Right Now...
(Update: I managed to get a new power cord for my Compaq, my one remaining computer, for cheap on Amazon and even tho I paid for 2 day delivery, it arrived barely more than 24 hours after I ordered it, which made Mrs. JP and me very happy. However, we got a quote yesterday morning from a local insurance broker that boils down to a cash outlay of well over $400 just to make the car barely legal. Here in MA, they actually charge you $75 just for a piece of paper, or the title, the sales tax on the car will be close to $100, then there's there's the $50 for the registration, the $10 fee for the insurance brokerage getting it for you, plus the initial down payment of the insurance policy. And that quote was cheaper than anything we were quoted by Esurance, Progressive or Geico.
We'll barely make the rent on July first so any help you people could give to get our car on the road would be greatly appreciated. I really do think I have this QC job nailed but it's about 5 miles away [I had to walk to the interview] and I'll need a car to get to it so I can work my way back to self-sufficiency and respectability.)
...life is thicker than a McDonald's milkshake that's been left in the freezer for a month.
Yesterday morning, I hiked it 4-5 miles to interview for a QC job and I think I nailed it. Hopefully, I'll be working again by the beginning of next month.
Yesterday afternoon, Mrs. JP and I looked at a car that we'll be buying for $1000 in an hour or so.
Then last night, the adapter cord on my final laptop (the Dell's hard drive got fried again a month or two ago) shit the bed and the battery can't hold a charge (So, no, it wasn't Popeye and his suicidal impulse to chew on cords that are still plugged in). It's either buy this car and put it on the road or a computer. I cannot do both. In the balance, the car wins, especially since I've already committed to buying it.
Obviously, I can't keep using public access computers. The auto insurance is going to be ridiculously expensive even with just one of us being insured on a compulsory policy. Then there's the registration, inspection sticker, blah blah blah. My second and final state UI extension will be kaput by the 26th and, with Congress dicking around with the federal extension bill, I'm pretending as if my income will be cut off by Tuesday the 29th.
Whatever you could kick in to the Paypal account would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully, if this new job pans out as I think it will, this ought to be my last public appeal. But for now, whatever help we can get from you guys would enable us to put our new car on the road and get at least one of our computers fixed while keeping ahead of our regular household expenses and would sure be appreciated.
And just when my uploads on Scribd are finally starting to get attention, too.
posted by jurassicpork @ Sunday, June 20, 2010
7 comments
7 Comments:
The "Thousand-Dollar Car" song. Original was by a band named The Bottle Rockets from the early 1990s, but this is a good live cover from last year.
Hey cute cat.
thanks metrogyl
Re: your latest need for financial outlays -- that's part of the truth behind the line in the song about how when you buy a thousand-dollar car, the first thing you have to do is put another thousand dollars into it.
Cars are SUCH a racket. One of the ways that America separates society into classes. Top class can afford ridiculously luxurious ones, average prole class can have workaday cars because the econo-scape of America is laid out so you MUST have one to survive (and keep paying into the car-economy matrix to do so.)
Then there are the unfortunate people like you who have fallen through he rusted hole in the floorboards of the thousand-dollar American economy. I don't say this to be insulting, but even with your intelligence and whatever skillset you possess, you're a Third World citizen. Many other countries, even a few cities in the U.S., you could get by reasonably without a car. But in America, you're a slave to your vehicle, or a serf without it.
I was going to suggest buying a bicycle, but that wouldn't do ya too good in a Massachusetts winter. Maybe as a stopgap while the weather is good, alow you to build up some backstop for when you CAN afford a car?
You're right. I am a 3rd world prole. I don't deny that. But I don't have to be happy about it.
And in a just society, people with talent and a willingness to work would have avenues to put their productivity into action for the betterment of society. Even if that was just giving you a job making sure that the widgets in whatever factory you worked for weren't going to fall apart after two weeks of use. But nooooo, we've got a society where cretins have zero-skill-set jobs punching cash registers with pictures of the food items on their buttons, because they can't be trusted to know that that greaseburger costs $2.29, and they might accidentally ring up $2.99 of left to their own devices. People of medium intelligence are managing the inventory flow of cheap plastic crap made in China, and the really smart ones are devising new ways to throw the people below them into the unemployment line.
America is wasting its peoples' potential just like it's wasting its environment. Not that it's the only evil actor -- Russia, China, so many shambolic nations in Africa, etc. are doing as badly. I have hope for Germany, France, some of the countries in South America led by leftists like Chavez and Morales... But America is fecked. Save yourself as well as you can.
Well, hopefully, that QC job will come through this time.
The "Mrs."? When did you get hitched? Matrimony is an honorable and holy estate, I sure as hell liked it, with every one of my wives, but I remember some sort of ceremony and some papers I had to sign. A whole lot less than getting divorced, tho.
If you have found a way to get the "Mrs." without all that, please let us know.
Otherwise, we might think you use words to mean what you want them to mean, instead of describing reality. There's an ugly name for that, or so my psychatrist says. It begins with "congenital..."
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