J.O.B. – an acronym for Just Over Broke.  It’s a position everyone holding a JOB is in, although they may not realize it.  Even households with two wage eaners who have “pretty good” salaries can quickly find themselves scraping the bottom of the barrel if either or both lose their JOB, especially if there are significant medical expenses involved:  Hospital bills can chew through savings at an alarmingly rapid pace.  If you have to go to work to get paid, you’re Just Over Broke.  If your continued presence at your JOB is required to keep food on the table – even if it’s two, or five, years before today’s wages stop putting food on the table – you’re Just Over Broke.

In my youth, I imagined my family would end up in business together as adults, working together to build a common fortune and achieving great things. It was not until years after his death that I learned my father had been sucking his parents finances dry to escape from the poverty I didn’t realize we were living in as children. Looking back on all of that, it’s not surprising he put everything he had into a trust to prevent his own children from doing the same thing to him. In doing so, he prevented us from being able to use what should have been our inheritance to reach our full potential.

My grandfather had a fifty acre farm in the middle of Long Island.  On summer days he’d load the truck with vegetables and drive to New York City to sell the goods in the markets there.  More than once I’ve wished I had gone with him and learned how to sell the wares we had to offer, haggling for the best price while ensuring the truck was empty when we went home. Instead, I got that education many years later when I was selling pizza slices and sausages in Kenmore Square for Pizza Pad, making someone else’s family rich. I’ve read a lot of books about how to succeed in business, etc., such as “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, all of Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” series, and many others. The common theme in all of them is you have to have some money or support in order to become successful. Bill Gates didn’t start out as a poor college kid with an idea and build Microsoft, he was a trust fund baby whose mother sat on the board of another company with the chairman of IBM. Peter Beck’s family gave him the support and encouragement he needed to acquire the skills and determination needed to build Rocket Lab, but without Mark Rocket’s $300,000 investment, the company would have never taken off. Steve Jobs may have started Apple in his parent’s garage with an investment from his uncle, but that also included encouragement and support of his parents as well. I, on the other hand, have never gotten any financial support for my endeavors, and have actively been discouraged by both family and “friends” from trying to build a business of my own every time I tried. Still I persist, knowing that the only way I will be able to truly succeed is through building my own business, filling the needs of my customers.

One time my father asked why I never came looking for help until I’d gotten into a crisis. I think I said because he would never listen until it was a crisis, but I may have just thought it. Another time, I heard him complain to my mother one evening saying “how come none of our children have become successful?” I should have gotten up and said it’s because he never invested into our success, but I didn’t say anything. I regret making those mistakes of silence, I think we all would have benefited from the ensuing discussions.

I set out with the intent of trying to save the world from a host of horrors that I saw coming down the pipeline. I found myself trying to do everything alone, by myself, all the time, even though that’s literally impossible: There’s so much more work than one person could possibly do by themselves. This has been compounded by always having to return to an empty house at the end of the day, which led to finding places to stay out later, putting off returning until I was ready to fall over from exhaustion. I don’t have anybody to celebrate with, I don’t have anybody to bounce ideas off of, I don’t have anybody to point out when I’m getting off track, or even help get any of the simple things done, let alone the big ones. Nobody I know understands that:  Everybody has their children or companions, or wives, or some group of people around them, giving support, suggestions, encouragement, and advice. I have none of that, yet I am expected to carry on and do everything, by myself, and make it all work. That’s just not possible.  At the very least, I need a partner in my life with whom I can work to build the better future I’ve envisioned.

I really thought on the morning of February 14 that I was going to have a date for my Valentine’s birthday (for the first time in a dozen years) with someone I would have liked to build a relationship. The date got blocked by another woman who had a mad crush on me, and I ended up taking me and myself out for dinner again. That was the last straw: I stopped doing anything productive for almost a month and a half because I’d gotten too tired of trying to do everything without getting anything more than momentary satisfaction in return. The last paycheck I got paid March’s rent and most of the bills due when it arrived. My cash flow has been negative since, and I started pawning stuff to buy groceries and all. Coincidentally, my car needed its engine thermostat and clutch replaced. Even with the parts on hand to fix it, I didn’t have motivation to do the work – I had decided I wasn’t going to do anything until I at least had someone to celebrate finishing something before I started again. That continued endlessly to the point where I was wondering if that would be how I spent my last days – in a frustrated fruitless search for something missing for most of my life.

A couple of months ago I found there are a number of entrepreneur and investor groups in this area I’d like to go and talk with – but I need my car to do that. There are a number of odd jobs around I could undertake, but I need my car to do that. I need to go buy groceries and other supplies – but I need my car to do that. Every time I think of something that I want or need to do, my first thought is I need my car to do that. That led to me being totally focused on trying to get my car back into working order, further frustrated by everything going wrong with the attempt – by myself, alone, with nothing but the tools and supplies that I already have, no real supporting documentation, and no one to assist me.  I did eventually avail the help of a couple of friends, but the shift linkage got reassembled incorrectly and I can’t use reverse or the top two gears in the transmission.

I went to college at MIT, listening to NAACP ads saying “give to the American Negro college fund, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” What happened? I ran out of money. That started the cycle. When I ran out of money, I went and got a JOB at the behest of my family. I soon found I wasn’t making enough money to get where I want and need to go. In other words, I ran out of money. I went and got another JOB. As the cycle repeated, I would sometimes be frantically working on something to make more money, hoping to finish before the cash on hand ran out. The money ran out, I went and got another JOB. The cycle repeated. One definition of insanity, attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and again expecting different results. Look at the pattern: I ran out of money. I went and got (another) JOB with the expectation that I wasn’t going to run out of money again. But I ran out of money and went and got another JOB, again with the expectation that I wouldn’t run out of money. Getting another JOB with the expectation that I won’t run out of money again is the pattern of insanity. What I need to do is be able to carry on with one of my projects to the point where I am making money, rather than earning a wage. Until I can get to where I am hiring people, rather than being hired, I will not be able to stop running out of money.  I have known this for years, but all I hear from everyone around me is “you need to go get another JOB…”

It’s taking the patience of Job to avoid getting another JOB, but I know it’s what I have to do to move my life ahead. My adamant refusal to go to another JOB “because that’s what you’ve got to do to pay your bills” has gotten me into extremely dire straits.  I’m not going back to start the cycle of insanity again, this is going to be my last pass through it.  I just hope I end up on the right side of the ground when it’s over.

…and so when people tell me I have to “get another J.O.B.” I “just say NO!!“

The back story about the trust:

I have been led to believe my parent’s farm and any other valuable assets my father had at the time of his death are tied up in a trust that no one in my generation can touch. The upshot of that is I have no inheritance while my brothers get to enjoy the comfort and use of the farm they live on that will be left solely to their children since none of the rest of my siblings (yet) have any of our own. The trust story may or may not be true, but since I have never had the opportunity to read the trust document, I don’t know how accurate the picture is, or how questions such as distribution of profits from the farm would be handled. I’ve also never seen my parents’ wills, which people around me have recently been pointing out should have gone through probate. I’m starting to have serious questions about the legality of everything going on here. There’s also the matter of the savings account my mother left for me that one of my sisters-in-law slipped up and mentioned one time (her husband immediately hushed her about it) that apparently had over $6000 in it at the time. That amount of money being wrongfully diverted squarely puts it into grand theft, and with more than one person involved, it’s conspiracy. I’m starting to wonder how different things will look if I do some investigating, and if I need to hire a lawyer to resolve the issues I’m wondering about.

As it is, the farm is a static asset, and nothing is being done to enhance its worth. Things like clearing ditches and removing overgrowth to restore arable land maintain the current value as a property but do nothing to increase its valuation as an asset. The only things driving its price up are inflation and competition for the limited resource that land represents, and both of those are offset by increasing taxes and rising prices. Because of COVID and subsequent issues, a million dollars today buys between half and a third of what it did three years ago. If similar events happen in the future, it won’t be long before the million dollar value of the farm won’t make it a significant resource: Change always happens, and if you don’t proactively move things forward, they are going to fall back.

As executor of the trust, I asked my brother to take out a loan using the farm as collateral and invest into my future so we can work together as a team to build our family’s wealth instead of fighting over who is going to get what, who is going to survive, and how long this death spiral we are now caught in is going to last. I wasn’t trying to make unreasonable demands or pick a fight, I was respectfully requesting that we join forces and move a common set of goals forward in a timely and effective way. What I got was a flat out denial:  “The farm is paid for, we can’t afford to jeopardize that.”

One of my brothers suggested I “get any important papers you might need like your car title, passport, Etc and some essential supplies in a go bag so if you do get evicted you can at least have that with you.” That shows an abject lack of respect for me and my life: I’m now facing the dangerously high probability that I could lose everything I have ever worked for in the very near future. That would be an extremely “not good” outcome. I asked for assistance to avoid that situation, in the best interest of everyone involved, but apparently I’m the only one who can see it that way.

The idiom “blood is thicker than water” implies a person’s family is more important than their other relationships or needs. There is also a quote that means the opposite: “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” – which means relationships you choose are stronger than the ones you inherit. I don’t know which is the “original” and which is the “extension,” but considering I’ve already suffered much more at the hands of my family than from everyone else combined, I’m inclined to agree with the latter.

          

Before adding new posts to my blog, I decided to upgrade WordPress on my server from 4.6.3 to 5.1.18.

BIG MISTAKE!!

My server is running PHP 5.3.8, so I cannot upgrade to 6.5.3. WordPress offered 5.1.18 as an alternative, but I had to manually install the update from the server’s command prompt because WordPress cannot do it internally. Not a problem, I am very familiar with Linux command line.

However, when I tried to update the plugins and themes, the connection type radiobutton was stuck on FTPS (SSL) – not a problem, since that’s the connection type I want to use. When I told it to proceed after entering my password, though, I got an error message stating

Failed to connect to SSH2 Server fkeinternet.com:22

WAIT! I didn’t ask for an SSH2 connection, and even if I wanted one, the radiobutton is stuck on FTPS! Why is WordPress trying to initiate an SSH2 connection when everything says it should NOT be doing that?

I found I had exactly the same problem trying to update the installed themes.

I set those problems aside because my objective here is to add some new posts to my blog.

WRONG AGAIN!!

I found every new paragraph is a new “block” – not that I wanted blocks in the first place, but OK, paragraphs can be blocks. I got three paragraphs written, and decided I wanted to change the color of some of the text in the second one. I selected the text by dragging out the range with my mouse cursor. When I went to the Color Settings and picked from the Text Color options, the entire paragraph changed color! This is NOT what I wanted to do. I deselected the color option, and went to edit the paragraph as HTML. I wrapped the selected text in a <span color=”#cdcd77″> directive, switched back to the visual editor – and there was no change. There was also no change when I previewed my post. Back in the editor window, I did something where an “invalid HTML” error appeared.

I deleted the entire paragraph block and retyped it. I figured perhaps I could look at the code when the whole paragraph is colored to see how I should set up my <span> directive. When I looked at the HTML after changing the color, I was horrified to see the <p> directive bounding the paragraph (inside the HTML comment <!– wp:paragraph –> directive added by the Department of Redundancy Department) had been changed to

<p class=”has-text-color has-luminous-vivid-amber-color”>

What? Is <p color=”#cdcd77″> really incomprehensible? (Further incendiary comments withheld…)

I turned to Google, trying to find ways to change the color of just a few words of text in a WordPress post. I found many references saying things like “select the text, use the controls in the toolbar” – but since the options aren’t present in the toolbar, that advice is totally useless.

I then discovered this horrific editor had been introduced in the 5.0 release of WordPress, but it’s possible to get the previous functionality restored by installing the Classic Editor plugin. Great!

but no, FOILED AGAIN!!

I went to the Add New option for the Plugins for my WordPress instance, and there was Classic Editor, right at the top of the list! Just click “Install Now” – and the dialog came up asking for the FTP credentials. This time when I hit the “Proceed” button, I didn’t even get an error message, the same dialog simply came back with the password field apparently filled in.

I thought that perhaps there was a file permissions problem on the server, so I added group write to everything in and under the wp-contents directory. That had no effect.

Again I turned to Google, looking for a way to install the Classic Editor plugin from the Linux command line, since it seems WordPress is now incapable of doing any updates from its GUI. However, I haven’t found anything resembling instructions for a manual installation of Classic Editor.

I guess I’m going to have to revert my WordPress installation to the state it was in before I wasted the day today by trying to do an update. I hope there weren’t any significant database changes, because I’d like to avoid having to reset the entire database system.

I’m glad I did a backup before starting the upgrade process!

This also doesn’t address the issue that Permalinks now ignore my Custom Format selection – an irritation at best.

All I wanted to do was write a couple of new blog posts…

          

I just started a new job, and the employee benefits program is administered through an outfit called Employee Navigator from Bethesda, Maryland.  The first thing I noticed is their site is seriously broken if Javascript isn’t enabled, and they don’t bother to say anything about it.  When creating an account in their system, they’ve got a ludicrious requirement that usernames must be at least 8 characters long – so I can’t use “wfredk” as I do everywhere else – and they don’t bother to announce the limitation until after you’ve submitted the form with your username and password selection (which resets your password entry).  Oh, by the way, they don’t have a password confirmation field, either – they have a button to show what you’ve entered in the password field – which only works if Javascript is enabled.

Once you’ve logged in, the sheer incomptence of this bunch of amateurs starts to reveal itself:  Instead of having pages formatted using HTML, the documents a new employee are supposed to sign have the HTML code embedded into them – and much of the HTML is actually defective.  It looks to me as if someone pasted HTML into a text-only field of a CMS and didn’t bother to check if the result was correct.  (I’ve included the actual contents of the pages in question below.)  Since I’ve got extensive experience as a Web developer, I was able to sift through the HTML and figure out what I was supposed to be signing up for.

The first page, Electronic Signature and Consent, wasn’t too bad:

In spite of my reservations, I “signed” the Electronic Signature and Consent page, and continued on to the Premium Only Plan page – which, again, was obfuscated with inline HTML code.  Here is where I was really horrified, and decided I couldn’t continue the process:

At the bottom of the page, I found this paragraph prompting me to “sign” the document.

The problem here is that this does NOT say that it’s NOT an agreement to the terms and conditions described on the page.  Because that clause is missing, a “signature” here (again, without any real proof of who signed the page because of the previous document) could be interpreted as acceptance of the terms and conditions as described.  That would be rather like signing a blank check and passing it to someone you really don’t know.  To me, it looks like they’re asking for a license to commit fraud.  There is no way I would voluntarily and consciously do such a thing.

Furthermore, because of second thoughts, and of observation of other business practices of this company, I am revoking the authority and consent I hesitantly made on the first page, by sending an email notification to mybenefits@bks-partners.com and several people at the agency I’m working through, with CC’s to a couple of my own email addresses as supporting documentation.

Take another look at the problems I marked in red on the Premium Only Plan page.  It’s precisely this sort of behaviour that got the credit industry slapped on the wrist with a sledge hammer.  If the “employee benefits” companies don’t clean up their act pretty quickly, perhaps it’s time for a Congressional inspection of their practices as well…

As promised, here are the “as presented” contents of the pages mentioned in this post:

          

Gee, I wonder if I should “revert back to” Hildegard to get my good news from Facebook: Clearly “she” works at Facebook, they all have email addresses at consultant.com and send messages from noreply@accounts.com, right? That Hacker Way address in Menlo Park also tells me it’s a legitimate message, and the fact I’ve had to send bitcoins to all those guys with dirty secrets really makes me confident aztekcomputers.com@wfredk.com is a good email address, surely I’ve got to “revert back” to “her”!

My only question is how do I revert back to somebody who wasn’t me in the first place???

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: New Facebook Message for aztekcomputers.com@wfredk.com
Date: 03 Jan 2019 15:41:35 -0800
From: Customer service<noreply@accounts.com>
To: aztekcomputers.com@wfredk.com

Hello

Good day My name is Hildegard Evans from the Facebook
headquarters based in the USA, I am a Facebook Online
Coordinator.

Am contacting you because I have good news for you from Facebook

Kindly revert back to this to claim Your good news from facebook
:Hildegard.evans@consultant.com

Thanks

Facebook Cordinator

Hildegard C. Evans
Hacker Way, Menlo Park, 94025
(612) 440-8719
Email: Hildegard.evans@consultant.com

          

Purple turtle figurine

I recently sold a small item on eBay:  I bought a 10-piece lot of small turtle figurines a few years ago for $40, so the cost for each item is $4.00.  I had them listed for $4.95 each, plus shipping, so my gross margin on each sale would be $0.95 – not a lot, but at least it looked like a profit.

At that price, I couldn’t offer free shipping.  I listed the shipping and handling as $1.00 for handling (to cover the cost of a box, packing material, tape, etc.) plus the actual cost of shipping via the customer’s selected method.

The customer paid $16.36 to buy this $4.95 item – eBay added $11.41 for shipping and handling to the bill, which astounded me.  As it turns out, though, that wasn’t out of line, considering the actual cost of sending the package from Wellsville to Tulsa, Oklahoma via FedEx Home Delivery was $10.39 (after eBay’s bulk discount):  The assessed shipping and handling charges left me with $1.02 to cover the cost of materials.

Adding the gross margin from the sale, plus the handling fee, it would appear I gained $1.97 from the transaction.  The problem, though, is that there are fees involved:  eBay charges a 10% “final value” fee for sales at this level, so I had to pay them a commission of $0.50 to make the sale.  Fair enough, but now my gross margin is $0.45.  Then, PayPal charges 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction to process the payment – so PayPal collected $0.77.  Now my gross margin has disappeared, and I’ve already lost $0.32 on the deal – and that’s assuming my time has zero value, and there were no costs in packing the figurine to send it.  Using those assumptions, I’ve still had a net income of $0.70 because of the handling charges that the customer paid.

However, today the last nail in the coffin arrived:  eBay’s invoice for the month of June shows they have assessed a $1.14 “final value” fee on the SHIPPING CHARGES!  Ignoring everything else, that means they charged $0.12 more for their profit on my mailing the package to the customer than I received as a handling charge.

Together with the gross loss from the transaction, the loss from the shipping charges means I had a net LOSS on the $4.95 sale of $0.44.  No business can survive with a 10% loss on every deal.  That plan is fundamentally flawed, and is the reason I will no longer be trying to sell things on eBay.

I tried sending them an email about the situation, but I expect it will bounce…