Real Raggin' Wednesday

Staci has this idea for Real Raggin' Wednesday. Here's the idea straight from her:

Heres the deal. On Wednesdays you can rag on whomever or whatever you please.......go on rag on sistas........But here's the catch or the rules per say:
1. ONLY ON WEDNESDAYS this gives us an entire week to stew over the things in which we rag thus creating rule number two.
2. Never under ANY circumstances may you rag on this person or object again
3. You absolutely then must offer or extend forgiveness to this person and or object (i can totally picture steph forgiving her laundry "laundry I forgive you for being the mountain you are" lol
4. If you do not believe you could ever forgive this person....or object then you simply cannot participate or the blog monster will hunt you down.....okay so there is no such thing as a blog monster but there should be :)
5. And Finally, you must be REAL, you don't have to reveal the person or object in which your raggin, but you cant hold back....let it out, carefully....i don't want to be held responsible for someone getting the tar beat outta them :)

So - with all those rules laid out, here I go... look out, this one's been burning me for a while

Because of my impending divorce and a house that won't sell and an unemployed ex-husband, I'm struggling financially... badly... REALLY badly. Badly enough that I had to suck it up and take my girls and I down to Social Services and sign up for food stamps. I hated EVERY SINGLE MINUTE of it. I was embarrassed and ashamed and just... I hated it. But I need to feed my girls... so it had to be done.

So the other day I was on a blog (I don't think it was anyone in this circle of bloggers) and the woman was ranting about someone in the grocery store line checking out with her items and one of the items was a pack of gum, and she had the NERVE to pay for that with her food stamps. She went on and on and her commenters went on and on about how horrible that was, and that that was what the whole problem with the welfare system is and on and on.

And quite honestly, a few years ago I might have joined in - perhaps not quite so vehemently, but I would have at least been nodding my head.

But let me tell you a possibility. MAYBE the lady was just like me. Maybe she had two daughters that she LOVED SO MUCH, and maybe she was SO TIRED of having to say "no, we can't afford that" to everything her daughters asked for. And I bet they weren't greedy girls, just normal kids who would like a new toy now and then. But she just didn't have the money to do it. And maybe her girls think gum is a pretty freaking cool treat. And maybe she saw that gum, and thought "Oh WOW! I can finally get them one thing... I can say yes to something. They are going to be SO EXCITED." And so she bought the $1.19 pack of gum, with her foodstamps.

Maybe.. just maybe... we have NO right to judge ANYONE because we NEVER know the whole story, do we?

Stupidity in Corporate America

Update - So, I post this in the morning. I get home in the afternoon and there's a bill in my mailbox from my old cable company in Minnesota. I was a little miffed, since I know I paid them the final amount due. I open the envelope - there's a 3 page bill, and a return envelope, and a message on the bill that says "Your account is currently past due, please remit payment as soon as possible to avoid further action." And what's the amount due? -.53 THAT'S NEGATIVE 53 CENTS!!! They owe ME money, and yet they spent the money for 3 pages of bills, a return envelope and postage. THAT'S REDICULOUS!!! And then it really chaps my hide when I think of the letter I got from the President of the cable company last fall that said they were sorry but because of rising costs, they were going to have to raise the rates. WELL IF YOU DIDN'T DO STUFF LIKE THIS MAYBE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

**********************************************************************************

I get to watch Fox News all day at work (Unless there's a playoff in a certain golf tournament and then I get to watch a golf)... so I hear about the economy and businesses having short falls and bad quarters. Well you know what, I've been around enough of corporate America these days to tell you that at least some of their trouble seems to come from plain, old fashioned stupid money and expense management. Examples I have seen:

A SINGLE peice of paper sent from a corproate office to a branch office. In a large envelope. The postage cost .88... for ONE piece of paper. This company has thousands of branches, so start doing some math... for just this one instance. Hmmmm

Checks sent for .22, .19, .12. And not just a few... LOTS of checks. With .42 cent postage on them. Printed on check stock. Yeah... there's NO WAY that makes sense.

Paying for utilities for years at a location that is no longer occupied by the company. One company I worked for I found places where we had been out of the location for close to 5 years, and had never had the utilities taken out of our name. In one case the total amount we had paid was well over $24,000. That's CRAZY.

When you just catch a glance of this kind of stuff, you think "eh, it's not that much money" but when to start to look deeply and start to do the math, these can be serious issues. And signs of stupidity that drive me NUTS