Christine the Curmudgeon

So the landladies have apparently been putting their GARBAGE into our recycling bin.  They do try to recycle as much of their trash as possible, in order to avoid paying for the expensive garbage bags we have to buy here, in order to get actual GARBAGE picked up.  If we don’t use the city-approved bags, the trash will NOT be picked up.  Surely some wholesale distributors are getting rich over making low-quality trash bags that are sold for premium prices.  Anyhoo, mostly what they put in their recycling bin gets picked up, no problem.  But now they are throwing stuff that I think would be considered GARBAGE into OUR recycling bin!

Mister Curmudgeon is a doofus.  He wanted to use one of OUR expensive garbage bags, that WE paid for, to put the trash that the landladies threw in our recycling bin, just so the trash truck will take it.

I told him that if he did, he was a fool.  He’d be enabling these people to keep tossing their trash into OUR recycling bin, knowing that WE’D pay to have it picked up.

I got seriously yelled at by him over this.  Because of that, I made his ass eat leftovers.  Nobody yells at me for shit I didn’t do and gets away with it.

But I know I am right.  If there is too much improperly bagged trash that sits for weeks and is not picked up, it is not OUR problem.  The city fines THE OWNER OF THE PROPERTY for it.

When I managed to explain this to Mr. C., I THINK he finally got it.  Let the landladies get fined just ONCE, and hopefully that will be the end of them using our recycling bin as their personal trash can, rather than buying the bags like everyone else here has to!

Christine the Curmudgeon wants to know – WHY do stores insist on asking for phone numbers when you’re buying something, and then get all snippy when you refuse to give it to them?

The stores claim that they ask for this simply because they want to know where their customers are coming from.  But with cell phones, many of which have a different area code from where the owner of the phone actually lives, this is not so accurate.  Yet they still ask.

If they want to know where customers come from, asking for a zip code should be good enough.  They can’t do much with just a zip code except find out what city, town, or neighborhood you live in.  I consider to harmless to give that out.  However, I do believe that if someone chooses NOT to give it out, that should be their right as well.

But giving out your phone number can lead to a lot of annoyance later on.  If you buy something in a store, you are a customer, have officially done business with them.  And technically, since you are doing business with them, they are now exempt from the DO NOT CALL list, and you can bet that they WILL call you to try to sell you stuff.  And it will be next to impossible to make them stop.

Do you have cable TV?  Then you know what I mean, they forever call customers to try to sell them more services.  Do you have a Sunday-only subscription to the local newspaper?  I used to, I canceled it because they would not stop calling me to get me to buy a daily subscription.  It got to the point where they were calling me twice a day.  I told them to stop.  They said they would, but the calls kept coming.  I told them that if I got one more call, I’d cancel the Sunday subscription that I had.  They called again.  I canceled.

Never mind that people are often too busy, with their production jobs and all, to watch 500 channels of TV, or read the paper every single day. These people will NOT LET UP!

Telemarketers are universally annoying. So WHY would any sane person hand out their phone number to a store clerk, when there is absolutely NO reason they’d need it? You just KNOW they’ll use it to call you, and it’s perfectly legal.

I already have enough trouble getting unwanted callers to stop bothering me; the last thing I’d want is MORE annoying calls. So I refuse to give it out when a store cashier asks. If they give me crap about it, I speak with my wallet, leave the merchandise on the counter, and walk out.

Talking with your wallet is often the only thing that these businesses understand.

The PROPER use for those flip-up bus seats

There has been a rather annoying thing that Christine the Curmudgeon has been noticing lately.  It’s parents with those Hugh Jass SUV strollers who get on the bus with the thing, and then opt to flip up the seats (which is supposed to be for making room for passengers in wheelchairs), and park the behemoth stroller there.

In my opinion, this practice is almost, if not AS bad, as parking in a handicapped space when you are not legally qualified to do so.  So what if there is no handicapped person on the bus/in the space right NOW?  You never know when someone MIGHT need it at any given time, so if you don’t need it, don’t use it.

When there is no wheelchair person on the bus, this also takes seats away from people who may need them.  The seats are at the front of the bus, and there are signs asking people to give up these seats to elderly/disabled people who need them.  But very few people do so; no doubt that the woman with the stroller that was as big as an RV, so big that it should be carrying 5th wheel insurance, would move if someone boarded who needed one of the three seats that were lost due to the stroller being there. Srsly, I don’t know why the bus drivers allow this. The rule should be, no flipping up those seats unless you’re using a wheelchair. No exceptions.

Yes, if you have a baby, you do need a stroller.  But if your regular way of getting around is on public transportation, why not just get a smaller stroller, rather than something that is as huge as a Winnebago?  I see plenty of people on the bus with normal-sized strollers, which do not block the aisles, nor require the need to take seats from people, by flipping up the seats at the wheelchair spaces.

People in wheelchairs have no choice, and they are protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act.  I don’t begrudge them at all for taking away two or three seats on a bus or train.  But parents who choose to buy a stroller that is big enough to tow my car away with deserve no rights, no protection under any law.  Those Hugh Jass things need to be banned from all public transit (unless they are checked baggage on an airplane, or stashed in the luggage  storage bins on a long-distance bus).  And they should all be labeled as to whether or not they are public transit-permitted or not, that way, parents who plan to use the buses a lot will know that to buy and what not to buy.

Basically, if it’s not a wheelchair, but you have to put it in a space that’s supposed to be for a wheelchair, it should not be on the bus.  Period.

Today, Christine the Curmudgeon is going to rant about people who do not properly plan ahead – specifically large groups of people.

Several years ago, Mr. Curmudgeon and I dined at a restaurant in Portsmouth, NH called The Stockpot.  It is no longer there…too bad, it was a pretty good place.  Anyhoo, it was kind of a small place, at least the one non-smoking room was (at the time, smoking was still permitted in NH bars and restaurants).

We were there on a Saturday night in the summer, a busy time in Portsmouth and other seacoast towns.  Since it was just the two of us, we were able to walk into The Stockpot and get a table right away.

As we were sitting there, drinking our beers and enjoying our dinner, this group of nine people walked in.  The hostess told them that she could not seat them all together at the time, and that they’d have to wait.  The leader of the group started screaming at the poor hostess, as if this were somehow her fault.  But there was nothing she could have done, she did her best to calm this person down.  They left for a while, but then came back, probably because they realized that there was nit a single restaurant in all of downtown Portsmouth that could seat a group of nine people together on a Saturday night.  In the middle of the summer.  With no advance notice.  They were still waiting when we left, and they were loudly bitching and moaning about it all as we walked past them.

I was reminded of this incident by one that happened more recently.  I’ve been becoming a regular on the 3PM Boston Express Bus from Boston’s South Station to Manchester, NH, at least once a week.  This is because we go to a lot of New Hampshire Fisher Cats games, and for the weeknight games, it is easier if I go up on the bus, and Mr. Curmudgeon meets me at the stadium after he gets sprung from work.  His office is about halfway up I-93 between our house and the ballpark, so it makes no sense for him to have to drive home, get me, and them backtrack north again.  We’ll have season tickets for next year, so I’ll be using Boston Express Bus all the more; I hope they come out with monthly passes by then!

Anyhoo, these buses come equipped with free WiFi, as well as electrical outlets at some of the seats.  These are clearly marked, but you need to get in the queue for the bus early so you can get on sooner and snag one of these seats, if you need one.  Since I never go anywhere without my cell phone, Amazon Kindle, and iPod (and sometimes I bring my netbook if I need to do some work), I always get there early enough to get an outlet.  I always seem to have SOMETHING that needs to be charged up!

So I was on the 3PM to Manchester last Friday, sitting in my seat with the power outlet, my phone happily charging away.  At exactly 2:58, this large group of older ladies got on the bus, and once they saw that the bus was nearly full and that there was no way they could all sit together, they started bitching and moaning loudly about this.

Some people actually got up and moved so at least some of them could sit together.  I was not among them.  I was the one who planned ahead because I wanted access to a power outlet; although I do charge things up at home, using mobile web on a phone sucks up a lot of juice.  But that’s not the point – the point is that I knew what I had to do to get a power outlet seat, and I made sure to get there in time to board the bus and get one.  It’s not my problem that this bunch of old biddies didn’t plan ahead to get to the station early enough to be the first to board and get their choice of seats!  This is NOT the same thing as refusing to give an elderly person a seat on an MBTA bus or train, now that I would do.  The Boston Express Bus only sells as many tickets as there are seats, so nobody has to stand.  This was just a case where the old bats all wanted to sit together, and it wasn’t going to happen.

One of the old biddies sat next to me, but I put my iPod earphones in and ignored her as she glared at me.

Next time, get there earlier!  Sheesh!  If I ever act like this when I become an old bat, somebody please shoot me!

So Christine the Curmudgeon and the Mister went to Kappy’s.  The Hugh Jass location you see right here.

I was looking for a couple of beers in particular, neither of which they had, but I hung around the better beer section looking to see what else they had.  They actually had a decent selection, considering that Kappy’s mostly caters to the Bud/Miller/Coors crowd.

Somewhere along the way, Mr, Curmudgeon lost himself.  As in, he wandered off as I was looking at the beer, and when he tried to look for me, he could not find me.  So he went out to the car.  Which was why I could not find HIM anywhere.  But I didn’t know that he’d left the store until later.

I had a cart containing a case of Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale, and a six-pack of Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues.  I decided to just pay for it and put it in the car, and then try to find my dopey husband.

And that’s when I saw he went out to the car.  “I couldn’t FIIIIND you”, he whined.  Where, where the HELL did he think I was, other than looking at the GOOD beer section?  Off looking at Outer Banks homes?  Sheesh!

For someone who is a member of Mensa, sometimes my husband can be a serious doofus.