January 2, 2003

• I love the way one blog leads into another.  In a comment on my latest entry, on LIBERTY, Maryt63 asked for more info about making enough money to get by without having a job (I’m paraphrasing).

  
  

  I did a blog about some of my occupations, in November, and called it, “What I do for a living…”.  After I wrote that, several other ways that one or another member of this household has earned either cash money or needful things occurred to me.  I will describe one of them here today:  professional kvetching.

  
  

  This started, for me, at some time in the ‘eighties.  I remember the occasion well, but not the precise date.  I was setting up a month’s supply of vitamin and other nutritional supplements in little film cans.  I opened a bottle of some kind of pills.  The label said there were 30 tablets or capsules, but when I got them portioned out into my little containers, I came up 3 short.  I was accustomed to occasional shortages or overages of one or two pills, and had always just figured it evened out.  But that day, that bottle was the third or fourth one that had come up short, and at the time a three-pill shortage of pills that cost close to a dollar each was the last straw.  I just had to complain, or I’d burst a brain cell or something.

  
  

  The manufacturer had a toll-free number printed on the label, so I called them and complained.  They sent me an entire bottle of thirty pills to replace the three pills their machinery had shorted me.  I immediately realized the potential to abuse such a system.  One could, of course, defraud  manufacturers by claiming shortages that did not exist.  I never felt it necessary to do that.  I’m a Virgo.  It is my destiny, my cosmic responsibility, to find fault and criticize.  There is no shortage of legitimate complaints in this world.  I started telling every manufacturer about every fault I found.

  
  

  Here are some of the highs and lows from my career as a complainer:

  
  

  When Stagg came out with their Ranch House Chicken chili, I tried it.  Chili??  Is that what they call it?  The taste of sugar dominates all others.  In my opinion, chili is properly more spicy than sweet.  I wrote and told them so.  One day, a delivery van pulled in the driveway and brought me a long skinny box… from Stagg.   It was a “Gift Sampler Pack” of every variety of chili in their diverse line, including the Ranch House Chicken not-chili.   I was seriously tempted to complain about THAT, but I stifled myself.

  
  

  When Greyfox moved in here, he picked right up on the consumer complaints.  It was he who began referring to it as “professional kvetching.”  One of his big scores came from a can of Chef Boy Ar Dee pasta.  Either it tasted vile or he found some foreign object in it–we don’t recall the details there.  They sent him three coupons, each good for one free ”any size package, any Chef B.A.D. product”.  At the food warehouse in Wasilla, that got us three #10 cans (one gallon, each) of ravioli.  Yum.

  
  

  For a while, it seemed as if we were going to have a perpetual supply of Banquet frozen dinners, chicken, etc.  Each time we redeemed a coupon for a free one, the product was sufficiently sub-standard to warrant another complaint, and they would send us coupons for more free ones, and we would complain about them….  Finally, I rebelled.  I said, “no more”.  At some point, bad food becomes worse than no food at all.

  
  

  Of course, food is not the only product with which we find fault.  We have successfully (though often with difficulty) received refunds or replacements on electronics, hardware, auto parts, and just about every class of products we purchase.  Food is one of our main expenses, though, and agri-biz corporations have liberal customer service policies.  They might send us defensive letters claiming that the things about which we complain just slipped through their quality control, and thanking us for calling it to their attention, but they always enclose those free coupons.

  
  

  I probably have enough kvetching history to provide fodder for at least another blog or two.  Right now, I’m in a bit of a hurry.  Greyfox and I are going grocery shopping, unless that half-heard “advisory” bulletin, when I get it tracked down, indicates weather or road conditions farther down the valley that are bad enough to warrant delaying the trip.  I’m almost out of goat milk, Koji is out of rawhide chews, and Doug needs steak.  Greyfox has put Banquet frozen dinners on the list.  They are on sale, and since I’ve gone on this strict diet it leaves him pretty much on his own for the kind of junk food he prefers to eat.  I’ll bet he finds something in there to complain about.

  
  

   

  • 2:57 pm
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