Paul's Comments

The History Channel has a series called Life After People that runs every Tuesday night at 10pm, in which it gives an idea of what could be expected to occur if people suddenly vanished from the earth (for whatever reason).

A couple of comments I found were very funny. The first concerned a painting by Leonardo DaVinci on a church wall, which has required regular retouching over the centuries including dehumidifiers. Since people are no longer around to keep up these protective actions, "How long will it be before nature finishes off The Last Supper?"

They also take a look at the 2nd tallest building in the world. "Taipei 101 is considered by some to look like a series of [Chinese Food] take out boxes. How long before nature takes out Taipei 101?"

I thought that maybe 2007 - when I moved out on my own for essentially the first time - or maybe 2008 when I had to move a second time, would be big years for me, but I think 2009 was the biggest.

I moved, ended up in a place that was foreclosed, had to run a house that had problems, made a bunch of mistakes trusting people, got a power wheelchair, got evicted, lose almost everything I own, ended up in a homeless shelter, find that something damaged the power wheelchair and it only operates at 1/2 of the amount of time it did when I got it, got an eye infection, and finally move to another place.

And this was only over a period of about 10 months, from the middle of December 2008 through September 2009.

But as I said in my video [a link to the entry on this blog appears here], I'm coming back, and I'm coming back stronger than I was. I have to learn a few things because I'm going to open a new business. I also need to try to find out what to do about this eye infection that makes one eye weep all the time and causes the other to have light sensitivity. The eye drops my original doctor gave me didn't seem to help - I apparently got dizzy from them and had to stop using them - and he recommends I go see an opthamologist. Now all I have to do is find the money.

Other things I need to do as well, there are a bunch of people who owe me money who ripped me off, and I think I'm going to sue them. Have to do some of this quickly before the statute of limitations runs out. I have a post office box so I don't have to give any of the slime who stole from me my home address. This is part of the same thing that I've had to learn to be hard about, I am sick of being ignored because I'm a disabled man in a wheelchair and people think I'm an easy mark. And you know what, they've been right. I've been too nice, but the problem - if we can call it that - is that I've generally been a nice guy because I've never been good at being a bastard. But I'm learning that I may have to be if I want to get people to treat me with respect.

I hate having to consider the question once asked of a criminal in a movie: "Is it better to be loved or feared?" I've found that when you deal with people personally, the former works better; when people like you and respect you because you're a decent sort, but occasionally that means some of them treat you badly because, in part, they can get away with it. So I may be involuntarily forced to become harder and more ruthless because of mistreatment by others. I hate having to go that way, but it looks like I have no choice or some people who rip me off are going to continue to get away with it.

Suing people is not going to be fun but I'm probably going to have to go that route. I'm sick of some people treating me like a Welcome mat. (I have some nastier terms to describe how I've sometimes been treated but I think I'll go the high road and not mention them here.)

On June 28, the mortgage company got an "order of posession" (the equivalent of a court-ordered eviction) for the property I was living at and was paying rent until the landlord got foreclosed upon, whereupon I was then paying utilities and repairs on the place which essentially ran more than I had been paying in rent. The morgage company never told me or anyone here anything; they never even sent me a postcard. I'm not going to ignore or disregard a court order; they could have had the place clean and without the extra expense of a dispossession, but obviously they don't care. I was paying a guy a monthly fee to warn me about such things. He also failed me.

On August 4, 2009 at about 11:30 in the morning, deputies from the Prince George's County Sheriff's department came out and evicted me and everyone else in the building. I salvaged a few things over the next few days but essentially I lost everything. This wasn't supposed to happen; my expectation was that I would have notice of this happening and had time to act, to have my posessions put into storage, to find another place, etc.

What a mess.

One "advantage" to being handicapped is that the Sheriff can't just dump me on the street; they had to find me a place and can't just leave me, they had to wait until Metro Access - surprisingly on only two hours notice, not a day in advance as is usual - came and got me to take me to a homeless shelter that had space and could accomodate a wheelchair client.

A deputy sheriff - Paula Henderson - called Prince George's County Social Services. The people on the phone didn't particularly like having to get off their ass and do something for a change, and basically kept trying to dump the problem on someone else, because apparently they have considerable trouble understanding "plain ol' Galveston English" when I kept explaining that I did not have any one who could help me, until finally I gave them my sister's phone number and they put her on three-way conference call with me and she confirmed that it was not possible for her to help me.

Which ended up getting me to Prince George's House on Addison Road South, a few blocks from the Addison Road Metro station. It's not a bad place. A little heavy on the religious aspects of trying to use God as a means to solve the problems of the clients - like myself - who end up stuck there for a time.

If the Sheriff's office hadn't hit the place just after I had paid a number of bills that left me with very little money, there are a number of things I could have done to salvage the situation.

Well, anyway, so Metro Access comes gets me and takes me over to the shelter. In the mean time the vultures in the neighborhood came and feasted on whatever I had that they could cart off and steal. Actually, that's incorrect; vultures only feed on the dead. So, in the mean time the hyenas in the neighborhood came and feasted on whatever I had that they could cart off and steal.

I salvaged a working laptop, which is what I'm using to write this, and I would like to acknowledge the very generous availability of free wireless Internet access from the Martin Luther King (main) branch of the District of Columbia Public Library.

There will be more news later as I tell about some of the things that have happened over the last (almost) three weeks, including two unsuccessful trips to MVA to convert my license over from Virginia to Maryland; a trip to Baltimore where I got chewed out by the train crew for trying to take the elevator from the station to the train; how I almost converted from agnostic to atheist until I gave the universe an ultimatum; and handling various paperwork to try to find substitute housing which someone in a wheelchair can use.

I decided to split this entry off from the one about the Office Max catalog as I realized this is really a totally separate article.

Looking at the Office Max catalog, I see that they are selling Lexmark laser printers, basically at the typical full price of a printer, around $400-800 depending on features. Based on what Lexmark cartridges cost, they should be giving the printers away. Let's see what a Lexmark cartridge costs. The C543dn is a color laser, costs $399.99, will do a 35,000 page per month duty cycle, has 128mb of memory, and uses the 21724528 black cartridge, which I am having trouble finding. That number is an Office Max SKU and I can't find the cartridge for the C543dn, which frightens me even worse about what it would cost. I'll go to their website - or someone's - and see if I can find the cartridges for the Lexmark C543dn. Well, something is wrong because Office Max's website doesn't even list a cartridge for a C543dn. And the printer itself is there on the catalog and web pages.

Their website doesn't have the cartridge when I tried that SKU. So this is amazing; Office Max will sell me a $400 color laser printer that as soon as I run out of toner, it's a boat anchor! This is so funny as to be absolutely tragic. So I'll try Lexmark's own website. Oh, Lexmark will sell me this printer directly at the same price as Office Max, $399.99.

Well, I am surprised to find that the cartridges sold by Lexmark are the C540 series, which is $44.99 for black and $58.99 for each of cyan, magenta or yellow. I am really surprised that they're not as expensive as I expected. Oh yeah, they're the "prebate" cartridges where you're only supposed to use them once, then send them back to Lexmark for remanufacture. Yeah, right, if I buy your cartridge, it's mine; once it's empty, it's going to Staples or whoever else is offering the best return deal. You want it back that bad, pony up some rebate cash. Staples offers $3 apiece in store credit for all ink cartridges, up to $30 a month. Or that might just be inkjet, maybe they offer a little more for laser cartridges.

One time I had my brother go in and turn in a cartridge for the - what I thought was - cash rebate, but they weren't offering that. What they were offering was a free package of paper. Oh, let's see, a $3 cash refund or a package of paper - which I can use and will still eventually need anyway - that will cost me $4 to buy? Hmm, okay, I'll be happy to take that instead.

It doesn't tell me the estimated page count for the C540 cartridge. Oh, the specs page does: 2,500. But the color is only estimated for about 1,000 pages. Okay. Now let me try a comparison to a competitor.

Brother HL4040CN, same $399 price, but their cartridge price is actually more than the Lexmark at $59.49 for black and $69.49 for each of the three colors. Estimate 2500 black/1500 color pages.

So Lexmark's price per page is 1.7c for black, 5.9c for color; Brother's price is 2.3c for black, 4.6c for color. So it basically means that you're still better off with Brother over Lexmark as presumably you purchase a color laser because you regularly use color in your documents more than just occasional spot color.

So maybe Lexmark has realized that they can't be the high-price leader, and have become more reasonable on printer pricing. Or maybe it's just on inkjet printing that they're outrageously expensive. Hmmm, Office Max does not have any injet printers from Lexmark, maybe it means they realize they can't be competitive in that market and they've moved on to laser exclusively.

I have a copy on my desk of the complete Office Max catalog. Now consider that Office Max probably is at best, the #3 retailer for office supplies, with probably Staples as #1 and Office Depot as #2. But still, for comprehensiveness one can't claim Office Max isn't trying. It's phone-book sized (1152 pages plus front and back cover, and a page of pull-off tabs to stick on various areas in order to make things easy to find) probably cover almost every possible thing you'd buy for an office (now what's a good comic exception? Hookers and flash paper, which bookies used to use to write their notes on so they could burn them in the event the cops show up to raid them. Oh wait, they do have a very nice picture of an attractive lady, so maybe the only thing they don't sell is flash paper. By the way, in case you're humor challenged, this was a joke; please don't sue me.)

One thing that now hurts is, I threw away my old laser printer, only to discover Staples or one of these places was offering $50 in store credit to recycle an old laser printer. Oh well, it would be kind of hard to carry a used laser back to a store. What am I saying, I carried the new laser I bought home on the bus. Yeah, but it was in a box at the time, that had handles.

Anyway, back to the Office Max catalog. They have over 30 pages of classes and types of paper alone, along with some interesting statistics: one 500 page ream of 30% recycled paper saves:

• 8 gallons of waste water
• 5.3 pounds of greenhouse gases
• 1.4 pounds of solid waste, and
• 12,500 BTUs of energy (for those who don't know the meaning, 1 BTU is the equivalent of the energy generated by one match)

Now what else does Office Max sell? I've moved the article about a Lexmark printer to a separate entry. So let's see what else. Coffee, cookies, furniture, cleaning supplies, pens and pencils (79 pages!), even 19 pages of staplers. 33 kinds of ring binders, and more than 240 different Office Max-label products. Plus 5 pages of coat hooks, racks and hangers.

Oh, so much amazing crap valuable merchandise.