No Forwarding Address

Sometime last year, we started getting mail for a Hrishikesh Samant at our home. We have been at this address for nine years and the people who lived here before were not so named either. I thought it would be an easy matter to Google the name and perhaps trying to contact him. No such luck; there seems to be at least a geology and/or zoology professor in Mumbai, India and a GIS expert in the US. Here’s a video of one of them. Or maybe it’s all the same guy. But it doesn’t explain while mail, including utility bills, cable bills, and items of the sort started arriving at our door in that name.

So I decided that perhaps I should contact the authorities to see if someone was trying to perpetrate some fraud in Mr. Samant’s seemingly good name(s). I contacted the postal authorities. They told me to just return to sender. After three or four months, the mailings have seemed to stop.

Now we are getting mail for Gwen Powell. It’s all what we would consider junk mail. Moreover, we at least have a theory about how we came to get “Gwen’s mail”. My wife’s given surname, her “maiden name” if you will, is Powell. A C and a G have similar structures; the line of the G plus ar could be construed as a w, I suppose. In cursive, o and e both have loops. I need to contact these vendors to get “Gwen” off their mailing list.
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There was a story this week in the local paper about an a 11-year-old boy who pedaled his bicycle into the path of a car and later died. Very sad story made worse by the fact that he waited 25 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Someone on Twitter commented that the fact that the driver of the car wasn’t ticketed was tantamount to getting away with “murder”, and used that specific word.

Now few people complain more about how irresponsible car drivers are vis a vis bicyclists than I do. I got a broken rib about 50 weeks ago from trying to avoid a car running through a traffic light. But the facts in the case – the boy’s bike hit the passenger-side door – suggests that the boy either didn’t see the car, had his brakes fail or some other circumstance. In any case, the driver, who will undoubtedly be traumatized for a long time, doesn;’t need apparently unfounded claims of murder bandied about.

ROG

On and On Question

But first, may I express my disdain for this white-collar criminal who stole over $110,000 and got no jail time. Meanwhile, someone who recently stole $600 of returnable bottles and cans got six months in jail. As it turns out, I was unfortunate enough to know Felix; he made my life and the lives of some of my colleagues quite difficult, and there are any number of us who wanted to see him behind bars. Feh.

Did you ever want to get a particular piece of information one time, but because you have to sign up, you end up getting mailing/e-mails, etc. ad naseum? That happens to me a lot at work. I used to get stuff from some pizza manufacturing association. I still receive material from associations dealing with everything from raising alpacas to designing car washes.

I DID sign up for New York’s complete state government payroll, which was posted for 2008 recently on www.SeeThroughNY.net, the government transparency website sponsored by the Empire Center for New York State Policy.

But sometimes, I keep getting stuff with no effort on my part. I made reference to an independent film in this blog and now I keep getting their literature. I wrote about the black bicycle champion Major Taylor in this blog, and I keep getting their mailings. It doesn’t bother me; I just find it interesting.

AARP sent me information on joining six years ago, and I did, but then failed tpo renew because of their position on some issue or other; they keep trying to get me back, though.

So what vestiges of information that you may have wanted in the past but no longer desire pops up in your mailbox, electronic or snail?
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Just yesterday, we received a call from 1-954-636-1087. We didn’t answer and the caller ID did not identify the company. I was curious, though, who it might be; I had faxed something to Florida earlier that day, and I did not want to blow off a legit call. I discovered 800 notes, where people can leave messages about unknown calls. For the number in question, there were a number of recent notices. One contributor discovered the number belongs to something called My Major. “I asked what kind of business it was and they said they are a college locator that provides information about people to college advisors so that they can be called back. I told him that I had already graduated and that I didn’t want them to call again. He said he was sorry and that I was not in their demographic group, then put my number on a do not call list. I would suggest telling them that you have also graduated (even if you have never gone to college) so that they are not interested in you anymore. I will post again if they call back.”
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Irving R. Levine died. I wonder how many people reading this blog know who he was; I most certainly did. And Dan Seals, member of a popular singing duo and brother of a member of an even more popular duo, died at 61, which always brings me pause. I picked this obit for the local boy makes good headline.


ROG

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