"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear" If you need to be reminded of that, the object in the x-ray of your head is smaller than it appears.

Monopolies: Public Utilities say they are not a monopoly yet how many choices do you have for your electrical service.  I actually lived in one place that had two power companies, Phoenix, Arizona.  Certain areas of the city are under Salt River Project, an REA, and the rest of the city gets screwed by Arizona Public Service.  In certain parts of the city you have no choice, in other areas you do.  In those areas, APS has few if any customers.  One of the ruses that APS used to make their exorbitant rates more palatable was called “budget billing.”  That was where they averaged your previous year’s billing, and then charged you the same price every month, then at the end of the year, you paid the difference or got a refund depending on your total usage.  It worked out to instead of paying $900 a month in the summer and $300 a month in the winter, you paid $600 a month year around.  Public Utilities have other plans to make their gouging more palatable, one of them is “off peak hour usage” where it costs you less to use electricity in the other than peak hours.  I know I really enjoy doing the laundry at 3 AM and pretty soon I will be able to figure out how to set my refrigerator so that it will keep things cold and fresh when I shut it off between 8 AM and 9 PM.  You would think with a license to steal like the power companies have, they would be rolling on dough, but they are not.  I have stock in several of them and through consistent top of the line management some of them have managed to screw up even a sure thing.  Pacific Power and Light went bankrupt. Allegany Energy is in Chapter 13, Montana Power is almost completely defunct.  Fortunately I sold the PPL and Montana Power long before they got into trouble.  I still hold some Allegany and hope for the best.  How you can make a product, in this case electricity, and sell it for more than your production cost and still lose money without being a Government Agency is beyond me.

Attendants at Drive-up Windows:  The electronic communication system at most fast food drive up windows is slightly more primitive than two tin cans and a string.  On top of this, the transmitter/receiver for the customer is located at least 6 feet from the customer, the transmitter/receiver picks up not only your voice, it also picks up the noise from the street that is located 30 feet away and to top this off, the person on the other end of the line is usually someone who is either trying to correct a speech impediment by talking with a mouth full of marbles, or is someone who has been in this country, usually illegally, for a grand total of 16 hours and has a total command of 6 words in English, none of them being larger than one syllable.  If my some miracle, you actually  can speak and enunciate the English Language this person is so schooled in the company sales pitch that they cannot wait till you complete your order before asking you if you would like to purchase 37 different condiments and accessories to go along with your cheeseburger.  If you would shut up for 30 seconds, I would tell you exactly what I want then you could fill my order and I would be on my way.  Don’t try to sell me what you have, sell me what I want.  I am partly to blame for this, remember back a couple pages where I recommended a Telemarketer get a job in a fast food place.  What the hell was I thinking anyway? 

Computers:  First of all, computers can do only two things.  They can do math, that is add subtract, divide and multiply; and they can do logic, that is compare one thing to another and tell if that thing is less than, greater than or equal to the other.  Don’t matter if the computer is a prehistoric Commodore 64 or the biggest fastest mega computer that is made, that’s all they can do.  The advantage to a computer is that it does the two things it is capable of at an incredible speed.  The problem with the blamed things is they can’t think and they aren’t any better at reading the user’s mind than men are at reading the female mind.  They are simply a machine and they were created by the Devil in the deepest bowels of Hell.  He has created these demons to torture us for eternity and he is testing them on Earth to make sure he has the perfect model to stock Hell with.  Computers themselves are “hardware” anything you can see, feel and touch is “hardware”.  To make a computer work you need programs “software”.  Now this would be simple if you had one person making both hardware and software, but here is the rub.  You have many groups of demons making the hardware and separate groups making the software.  None of these groups speak the same language in fact most of the people in any group speak different languages which makes communication within the group or from group to group impossible.  To further complicate the process, most of the Demons have advanced Engineering degrees.  If you remember that the Camel is a horse that was designed by a committee who could talk to one another you are beginning to see the depths of the problem with computers.  To work perfectly, a computer’s software has to interface completely with its software.  With several groups of Demons with an inability to communicate working on each phase of the project, this is impossible which gives rise to a third group of Demons who come directly from the 9^th ring of Hell.  These are the ghouls who write patches and fixes to make balky programs actually function half the time or less.  Think of this, if you bought a new boat with a faulty motor that only ran part of the time, and quit without warning frequently and leaked like a sieve, would you hire a group of morons to patch it and hotwire the motor.  Not likely, but you accept this at the ordinary with a computer and pay through the nose to get it done.  Remember that computers are only part of the Devil’s grand plan.  Once he gets us totally dependant of the damn machines, and that time is fast approaching, he is then going to cut the power off for long periods of time and then we will truly know what Hell is.

After Word and Disclaimer:  I was going to put a disclaimer here that stated “This piece is completely fictional and any resemblance between persons living or dead is completely coincidental.”  But then I figured the people I am writing about are too dumb to realize it.  So if you think this is about you, it is probably not.  Or, then again, maybe it is.