Scammers

Telephone scamming goes on everywhere, I imagine, but somehow the Academy of Telephony and Thimblerigging (AT&T, by coincidence) has pinpointed our senior community for extra effort.

We are supposed to be intimidated by a voice coming over this newfangled talk box, or senile enough to be convinced that we all have grandchildren unjustly jailed in Mexico. Some of us are, unfortunately, and are taken for varying sums of money despite weekly warnings in our community newspaper. Others succumb to threats that their electrical service will be cut off unless they pay ransom immediately.

For this latter scheme to work, the voice must be authoritative, and fluent enough in the language to sound like a representative of a major utility company. That’s one side of the industry, and it has no redeeming features.

The other branch, while even more annoying, does serve a social function. It provides entrée to the job market for recent arrivals. Almost all the calls I get, and at times there can be two or three in a day, are from people to whom the language is obviously of only recent acquaintance.

Socially valuable, yes, but at the same time extremely frustrating: you can’t insult the operatives who call you. I’ve tried. I’ve used every obscenity I know, suggesting feats of physical insertion I know to be realistically impracticable -- but they don’t understand. They plow ahead with the sales story, not realizing that they’ve been told off in terms a native recipient would respond to with, if within reach, a poke in the speaker’s eye.

What use, after all, are the carefully hoarded obscenities you so seldom get to use if not to tell off a telephone scammer? Yet what should be the satisfaction of letting loose to verbally demolish an adversary becomes in this case a futile gesture. You have brought up your most devastating linguistic artillery but the target, armored with unknowingness, doesn’t feel a thing. New arrivals should be required to take classes in Obscenities, especially if they’re going into telephone work.              

Scammers

Telephone scamming goes on everywhere, I imagine, but somehow the Academy of Telephony and Thimblerigging (AT&T, by coincidence) has pinpointed our community for extra effort.

We are supposed to be intimidated by a voice coming over this newfangled talk box, or senile enough to be convinced that we all have grandchildren unjustly jailed in Mexico. Some of us are, unfortunately, and are taken for varying sums of money despite weekly warnings in our community newspaper. Others succumb to threats that their electrical service will be cut off unless they pay ransom immediately.

For this latter scheme to work, the voice must be authoritative, and fluent enough in the language to sound like a representative of a major utility company. That’s one side of the industry, and it has no redeeming features.

The other branch, while even more annoying, does serve a social function. It provides entrée to the job market for recent arrivals. Almost all the calls I get, and at times there can be two or three in a day, are from people to whom the language is obviously of only recent acquaintance.

That creates an extremely frustrating situation: you can’t insult the operatives who call you. I’ve tried. I’ve used every obscenity I know, suggesting feats of physical insertion I know to be realistically impracticable -- but they don’t understand. They plow ahead with the sales story, not realizing that they’ve been told off in terms a native recipient would respond to with, if within reach, a poke in the speaker’s eye.

What use, then, are the carefully hoarded obscenities you so seldom get to use if not to tell off a telephone scammer? Yet what should be the satisfaction of letting loose to verbally demolish an adversary becomes in this case a futile gesture. You have brought up your most devastating linguistic artillery but the target, armored with unknowingness, doesn’t feel a thing. New arrivals should be required to take classes in Obscenities, especially if they’re going into telephone work.              

Farming

We have tomatoes! I mean actually growing in our “garden.”

They are growing in the derelict planter box in the narrow planting area between the  patio wall and the public/common lawn. There are also green peppers growing in a pot by the doorway.

This is incredible news for a brown-thumber like me who’s been called a herbicidal maniac. Even the way the tomatoes are growing reflects that.

I had bought a you-don’t-have-to-do-anything planter box last year. Everything was in it: growing mix, fertilizer, and anything else that was needed except water and your choice of seeds. I added those, but I think that in an overdose of caution I must have put too many seeds into the box. True to the advertising, the seeds grew -- all of them. The tangled mass of stalks and leaves yielded a total of six stunted tomatoes. Even so, I was not much  disappointed because  in view of my record with this sort of thing I hadn’t let my hopes get too high.

The planter box was discarded, removed from its prominent place on the patio railing and dropped into the narrow planting area and forgotten. And now it’s growing again. Unattended and mostly un-watered, it has a sizeable green tomato and another smaller one, and numerous blossoms that apparently turn into the tomatoes.

The green peppers, which came out of nowhere, are small but perfectly formed, and I have eaten two. Not quite as flavorful as the store kind, but that’s only because the commercial growers work all sorts of treatments on them. These are organic; nothing in that pot but soil mix. The tomatoes are presumably working on what remains of last year’s fertilizer, but they’ve never seen any pesticides, and that’s close enough to organic for me.

We’re looking forward to a real treat. Store tomatoes aren’t worth buying. They have no flavor, and I remember reading that, tested for vulnerability to collision damage, they outperformed Detroit automobile bumpers. I’ve been slashing them apart and smothering them with black pepper to make them edible. And all that seems about to change. If the desert winds keep warming the days as they usually do this time of year and the nights don’t get too cold, we could have a real harvest.   I can taste them already.  

When New Beginnings Get Old

OK, enough with the lit’ry stuff.

Was it only a few weeks ago that I swore off commercialism and “ascended to the realm of the creative writer”? My novel was obscurely but finally (self-) published, I had enlisted in a short-story-writing group, and I had entered half-a-dozen contests.

Now, as the contest results come back, I am informed, in case I didn’t know it, that fiction is not my strong suit. The fact is that the writing habits developed over decades of business/commercial/technical writing do not lend themselves well to fiction. The novel was an exception -- something I felt strongly about -- and had the leisure to complete -- 47 years from first draft to publication.

Most of the time, however, I was working to shorter deadlines and in shorter forms. What develops out of that, for me, anyway, is a style that is short to the point of being terse, and an eye for removing excess words (in my own writing, or others’ if I’m entrusted with editing it). This blog is an exception to some of that, but the material I dealt with in a business capacity was factual.

This does not go down well in fiction. The winning entries behind which I have been finishing (far behind) are tales spun out at lengths I would once have considered novellas. More importantly, they seem always to appeal to the emotions.

I’m not opposed to emotion in writing, and Lord knows there are subjects to write about today that will arouse them. But that’s real emotion. The emotion in fictional work is by definition contrived, and I find it difficult to generate. However, there’s a lot of instruction available at the writers’ group I joined, and I will continue to study the techniques revealed there.

For now, though, I’m retreating to my comfort zone. For the next while I will be writing articles for trade publications and, with two friends of the graphic persuasion, offering proposal building services. Our niche will be mid-level contractors who would like to win government business or subcontracts from larger corporations but don’t have the resources to build the necessary proposals. We will help them get into the game.