with another educational tool.

Maybe verbal scolding is the best course of action because they’re just ignorant. My Grandma educated me. I wouldn’t dare sit in the presence of a lady. I also would never wear by cap at the table, or put my elbows on the table, or curse in public. While those are other issues, they point to the root cause of bad manners. That root cause is a lack of correcting bad manners at appropriate times.

With the possibility of the authorities frowning on the whole switch thing, just try a little passive-aggressive action. When driving on the interstate, drive real slow in the left lane. Go down the parking lane at the store the wrong way and make everyone back up to let you through. Block the aisle in your favorite retail establishment. Make the young walk around you. Move your electric scooter back and forth erratically so the young people have to dance around. Wait, we do that now. It hasn’t worked.

I know what to do. If the young won’t get up, sit on them. If they use up the handicapped spots, sit on the vehicle and refuse to get up when they return to it. It’s even better if you happen to be incontinent. That brings a new aspect to the term “sit in”. If we all do these things, the world will be a better place. The world will be a better place where a guy can sit down while waiting to get beaned by a hot roll.

by Charlie Melton

Geezers Are Rip-Off Targets

Every turn reveals danger. It’s almost like we’re sheep in some sort of diabolical board game.There's a wolf on every corner. They’re waiting to rip us off. The older we get, the more the con-wolves get our scent and work at getting what little we have.

I delivered hot lunches to shut-ins. I delivered lunch to Faith everyday and became friends with her. She always had Michael Buble’ playing on a really high tech stereo. When I brought lunch that day Faith was paying bills. I sat her lunch on the table. Faith looked over her reading glasses. “I don’t understand this bill.” I looked at it for her. It was for an internet company I’d never heard of. Faith didn’t have internet.
Faith and most people of the golden generation were taught to pay what they owe. They get a bill, they pay it. All the scammer has to do is send out a bunch of bogus bills and some will pay. It’s all profit, except for postage fees. They even do it to businesses and get a lot to pay.
As counter-intuitive as it may be, don’t pay a bill unless you owe it. You can’t be sued for something you don’t owe. Correct that, you probably won’t be sued for what you don’t owe, but when lawyers are involved who knows. It’s probably best to pretend you’re my ex-wife and just ignore the bills. Notifying the authorities is a good idea too.

To keep from being ripped off, brush up on your math. The chances are slim that a Nigerian prince will select you out of millions of Americans to receive millions of dollars. You also haven’t won a foreign lottery. Forget the magical thinking. You haven’t won. You never will. Welcome to reality.

A common scam is when an unknown person calls and says your Grandson is in jail in a far off land and he needs money to get out and get home. You have to send funds right away.

Here’s what you do. You do nothing. He probably isn’t in jail. If he is, he probably deserves it and it’ll build character. Even if he was in jail and you successfully got him out, he’d never come and visit or clean the gutters. The best you can hope for is him coming to your funeral and overeating at the associated dinner. If you have time and Matlock isn’t on you can call the kids’ father and let him check it out. The father can always make more money, you probably can’t. In short, remember: “Not your problem”.

If you use the internet the chances of getting ripped off are huge. There are a million ways a 12 year old with a Wi-Fi connection can clean you out. Keep your computer security updated and get one of those PayPal or similar accounts that are reportedly more secure than other accounts. Other than that, you can check your credit card statements frequently and contest any unusual activity.

Keeping your money in cash isn’t a good way to avoid rip-offs. My Grandmother avoided getting ripped off by keeping her money in cash under the carpet. It worked well until a family member took it and her car to another state.

To sum it up, there are a lot of chances to get robbed. Guard your money carefully, and don’t give it up without careful scrutiny. It may help to chant the advice of my uncle. He always said, “Money comes in. It doesn’t go out.” That’s except for the electric company. You’d better pay out to them. They will cut you off. We’ll talk more about that next time.

Until then, let’s be careful out there.

Retirement- A "How To".

Now that I’ve been retired for most of a month, I’m what you call an “expert”. Stay tuned for some helpful hints to make a success of your very own retirement.


As a retiree, you should be concerned with your money, your time, and your relationships.

The first issue with retirement is money. This is where you should have planned ahead. I don’t mean by saving money, because that’s boring. A few months before retirement form a lottery pool. Get everyone at work to sign on. Peer pressure is useful in shaming people into each giving you a couple of bucks a week. Keep collecting for the lottery after you retire. This is income if you don’t buy the ticket. It’s tax-free money. If someone wants actual proof you bought the tickets you collected for, act like you forgot them. If pressed, you can always get the lottery place to give you old tickets that losers have thrown away. Just tell them that you want them for an art project at the old folk’s home. Use them as the required proof of intent when gathering the lottery pool funds. Remember this income is tax free and won’t affect your social security.

Manage your time well and make every minute count. Get up early. If you sleep in you’ll screw up your nap time. If you get up at about 5:00 and start posting to Facebook, everyone will think you’re doing stuff. Maybe post a thing about a marathon. Everyone will think that you got up and ran. Image is everything. Maybe post a selfie of yourself in running garb. You can feel good about yourself while you watch daytime TV.

You’ve gotten up early, so make sure you take a nap. Naps must be planned carefully. The trick is to nap without missing Andy of Mayberry or Matlock and still be ready for an early-bird dinner. It takes some planning but it can be done, even without a DVR.

Eat dinner early. Not only is it cheaper, it’s also when all of your fellow retirees eat. You need to be at the café when they’re at the café. That way you feel better about yourself because you will undoubtedly see someone that isn’t as well off as you are. Looking down on someone is time well spent.

Relationships are easy. You may think things like, “My kids barely come over” or “My cousins never call”. The short answer to this is “Good”. If something’s really wrong with you, and you want the creatures that share your DNA to be a part of your life, you can do certain things to mitigate the lack of interaction.

It’s easy to get your kids to come over. Get some snacks and drinks ready. Send a text your adult child’s phone “911”. Do not answer when they call back. If they live in the local area they’ll be over in a few minutes. Have a nice visit. Beware of doing this if the kids live in another state. They’ll call the police to do a welfare check. When the police come they won’t be in a mood to visit and have tasty treats.

As for your cousins, you can get them to talk to you even if they don’t want to. Get them emotionally invested in an imaginary relative’s shocking demise. Just call and say, “Aunt Myrtle just passed away”. Make up a connection to Myrtle. “Myrtle is your Dad’s illegitimate daughter by that female serial killer back in the 40’s. You remember, she’s the one who killed everyone at a family reunion.” They won’t remember because you just made it up but it’ll keep the family talking for generations. Just make it good.


If you do all of this, most of your days will be full. Mix in a couple of trips with other seniors, some doctor visits, and a good Wi-Fi connection and you’ll have a full retirement. You’ll wonder how you ever had time for work. I know I do.

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