A View from the Other Side

Travel Woes...

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 07:11:00 +0000

A letter just sent to ACSA--Airport Company of South Africa...

Last week I flew from Lanseria to Cape Town on Thursday and back on Sunday. My experience with your baggage handling was extremely poor.

En route to Cape Town, my checked toiletries bag was opened and presumably searched. The cable ties securing the zippers were not replaced and the zippers came partly open during transit. When I arrived at my destination I discovered that a jar of face cream valued at more than R500 [$50 USD] had been opened and when it was returned to the bag, the lid was not fully secured. It was dumb luck that I was standing on a carpeted surface when I took the jar from the bag and the glass jar came away from the lid and fell to the ground.

When I returned home I found that my other bag had been searched and this time the carelessness of your employees caused a financial loss. I am diabetic and I carry with me a blood glucose monitor that uses testing strips. I carry the monitor with me, but I packed an extra container of test strips in my checked luggage. I put it in a small zipped bag with some make up. When I opened the bag at home I discovered that the lid (which is supposed to be attached to the bottle by a strip of plastic) had been completely torn off the container and the entire contents of the bottle--25 test strips--were scattered around the bag. Not only did your employees destroy the container, their action contaminated test strips and made them unusable.

Now, the R150 that bottle of strips cost is not the real problem...the real problem is that this could have resulted in a life-threatening situation. If I had had to depend on those strips to check my blood glucose in an emergency, I would not have been able to do so because your ham-handed employee damaged them. A crashing diabetic can die...and without those test strips, that is the situation your company can cause one day if your employees do this as a matter of course.

I am not asking for compensation for my loss, but I am asking that you regularly inform--and remind--your employees of the importance of putting things back the way they found them: not breaking or damaging containers, putting lids back on snugly, resecuring bags that were closed with cable ties (surely you can supply your searchers with cable ties so that bags don't come unzipped en route?). I was fortunate enough not to need that extra bottle of test strips, but the next diabetic your employees do this to may not be so fortunate and he could die as a result of not having his medical needs met due to the carelessness of your staff.

Please familiarize your staff with common medical devices such as asthma inhalers and diabetic products such as test strips, insulin pens, needles, lancets and cartridges. The next person who opens his luggage and finds your staff has destroyed an essential medical product may not be so lucky as I was and survive it,

Regards

Pick n Pay has a new CEO...but does he have a clue?

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:46:00 +0000

...earnings per share from continuing operations are 31% lower. The dividend is down by 36%...

The new CEO, Richard Brasher, has been on the job for just 2 months. Last week he was a guest on a popular local finance program (click link above for a transcript), speaking of his plan to turn the slowly sinking giant around. But I am not sure he really understands the reason South African shoppers are abandoning his supermarket chain in favour of the competitors. Below is a copy of the email I sent to him this afternoon...

Dear Mr. Brasher:

Last week I heard you speak on MoneyWeb on Radio 702. I thought you'd like to know why I stopped shopping at Pick n Pay and why my venture into a store today only firmed my resolve.

I live near the Woodmead Pick n Pay Hyper, but have also done considerable shopping at the Morning Glen, Morning View, Sunninghill, Northgate and Douglasdale stores. With the exception of the issues with the pharmacy, which is limited to the Woodmead store, my remarks apply to all of the Pick n Pay stores I have patronized.

The ineptitude of your pharmacy nearly killed my husband. He is diabetic and takes numerous medications for that condition as well as hypertension and hyperlipidemia. He picked up a set of his repeat meds from your pharmacy on one occasion last year and the pharmacy had neglected to put in his blood pressure meds. Because he takes so many meds, he did not realize at first that one of them was missing and so he went for more than a week without his blood pressure meds. He found out when he started having symptoms of dizziness and laboured breathing and I took him to the hospital where they discovered his blood pressure was at stroke level. He didn't receive his meds but you can bet our medical aid was billed for them as well as the emergency room visit necessitated by your pharmacy's deplorable oversight. While this was by far the worst incident of the pharmacy's ineptitude, it was far from the only one. Almost every month your pharmacy was either out of stock on such staples as insulin pens and needles and commonly prescribed meds (I can understand not having a stock of rarely prescribed meds, but insulin? glucophage? blood pressure meds? statins?). What is even worse than being out of stock is having to count my meds upon receiving them because your pharmacy chronically shorted me on my meds. The prescription would call for 30 tablets, the pharmacy would either short me a whole card or fail to give me a partial card to make up the whole 30. So, I would bring in a prescription for 30 tablets and receive 28, which is neither what the doctor prescribed nor what our medical aid paid for. After numerous complaints to the pharmacy manager and even the store manager...which garnered us apologies and promises but no action or improvement...we have taken our medication business to your competitors. We have not used your pharmacy for nearly six months now: between Pharmacy Direct and DisChem, our needs are handled adequately and Pick n Pay has lost thousands of rand per month in revenue to the pharmacy with our move elsewhere. We are both diabetic, hypertensive and hyperlipidemic--I take five different drugs plus my insulin, my husband takes even more than I do: we are walking wallets when it comes to revenue from medications and your pharmacy drove us away with its lackadaisical attitude regarding our health and even our lives.

I have pretty much switched to Woolworths for my grocery shopping and to Makro for cleaning and pet supplies. But there are always a few things they don't carry and so I periodically pop into a Pick n Pay for those items. I did so this morning and as a result of my visit, have decided to simply skip Pick n Pay from now on and just stop in at Spar or Checkers for those items. Why? Because you have either discontinued items I normally buy or you cannot seem to keep them in stock. Coupled with the unappetizing condition of your fresh produce, I just cannot see why I should waste my time even going to a Pick n Pay because, based on several years of increasingly dismal experiences with your stores, I am just wasting time and energy going there. This morning I stopped in for just two items, items I have been purchasing from Pick n Pay for nearly ten years, items I have not seen on the shelves for the last couple of months: Kraft Miracle Whip and netted bags of rawhide "bones" for my little dogs. In the past I have seen your stores be out of stock for months (literally) of Pick n Pay's own brand of kidney beans, crush tomatoes and tomato puree. At one time you carried Dairy Belle Colchester cheese in slices...I haven't seen it in years, now. At one time you carried Maruchan Cup-of-Soup but it has probably been a year since I've seen it: you substituted an inferior self-branded product that is more difficult to use and less tasty (the noodles taste like cardboard) and you don't bother to even keep that adequately stocked, leaving only the Maggi brand well stocked, which tastes disgusting.

I don't know if your employees intentionally dissemble to the customers, but I recall coming into a Pick n Pay store and finding no fresh chicken. This happened several weekends in a row and finally somebody taped a sheet of paper to the empty section saying that there was a "shortage of chickens." Really? Then why did Woolies and Spar have them? I have gone to multiple Pick n Pay stores looking for frozen peas...at one store someone had taped a similar sign inside the freezer...and yet I could find frozen peas at a Spar and Woolies. And who is the person responsible for scheduling bread deliveries? Maybe someone should tell him/her that weekends tend to be busier than weekdays and he should order extra for the weekend shopping...I cannot tell you how many times I have walked into a Pick n Pay store on a Sunday for bread and the shelves are virtually empty.
I am appalled when I walk in the store and find entire shelves empty. I was in the pet food aisle this morning and literally saw a dozen or more metres of actually empty shelves. The various treats I regularly buy for my dogs (four of them--that is a lot of biscuits) were out of stock. I have seen your stores fail to stock some items, like Beeno Chocolate-coated biscuits, Beeno Chocolate Drops, and Beeno Yoghurt drops for months--no exaggeration--at a time. It has been a month since I have seen Dentastix (the kind with the green filling) in your stores. I went to the pasta aisle this morning and found empty shelves there. I once waited eight weeks for the Woodmead store to restock beans and dishwasher rinse aid...both store brand...and finally had to approach a manager to find out if the items had been discontinued. On my subsequent visit I inquired as to the reason for the lack of stock (as the items had been restocked in the intervening week) and was told that the individual responsible for monitoring and reordering stock had simply failed to place the order: the system reflected the lack of stock but the operator simply did not reorder. Guess what? Within the month those shelves were empty again.

The worst thing about the empty shelves is that it looks to me like it is a part of your business plan. When I first came to South Africa ten years ago and walked into a Pick n Pay for the first time, I saw a card on the shelf in the place boxes of breakfast cereal should be. That card was professionally printed, not something someone ran off on the computer to deal with an unexpected shortage. It was a professionally printed "tent" card intended to stand in the empty shelf and printed on it was something to the effect of "Oops! We are out of this product____________. " In other words, the unstocked shelf issue is so common to your stores that you spend money to have "Screw you, go buy it from our competitors" cards printed up to put on those empty stretches of shelves.

Why should I shop in your stores? The stuff I want to buy is not there...we are down to TWO products I relied on Pick n Pay to carry and now you don't have those any more. I spend more than R1000 per week on groceries and another R1000+ per month at Makro on items I used to buy at Pick n Pay. Hypermarts should be the answer to a busy person's prayer---everything under one roof---but if I have to go to your competitors to buy the stuff I want, kindly explain to me why I should burn either my petrol or my time going to a Pick n Pay, because personally, I don't see any reason at all.

The bottom line for any retail business is that in order to make money, you must have stuff to sell. And if you want to do very well at making money in retail, you have to have stuff that your customers actually want, and in sufficient abundance that there is enough for all of them. You aren't selling shoes, where people come in, buy one two items and leave, you are in a business in which people buy dozens upon dozens of different items with each visit. Discontinuing (or failing to adequately stock) items that customers want is akin to cutting your own throat. When the list of discontinued or unavailable items that a shopper must buy elsewhere becomes large enough, the customer will simply go elsewhere for the whole shopping...and your loss of marketshare over the past few years should have amply demonstrated that. Pick n Pay is still the most convenient store, location-wise, to my home but until and unless you address this lack of stock issue, I am not going back.
Regards,

**Sweet Violet**
Sandton

The Folly of Prohibition: why banning guns won't work

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:06:00 +0000

When did banning something make it go away?

In the wake of yet another horrific mass shooting…the 27th in America in the past 10 years…people again are trotting out the knee-jerk “ban guns” demand. And while it may sound good at first blush, a little critical examination will reveal that legal prohibitions against things that members of the public really want and are willing to break the law to obtain benefits nobody in the society except the criminals.

In 2010 the US government spent more than $15 billion…that’s $500 per second…on the War on Drugs. And that is just the tax dollars spent on a drug policy that is and has been an unmitigated failure…except for those who have exploited and grown rich and powerful in the black market America’s prohibition of drugs has created.

The 18th Amendment to the Constitution took effect in January of 1920 and for the next 13 years, thanks to another black market created by the US government, liquor continued to flow throughout America due to the likes of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. The government hemorrhaged money into enforcing Prohibition and went without substantial potential tax revenues, since the production, transport and sale of alcohol was, officially, not happening. But it was happening and it spawned and supported America’s first major foray into organized crime, an organization that stayed with us even after the Amendment was repealed in 1933: the Mafia. And the cost, both in dollars and in lives, has been vast and the legacy of Prohibition continues to this day, nearly a century later.

Prohibition of abortion did not stop abortion, it merely drove it underground. From conscientious doctors who wanted to provide desperate women with a medically safe alternative to an unwanted pregnancy to back-alley butchers who killed women with perforated uteruses and septicaemia to distressed women who attempted to abort themselves with coat hangers, knitting needles, and noxious potions, abortions continued despite laws prohibiting them and prescribing draconian punishment for doctors caught providing them. It didn’t go away, it simply provided yet another black market opportunity for illegally-generated wealth while it dealt death and disaster to those forced to seek abortion outside the clean, sterile, safe walls of a hospital or bona fide clinic.

With this for a history to reference, who in their right mind can possibly believe that banning guns will not result in a new black market and increased opportunity for a new organized criminal element to rise to wealth and power—illicit gun dealers? Why target the tool when the real problem is the people using the tool? If we want to spend tax money on making and enforcing a law designed to reduce or eliminate these kinds of horrific killings, why not invest that money into something more likely to have a positive result, like government-funded mental health programs and mental health laws that improve the quality of life not only for the mentally ill, but for those around them as well.

We live in a society that, in the span of just a couple of generations, has gone from valuing and admiring courtesy and “good guys” to a culture that admires the rude, the snide, the cruel, the sarcastic. It is no longer enough to win, you now have to rub the other guy’s face in the dirt and spit on him. Gone are the days when the losers in a contest were consoled, their successes during the course of the contest praised, and encouragement for the next time given. Instead, they are humiliated, castigated, shamed, and hauled over the coals, as if rebuking them further provides some kind of inspiration to do better next time. We embrace and admire and make wealthy celebrities of people whose stock-in-trade is cutting, degrading, mortification of people who have done nothing more than fail to live up to an expectation. Gordon Ramsey, Simon Cowell, Anne Robinson of TV’s Weakest Link: all epitomize the sadistic set down trend that passes for humour nowadays, entertainment wrought at the expense of the feelings of those whom they verbally abuse. And, being the Great Apes that we are, we humans imitate and try to top our celebrity mentors and we turn our friends, families, classmates, co-workers, neighbours and even complete strangers into the butts of our cruelly conceived and thoughtlessly delivered attempts at humour.

Brutality has not always been considered acceptable entertainment. Historically speaking, American entertainment has had guidelines, regulations, and controls in the past. The Hayes office controlled the content of movies for decades, which is why old movies showed married couples sleeping in separate beds and you didn’t see graphic sex or violence in the theatre. That said, French and Italian cinema produced some pretty steamy pictures at about the same time, and you didn’t see their societies implode as a result. I remember my first Sam Peckinpah film and how horrible the graphic killings were. It does desensitize a person to see this kind of thing, and when it becomes everyday fare both in films and video games, it has to desensitize a person to the carnage: imagine the impact on someone already disaffected and feeling disenfranchised?

In any given contest there is only one winner. Everybody else are either fans or losers…and if you aren’t the winner, the way you avoid being identified as one of the losers is to throw your lot in with the winner—become a fan, a sycophant, a toady. And so the winners of the world, be they jocks or bankers, celebs or mean girls of any age, are joined by their fans in creating the us vs. them paradigm in which “them” are grievously insulted, assaulted, disrespected, humiliated, diminished and generally shat upon, all in the name of entertainment and humour.

And what are these “losers” supposed to do with their feelings of outrage and hurt? Suck it up? Shrug it off? Not have any feelings at all? One of the things people do when they are deeply and repeatedly wounded is they stop feeling. They become emotionally numb, at least on the surface, so that they don’t feel the pain so sharply. One of the problems with that, however, is that this causes a loss of empathy and compassion because if they can’t access their feelings of pain for themselves, those feeling for others are pretty inaccessible as well. They aren’t really numb, though…they just repress the pain and it goes underground where it festers and grows. And if the targeted people are already struggling with issues of low self-worth, if they’ve been bullied before, if they aren’t pretty or popular or have some kind of physical anomaly or are socially awkward…how do they assimilate the emotional assaults and carry on with equanimity? With little or nothing available to the average person in the way of mental health care, a lot of them don’t. Some of them become withdrawn and anti-social, some of them become willing to do anything to be liked, some of them engage in self-harm, some join gangs where they feel accepted, some commit suicide. And some of them turn their rage outwards and they kill.

Normal, mentally healthy people do not commit mass murders. And quite a few of the shooters in recent tragedies had mental health problems that could have been treated, or at least managed via medication or even hospitalization if it had been available to them. What few people seem to have noticed is that this mass murder as a means of payback or gaining recognition is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Very, very few comparable acts have been committed outside the US…and there has to be something to that. What is it about contemporary American culture that spawns this kind of heinous act?

One of our biggest failings, I think, is the abandonment of the mentally ill. Jared Loughner, had he been born a couple of generations earlier, would have been in a state hospital not for committing a crime but because he was mentally unstable and dangerous to himself and others. Today, state mental hospitals are almost exclusively for the criminally insane—after their mental illness has led them to commit crimes. In 1967 California passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act which, unfortunately, has only been enforced as far as relieving the state of the burden of care of the mentally ill; the provisions which would cost the state money have been assiduously ignored. Other states followed suit with similar limitations and basically put the mentally ill out on the street and took away the power of family members to do what is best for those people, and the state washed its hands of responsibility. Given that a significant portion of Americans do not have any medical insurance and those who do have it ordinarily have very little mental health coverage (certainly not enough to pay for extended confinement for a mentally ill family member), there appeared not a crack but a chasm in mental health care: with the exception of the independently wealthy, care for the seriously mentally disturbed was out of the financial reach of most Americans and the state washed its hands of any responsibility.

This “not my brother’s keeper” mentality has added to this problem by making people unwilling to have tax money spent to house and treat such individuals. Because the mentally ill are not gushing blood or spreading communicable disease like TB, the average American sees no reason why the mentally ill can’t just “suck it up” and behave like the rest of us. Ignorance of mental illness is rife—I remember being frustratingly unable to pry open the minds of people in the Andrea Yates case and get them to grasp what psychosis meant and why she could not be blamed. People kept saying “she must be crazy to do such a thing” without truly grasping exactly what crazy meant in the context of her situation.

Part of this “not my brother’s keeper” mentality includes a slavish but uncomprehending dedication to both competitiveness and capitalism. Socialism is beginning to take on the spectre that Communism had back in the days of the Red Scare and any program intended to help the unfortunate using tax monies is branded “Socialism” and backed away from with abhorrence. But the truth is, those countries that foster cooperation and respect and care for the less fortunate, like the Scandinavian countries, have the lowest crime rates, the highest education rates, the greatest “life satisfaction” scores. And these countries are heavily Socialist--they invest tax monies in their people through high-quality education, health (including mental health) care, and a societal attitude that does not foster a heavily competitive, win-at-any-cost kind of society. Norway had a single spree killing in 2011—America had four. In the decade from 2003-2012, inclusive, the whole of Scandinavia had just the one massacre, America had 27...five of which occurred in California, the most populated state in the Union, and six of which occurred in Wisconsin! In fact, the most recent massacre in Scandinavia, prior to Breivik’s attack, appears to have occurred in the 15th or16 century!

Scandinavians value the idea of not only a free and equal society, but one in which the more fortunate help the less fortunate through government social problems. You seldom see tax refugee Swedes or Danes, and the idea that allowing poor people to freeze to death or starve, or that their children should die due to lack of appropriate medical care, doesn’t seem to have much traction. And yet, despite the high tax rate and socialist government, many people make money and live affluent lifestyles...Sweden alone boasts at least nine billionaires (in USD), of which only two have left to escape taxes.

The bottom line here is that this is a complex problem that will not respond to simplistic solutions. Mentally healthy people do not commit these kinds of atrocities, mentally unbalanced people do, so it would seem the very first line of address should be to tighten up the mental health laws. Gun laws? I dunno—Texas, a state rife with NRA-types only accounted for one massacre in the past decade, and that was on a military base where gun control laws would not apply. And yet Wisconsin, a state with a low population and even lower profile, had more massacres in the last decade than any other. What is going on in Texas that has kept a well-armed civilian populace massacre-free over the last decade that is not going on in Wisconsin? Or, conversely, what is going on in Wisconsin that so many citizens feel the need to spray death upon their unsuspecting neighbours that is not going on in Texas?

More than anything, we need to think...really, truly think...about this situation and not take action simply because it is an action. Ill-conceived laws hastily passed end up getting tossed out by the courts, leaving us right back at the starting point, but with precious time having been wasted. It’s not enough to control guns—or even ban them. The disturbed and truly determined will find other ways... there are numerous other ways of committing mass carnage than firearms including running a motor vehicle into a crowd or busy establishment or even bombs...any fool can make a bomb, instructions and ingredients are readily available. Most of all, however, we as a people have to start changing our attitudes, remember we are our brother’s keepers, and that compassion and empathy get us all further in the long run than selfishness and scorn.

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:54:00 +0000

Saturday morning when I got up, my internet connection and my phone were working. Why is this significant? Because for most of September and October sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, my phone would go down and the technicians from the telephone company could not give it a permanent fix.

By their third visit, they were blaming my telephones and my house wiring (which they installed just 2 years ago). So fixated on blaming my telephones and in-house wiring were these guys that, once they had confirmed that the line was working up to the pole outside my house, they simply ceased to troubleshoot any further and blamed my equipment. Over the course of 3 weeks they blamed my telephones, my wiring, my modem/router, my line filters, even the weather!!...but failed to troubleshoot beyond the pole.

A week ago a tech came out and when he started his blaming the customer song and dance, I lost my temper and read him the riot act and demanded he go up on roof and check the wiring from the pole to my house and from there, the wiring up to the first telephone in the series, and to replace it if it looked worn. He balked. He called his supervisor to complain about what I was asking, moaning about how long it would take to replace that wire. I refused to "no" for an answer and I actually yelled at the technician (something I seldom do--my maid has worked for me for 5 years and I haven't raised my voice to her even once in all that time).

My husband stepped in and spoke to the supervisor who informed us that the technician told him we had illegal extensions and that was causing the problem. Hubby had to get out a phone bill to prove our extensions were installed by the phone company and we paid a fee every month for each of them. The technician pretended he couldn't read the bill when the supervisor asked him to verify that. Finally, he was told to comply and my husband actually went up on the roof with the technician to ensure he did as I asked.

And guess what? On the roof they found the wire that lead from the pole to the kitchen phone had lost some of its insulation and the bare copper was exposed to the rain, wind, birds, falling leaves and whatever else. The technician replaced the wire, but remained unconvinced that it was the source of the problem. But I got up on Saturday and my phone and my ADSL were working...and this morning it was working, despite a hellacious electrical storm last night.

I, for one, will not be surprised if they keep on working since the one place the technicians repeatedly overlooked in their troubleshooting had a fault and that fault was finally corrected. I expect things will work just swimmingly, at least for a while...until something new comes along to toss me off the internet again...

Snow? WTF??

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:29:00 +0000

Bird of Paradise flowers in my back garden in the snow

It is snowing outside.

I live in a brick house with no central heating, and it is snowing outside. In Africa.

The inside of my house is like the inside of a refrigerator.

I hate snow.

It never snowed in Cape Town--not even a little bit. Every time I think Joburg maybe isn't as bad as I was thinking, something like this happens to remind me why I was right about this place.

I HATE snow.

And it is snowing outside.

SPAM

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 07:57:00 +0000

I have just had ten spam comments on this blog in less than an hour. KNOW that if you comment here and include a link to another site and the comment (and link) are not truly relevant to the blog entry, you will NOT get published. I approve EVERY comment before it gets published, so you don't even get a nanosecond of face time with readers or with me (because I don't click links that have an unknown source).

So give it up, asshole--you are wasting your time and I have ALL DAY to sit here and send your crap to the spam bin.

PUPPIES!!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 08:26:00 +0000

Friday night and early Saturday morning (29 and 30 June) Puddin' presented us with a litter of 6 little Yorkshire Terrier puppies--cutest little things on feet (well, actually, on bellies just now!). Mama and babies doing very well!

More pics as time goes on!

Profit or Loss? Customers write your bottom line

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Pick n Pay is South Africa’s second largest supermarket chain. From the store’s inception in 1967 until 2009, it was considered a paragon, an example of how to do business. Since 2009, however, it has been losing market share but nobody seems to have a definitive reason for it. I can’t tell you what kind of errors in strategic decisions Pick n Pay’s management made—but I can tell you why Pick n Pay has lost roughly R144,000 in annual sales: I quit shopping there.
I have to agree with business analysts that the real decline began in 2009, but for me, I knew there was trouble when I first started shopping there in 2004. Frankly, I expected Pick n Pay to be little different from its American counterparts—to be an Africanized Safeway—and I was disappointed. Naturally, there had to be some cultural differences, but the differences I saw right at the beginning were differences that impact the consumer negatively…and that is never good for business.

On my very first trip to a Pick n Pay, breakfast cereal was on my list. When I got to the cereal aisle, several sections of the shelving was bare. This was bad enough but when I approached one of those shelves, I saw something that made me shake my head: a sign printed exactly for the purpose of apologizing for being out of stock. This was not a hastily hand printed or computer generated note, it was a professionally printed “tent” sign with space for someone to write in the name of the missing stock item. Why is this bad? Because it told me that this was a natural part of doing business in this store (and, I learned later, not this store alone): it was OK with management for them to be out of stock on staple items.

Frankly, I was shocked, both at the absence of the goods and at the cavalier attitude of the chain’s management as evidenced by those purposeful signs. “We can’t be bothered to keep enough inventory to keep our shelves full,” the management might as well have said. “We encourage you to visit our competitors for your needs.”

This has been a signature issue for me with Pick n Pay: lack of stock. Some stores are worse than others, some have gotten worse with time. I will no longer buy fresh fruit and veggies at most Pick n Pay stores because it is not fresh, the quality is poor, and in many cases, it is way too green for use. In early 2010 when I first move up to Joburg, I shopped at a Pick n Pay in FourWays that carried amazingly good fresh produce. But the last few times I have stopped in that store, it has declined there as well. Nowadays, I buy my fresh items at a Woolworth’s store (which also suffers from stock depletion but at least what they DO have in stock is good quality).

I cannot say if the problem with stock depletion on the shelves is lack of replacement goods in “the back,” ineffective stocking practices, or poor inventory control, but I can say that last year I confronted the manager of my nearest Pick n Pay Hypermart (a giant store with extra departments including a café, a pharmacy, garden department, housewares/furnishings and toy departments) about them being out of stock of their house brand beans and crushed tomatoes. I had been looking for the items for six weeks and they were constantly out of stock. I told the manager that if they weren’t in stock when I came the following week to do my shopping, I was not going to shop there anymore and that would cost him about R7000 per month in revenue.

When I returned, the items in question were in stock—but when I queried the manager as to the reason they had none, I was told it was the fault of the employee tasked with ordering new stock—even though his computerized inventory system told him the products were out of stock on the shelves, he just didn’t bother ordering any!

I suspect something a bit more nefarious was afoot—I needed the products for making Chili con Carne. The store-brand beans and crushed tomatoes are half the cost of name brands, so by forcing me to buy name brands, the cost of my chili was doubled—but the store’s bottom line is plumped by the sale of the more expensive brands. Whatever the reason, the store brand beans and tomato didn’t stay in stock long and soon we were playing “musical grocery stores” again, hunting for the stuff we wanted to buy.

If it was just beans and tomatoes, I could rightfully be accused of being petty—but it didn’t stop there. Bread—low GI white bread, specifically, eaten by thousands of diabetics and people watching their weight—would be gone from the shelves by closing time on Saturday and the shelves would be bare all day Sunday. Mundane things like dishwasher rinse—out of stock for 6+ weeks, although available in a different Pick n Pay store, so it wasn’t like the chain didn’t have any to stock. Maruchan noodle soups—the chicken flavour sells out instantly, but rather than order extra chicken because it is the most popular, the chicken flavour remains unstocked until the unwanted beef and shrimp stuff slowly disappears from the shelves. Minced garlic, capellini (angel hair) pasta, Barilla pasta sauces, sliced Colchester cheese, sliced cheddar cheese, capers (small), black olives, fresh cream, jumbo eggs, baby potatoes, fresh garlic, English muffins, fireplace matches, outdoor bug spray, Mitchum deodorant (unscented), Sprite Zero (2 litre)—if I really put my mind to it, I could double this list and still not cover all of the items I have tried to buy at the Pick n Pay stores near my house, only to find them out of stock, sometimes for more than a month at a time.

Part of the problem is that their stock forecasting is waaaay off base. They cannot accurately anticipate how much of anything the customers are going to buy, which means they cannot keep the shelves stocked. This, of course, assumes they do forecast stock.

Another problem is that they stock during store hours. This is disruptive and just plain stupid. American supermarkets stock shelves after hours and when the store opens in the morning, everything is in place. Trust me, you do not want to be the first shopper in the door at a Pick n Pay market on a Monday morning—the store looks just like it did at closing time on Sunday—the cupboards are bare.

When it got to the point that we had to hit three or four Pick n Pay stores to do a full week’s shopping, we changed our shopping habits. We go to Pick n Pay for the low GI bread and one or two other items that Woolworth’s doesn’t carry and we buy the rest of our food at the Woolies. Pick n Pay’s inability to keep their shelves stocked with the products I want to buy has cost them R7000 per month or R84,000 because I now spend the money at Woolworth’s.

But that's not all of it—my husband and I are diabetic and suffer from certain other chronic conditions for which we buy medication and the pharmacy inside the Pick n Pay Hyper near our house has the best prices on meds. But some things are more important than saving money…like your life. I cannot count the number of times I have come home, unbagged my meds, started putting them in my little pill dispenser boxes, only to run out of something: they shorted me on my meds. On one occasion, they simply left out my husband’s blood pressure meds and, because he takes so many meds, he never noticed one pill was missing. Ten days later he was in the ER with symptoms that were eventually put down to stroke-level high blood pressure.

And every trip to the pharmacy, they are out of something. This is just inexcusable—we have been filling our prescriptions at this pharmacy for more than two years; our prescriptions are on file (physically) and are good for six months. They know I will be coming in around the tenth of each month because that is when I am nearly out of meds; they know my husband will be there about two weeks later because that is when he runs out of meds. They have the prescriptions on file—how hard is it to have enough to fill our prescriptions when we get there? And most of the stuff we get is ordinary, run-of-the-mill stuff: blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, thyroid meds, insulin, pain meds—only one of the drugs on the prescription is uncommon and running out of it is understandable since you don’t want to keep a large stock of a perishable that doesn’t get prescribed with regularity. But insulin? What pharmacy runs out of insulin?? Or a prescription pain med that has been around more than 100 years? Or small insulin needles? What kind of pharmacy runs out of insulin, for mercy’s sake, twice in one month??

On 9 June we refilled my prescriptions: they shorted me on my blood pressure med and my insulin and gave me the wrong size needles—the ones that leave bruises the size of a 5 rand piece (a quarter) because they were out of the smaller ones. They told my husband they would deliver the missing drugs to the house. A week later, no delivery. Hubby goes to the pharmacy where the pharmacist says he was off sick and he left a note about my drug delivery but it appears nobody read it. Hubby collected my meds and left.

Three days ago we went back to the pharmacy to refill Hubby’s prescriptions. They were out of insulin again and still out of the proper-sized needles. This time they did deliver as promised, but that trick only works if somebody is home to accept the delivery. What happens if everybody is at work when the delivery comes? How many times a month should a person have to go to the pharmacy to collect the drugs from a single prescription, a prescription that is on file and can be anticipated, stock-wise??

So, we are done with Pick n Pay. What used to be a minimum of R12K monthly income to the chain is now going to their competitors. And I don’t care what the analysts assign as the reason for their decline, I don’t shop there anymore because I cannot buy what they fail to keep in stock.

And I am pretty sure that I am just the tip of a huge iceberg of dissatisfied, disgruntled, disgusted customers who are taking their custom to the competition and started doing so in 2009.

Big boobs: blessing or curse?

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:43:00 +0000

Breathes there a maiden raised in our culture who, upon seeing a full body profile of herself that reveals a modest bustline, has not wished for bigger boobs?

The desire for large breasts is nothing new—when I hit puberty in the late 1950s, I prayed for big. Jayne Mansfield was famous for her large (often brazenly displayed) breasts more than anything else. Women wore tortuous undergarments and teenaged girls “stuffed” with gym socks, toilet paper, or anything else readily at hand, all to give the illusion of a fuller, more generous endowment.

Well, I got my wish. Jayne Mansfield reportedly carried around a pair of 40D or DDs…I’m packing a pair of 44 DDs. And it ain’t what it is cracked up to be!

Breast augmentation surgery is the single most-often performed cosmetic surgery in the world today. A lot of women out there are unhappy with themselves and many of them think (consciously or subconsciously) that the answer to their self esteem issues is a pair of big breasts. And it’s not just women with AA or A cup breasts who are seeking enhancement—women with respectable B and C cups, sizes that are a good fit for their clothes, balance of bodily features and musculoskeletal health are focussing their feelings of inadequacy or inferiority on their breasts, believing that by “fixing” their “inadequate” breasts they will be fixing themselves. But when the surgery heals and they are still as unhappy, still feel as inadequate, still don’t have the life they thought their breasts would bring, do they hie themselves off to a therapist to fix their psyches? No—a large number of them return to their plastic surgeons for even bigger boobs or for other “work,” continuing to believe that changing the outside will somehow fix what is wrong on the inside. It’s like believing a paint job and a new roof will magically fix the problems caused by bad wiring, leaking pipes and termite-eaten timbers inside a house.

Even if you are emotionally well balanced, there are other issues to consider before moving from smaller to spectacular. One of the social downsides of big breasts is the perception others have of them: for every cup size you go up, expect people to perceive your IQ to go down at least 10 points. If I had a nickel for every time someone could tear their attention away from The Girls long enough to actually hear something I said and react with a surprised “You’re very smart, aren’t you?” I would be a rich woman today. And if you are a blonde (natural or otherwise), make that IQ drop 20 points per cup size.

Then there are the gender-specific reactions you have to deal with. Depending on the kind of manners your social/work set of friends ascribe to, expect anything from chilly to hostile reactions from women and salacious to downright crude reactions from men. And if you change your wardrobe to include clingy, low cut tops or otherwise showcase your new assets, expect those unpleasant reactions in spades.

You see, even if you are socially well-integrated, adding inches to your bosom will suddenly take you out of the social niche you have carved for yourself. Others will have to reassess where you fit in their group because by increasing your bust size, you are changing the dynamic of the group. Whatever primary attribute you had that defined your place in the group, in-your-face breasts will cause that place to be redefined. You may have been the “funny one” or the “smart one” or the “sweet one,” but once those massive mammaries make their debut, you will be the “sexy one” or the “pathetic, attention-seeking one” or even the “not-to-be-trusted man-stealing one.” Whatever your role in your social and work groups, suddenly pitching up with big boobs is going to change it, for good or for ill.

Do plastic surgeons ever tell women about the downsides, medically, of having large breasts? I know they discuss such things as breast feeding after augmentation and capsular contracture and ruptured/leaking implants, but do they tell you about backaches and shoulder grooves and things like that? I’ve been toting around a pair of “big ’uns” for decades now and I can tell you from personal experience what to expect.

Nobody…and I mean nobody…escapes the pull of gravity. My mother barely had a B cup, her mother barely an A, but given enough years, even gravity got them. And when you are big, you tempt gravity early. Factor in a few lifestyle choices…like having babies and breastfeeding, going without a good, supportive bra, or exercises that make them bounce (jogging, running, even dancing) and you guarantee sag. So, you’re too smart to let those ligaments stretch out and introduce your nipples to your navel, right? You’re going to wear properly supporting brassieres to keep The Girls perky and pretty forever, hm?

Welcome to the world of bra fashion where the prettiest bras are made for those who have no boobs at all. Welcome to wide, cushioned straps, breath-restricting bra bands, “structurally engineered” bra designs that look more like bridge trusses than boob supports, and the horrors of twisted, bent, pinching, rubbing, and broken underwires. Welcome to bras for big boobs, where the really pretty ones (if you can find any) offer little or no support and the ones that support you properly look like something a nun…or your great grandma…would wear.

Being female and vain enough to think your whole life will be improved by having big boobs, you are not going for the industrial strength bras, are you? So you opt for the pretty ones despite your horror at their cost…and you discover something new. Your back hurts. The muscles in your upper back are having to support the weight of your boobs because your bra isn’t. You get a different bra—maybe a sports bra—only to find that in order to properly support you, it has to be cinched so tight around your ribs, it is a challenge to draw a deep breath. Or, if your bra doesn’t need to encircle your ribs like a constricting boa, then your shoulders take the weight, digging grooves into your shoulders and even abrading the skin. And your back still hurts.

So you try an underwire bra…you didn’t have trouble with them when you were only a B cup, so you know they should be ok. Trust me, honey, there is a HUGE difference between a B cup underwire and a DD cup underwire, and it is not just how wide the wire is. Small breasts do not have the weight large ones do, nor do they move around as much as big ones. The wires in smaller bras do not take on the stresses that the wires in larger bras do. In large size bras, the wires bend, twist, and move, all due to the stresses the weight of the breast puts on them. Most commonly, I have found, is that one wire (usually on your dominant side) will eventually poke through the end of the casing—usually at the end between the breasts, not under the arm—and pop out. Mending a bra to contain this escaped wire is next to impossible and the cheaper the bra, the less likely the manufacturer has taken steps to prevent this by reinforcing the fabric at the ends of the casing. But even the “good” bras that don’t suffer from underwire escape have a problem—when the wire can’t move to accommodate stress, it stresses in the same place over and over again. I cannot begin to tell you how many bras I have had—good, expensive, well made bras—that have a broken wire and it is always the right wire and always at the same spot where it breaks. A comfortable, supportive, pretty bra for big boobs that doesn’t break your budget is yet to be designed.

Then there are the practical aspects—buying clothes that fit. OK, if you are a bimbo and habitually run around in Daisy Dukes, thigh-high boots, and skin-tight sweaters à la Pam Anderson, then you probably don’t have much to worry about. But if you need proper business attire, if you like your clothes to fit you properly, if you like to look well turned-out, giant gazongas are going to get in your way. Unless, of course, you are rich enough to have your clothes custom-made or custom-tailored (that’s the secret of the Hollywood stars and starlets who have ginormous bosoms but still manage to look “normally” dressed—someone who makes or tailors their clothes for them). Forget one-piece garments like swim suits, jump suits and dresses, forget suits (unless they come as separates): you will have to buy to fit the boobs, which (unless you are obese) will automatically mean the bottom part is going to be too big. Regardless of passé fashion to the contrary, blouses that strain at the bosom and expose your bra to even the unprying eye are not properly fitted nor are they proper business attire. You can also say goodbye to such things as ruffled necklines and shirt fronts, neck bows (which have just come back from the 80s), and jewellery that hangs down to the bosom: shorter pieces fall between the boobs and get stuck, longer pieces refuse to fall gracefully and usually end up framing The Girls, one strand of beads or chain on each side. In fact, anything that shows detail between your waist and your throat are no longer appropriate as the boobs themselves are your primary accessory now. No shirts with pockets, no tshirts with sayings, no jackets with zippers and buttons and plackets—not even busy prints! Simplicity is the word of the day when it comes to dressing the overblown upper half.

Now, imagine shopping under even some of those conditions. Tastes aside, finding clothes, especially good quality designer clothes, to fit a 40”+ bust is an uphill battle. Even prêt a porter design is made with the slender female physique in mind—and that includes a slender upper torso. If you are into quality clothing and looking chic, big boobs will sabotage you every time.

So, before you break open that piggy bank and head to your local Dr. Rey clone, give this exposé another, slower read-through and then spend some time thinking about it. You may decide your money is better spent on some chicken cutlets for less than 1% of the cost of a boob job, and use the rest of the money for those fab boots or that gorgeous leather coat…or even some therapy sessions to figure out why you feel so bad about yourself you are willing to mutilate your body in an attempt to feel better. Now that would be a truly healthy, long-lasting, life-enhancing use for that money!

Renovating your rental

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Fri, 18 May 2012 08:28:00 +0000

So, the day has come that you are the proud owner of a rental property…or perhaps you are still looking forward to that day. Whether you inherited a property, built a new home and the old one is now going up for rent, or you bought (or added on) something specifically to rent out, you are about to embark upon a new phase in your life: you are going to be a landlord.

One of the things few people think about when embarking upon landlordhood is preparing a property to be lived in by renters. Oh, you can just take the money and give them the keys and let the debris fall where it may, but if you want to be a landlord and have the least difficulty with the actual property, you may want to consider some strategic renovations before you stick that “For Rent” sign in the front lawn.

First of all, expect that your tenants will damage anything that can be damaged. It’s not that all renters are wantonly destructive (some are but most are not), it’s just that people tend not to take care of your property the way you would. Part of it is the wrong-headed notion that landlords are rich (you own more than one house, right? You must be rich, then!), but another part of it is simply that people just don’t care—it’s not theirs, it doesn’t matter. This attitude is the cause of ruined carpets, broken drapery rods, bent blinds, burnt counter tops, damaged floors, and a host of other problems you will know nothing about until your tenants move out. And all too often, the damage not only exceeds the security/cleaning deposit they paid, you end up losing subsequent rental income because you cannot rent it out the way they left it and you can’t wave a magic wand and have it in pristine condition overnight, either.

If you can possibly afford it—or if a tenant has thoroughly trashed your rental unit and you pretty much have to renovate from the ground up—here are some practical renovation ideas you might want to consider before you place that first ad.

Kitchen
The kitchen is called the “heart of the home”—it is also one of the most likely places for your tenants to cause damage. I recently renovated a 3 bedroom flat and the kitchen was so badly damaged I had to strip it to the bare walls and start from scratch. Here are some lessons I learned:

Countertops: no Formica/Melamine countertops. One hot pot placed on the counter top and you have a blister—the blister will break and cause a hole. Water will get into the hole and swell the substrate…which will then mildew and smell, as well as provide a handy breeding place for nasty little bugs. Formed surfaces like Corian and natural surfaces like granite are hard-wearing but not impervious to the inventive kinds of damage tenants can inflict, and shockingly expensive to replace. What to use? Ceramic tiles with a dark grout. Use the same tiles for the counter top and backsplash and keep extra tiles and grout (in an air-tight container). Tiles won’t burn or scorch but, like natural surfaces, they can be cracked or broken. Fortunately, however, a broken tile doesn’t require the replacement of an entire counter top—just replace and regrout from the spares you have kept aside.

Floors: fatuous manufacturer’s claims to the contrary, laminate floors are a bad idea in the kitchen (anywhere, actually), especially in a rental. I had a laminate floor in a room in a house I used to live in…somebody dropped something heavy on it—the corner of a piece of furniture…and it dented the floor. No big deal? Well, that’s what I thought until I mopped it. The dent actually broke the surface seal and water got into it, and it swelled up. I still didn’t think it was a big deal until I tried to replace the damaged panel—not an easy task. Vinyl flooring is a popular choice in the US, but vinyl floor tiles will come up at the corners and sheet vinyl can be torn, burnt, and the surface scraped by pushing something heavy over it…like a refrigerator (you don’t need to ask me how I know this). Again, the best floor for tenants is ceramic tile, for the same reason it is a good idea on the counter tops: a light coloured tile will make the room look large, light, airy, and clean—dark grout will not show accumulated dirt and stains from spills. And a single broken or chipped tile can be replaced much more easily and cheaply than any other flooring choice. Use a larger tile than those on the counter top and backsplash, make sure they are tiles made for floors (not wall tiles—those are too thin) and that they are safe when wet…and keep an extra box or two for replacements.

Cupboards: if the existing cupboards are in good condition, then spray them for bugs (do this after every tenant moves out while they are empty) and paint them inside and out with a washable enamel paint. Additionally, it is a good idea to cover all of the shelves with a sticky-backed vinyl, otherwise you may be looking at some serious clean up time when your tenants vacate. It is amazing the kinds of sticky messes you will find on those cupboard shelves!

If the cupboards are not in good condition, replace them with real wood carcasses if at all possible. It may cost a bit more in the in the beginning but in the long run, they save you money. Pressboard carcasses need only one sink overflow or burst pipe or liquid spill to swell up and subsequently crumble. Don’t ask me how many of those I have had to replace due to water damage—I have lost count. Before you install new cupboards, spray them with a sealant on all surfaces to help kept them water resistant.

Resist the urge for trendy: install plain cupboard doors with simple, inexpensive, easily sourced knobs and pulls. If your tenants lose or break a knob or handle, you don’t want to have to replace them all because the cutesy ones on the rest of the cupboards are no longer available. And make sure your hinges are sturdy and affixed with stout screws. You don’t even want to know the kinds of things tenants can do to cupboard doors!

Do not remove cupboards without a good reason. “It’s the fashion” is not a good reason. No kitchen ever has enough storage space, so don’t make it any less. If there is an expanse of counter space, like a breakfast bar, that has no cupboards above, consider adding some suspended from the ceiling. Abundant storage space appeals to people and you want to appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of people in order to have the best choice of tenants.

A good reason to remove a lower cupboard is to install a bank of drawers. Few kitchens have enough drawers. If the kitchen has fewer than eight drawers, consider adding more.

Walls and ceiling: no wall paper…it peels, it is hard to clean, it stains. If there is wallpaper, steam it off and paint the walls with a washable enamel paint. Use a light neutral colour on walls, ceilings, and woodwork, including doors. If your tenants want to repaint, refuse permission: tell them they can use colourful curtains and accessories but leave the paint alone because you have kept extra cans of paint for touch ups (and you have, haven’t you?).

Fixtures: keep lighting fixtures simple: no fancy chandeliers or dangling pendants—simple ceiling fixtures that give good light and aren’t so pretty your tenants will be tempted to steal them. Remove under-cupboard task lighting if possible—the more stuff you leave to damage, the more that will be damaged.

Avoid ceramic sinks if possible: the porcelain can crack and chip away from dropping pots and such into the sink. A thick stainless steel sink can better withstand the kind of abuse tenants tend to give. And avoid the trendy taps and clever single handle faucets, too. A simple tap with two twist-type handles is the simplest (and therefore cheapest) to repair.

Appliances: provide as few as you can get away with and only built-in items that are difficult to steal. (I once rented out a furnished unit and within six weeks the tenant had stolen and sold everything that was literally not nailed down including the refrigerator and the kitchen stove!) You may be required to provide certain minimums, so check your local laws, but if you are permitted to rent out a house with no kitchen appliances, do so. Otherwise, go for built-ins like a counter-top mounted cooking surface and built-in oven. Again, don’t go for trendy: the simpler the appliance, the fewer gadgets like timers and probes and electronic clocks, the more difficult to break and easier (read that “cheaper”) to repair. Avoid ceramic and glass-topped cooking surfaces as they are easy to scratch and crack and difficult to repair. Better a simple top with plug-in coils or a gas top with sealed burners.

While it is unlikely that you will provide a refrigerator for your tenants, when you renovate, leave room for any size fridge in the kitchen—you have no idea how large a fridge a prospective tenant might have and you certainly don’t want to lose a good one over fridge space! So, don’t box in the area for the fridge, leave it open and leave plenty of room.

If the kitchen has a garbage disposal, you may want to consider removing it. Not only can it be dangerous in the hands of a tenant’s children, your tenant may not be too careful what s/he puts down it, giving you headaches and plumber’s bills. Same thing with a dishwasher: remove it and put in that bank of drawers or a cupboard door and tell the prospective tenant it is a cupboard for the trash bin. If you feel you absolutely must provide a dishwasher, buy the cheapest one you can find with the least amount of features…you will probably have to repair (or replace) it frequently. Definitely do not provide a microwave oven. If the kitchen has one built in, remove it and make the space into storage.

Bathrooms
Ceramic tiles are the only floor treatments to consider—seal the floor before setting the tiles to waterproof the floor, then seal the grout, especially at the baseboards/skirting boards, once the tiles are installed.

If the bathroom has only a tub, consider adding a shower as it makes the place more “rentable.” Most men prefer a shower rather than a tub bath. But do it right—spend the money to have a plumber open the wall and install a proper shower and don’t add a hand-held shower head. Don’t give the tenant anything to break or pull loose (I had a tenant rip the hose completely out of the wall, making a huge mess and necessitating an expensive repair). Avoid shower doors if you can—one more thing to break or for you to have to laboriously clean when the tenants leave. Shower curtains are cheap and you can expect your tenant to provide his own.

Check the tub—if it is fibreglass, consider replacing it with a porcelain-finished cast iron tub. I had to replace a fibreglass tub last year because it had a hole in the bottom—a split at least eight inches (20 cm) long. Then I had to spend a small fortune repairing the bathroom in the flat downstairs (which I do not own) because of the water damage caused by my tenants continuing to use the tub with a hole in the bottom!

Tiles around the shower/tub should be the same ones you used in the kitchen counter and backsplash so you don’t need to keep a lot of different spares on hand. If the sink is mounted on a cabinet, tile the top of it to prevent scorch marks from curling or flat irons and cigarettes (it is not enough to say your unit is non-smoking—I have had to completely repaint an entire 120 sqm non-smoking flat to be rid of the nicotine stains and stale cigarette smoke smell, and I had to strip, sand and paint a beautiful natural wood bathroom cabinet that was ruined with cigarette burns).

If the sink is a wall-hung model, replace it with something supported from the bottom. A cabinet-type sink base is best. People lean—even sit!—on sinks. A pedestal-style sink is not as secure as it looks (often the pedestal is not supporting the sink, it merely hides the pipes). And provide an over-sink mirror that is the door to a built-in medicine cabinet: those are harder to steal or break than something just hung on the wall.

Make sure the toilet is in good working order and that the valve behind the toilet (for controlling water flow) is not stuck or corroded shut. If you don’t already have one, a low-flow toilet will reduce the water consumption and therefore your bill. Be particularly certain that the toilet is secure on the floor and that there are no water leaks that can cause costly floor damage.

Provide a locking door knob or handle. Don’t cheap out here by putting in a sliding bolt or chain or hook and loop lock—those are easily forced and they take out your door jamb, too. Install simple, bright lights in the bathroom, preferably over the sink so the tenant has enough light for shaving/make up/hair styling. And stay away from wall paper: if it is already installed, remove it and paint with the same enamel paint as used in the kitchen.

In general:

Window treatments: It might be tempting to put in cute curtains, but the smart money is on putting up a sturdy wood pole to hang curtains from and leaving the decorating to the tenants. Metal rods and brackets are easily torn from the walls, pull-type drapery rods are easily damaged. Vertical blinds and even custom metal or wood blinds all fall prey to the carelessness of a tenant. Solid wood poles mounted with long solid screws (or molly bolts, if you have hollow walls) above every window will last the longest.

Floors: high traffic areas like entries, hallways, back doors/mudrooms all benefit from ceramic tile with sealed grout. They are the easiest to clean and least likely to show wear. Wood floors, if finished with polyurethane, also hold up well. Carpet is a bad idea but if you must install it, choose a dirt-friendly colour to hide the inevitable stains and invest in a really, really good vacuum because you will need it when the tenants leave.

Walls, ceilings, woodwork: wallpaper is to be avoided. Washable matte finish paint in a neutral colour on the walls, white on the ceilings, white gloss enamel on painted woodwork, polyurethane on natural wood. Keep paint in sealed cans (lay a sheet of plastic wrap over the surface of the paint to prevent it from drying out) for touchups later.

Locks: make sure all windows and doors have fully functioning locks. You don't want too get sued by your own tenants when a burglar comes through an unlockable window and someone gets hurt. Keep a complete set of keys for every lock in the house, including any padlocks (like for the garage door) that you supply. If there are remotes, keep one for yourself. If there is an emergency—or if the tenants lose their keys or move without returning the keys—you will need a set.

None of these renovations will prevent a tenant from damaging your property, but they will cut down on repairs and the dead time (your rental will be empty and not generating income) while you are doing the repairs. Best of luck in the landlord business!

France: the mood is rude

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:13:00 +0000

Ok, it’s official—France is the rudest country on the planet. Seems that a company called Skyscanner.com, which claims to be Europe’s leading travel search site, surveyed its users seeking informed opinions (i.e., from people who have actually travelled to the countries they are disparaging) about how various nations treat foreign travellers. A whopping 1200 people responded from all over the world (although a preponderance of them were European) and to nobody’s surprise, 19% named France as the place most likely to insult or offend foreign visitors, with Russia following closely behind with 16.5% of the vote. With 33 countries named by the respondents, just three countries—France, Russia and the UK—managed to amass a full 46% of the total vote!

So, if France is the rudest country in the world, it must stand to reason, then, that the French are the rudest people in the world, right? Never having been to France and having met precious few French people in my life—although the one I knew best certainly would win no prizes for her courtesy towards others—I am not in a position to definitively declare the French a race of boors, but simple logic would lead you to the conclusion that, in order for France to be declared the rudest country in the world, it must be because its citizens are significantly lacking something in the courtesy department, hein?

So this got me to thinking…

When people want to give something a touch of elegance, when they want to evoke sophistication and grace and classiness, the go-to vibe is inevitably French. Whether deciding to call your coffee shop a bistro or sidewalk café, whether evoking illusions of Versailles or the Champs Élysées, whether channelling Coco Chanel or Christian Dior…if we want to bring to mind class, elegance, and style, we turn to the French.

We even do it with language. If we want to sound erudite and urbane, we toss in a vis à vis here and a faux pas or billet doux there, knowing the cognoscenti will recognize us as one of them, and everyone else will just pretend to know what we are talking about. Despite our recent falling out with the French, renaming their delightful fried potato fingers “Freedom Fries” in a petulant attempt to teach them a lesson about reciprocal support in times of trouble, we still look to the French for those things we subconsciously consider better than prosaic American sensibilities. If it’s French, it must be classy!

So how do we reconcile this sense of Frenchness being sophisticated and worldly with their apparently deserved reputation for being the rudest people in the world? French was once the language of diplomacy and international business, having been supplanted by English in recent years, and a mental image of couture-draped women dripping gems, French tripping lightly off their tongues, is what pops up when one thinks of embassy functions and soirées. Exceedingly polite diplomats and foreign functionaries concealing their deceitful intentions behind correct smiles and polite French phrases, rigidly correct, excruciatingly refined…this perception does not square with the exasperated “Merde!” muttered as another foreign tourist butchers a patriotic Frenchman’s mother tongue with his crude accent and ridiculous phrase book.

I suspect that France—and the French—are no more rude than anyone else, that the denizens of big cities like Paris fall prey to the stress of their environment like New Yorkers and Johannesburgers, and that in more laid back environments we might find gracious hospitality rather than rude rejection.

Then, again, maybe the French are just more willing to be honest than the rest of us, less politically correct, more true to themselves and their expectations of what it takes to make a satisfying life—which, in their culture, may not include being excessively patient with visitors who seem to think everybody in the world should speak English and drop what they are doing to serve the unintelligible stranger.

There is something inherently flawed in judging other cultures based on our own values. An American or Brit might find himself repulsed by the Japanese visitor’s loud slurping and lip smacking at dinner—while the Japanese host would find himself insulted at the carefully silent dining habits of their American or British guests. Perhaps what we non-French consider rude the French consider merely expedient. It is absurd, after all, to go to a foreign country and expect its denizens to ape your own sense of manners and courtesy. When in Rome, do as the Romans do—don’t expect the Romans to suddenly exhibit the manners and mores of your culture.

Maybe we should apply that to our judgments of the French as well, n’est pas?

Earn respect?

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:27:00 +0000

Do you think people should earn your respect? Really? Why?

When I was growing up, respect was not something you earned. Respect was freely given, in fact, it was considered an entitlement. It was DISrespect that had to be earned. Now, if you think I’m full of crap on this, put on your thinking cap and follow along with me.

In a circumstance in which respect is not freely accorded to others, disrespect reigns. When you respect the rights and feelings of others, you don’t do things that might infringe on those rights or impinge on their feelings: you don’t cut in front of them in line, you don’t cut them off on the highway, you don’t interrupt when they are speaking, you don’t insult their politics or religious inclinations, you don’t assault their ears with loud cell-phone conversations, or impair their breathing with your second hand smoke—and they don’t do the same to you.

Common courtesy and manners, the lubricant that oils the wheels of social interaction, are based on simple respect for the feelings and rights of others. When respect is absent, disrespect reigns…and when you behave disrespectfully, you invite others to behave towards you in the same way.

Speaking altruistically, you must give respect to get respect and a society that values pleasant social interaction must be based on the simple tenet that we must all respect each other if we are to avoid conflict and make progress.

But there is another, more practical and less esoteric reason that respect must be freely given rather than earned: the sheer impossibility of doing so.

You see, there are billions of people on this planet and even if you live an insular life in a small town, you are going to meet quite a few of them. And each person is going to be different, have different mores and beliefs and feelings…and each one will have different criteria for earning respect. Moreover, those criteria will not be tattooed on their foreheads, nor will they thoughtfully hand you a list of them…in fact, if asked, they will likely be hard pressed to even articulate what it takes for you to earn their respect. And if they really thought about it diligently, it is most likely that one of the critical criterion would be that you show respect to them.

You are no different. You have some kind of nebulous concept rattling around in the back of your brain that defines what it means to earn your respect. And you hold countless numbers of complete strangers to this amorphous, undefined criteria in order to “earn” your respect, without telling them or even being able to articulate it yourself. This is grossly unfair. It is setting a standard to which you expect others to measure up without ever telling them what the standard is. It virtually guarantees failure on the part of others and virtually guarantees you a conscience-free pass to be rude and disrespectful to the majority of people you meet! I mean, if they don’t earn your respect, why should you treat them respectfully?

This attitude is the most basic underpinning of bullying. If you don’t respect someone because you believe they have to earn your respect and you have made it impossible for them to do by creating an impossible and/or invisible set of standards, then you don’t need to respect their rights or their feelings, do you? If you further create some gates that a person must pass through in order to even try to earn your respect—like they must be straight, or Christian, or politically conservative, or a certain race or ethnicity or gender—you further create a situation that you feel absolutely justified in not respecting those who are unable to pass through those gates. If they can’t jump through the hoops and avoid the obstacles you have set up, then you feel perfectly justified in disrespecting them.

When you consider that there are potentially billions of people doing this, that if you meet 100 people in the course of a week, each one of them may be doing this to you, you may begin to see how this cannot work as a way of life. If you meet 100 people and each of them has a different criteria for having their respect earned and none of them are willing to tell you what you must do to “earn” their respect, you are basically screwed. It is a hit or miss situation where “earning” someone’s respect is accidental rather than by design or intent. It is, with rare exception, impossible.

But it goes even deeper than this. Consider for a moment: what kind of a person truly believes that his respect is so rare a commodity that others must earn it? What kind of a person has so little respect within his heart that he must dole it out only to those who are willing to abase themselves to “earn” it? If you think of yourself as a “good person,” what are you doing withholding that most basic entitlement of humans, the right to be respected simply because they exist?

That’s right—we all have basic human rights—and the right to be respected is one of them. We earn DISrespect when we have done something worthy of it, but respect is your birthright. And to expect others to earn your respect is tantamount to saying that you are entitled to withhold from them a right that came with their first breath, setting yourself as a superior being above those from whom you withhold your respect. It speaks ill of your character, and reflects badly upon your moral fibre.

Many of us have bought into the notion that respect must be earned out of ignorance and lack of critical thinking. We aren’t really bullies and we deplore the lack of common courtesy we are subjected to in daily life. Curiously, while we take the position that strangers must earn our respect, we fully expect those strangers to treat us with the respect and courtesy we have made no effort to “earn” from them. It’s a one-way street in our minds—others should treat us with respect but they must earn ours—and we don’t even realize it!

If you take the time to really think about it, you have to come to the conclusion that respect simply cannot be earned. No one person is sufficiently intuitive and simultaneously fluid of personality that they can divine and appropriately react to an infinite, and infinitely changing, set of demands. You cannot please all of the people all of the time—and when it comes to earning respect, you cannot even know what all of the people think you need to do.

If you want to be respected, there is a simple way to achieve that: respect others. Respect their feelings, their rights, their existence. Give them respect as a matter of course and only withhold it when a specific person has done a specific thing that is worthy of withdrawing it. Set the bar high—determine that taking your respect away from a person is a serious thing, not to be taken lightly or in response to something small, like disagreeing with you politically. In fact, to my way of thinking, it is only demonstrating an ingrained lack of respect for others that warrants the withdrawal of my respect.

You might consider this the next time you think another person should earn your respect rather than you giving it freely and giving him a chance to earn your disrespect instead.

Manners, people! Bring your manners!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:24:00 +0000

Geeze, there are days it just doesn't pay to leave your house!

I only had to be out a couple of hours this morning--refill some prescriptions and pick up a few groceries--nothing major. And while it is a Monday morning, it is a public holiday here, so I expected things to be a bit more crowded than on a normal Monday. It wasn't nearly as busy as I expected, but that was probably because I got to the store as it was just opening.

One sack of groceries--that is all I bought, which isn't much. I was in the queue, waiting for an open till, within a short time. The little automatic queue monitor flashed "6" and the electronic voice intoned "Teller Six" and Hubby and I set off for the till. Oddly, the woman behind us cut in front of Hubby as we headed for the till and when I hesitated a moment to allow him to get around her and catch up with me, she swooped past me and presented herself at Till 6 in my place! Fortunately Till 7 was available so I took my trolley there, but the Rude Cow at #6 never did seem to figure out that she had jumped the queue in such an egregious fashion--she was absolutely shameless--even clueless--about it.

We then had to go to the big market to pick up the prescriptions and I needed a couple of things from there as well. Much to my amazement, a younger version of the Rude Cow from Woolworth's appeared! She and her male companion, apparently oblivious to my big trolley being pushed by PlusSize me (who knew a woman my size could be invisible??), decided to enter an aisle as I was turning into it. My trolley was already more than half way through the turn when they jostled it and leaped in front, rushing past. Good grief--would their worlds have fallen apart if they had waited a whole two seconds while I completed the turn and left them sufficient room to go past without crashing into my trolley? What about the woman who parked her trolley in the middle of an aisle so that nobody could get around it and when I said "excuse me?" to her back, she moved but left the trolley in the middle of the aisle?

What is it with people who behave so badly in public? We were in another store on Saturday morning where someone had let a completely unmannered little girl of about 5 loose. Every aisle I entered, she got there ahead of me and every time I needed to stop to choose something, she managed to park her little body right in front of where I needed to be, doing absolutely nothing except taking up space and refusing to budge even when politely asked to do so. Where were her parents? Why was she allowed to run amok in the store? Where are the kidnappers when you need them?

There was a time when people left their children at home until they could behave in public (do not give me that lame tripe about kids needing to be in public to learn manners and I should be more tolerant. If you are a parent and truly believe that, then you are in desperate need of a course of etiquette yourself!) and if a child transgressed in public, s/he was brought up short, on the spot. Now, parents seem to be unaware that "having a baby" equates to raising (as in teaching, training, disciplining, and paying attention to) a child. Like the bride who doesn't think about the marriage, only the wedding, these parents seem not to look past their expectations of adorable, cooing babies and into the real future of the savage little beasts they are supposed to tame.

These little beasts grow into the thoughtless, self-absorbed Rude Cattle I encountered this morning. From supermarket trolley wars to airline passengers refusing to turn off their phones to women having no shame about dating married men, this "me me me" mindset has just gone too far. Manners are an expression of respect for others--and the idea that strangers have to "earn" your respect is a completely bankrupt, narcissistic, utterly stupid notion--and when you show disrespect for others, you invite them to reciprocate. Discourtesy and disrespect breed further discourtesy and disrespect...it creates a hostile environment. People with good manners will not point your faux pas out to you, as that is just as rude, so you must monitor yourself. Slow down--nothing is so important that you cannot wait 3 seconds for someone or at least say "excuse me" in an apologetic tone of voice as you go past. Think before you stop in the middle of a walking space to chat with a friend, before you leave your trolley in the middle of the aisle then block the rest of it with your body as you leisurely peruse the selections, before you gridlock an intersection because you just cannot wait for the next light, before you cut off another driver or refuse to let someone in--THINK--

You just aren't THAT important that everyone else on the planet should give way to you, now are you??

Happy Birthday, Dear Hubby!!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:15:00 +0000

My husband's 40th birthday was last Sunday. We celebrated it by going to Sun City for a week, being careful to come home on Good Friday so as to minimize being stuck in crowds--South Africans loooove to travel over the four day Easter holiday and Hubby timed the trip so that we would be leaving as they would be arriving.

We wanted to try the off-road Segway safari, but a big rain before we arrived left the trails too muddy for that, so it is postponed until our next trip. This trip we decided to try a 6am game drive since the later ones seldom turn up a lot of animals. Seems they rise and eat early, then retire to the shade of trees and thickets when the sun starts to heat things up, so the early morning game drives show more promise.

And it worked! Although the leopards remained elusive, I have finally seen my first wild lion (unfortunately a sighting too brief to photograph), and we actually happened on a rhino actually standing in the road! A small herd of elephants were snacking on some trees and I saw kudu for the first time in this park (our third game drive in this park).

We made it down to Waterworld where Hubby learned to jet ski. And while he seemed to enjoy it tremendously, I couldn't convince him to try parasailing or any of the other water activities (save swimming and floating in the heated pool which was, unfortunately, thickly populated with children).

We took a boat ride on the lake, which afforded us some lovely views...

And at the boat dock there was a huge cluster of carp and catfish (and those fish were gigantic!) including this monster of an albino catfish...

We drove back this morning and have been greeted (and kissed to death) by the little doggies, sent the maid (who was house sitting) home, wer and are blessedly, peacefully, home again. I love our little trips and travel, but the best part has to be getting back to my own cosy environment!!

When Eskom hands you lemons...

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:09:00 +0000

Originally posted in 2008--Edited today

I happened upon a thought provoking article on the web today, in a place I didn't expect to find it.

Tessa Silberbauer, writing for IOLjobs, had this to say:

"The other evening, while sitting and looking at the puddle of candlelight in front of a mirror, I had to laugh at myself.

"For all my belief in saving resources and environmental awareness, I've still been spoiled by "progress": I've forgotten so much.

"How to word-count longhand work, for example (I had to re-write this article by hand to conserve battery power, after writing the original on my PC just before a power cut). And I've become so used to having light when I want it, that I've forgotten how little I really need.

"I'm not alone in responding to power cuts, with anger sometimes. I know that there are serious losses, and that these are hurting us all. But there are also advantages to take, when we focus on our abilities rather than what we can't control.

"We can choose whether to be part of the solution, or part of the problem. Most of the time, it will be a mixed effect; but there is no excuse for refusing to do what we can, just because our contribution is small. " (see the rest of Tessa's excellent article here: http://www.ioljobs.co.za/article_view.php?fArticleId=4237298)

Being part of the solution does not mean that our contributions must be gargantuan. A grain of sand is minute, but enough of them make up a beach. And while your contribution may be only the size of a grain of sand...remembering to shut off your geyser during peak times, for example...if every household in South Africa did just that one thing, our power problem would be diminished significantly.

A painless way to be part of the solution is the change your attitude. Instead of revelling in the "kick 'em while they're down" mob-mentality of blaming Eskom and demanding pointless action (like sacking the managers, which is monumentally stupid and counterproductive), we can channel our energy into a positive, productive course of action. Tell our friends that moaning makes things worse, not better, because Eskom and the government already know there is a problem, so it's time for us all to look to solutions.

Yesterday I had a conversation with my husband's auntie, who is a bank manager in Natal. Her bank gets power cuts at about 2 in the afternoon, and sometimes her town also gets a second power cut in the evening. Now you may not realize it, but even after banks close their doors at 3, work continues inside the bank...work that ordinarily requires electricity. Auntie is very service oriented, and it bothers her that her customers, who have only a short window of opportunity to use the bank anyway, are losing an hour (and sometimes more) of opportunity to use her services. Her solution has been to install UPSs and soon her bank will be open, even during power outages. She is turning this into a marketing opportunity by posting discreet signs in her bank and at the ATMs (and is considering taking out ads in her local newspaper) advertising this fact. Not only will her customers remain loyal, but she expects her ability to remain open and functioning during the outages may draw new customers to her bank. The lady has a firm grip on the concept of taking the lemons of the power crisis and turning them into the sweet lemonade of opportunity.

Another friend of mine reports that they have dug out the old board games and play Monopoly and Scrabble and cards in the evening when the power is down. Where they used to go to separate rooms to watch TV and play video games, the family is now coming together and interacting. More lemonade.

Silberbauer's comment about being spoiled is well-taken. Since when can we not live for two hours without electricity? So, you are expected to adapt a little, change how you do things, make some plans and organize your time and activities around a short loss of power...so what? How selfish can we be, expecting our personal situations to be the hub of the universe? Can we not look for the good that can come out of adversity? Can we not take advantage of the downtime to replenish, relax, reconnect? Have we forgotten that electricity is our servant and not our master?

Being mad at Eskom only hurts you by feeding a negativity of spirit...it doesn't hurt Eskom or change the situation, it only changes you...and for the worse. Scheming to punish Eskom by lawsuits or demanding a management change or, worse, attacking Eskom employees, accomplishes nothing positive. Money awarded through lawsuits takes money away from projects designed to alleviate the crisis and, ultimately, comes out of YOUR pocket and the pockets of people like you, because Eskom's profits go to your government...and its losses come from your government, which you support with your taxes. It is never wise to change horses in midstream, and a new management team for Eskom will inevitably cause delays downstream...where the work of alleviating the power shortage is being done. And what good does it do to pinion an Eskom employee and demand answers from him or even assault him for the power issues? Better to look in a mirror and ask, "what have I done to contribute to this problem and what am I doing to help resolve it?" because you will get more answers there than from the poor guy who comes to read your meter and knows no more about what his bosses are doing than you do.

So, the government, through refusing to give Eskom the go-ahead to start building power stations years back, has handed you a basket of lemons. I'd be interested in knowing what you have done to make lemonade out of them.

Forgiveness: a mistake?

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:38:00 +0000

I have had a lot on my mind lately (in addition to having a lot on my plate). I turned 65 earlier this month and have done a lot of reflecting.

One of the things you get with advancing age (along with arthritis and dimming eyesight) is sufficient experience to gain some perspective. Unfortunately, too many people also become used to jerking their knees rather than actually thinking—which is a waste of both experience and perspective, since they both go unused.

Like all others, Western society has a herd of sacred cows. I’ve always been the kind of person to examine those cows, to test the reason for their sanctity. Maybe I am an iconoclast, maybe I am just, as my mother used to call me, a “shit disturber.” Whatever the reason, I find it very difficult sometimes to not dismember a sacred cow with the sharp blade of critical thought—and when I do that, it seems impossible to put the poor cow back together when I am done.

My subject matter is eclectic. I didn’t like Hemingway despite my sophomore English professor’s adoration of him and his writing—I found his writing juvenile in the sense that it was choppy and lacking in flow. I take issue with modern interpretations of Christianity. I am not on board with the child-centred lifestyle so many parents indulge in today. I detest pop-cultural icons like Kim and Paris and the vapid, self-indulgent consumerism they inspire. But most of all, I despise “popular wisdom,” especially when it may be popular, but is anything but wise.

One of my favourite straw men is the silly notion that, in order to heal from some traumatic event, you have to forgive the person who hurt you. What unmitigated bullshit! Gail Meyers, in her article When Your Mother Has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, addresses the topic very wisely. This “forgiveness imperative” that is plaguing our society right now is, of course, based in the Christian notion of being forgiven by God for our sins. If someone as powerful and omnipotent as God can forgive us for terrible sins, who are we, puny little mortals that we are, to withhold forgiveness from each other?

Not only is this unnecessarily guilt-inducing for victims, it is wholly inaccurate. To quote Meyers: “Forgive as the Lord forgave you." (Col. 3:13) How did the Lord forgive you? Did He just ‘forgive and forget’ your sin as you refused to repent or even acknowledge it as abusers often do? No, you confessed your sins to Him, acknowledged your sin, repented and He forgave you. God does not forgive a person denying they have done wrong and continuing in their sin. Quite the opposite. In Luke 17:3 it says, ‘If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.’ In the Greek, "rebuke" is epitimao, which in this case means to honestly, frankly, politely speak as you tell a person how you feel that he has wronged you. It does not say a thing about stuffing your normal human response of anger, pretending you forgave, ‘forgetting’ and returning for more abuse as some would have you believe.”

Dr. Susan Forward, in her book “Toxic Parents” also addresses the subject of forgiveness: page 189 of her book Toxic Parents:
—   “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this absolution [forgiveness] was really another form of denial: ‘If I forgive you, we can pretend that what happened wasn't so terrible.’ I came to realize that this aspect of forgiveness was actually preventing a lot of people from getting on with their lives.
—   “Responsibility can go only one of two places: outward, onto the people who have hurt you, or inward, into yourself. So you may forgive your parents but end up hating yourself all the more in exchange.
—   “Clients all too often discovered that the empty promise of forgiveness had merely set them up for bitter disappointment. Some of them experienced a rush of well-being, but it didn't last because nothing had really changed in the way they felt or in their family interactions.”

If you are guessing that I am not a big fan of forgiveness, you are correct. I think the pressure on victims to forgive those who have harmed them is reprehensible. It is revictimizing the person, demanding that they, in essence, disavow their right to experience their own feelings and instead, invalidate themselves in favour of the person who hurt them!

This is just not acceptable! One of the unhealthiest things we do to ourselves is to “stuff” our feelings. This repression and refusal to acknowledge reality leads to a host of new personal difficulties from drinking problems and eating disorders to being unable to trust or even love others, and more. Women who stay with abusive partners are people who have learned to stuff their feelings. People who blame themselves for the behaviour of others—like a man who was brutalized as a child saying “I deserved it…I was a handful as a kid,”—are people who have learned to stuff their feelings. Anorexics, people who cut themselves, the perpetually but inexplicably angry or anxious, even the promiscuous, are people who have learned to stuff—to disassociate from—their feelings.

Don’t get me wrong…I am not saying we should never forgive. I am simply saying that we should not forgive indiscriminately—or prematurely—or because others say we should or that forgiveness will somehow heal our hurts, because none of that is true. I think forgiveness has its place, but it is not a healing tool. In fact, if you expect to get something out of forgiving someone who has hurt you, you really are viewing it all wrong. Forgiveness, to be genuine, has to be a selfless act, selflessly given, with no conditions or expectations attached.

There are a number of people in my life who need forgiveness—but I’m not handing it out. I am also not bitter or “withholding” or any of the other epithets others cast at those who refuse (or are unable) to forgive. I am rational, I am intelligent, and I am good at critical thinking. Refusal to forgive is directly related to those people refusing to acknowledge their sins, apologize, and trying to make amends of some kind. It is Biblical, as it were, in that before I will forgive another’s trespass, that other has to own up to his trangressions and be truly remorseful for them. Absent that, there is no forgiveness.

No—it is not harsh—it is eminently pragmatic and protective. Normal people, when they learn they have hurt you, actually feel bad about it. Their internal processes generate a feeling of guilt which they expiate with an apology. It is the people who refuse to acknowledge they have done wrong, who rationalize or justify or blame their victims, who feel no remorse, no guilt, who should not be forgiven. They do not understand selfless acts given selflessly. They see life through their own set of warped filters and perceive forgiveness as consent on the part of their victim, an assent to continue the assaults that generated the need for forgiveness in the first place.

For some transgressors, the knowledge you are forgiving them can be enraging. How dare you take it upon yourself to imply they are wrong in anything they do? Because, after all, you only give forgiveness to those who have done something wrong. Others use forgiveness sanctimoniously—just see how big, how magnanimous, how humble (and wonderful) they are to forgive you for your sins against them. They may even tell you, in supercilious tones, that they forgive you, that they know you don’t hurt them on purpose, that you are living your life as you choose and they forgive you for the pain those choices have inflicted on them. That isn’t real forgiveness, for all that they might believe it is. It leaves them feeling pure and good and self-righteously superior. It isn’t real forgiveness, it is a game they play with your feelings and your self-esteem, your mind and your soul. It makes them your judge, with a perceived right to forgive or punish what they perceive as your sins—it allows them to think they have a right to control your life and that your behaviours (and even beliefs and values) must align with their own. It takes away your power—in their minds—and give it to them.

So, is forgiveness a bad thing? No. Not if it is appropriately and judiciously dispensed. Given too freely, it has no value. Withheld parsimoniously, it loses its purity, it become a cudgel with which to beat those who would have forgiveness into submission.

If you ascribe to the Christian model, forgiveness cannot be dispensed until and unless the transgressor acknowledges and repents his sins because that’s how the Christian god does it and no mere mortal can be smarter, better or more righteous than God. If you ascribe to something a bit more terrestrial, logic dictates that forgiveness still cannot be dispensed until and unless the transgressor acknowledges and repents his sins, otherwise all the forgiveness represents is permission to continue committing the acts that required forgiveness in the first place.

Forgiveness absent repentance is nothing more than permission to carry on as before.

And I still don't get it...

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:46:00 +0000

You would think, at this venerable age, nothing a person could do would surprise me, that by now I would have experienced enough that little in the human condition would give me pause.

So, when my phone went “ping” repeatedly this morning—at 5:30—you would think I would expect it to be my deadbeat tenant, messaging me that she had her most recent instalment on her arrears, right? Silly me, I thought it might be from a family member notifying us that someone was desperately ill or critically injured!

I do not understand people who become aggressive (or, in this case, passive-aggressive) when they are, by any measurable standard, clearly in the wrong. This woman is more than two months in arrears in both her electricity and her rent. We finally cut her electricity off for non-payment last month, an act that finally had the desired effect of her coming up with about a third of her debt to us in cash. As part of our agreement to turn her lights back on, she had to agree to pay us R1000 per week against her outstanding debt or see the power cut again.

The first week she tried to short us by R50. My husband refused to turn the power back on until the full R1000 (about $125USD) was paid. The second week she paid OK, but in the third week her rent was due and she whined to my husband she could not afford to pay the rent and the back payment so he let her slide and pay the rent only. Then she skipped a payment and ignored our reminder texts, so Hubby turned off her electricity. Three days later, I received a text at midnight that she had the money.

I do not understand her hostility. She signed a lease agreeing to pay rent and electricity and from the second month of her tenancy, it has been like pulling teeth to get money out of her. And she has come up with some of the most inventive lies I have ever heard to explain her tardiness with the rent. She deposited it via EFT to our bank account and the bank put it in the wrong account (yah, right); her ATM card wouldn’t work so she couldn’t draw cash; she has a new job and will get paid next week (we checked—payday was three weeks away). She promises money in a week, three days, tomorrow—all forgotten as soon as the door is closed or the phone put down.

So when she got two months in arrears and Hubby called her, she got hostile and nasty. And she took it out on the maid by being rude to her (and my maid is the sweetest, kindest lady you would ever care to meet) and the tenant who lives in the little studio flat at the other side of the property. But always nice as pie to my face or my husband’s face…just rude and hostile over the phone or to people who have nothing to do with her little drama.

Finally Hubby cut off her electricity. Of course, we sent her a message (in writing—hard copy) that this was going to happen, when it was going to happen, what she could do to prevent it, what she had to do to get it turned back on. She ignored us. He turned off the power. I don’t know what she thought would happen—maybe my good-natured Hubby would relent and restore her power without any action on her part?—but she lasted just short of a week with no lights, hot water, kitchen stove or power for her refrigerator. She brought money and she agreed to pay R1000 per week towards her arrears—and she can’t seem to manage that.

My husband says he doesn’t think she is malicious, just unable to appropriately prioritize and right up to 5:30 this morning, I agreed with him. She told the maid a couple of weeks ago that she spent R2000 for an elective surgery for her cat—this was the same week she cried poverty to my husband and said she couldn’t afford both her rent and the arrears payment. On Monday of this week, she told the gardener that she was moving to a “big house” in our area, which just happens to be one of the most expensive places to live in all of sub-Saharan Africa. “If she can’t afford to pay her rent here,” my maid asked, “how can she afford a big house in Sandton?” Good question, isn’t it?

But the thing that gets me is the hostility and passive-aggressiveness. We’ve been through this before, some years ago, with a tenant in Cape Town. This woman stopped paying her rent, claiming tough times in her business and lack of funds, but the truth was, her lease was about up and instead of paying her rent for her last two months, she used her rent money to pay for the deposit and first month’s rent on a very high-end house in the posh district of the up-market suburb we were living in. For months afterward she insulted us and our lawyers, and indignantly claimed we were accusing her of being a liar when she really, really was broke and just couldn’t pay up. On move-out she did R7000 worth of damage (50% more than her deposit covered) and accused us of “padding” the damages—she offered to have a carpet cleaned (offering about 10% of what a cleaner would charge) when the problem with the carpet was not soil but a hole nearly half a meter in diameter where the carpet had rotted from moisture. She had had a large potted plant sitting in that spot and had allowed the thing to drain into the carpet!

She damaged the walls and although it was a no-smoking flat, nicotine literally dripped from the ceiling light fixtures when we took possession of the flat. Cracks in the walls so bad they required replastering, stains on the paint from thrown or spilled coffee or cola, paint ripped away from the walls, cigarette burns in the wood bathroom cabinetry…and the whole garden dead from lack of water, despite the presence of an irrigation system that took but one turn of a handle to operate. She did so much damage that it took more than a month to set right and not only did she claim she was leaving it the same condition as she got it (she was the very first tenant and the place had been completely renovated just before she moved in), she was the very picture of righteous indignation at our demands that she pony up and pay for the damage she caused.

And she was not without funds. We sued her and she cried “poverty! poverty!” right up to the day the court issued an order to seize her pretty little lavender BMW and sell it to satisfy the debt. Suddenly, large sums of money began appearing in our attorney’s trust account, and within 10 days the debt, which had grown by 50% with the inclusion of legal fees, was satisfied. She had had the means to pay us all along, but not only refused to pay, acted as if there was something wrong with us for not believing her patently false cries of poverty.

I don’t get this. Oh, I clearly understand being short on funds…I was poor for a good portion of my life. But what I don’t understand is getting yourself in an arrears situation when it is not necessary—and then becoming hostile to the people to whom you owe money. When you are in the wrong, isn’t it obvious that you make your situation even worse by becoming hostile (either actively or passively) to the people you have wronged? I have had situations in which I was unable to pay bills—I didn’t handle it by becoming hostile to my creditors!

The good news is, my deadbeat tenant is moving out at the end of the month and new tenants—people with a squeaky clean credit history—are moving in and at a higher rent that the deadbeat was supposed to be paying. The bad news is, we are certain that the deadbeat, as soon as she is gone and we have no leverage (like turning off her electricity) to force the money out of her, will completely forget the debt, expecting us to do the same. I don’t know how she sleeps at night.

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:05:00 +0000

Our calendars have all come to an end and have been chucked out, replaced with bright, new, unsullied calendars for the next cycle of days. All over the world, obsolete Gregorian calendars (the common calendar in use today) lay discarded and largely forgotten, new ones having taken their place on desks and walls everywhere. A year from now they, too, will be nothing but relics, a chart of time gone by, never to be revisited.

But because the calculators and issuers of Gregorian calendars continue to practice their trade, we have new calendars for the next year. Some include phases of the moon and the ebb and flood of the tides, even holidays important to the location of issuance…but they all have two things in common: they are a chart of days for the next 365 days, and on that 365th day they come to an end.

This has been going on for centuries—in fact, depending on where you live in the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the official time-keeping chart for anywhere from the 14th century to the 20th (Britain and her colonies adopted the calendar in the mid eighteenth century, changing from the astronomically inaccurate Julian calendar and shaving about 11 days off the calendar—the dates between 2 and 14 September, 1752, did not exist!)1

Calendars, then, are the inventions of men, a means of keeping track of the flow of day, both before and after the day we presently inhabit. They are based on time as measured by our planet’s rotations around the sun (years) and divided into relatively equal portions based on our planet’s axial rotations (days). Depending on how sophisticated our ability to read the heavens and calculate our solar and planetary revolutions, our calendars can be both crude and sophisticated, but all contain varying degrees of inaccuracy. Our own Gregorian calendar is inaccurate to the approximate tune of 6 hours per year or 24 hours in a four-year period. It is corrected by the simple expedient of adding a day (29 February) every four years.

Through the use of calendars man can appear to manipulate time by adding days (like Leap Year) or deleting days (like the Julian to Gregorian shift). You don’t really think an “extra” day comes into existence every four years do you? Or that those days in September 1752 actually disappeared? Well, they didn’t—we simply adjusted the way we are keeping track of time by adding or deleting days from our calendars in order for our calendars to stay relatively astronomically accurate. The cosmos keeps on functioning as it always has, regardless of how we choose to keep a record of it.

So, calendars are man-made and adjustable in order to keep them relatively accurate with respect to our annual circuits around the sun (each of which takes about 365.25 days according to the way we measure days). They also give us information about events that take place at given times, but these events are often dependent on location. Holidays, for example, are not universal: Thanksgiving in the US and Canada fall on different dates—even different months—and in the UK and Europe (and most of the rest of the world), Thanksgiving is not celebrated at all. The moon creates the tides and with knowledge of the moon’s phases and its rotations and around the earth, the rise and fall of the tides can be predicted.

We choose to measure time in the form years, broken down one year at a time into days and those subparts of days, hours, minutes, and seconds. We choose to number our years beginning at the time of the birth of a Middle Eastern teacher (something implemented by the Catholic Church centuries ago). And while there are other calendars that predate the Gregorian by millennia (Jewish, Chinese, Hindu, etc), they each end after a period of days and months, only to begin again with a new year, a new calendar, calculated and created by people who know how their calendar is formulated and distributed to those who follow it.

The end of one of these calendars is not perceived as cause for alarm. Nobody thinks that December 31 is the harbinger of doom because everybody knows that when December 31 comes to a close and the clock clicks over to 12:01 am, the world will not end, it will just become a new day—the first in the next new year. Why, then, do so many people take the end of the Mayan calendar later this year as the date which we will all cease to exist and the planet will disintegrate from beneath our feet?

The Mayan calendar, instead of covering a one year period of time, encompasses a 5000 year period And, between the passage of time and the virtual obliteration of the Mayan priesthood by the Conquistadors, it’s pretty safe to say that the guys who created the Mayan calendar are long dead and didn’t have much of a chance to train up some apprentices to take over the job. Would we be so convinced that the world was about to end if it was the Gregorian calendar came up to its last day and nobody around knew how to create a new one? Do we think that time has stopped when our watches stop functioning? My computer’s clock suddenly went crazy a few weeks ago when we had a lightning strike in the back yard—it kept counting the same couple of hours over and over again, never changing the date, never going later than 7 pm or earlier than 5: should I have taken this as a sign that we were repeating the same two hours of the same day ad infinitum, a la Groundhog Day?

Perhaps those who have convinced themselves that December 21, 2012 is the end of the world rather than just the end of a calendar that, sadly, cannot have a sequel as the technology for creating the next 5000 year instalment has been lost in the mists of time, could apply a little critical thinking as noted in the paragraph above. The calendar, after all, is merely a tool created by man, a tool infinitely adjustable, endlessly renewable, which ends at the time its cycle comes to an end. It is the calendar that is ending, not the cosmos or the world.

1 http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/cal_art.html

Happy Holidays!!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Contrary to popular belief, Christ was not born on December 25. The best guess of Biblical scholars puts the time of year more towards autumn, most likely some time in September. Late December is the time of the winter solstice, a sacred time for the nature-based religions of pre-Christian Europe...and of today. Near this same time of year Jews celebrate Hanukkah, the festival of light, remembering a time during a siege when a store of lamp oil sufficient for only a single night miraculously lasted for eight. Even the pagan Romans celebrated Saturnalia during late December.

During the time of the Roman conquest and occupation of Europe and Britain, Christian missionaries found that they could more easily sway the local pagans towards conversion through the simple expedient of co-opting pagan religious observances and giving them a Christian theme. "The Roman Christians, ignorant of his (Christ's) birth, fixed the solemn festival to the 25th of December, the Brumalia, or Winter Solstice, when the Pagans annually celebrated the birth of Sol." Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. ii, Gibbon, p. 383. (For a lengthy list of pagan celebrations that fell on or about December 25 of each year, click here.) By mingling Christian worship and dogma with pagan customs and traditions until they were inextricably intertwined, pagans ultimately became Christians...and the origins of many once-pagan customs became lost in the mists of time.

Late December is a time of observation and celebration of people of many faiths, not just an annually belated birthday remembrance of a person born more than two millennia past. The Festive Season belongs to Christians, Jews, and unbelievers alike. It is not a holiday originated or owned by Christians alone. Sadly, however, there is a movement afoot to seize this universally shared season of peace and goodwill and brand it their own to the exclusion of all others. The internet abounds this year with selfish please of exclusion, begging people to refuse to enfranchise their non-Christian brethren by refusing to say "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" but to confine their greetings to "Merry Christmas," thereby behaving as if the observations of others are of no value and may be ignored--or overwritten, as it were--as if they do not exist.

The nice thing about "Happy Holidays" as a greeting is that it acknowledges and enfranchises everyone. From the most devout Christian to whom the word "holiday" still carries its original meaning of "holy day" to the non-Christian who may or may not have a holy day at this time of year to celebrate, the phrase "Happy Holidays!" and acknowledges everyone from the faithful to the devoutly secular, a phrase that joyfully wishes good cheer to everyone to whom it is addressed.

So what is the curmudgeonly excuse for those who admonish us to eschew such ecumenical greetings in favour of saying only "Merry Christmas"? While I find no fault in the phrase itself, I do find a meanness of spirit and flintiness of heart in those who would use the phrase a a means to exclude others from the festive nature of the season by denying them acknowledgement their own beliefs. How sad that a little knot of blindered, Scrooge-hearted souls can take a season revered for its goodwill towards all and turn it into yet another example of arrogant, unwarranted superiority by exclusion.

Those of us who believe that this season belongs to us all, please, greet your fellows with expressions of good will that encompasses us all. If you know the person you are greeting is not a Christian, perhaps you can take a moment to stretch yourself a bit and, rather than impose your own belief system on him, acknowledge his. Happy Hanukkah for Jewish friends, Happy Holidays or have a Joyous Festive Season for others. It's what the season is all about--celebrating goodwill to our fellow, not dampening their joy by implying their beliefs, whatever they might be, are inferior to our own.

Happy Holidays to you all!! And may your new year be bright, happy, and prosperous!!

How to avoid a lawsuit—

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:39:00 +0000

So, on Oct 4 at about 6 pm, I was in the supermarket doing something I have done at least weekly for pretty much the last 45+ years: grocery shopping. The only appreciable difference between South African supermarkets and American supermarkets is the hours they are open, so my shopping skills, finely honed in busy American markets, are eminently translatable from that country to this.
I was almost finished with the shopping and walking down the canned goods aisle when I remembered that I had used up my two cans of tomato puree the previous week making enchilada sauce. This particular market has a problem keeping things in stock (invariably I come away with things left on the shopping list because the market hadn’t restocked an item, sometimes for weeks), so I was concerned that I might not be able to get the tomato puree without going to another store—something I had no time for that evening.

There was a tall man in front of the display I wanted, so I waited patiently for him to step aside. When he finally did and I could see the display, I inwardly heaved a sigh of relief: not only was the tomato puree in stock, there was plenty! Neatly stacked two high on a shelf above my head, there seemed to be an abundance and all I needed was two cans,

To the left of the display of the 410 gram cans I wanted was a stack of half sized cans, also containing tomato puree. The 410 gram cans were stacked two high but the smaller cans were stacked four high and, because they did not have tapered bottom edges, the stack was not especially stable. I reached for one of the larger cans and, before I could get it off the shelf, the stack of small cans wobbled and two of them fell off the shelf—and one of them hit me square in the face.

It felt like I had taken a fist to the mouth. I staggered backwards with the blow, then retrieved my tomato puree cans from the shelf and re-stacked the two cans that had fallen. It was not until I reached the end of the aisle that my nose tickled and when I reached up to rub it, my hand came away bloody. The punch to the face did more then just step me back a pace and rattle my equanimity: it had opened a half-inch long wound about ¾ of an inch above the right side of my upper lip, and it was bleeding profusely.

I called Hubby, who was in another shop, saying that a can had fallen off a shelf and hit me in the face and now I was bleeding. He showed up and quickly took charge, going for a store manager while I pressed a folded tissue to my face to stop the bleeding and retard swelling. Anna, a management employee, escorted me to a private room where she cleaned the cut and helped me fill out an incident report. One of the things I tried to impress upon her was that the stack of cans was wobbly and should be moved to a lower shelf before someone else got hurt the same way I did. My husband asked if the store was going to pay the medical bills, as we had all agreed I needed to go to the ER for stitching, and Anna answered that the store would.

After a two hour wait in the ER, a doctor finally examined my face and decided that Dermabond—a surgical superglue—would close the wound with the least amount of scarring and an hour later my husband and I were finally able to go home.

The following day Anna called to see how I was doing. My face was swollen, I had a bruise both inside and outside my mouth, and the cut hurt…other than that I was fine. She wished me well and said she would call again to check on me. She called a couple of days later to check on me again and I asked if the cans had been moved to a lower shelf to save someone else from the same experience and she said they had not—the manager had looked and decided it was unnecessary and they had to be stacked that way. I thanked Anna for her concern and put down the phone.

Friday, however, the story took another turn. Early in the day Hubby stopped by the supermarket to submit the bills from the hospital and pharmacy. Several hours later I received a call from another supermarket manager, Joseph, who was apparently higher up the food chain than Anna, who informed me they were not going to pay my medical bills because the store had decided it was not responsible for my injury. I asked for the man’s name and telephone number, telling him that my husband would be in touch with him.

Instead of calling, however, my husband went to the market, furious. Joseph tried to bluff my husband with misinformation and outright lies, attempting to make the injury my fault. He told my husband that the can could not have fallen on my face because I was too tall. For some odd reason, he was under the impression that I was 5’11” tall [180.3 cm] (my husband’s height) when, in fact, I am barely 5’3” [160 cm]. With that misconception laid to rest, Joseph now tried to tell my husband that they had a witness who saw me cause the cascade of cans. We knew this to be false because we couldn’t find a witness to the event at the time it occurred—if anybody saw it, nobody came to my aid! And when Hubby demanded that Joseph produce his witness, the subject was dropped and he went back to blaming me.

Hubby suggested that they go to the aisle and replicate the incident. When they stacked up four of the half-sized cans (can B in the photo) and the department manager tried to lift a larger (size A) can from beside the stack, all four of the smaller cans fell on him, rather than just the two that fell on me! In view of the manager’s hands-on experience, Hubby was then told that our claim would be submitted to the supermarket’s insurance company…and gave Hubby a large bouquet of flowers to bring home to me.

On Monday Hubby returned the market and met with the store general manager who, incidentally, had been in the store at the time of my injury…and was notified of the injury…but never bothered to come into the office to see how I was. He told Hubby that he was willing to settle the claim on the spot, in cash, in exchange for Hubby’s signature on a claim release that said we would not submit any further medical claims for the incident. He gave no reasons for his abrupt decision to settle the claim immediately for cash, but it was the right thing to do—not just because the market was responsible for my injury because they unsafely stocked those cans, but for the store (which, surely, was his primary motive). A swift cash settlement in the amount of the actual medical costs accompanied by a signed release form virtually guarantees the market will not suffer the cost of a lawsuit for costs plus damages for negligence and legal fees as well. It was the prudent step to take, Joseph’s insulting bluster and posturing notwithstanding.

Oh—and Hubby went to the aisle where the mishap occurred and noted that after the manager had been showered with falling cans, those wobbly 4-up stacks of small cans had been moved to a lower shelf where, if they fell, the weren’t so likely to hit someone in the head or face. Imagine what they would have been dealing with that can had landed on the head of an infant in his mother’s shopping trolley instead of an adult??

The Dermabond came off after a week and I am now left with a half-inch long red scar on my face, just above the right side of my upper lip. I am thinking that manager was worried that I was going to want expensive plastic surgery for the scar and was in a hurry to get Hubby to sign the release that would protect the store. It’s a shame he didn’t get me, the actual injured party, to sign it, eh??

Passive Income and Rental Property: Oxymoron!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:19:00 +0000

A very smart friend of mine was filling me in on her “three year plan” for her finances. She’s an accountant and holds a very responsible management position in a fairly large firm…when it comes to money, she’s no dummy. But she said something that disturbed me—her next plan (this one is drawing to a close) is to create for herself some “passive income,” an excellent goal—but in the same breath she mentioned buying a second house for that purpose.
As a landlord and rental property manager, I had to tell her than owning rental property is anything but passive! There is nothing passive about 3 am calls that the geyser (hot water heater) has burst or that the roof is leaking onto the tenant’s bed! There is nothing passive about being on vacation and getting a call that the property has been burglarized and there are broken locks and windows all over the place. There is nothing passive about discovering your tenant has failed to maintain the garden, has broken a toilet, or stolen the satellite dish. In short, there is nothing passive at all about owning a house or flat that someone else—someone over whom you have virtually no control—lives in.

Tenants often surmise that because you own the property and rent it out to them, you must be rich. They assume that you own the property outright so that whatever they pay you in rent is pure profit to your pocket. To many of them, this means they don’t have to pay their rent on time or conserve power or water, and if they break something—oh, well—you’re rich, you can afford to fix it. The reality of owning rental property is often very different from the expectations—and different in ways many prospective landlords never dreamed.

First of all, it is unlikely you will turn a profit on the property in the first three to five years. Why? Because you are buying the property at market value which means your mortgage payments will most likely be more than the market value rent for the same property. It takes several years for rents to increase until the market rent is higher than your mortgage (bond) payment. And in a slow property market, that will be even more likely. When houses don’t sell, people rent them out, which puts a glut on the market and drives rents down. So, if you are planning to buy a property as a rental, you must expect to supplement the incoming rents in order to have enough to make your mortgage payments…and if you didn’t take out a PITI (principle, interest, taxes and insurance) loan, you’re going to have to dig even deeper for tax and insurance money.

Secondly, every dwelling has to have utilities: water, electric, trash, sewer, etc. It is tempting to tell the tenant that he has to transfer all these things into his name, thereby saving you the hassle of it. But that’s not always the smartest thing to do. The purveyors of water, electricity and the like tend to be pretty single-minded about getting paid for their services and if your tenant doesn’t pay the bills, the services get turned off. Not your problem, you say? Well, you’ll think differently when your tenant moves out and you find yourself with a mountain of refuse in the back yard—or worse, inside the house or apartment—(trash pick up was suspended for non payment), a dead garden (water was cut off for non payment) and you can’t turn on the lights to clean the place up after you get home from work (electricity shut off for non payment). And you’ll think even more differently when you go to get them turned back on…this time in your name…and the entity demands that you bring the accounts current and pay a whopping deposit before they will transfer them.

So, with this lesson in mind, you rent the property out keeping the accounts in your own name…you will bill the tenant for usage. But now, if the tenant fails to pay, you don’t have the legal right to shut off services! And if the tenant has kids, you can’t just put them out on the street with three days notice, either, you have to take them to court, which can take months—months during which the tenant continues to not pay the utilities and may even stop paying the rent.

Small claims courts have a rather low limit on what they will allow you to sue for, and that low limit will be reached very quickly if your tenant is using water and electricity at an alarming rate and not paying you for it. If the tenant also stops paying rent, you will end up having to fund a lawyer and pay court costs just to get the deadbeat tenant out of your property—and if you think you are going to recover that money from the tenant, think again. Unless you have the funds to hire a lawyer and take the person to court, you get nothing. In fact, even if you do have the money to take the person to court and you win, now you have to hire someone to collect for you! And the grim reality is, if the person is renting, they probably don’t have much in the way of assets for you to seize, nor a fat income to garnish: people who have fat incomes and valuable assets tend not to be renters.

Chasing rents and utility payments is hardly a passive occupation, and there is nothing passive about trying to get a vacant unit rented out, either. Free advertising exists on the web, but my own experience was that I got better response from a paid newspaper ad! First you have to get people interested in the property…motivate them to answer your ad. Once they call, expect half of them to fail to show up for their appointment: you get to drive over to the property, tidy it up for the showing, wait an hour only to have the prospective tenant no-show and often even fail to call to cancel.

Once you give the address of the unit, expect people to drive by and look at the place in advance of their appointment. Some of the cancellations I have received were astounding: “Didn’t like green houses” (the house was white and behind a masonry wall!); “Too far for me to commute” (we had already established it was closer than the current residence); “No garage” (that was already disclosed on the phone); “Doesn’t have a pool” (yes it does, you just can’t see it from the street!); “the house is too small” (you haven’t even been inside and you can’t see the whole house from the street!). Once they have seen the place, expect negotiations—some of them outrageous: “I can’t afford this, can you drop the rent by 25%? I’ll sign a year’s lease so you’ll know it will be rented for that long…” (Sorry, but if you couldn’t afford the advertised rent, why did you even call? Why are you wasting my time and yours? And I always require a 12 month lease—so you bring nothing to the table with your offer.) “Can we adjust the rent for work I do around here?” (What work?? The place is in good nick and your lease requires you to keep up the garden. Are you suggesting you are going to break things and expect me to pay you, via a reduction in your rent, for fixing them?) “I know the ad said small dog OK…what about my German Shepherd?” (Only if he weighs 10kg (22lbs) or less at full growth…) “Are you going to fence the pool/garden/front yard/patio? I have a small child…” (No, we are not. If you cannot keep an eye on your child then this is not the rental for you.)

Some people will also want to fudge the deposit: “Can I pay the deposit in instalments after I move in? I don’t have that much cash right now…” Trust me, saying “yes” this question has been a problem every single time we have agreed. Every time. If they can’t come up with your deposit in a lump sum, expect them to be unable to come up with the rent on time and in full as well—and don’t expect the deposit to be paid—ever.

The deposit is important because more often than not, the tenant leaves the property in need of expensive services. If you are lucky, the worst you will need is a cleaning lady and a carpet shampooer. If you are not lucky, you may require the services of an attorney to sue for damages. We have had both experiences and neither of them are passive—nor are they income! One tenant, for whom we agreed to accept monthly instalments on the deposit, we had to evict after only four months for harassing and threatening another tenant on the property (complete with police visits and reports). During his four month tenancy he did not make a single instalment on the deposit and when he moved out, damage to the property exceeded what would have been the deposit, had he paid it!! To add insult to injury, he consulted an attorney and we received a letter demanding a refund on the unused portion of his rent! Fortunately his attorney knew a losing proposal when he saw one, as we responded that we had applied the unused portion of his rent to the unpaid deposit which was then spent to replace the broken toilet, window, and clean the filth that he had allowed to accumulate in only four months (including sacks of rotting garbage in the kitchen), and that he owed us an additional amount for cleaning and damages, as the excess rent did not cover our costs. We never heard from the tenant or the lawyer again.

Assuming you are lucky enough to get a good tenant who pays their rent on time and doesn’t damage property (and credit checks...which cost money...won’t tell you that!), entropy happens—even to new and recently remodelled properties. We have a flat that was completely remodelled less than a year ago at a cost that approximates what we collect in rents in a year. The tenants are perfect…but the flat continues to need visits from our handyman and from the Body Corporate’s maintenance people: leaking roof, leaking pipe, leaking sink, wobbly tiles, burst geyser (hot water heater)…the list goes on. Another absolutely perfect tenant had to tell me that her brand new kitchen stove suddenly isn’t getting any gas, necessitating a visit from the handyman. Another tenant never, ever pays her rent in full and on time, necessitating constant contact with reminders and even threats to get our money. Other tenants are profligate with the electricity in their units to the degree that the property is now operating in the red. None of this is passive and all of it reflects an outflow of money rather than income.

So, the next time you are thinking about “passive income” and the idea of owning some rental property seems appealing to you, think again. There is nothing passive about being a landlord and precious little “income” until the property appreciates enough for you to sell it at a profit!

Some days...

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:52:00 +0000

...I should have just stayed in bed.

This is just soooo wrong...on soooo many levels!

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:11:00 +0000

I received this email this morning:

Hello Dear

I am interested in establishing and operating a very viable business as a means of investment abroad. I do not know too well on how this is done in your country, so I will need you to help me in this regard. My preference is any good profit yielding business and I would appreciate any viable ideas you could come up with.

I will also need you to help me look for properties like homes and lands for sale as I am proposing to invest the sum of Twenty Million British Pounds Sterling (£20 Million) for this. I do not know if you can and will be of help to me. For a brief on my personality; About me, my name is Mrs Comfort Porky a Saudi National,living in London, retired Business woman. I am married with my late Husband survive with my 2 lovely kids.

Dear friend i wish to let know that contacted you to be my business partner is not by accident but by the will of God, the most reason why i contacted you to be my partner over this project is because of my dangerous sickness which am passing through i don't know whether i will survive it or not, for six years now i have been suffering for kidney problem which i have been denying me so many thing.

Now for the project, am making it on behalf of my kids, i will like us to make investment of Hospital or School, this is my own dream i don't know of you. So you are advised to give me your own opinion.

Let me assure you that this business is 100% genuine and real, all that matters is your full cooperation by once you send me your full information's as listed below.

Your Full name..........................

Your Mobile number........................ ...

Your Telephone number.....................

Your fax number.........................

Your Residence address.............

Your current age.........................

Your International passport......................

Nationality :.................................

Profession ...................................

Your photo...........................

Thanks and waiting to hear from you.

Yours Sincerely,

Mrs.Comfort Porky.

Mrs. Porky is a Saudi national? In what dream world?? And does she really think I am going to send her , on a silver platter, everything she needs in order to counterfeit my passport and steal my identity? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the email's "sent" address hails from Russia...so a Muslim widow with the surname Porky (PORKY?? Doesn't the idiot who wrote this have even a clue about the relationship between Arabs and pigs??) who is living in the UK (and has somehow amassed £20 Million) sends me...a complete stranger...an email from Russia with a 100% genuine business proposal but I have to hurry because she is dying of kidney failure? Really??

The only thing more pathetic than this completely stupid fiction is the sad fact that, somewhere in the world, someone even more moronic than the sender is going to fall for this. Probably not an American, though...80+ percent of us are too insular to even have a passport.

A new kind of weight loss idea...

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:05:00 +0000

I have to go on a diet. I don't want to. Not because I don't want to lose weight, not even because I object to reducing my caloric intake...I don't want to because I know what I will be expected to eat and I don't want to eat it.

Margarine is gross...it feels disgusting on the tongue, and tastes like grease. I won't be giving up butter.

"Diet" or "diabetic" ice cream is like eating frozen skim milk...almost as disgusting as margarine.

I'm not willing to fill my plate with veggies I hate...and there are a few that fit that category which dietitians and other people who invent recipes for dieters seem to hold in high esteem. No kind of yellow squash crosses these lips unless it has been made into a pie...like a pumpkin pie...which totally kills the diet. No kind of bell pepper, regardless of colour, gains entry to this body. I will spend half an hour picking them out of my chow mein or off my pizza or hunting them down in a salad and discarding them...so these recipe inventors who mistakenly think that "colourful" food somehow makes up for overwhelming, meal-dominating flavour can count me out. Spinach and other leafy greens? Only in salads, my friend...and then only spinach. Ever eaten chard? High on the disgusting list, whether raw or cooked into stringy slime.

I am also choosy about the meats I eat. No mutton, thank you, very little lamb, and fish must be avoided unless it is salmon or trout, and then in small quantities only. No organ meats...none, zero, zip, nada. If it ain't a muscle meat from a chicken, turkey, pig, or cow, feed it to someone else. No meat fat---augh! gross!!---bacon should be fried crisp or left on the pig.

You may be getting the picture here...at my advanced age I have some seriously entrenched food likes and dislikes and I'm not up for changing them...poached eggs vs those scrambled in butter? I do not think so! (Unless I put some butter on them when they hit the plate!)

So, given that I'm not very open to changing certain aspects of my diet and I do have to lose some weight, what is the solution? Portion control.

Now, by this I do not advocate the lame current concept of starvation by choosing portion sizes so small they don't qualify as a respectable snack. Two days on the currently trendy portion control diet and I would be eating the wall paper in desperation. One serving of red meat every ten days, and the serving is as big as my palm and as thick as my little finger?? Not bloody likely!! No, instead of taking arbitrary measures of foods and imposing them on people who may have been eating several times that amount (which will definitely leave them feeling deprived and hungry), my idea is to start with your own portions of the foods you normally eat and simply reduce those portions. There is a bit more to it than that, but that is the essence of it: eat whatever you normally eat, just less of it. And if you eat less food, you will lose weight. Not rapidly, perhaps, but it will come down...and it will come down without you feeling like you can never eat cheesecake again!

So here are the basics: you need just a few tools: a scale to weigh yourself on; a scale (electronic, set to weigh in grams) for weighing food; a notebook and pen, and for the arithmetic challenged, a calculator. That is it.

Start with weighing yourself: in the notebook write down the date and your weight. Leave the rest of the page blank for now, as you will record subsequent weights here. (If you are bashful about a scale, an alternative is to measure yourself where you think you are the fattest: waist, hips, thighs...and record those numbers. I don't like scales and I can tell if I am losing or gaining weight by how my jeans fit around my middle and bum.)

Now, the next time you want to eat something, go to your food scale. Put the portion you would normally eat on the scale and weigh it. Write that in your notebook; now, calculate half that amount and write that next to your normal amount. Put half of the serving back and you can eat the other half. It doesn't matter what the food is: butter for your toast (one slice instead of two), ice cream, chips...whatever it is, measure out your normal portion then put half of it back. Exception: if the food is something you ordinarily will have second helpings of, like mashed potatoes or chili or spaghetti, take your normal portion and skip the seconds. Next time you want a food, you need only look in your notebook to see what the appropriate serving for you is because you have already calculated it.

This rule applies to virtually everything you put into your mouth: sauces, dressings, oil in the pan to cook something, gravies, jams and jellies, desserts, snacks, dips...if it goes into your mouth, the 50% rule applies. Exceptions: low cal veggies: you can have all the carrots, beets, green beans, celery, tomatoes you want...but only half the sauce, condiments, butter that you usually use. Fruits, however, because they contain sugar, fall under the 50% rule, as do starchy vegetables like corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, yellow squashes.

You cannot eat more frequently than before...that just shifts the time you eat and allows you to eat the same amount of food instead of reducing it. You can have three meals and three snacks daily, but your intake must be half of your previous intake. If you find this too stringent in the beginning, then calculate 1/3 and put that back, eating 2/3 of your normal intake.

This means you can't eat out much at first because you have to weigh things for a while to start getting an idea of what a "normal" portion is for you and how much of it to leave behind. My own plan is to simply eat half of what is served at the restaurant, take the other half home and have it for lunch the next day. Same with desserts: you can have desserts but just don't eat the whole thing. Share with someone else or eat half and take the other half home for a snack the following day.

I plan to follow this eating plan for six weeks and then check my measurements. If I am not happy with my weight loss after that time, I will reduce my portions further, perhaps cut out some things. As it is, I am not a big bread, cake, or cookie eater, and I have cut candies of all kinds from my diet for now. I drink sugar-free drinks and use sweetener in my tea with 2% milk. These reduce caloric intake, but I can reduce it further without feeling deprived.

And that, I think is one of the significant causes of weight-loss failure: people find their eating taken over by strangers who have no concept of (or respect for) their food likes and dislikes and suddenly feel deprived. There is nothing like feeling deprived of something to make you want it! By allowing people to continue to eat their preferred foods (but in reduced quantities), the chances of losing weight, I think, will go up.

For those who are ready to jump in here with the "healthy eating" noise: shut up. I think trying to do too much at one time is another reason so many people fail at weight loss. The time to change what you eat is after you have learned to change how much you eat. Once your stomach has shrunk to be accustomed to smaller meals and some success greets the dieter in the mirror, healthier alternatives can be introduced. But to tell someone who is struggling to drop some poundage that she must give up not only satiety but comforting, familiar tastes as well...well, I think that is just too much for some of us! Do not expect me to give up my butter---you will be disappointed!

So, who's with me on this? Anybody wanna be a guinea pig and give a revolutionary new concept in weight loss a try? You have nothing to lose but some unwanted poundage!

The Great Baby Ban

noreply@blogger.com (Sweet Violet) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 07:39:00 +0000

Today I laid my hands on another person’s child…actually, I could have easily walked off with said child and, except for the fact that he and I were of widely divergent colour, nobody would have blinked…not even his so-inattentive parent that s/he didn’t object to my manhandling the child, probably because s/he never saw it happen.

There is a movement afoot these days to ban children from…or at least limit their access to…certain venues where, for the last couple of decades, they have been increasingly allowed to behave like uncivilized, unrestrained wild animals. This child today was a case in point: no more than six years old, he was hanging around the bottom of an up-escalator, playing with the device and blocking access for people who wished to use it. Shopper after shopper stepped around the child, gaining precarious access to the moving stairway while the boy obliviously continued to treat the device and its moving rails like his own exclusive amusement device.

I’m old. I’m cranky when it comes to the ill-mannered of any age. I also have a bad back which causes me balance issues. There was no way I was stepping onto that escalator without having unimpeded access to both the steps and the handrail the child was using for his personal playtoy. First I stopped in front of him and stared at him. Most young children, when glared at by an adult, particularly a grumpy-faced old woman, will have second thoughts about whatever it is they are doing. Not this kid. Obviously so poorly reared that he did not even recognize this common social cue, he looked at me and, with no change in his expression whatsoever, kept right on blocking access to the escalator, clinging to the moving guardrail with his hands until it transported his upper body upward a bit, then letting go, standing up straight, and then repeating the process.

I found myself wondering what kind of parent allows a child this small to 1) wander loose and unsupervised in a busy mall; 2) allow the child to play on something as potentially dangerous as an escalator (people have been caught and died on them!); 3) fail to teach a child about such things as blocking the access of others; 4) fail to teach a child the most basic of social cues; and 5) pay so little attention to their child in this busy environment that s/he could easily be stolen by an ill-meaning stranger. But wondering wasn’t getting me up the escalator, so I reached down and firmly grasped the child’s upper arm and removed him from in front of the escalator to give myself access…dragged might be a better term, since he was reluctant to remove himself from his command post.

My first surprise was that he did not scream bloody murder when I grabbed him. I fully expected an outraged parent or irate security guard to accost me and demand an explanation for me putting my hands on a child clearly not my own. The second surprise was that no parent arrived, indignant and ready to give me a faceful of invective for manhandling little Johnny. In fact, nothing happened at all, except that the child was temporarily moved, like a gate, to allow me and my husband access to the escalator and then he resumed his amusement, playing on the escalator and hindering the access of all those who came after me, not a parent in sight.

It is winter here and it is cold outside…very cold…cold enough that some of our outlying suburbs reported snow flurries in the last few days. The sky was a brilliant, crisp, cloudless blue…the kind of sky that truly frigid days are made of, with no cloud cover to keep even a modicum of heat trapped to the earth. And so instead of outdoor activities, everybody went shopping…the mall was crowded. And crowded malls can be noisy, a combination of the various shops broadcasting their music into the walkways, people talking to each other, the rattle and clatter of bags, high heels on the tiled floors and, of course, the inevitable screaming child having a meltdown while Mama continues to shop, Junior’s eardrum splitting wails conveniently shut out. The older I become, the less inclined I am to suffer these indignities silently. As I passed one toddler shrieking his displeasure from his stroller (pram) while his mother obliviously chatted with a friend, I said to my husband in a voice designed to carry to the oblivious mother “My, it sounds like somebody needs to go home and have a nap.” I have little hope that she heard me, though, because if she could tune out the hellacious racket her little darling was broadcasting, it is unlikely she was able to hear my none-too-subtle suggestion that she take her noisy brat out of the earshot of the rest of us.

Then there was the kid, barely two, I would guess, whose mother just abandoned him in the queue for the cashiers when it became her turn to pay. I don’t know…maybe today was the day for other people’s children to act as impediments to still other people’s progress. Anyway, the kid started snatching candies from the impulse-buy displays and, instead of putting them back, Mama instructed the cashier to ring them up, meanwhile leave her little man standing at the head of the queue, blocking the rest of us from getting to cashiers as they became available. Who, after all, wants to trip over a little toddler with her arms full of crockery or shoes or a stack of pre-season sale summer dresses? We gingerly skirted the child…whose mother’s back was to him the whole time, making him fair game for the kind of monsters who steal and abuse children…and while my husband paid for the purchases, I was treated to an example of what becomes of children whose parents teach them that they are the centre of the universe and respect is something other people are supposed to give them.

A short time earlier I had been in the shoe department of the store, trying on bedroom slippers as my 10-year-old Walmart specials have popped a big hole in the sole. I found a pair to try on but, with the back issue giving me balance problems, I opted to go to the other side of the department and sit down to try the slippers on rather than drop them on the floor and stick my foot into one to see how it fit. Now, mind you, this is not an elegant, up-scale department store…this is Ackerman’s, the housewares and clothing equivalent of Safeway…and the shoes and slippers hang on racks by little plastic hangers. The aisles between the rows of shoes are narrow, not wide enough for two super models to pass each other, not even if they sucked in their tummies.

The slippers fit and my husband, thoughtful man that he is (and aware that I have been trying to find replacements for the Walmart specials for several months) offered to buy two pair, an offer I readily accepted. Unfortunately, when we returned to the rack, we were greeted with an enormous bum…bigger than mine, even!...bent over and blocking access to the one display of slippers I needed. This woman was not trying on a pair of flats or sandals she could drop on the ground and just quickly stick a foot into to check for size, no…she was bent over assiduously buckling one of a gazillion buckles on a particularly hideous pair of “gladiator”-styled demi boots. I waited politely for her to finish.

When she removed the boot and began looking again at the rack, still blocking my access to the rack behind her, I said “Excuse me, can I get in here?” She ignored me! I tried again: “Excuse me…” She flicked her eyes in my direction so I know she wasn’t deaf…but she didn’t move an inch. So, I just stepped forward, bent down, and reached into the size section I wanted and retrieved a pair of slippers. Did my shoulder inadvertently graze some unnamed portion of her anatomy? Yes. Did I acknowledge or apologize? No. Did I ignore her just as diligently as she had ignored me? Yup—there was nothing else to do if I didn’t want to start a row over her rudeness, which would have been rude in and of itself.

But the story of this self-absorbed adult brat doesn’t end here. I walked away from the rude cow and went to the tills, was treated to the candy-pilfering toddler and eventually got to a till myself. As I was observing the toddler while my husband paid the cashier, who should wander up to the cashiers but Shoe Cow herself, with a plastic basket full of shoes and boots. I kid you not…one of those baskets, like you pick up at the supermarket when you don’t need a whole trolley, and it had no fewer than six…and it looked more like ten…pair of shoes and boots in it. And, true to her oblivious behaviour in the shoe department, when one of the cashiers called “next!” this rude, selfish, inconsiderate cow simply skipped the queue of half a dozen people patiently and politely waiting their turn and marched straight up to the open cashier, plunked down her basket and began rummaging around in her handbag for her wallet. The woman who was supposed to be next was half way to the till when Rude Cow stepped in front of her and put her basket down and if she even saw the woman, she did not acknowledge her any more than she acknowledged me in the shoe department.

This woman was a young adult, young enough to have been brought up after the concept of teaching your children manners and respect for the rights of others had begun to decline. Obviously she had learned her lessons well: spoiled and entitled, she could not courteously share space in the shoe department and neither could she take her turn in the queue like everyone else. What she wanted is what she got and to hell with the rest of us.

This is the attitude I see parents actually teaching their children today…screw everybody else. Don’t like the grades on your child’s report card? Blame the teacher for “giving” your kid a bad grade, don’t blame the kid for earning a poor mark. Don’t feel like taking the time or making the effort to teach your kid some manners? Make excuses for your kid’s behaviour (“kids will be kids”), inflict them on other people in places they shouldn’t be in the first place (like five star restaurants, evening screenings of movies, supermarkets at 10 pm), then blame others when they get testy about your brat stealing morsels off their plates, talking over the screen dialog, or screaming with fatigue when they should be home in bed. Do you know what kind of adults these kids become? Rude cows. Selfish, disrespectful, inconsiderate cows who have no sense of propriety, no sense of respect for others, no sense of anything outside their own immediate wants…and who raise brats and bullies just like themselves.

So it is no surprise that restaurants, movie theatres, even airlines are beginning to listen to grumpy old people like me…there are so many of us fed up with the world becoming dominated by obnoxious children!!...as we complain about unrestrained children allowed to run amok, turning what could be a pleasant excursion into an Excedrin moment. Kids will behave like kids, it’s true, but that has only become a problem since parents have stopped behaving like parents.