Archive for the 'money' Category

Because I thought “Wiit Power” was too inappropriate

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on May 1, 2008 @ 9:34 am
in Mrs. ACW, awesome, beer, devil cat, food, happy hour, money, movies, potty humor and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 11 Comments

Before we get to the moist, throbbing awesomeness that is my post for the day, there’s some business we have to attend to:

blah blah blah happy hour blah blah tonight blah blah 6pm blah blah

Dougherty’s Irish Pub
223 W Chase St
Baltimore, MD 2120
(410) 752-4059

blah blah blah blah whatever blah be there, or be somewhere else: I know I will.

Anyway, on to the nonsense!

The night of the bachelor party I was actually hemorrhaging man points because I wasn’t actively engaged in the act of pickling my liver with as much alcohol as possible. In fact, I unfortunately spent the entire night maintaining a fine balance on the line between sobriety and mild buzz.

“Why,” you ask rhetorically because actually speaking to the computer is more than a little crazy, “would you deprive yourself of the sweet inebriating nectar that the gods themselves saw fit to excrete from their magical alcohol-producing organs so many Tuesdays ago for the benefit of all humankind?”

Because I was waking up early the next morning to go wait in line to buy a Wii. There. I said it. Are you happy?

Mrs. ACW and I have wanted to buy a Wii for some time now, but due to their relative scarcity we’ve been unable to procure one. Actually, we would have been able to get one a long time ago for about $600 on ebay, but Mrs. ACW refuses to sell her body on the street, and I just can’t bear to do another half-dozen equine-related porn movies. (I’m half-proud and half-nauseated to say I was second-assistant director on an official Harry Potter porn spinoff- More than a Man: Fisted by Firenze) Plus, let’s all finally admit that ebay is pretty much the squalid back alley of the internet, and that we want as little to do with it as possible.

The guy at Target told me to get there about an hour early because they expected there to be a line, and at 7am I was the only person waiting in line. And at 7:20am, I was the only person waiting in line. Thanks, Target guy, you unmitigated doucheface.

So I went home, fed the cats, jettisoned the previous evening’s mountain of snack food, had something to eat, and then went back to Target at about 7:45am to find myself the second person in line. Not too bad. A cold and boring quarter of an hour later and I was on my way home, not at all hungover but so exhausted that I may as well have been.

It wasn’t until many hours later that I was awake enough to actually set it up, and once I did I was immediately happy with our decision. It’s simply a fun gaming system. One of the things that surprised me is that you can even give your Wii a nickname, so I’ve dubbed ours, “The Wiiner”, which leads to hilarious conversations like this, “Have you played with the wiiner yet tonight?”
“No, not yet. I plan on working up quite a sweat later with the wiiner.”
“Excellent. The wiiner will definitely get you sweaty.”

And so on. For that reason alone I think everyone should get one.

I think I’m the only one who noticed the irony

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on April 30, 2008 @ 9:10 am
in awesome, beer, food, money, music and sex
. 24 Comments

Last weekend I had the honor of joining a friend at his bachelor party, and I have to admit that I’ve never been to a more masculine bachelor party.

We started out at my brother’s house drinking beers (10 man points) and playing video games (5 man points) eating half a tub of party mix (2 man points) and somehow consuming three pounds of onion dip (15 man points).

From there we went to a barbecue place for dinner (20 man points) and filled our bellies with various kinds of meat served to us in heaps (18 man points, 23 double entendre points). One of the attendees bit the inside of his cheek while eating and started bleeding profusely (3 man points (yes, bleeding counts as something manly)) and decided to “cauterize” the wound by taking a huge swig of the bottle of hot sauce that was on the bar (35 man points). Numerous shots (15 man points) and PBRs (5 man points) were consumed before we headed off to the next bar.

We started with more shots (20 man points) but generally took things pretty easy, primarily having beers (5 man points) and shooting the shit (2 man points). I think, however, we get extra man points for getting one of the waitresses drunk (5 man points).

From there we went to Max’s in Fell’s Point where we had boilermakers (30 man points) and the bachelor had a pimp-cup full of some high-falutin’ hefewiess microbrew that clocked in at about 10% alcohol (27 man points).

From Max’s the decision was made to go to a strip club (25 man points), and while strip clubs aren’t necessarily my thing (-45 man points) I was happy to have one of the other guys buy me two 10-dollar Miller Lites.

Numerous table dances (40 man points), lap dances (50 man points), and public spankings (100 man points?) later, we were closing out the strip club (200 man points). We piled back into the limo- did I mention it was a stretch Escalade? (50 man points)- to head home.

So let’s see, ignoring the fact that strip clubs aren’t my thing, as a whole, we scored 681 man points for the evening with the only thing missing being a bare-knuckled street brawl between our bachelor party and some other douchebag’s bachelor party which would have netted us 500 man points. It would have been 1000 man points if someone was killed.

But, alas, we lost a few points on the way home. As we were careening through the streets of Baltimore, drunk and with visions of strippers named Sugarplum dancing through our heads, someone tuned the radio to Tiny Dancer by Elton John (-200 man points).

And we all sang along. (-300 man points)

At the top of our lungs. (-500 man points)

I guess it could have been worse. We could have been singing it quietly, holding each other and weeping (forfeiture of penis).

All in all it was an awesome night, even if the man points were all lost in a wash at the end.

BGE Peak Time Rebate Program UPDATE

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on April 8, 2008 @ 9:23 am
in house, money, nerd stuff and suhmuhmuh bitch
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Most of you will want to skip this post unless you live in MD, DE, NJ, or PA and you’re interested in saving some money on your energy bill. Really. Stop reading. Stop. Right now. You’re going to be bored.

Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When I was first enrolled in the program I thought I had passed all the major hurdles. Apparently not. They can’t attach the new meter to my house because of the way our current meter is set up. Right now the old meter has the deck built around it, and apparently the new meter is bigger than the space in my deck. So, no peak time rebate program for me. Boo.

But, because I called to find out what it would take to be in the program, the guy let me know that I could call BGE and just ask to be in the air conditioner/fan program described in the link above. So I’m going to call now and see what that’s all about.

UPDATE: Here’s the basic process to get more information-

1) Call BGE at 800 685 0123
2) Listen to the menu options twice to be connected to a human
3) Ask about the BGE Demand Response Infrastructure program and the free programmable thermostat OR an air conditioner load control switch. I don’t know if they’ll let you do both, but I guess you can ask. We already have a programmable thermostat, so I didn’t ask.
4) They’ll ask for some address and phone information to look up your account, and then they’ll put you on the list to receive further information about the program. From what I was told you not only get this device strapped on to your AC unit to save you some energy costs, but they also give you a credit for each month you have the thing on there.

Steak and Cheese Lean Pockets, is there anything you can’t do?

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Anonymous Coworker
on April 2, 2008 @ 9:25 am
in bitches, food, jokes, money, music, people are idiots and potty humor
. 9 Comments

First of all, I’m surprised I fooled so many of you yesterday. I’m a huge liar. You know this. I’m almost constantly lying. How can you tell if I’m lying? Well, you can’t. It’s because I’m sometimes telling the truth that I’m an even more effective liar. But really, you should have known.

That said, here’s a relatively truthful story about what happened to me yesterday.

I mentioned a while back that I’d be sampling beef and cheese lean pockets. And as a quick summary, beef is to me as a shotgun is to Kurt Cobain. Too soon?

Anyway, I quickly realized that the most punishing aspect of the focus group would not be the lean pockets, but would instead be my fellow focus group attendees. Their brain powers combined would barely qualify them to watch Dora the Explorer. I can see the group of them now, sitting in front of a television, three of them wetting their pants out of fear of the talking picture box.

We were given four whole lean pockets, one at a time, and told to eat as much as we could to get an accurate sample. As usual, I was doing my damnedest to mess with the results.

I was right in the middle of the group, so whenever the group leader would ask for opinions, I would listen carefully to what the other folks had to say (which I learned quickly was a pointless endeavor) before saying something completely opposite, and bringing up something out of left field.

For example, after tasting the first lean pocket, the comments went like this. See if you can guess which one is mine:

“The meat is too hard? Like, I think it should be softer? Like, not as hard? But more soft?”

“I like this one because it doesn’t taste like pizza.”

“Need more meat. More meat.”

“The cheese is too stringy. I like cheese to be stringy, but not really stringy, just a little stringy. But it was good. I loved it.”

“This doesn’t taste like a Philly Cheesesteak. I did not like it.”

“Did you put mayonnaise in these things somehow? I think I caught some mayonnaise in there. Oh god, I hope it was mayonnaise.”

“The beef is too pink.”

And finally, “This tastes like rubber.”

To which the group leader responded, “Tastes like rubber, or has the texture of rubber.”

“Oh, the texture. … And the taste.” I don’t think that participant knew what the word “texture” meant.

And so the taste test went on like that, my brain cells throwing themselves against the insides of my skull in a desperate attempt to escape the rampant, unbridled stupidity. I swear, if they could bottle stupidity like that, it would become a dangerous, dangerous weapon. Can you imagine all that concentrated stupid being used to wipe out the intellect of an entire country? They could probably call it American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. But I digress.

The one thing that kept me sane the whole time was the near constant supply of hilarious “that’s what she said” jokes running through my head. Almost anytime anyone said anything, it was funny. Just try it with the samples from above. I’ll wait.

But I don’t care what they say
I’m in love with you
They try to pull me away
But they don’t know the truth
My heart’s crippled by the vein
That I keep on closing
You cut me open and I
Keep bleeding
Keep, keep bleeding love

Oh good, you’re back. What a terrible song. Anyway, you can see the potential for hilarity was high, and I was almost fooled into thinking the funniness would outweigh the bone-shattering, mind-crippling dumbness, but every time I would think the dumbness was over, one of the participants would say something like this:

“My favorite cheese is gouda, but I can’t ever find in anywhere.”

I wanted to smack her and say, “Really? Really? You can’t find gouda? That’s funny because I’ve seen gouda in every grocery store I’ve ever been to in my life. Ever. It’s not a fancy cheese. You get it in those shitty fucking Christmas meat and cheese gift baskets that are nice enough to say, ‘I was thinking of you’ but not nice enough to say ‘for more than twelve seconds’. I hate you. You’re an idiot.”

Eventually the session ended, we headed back out to the lobby at the front of the building, and we were given our compensation in the form of a check. Ten seconds later, my ass turned into a Howitzer and I pretended their toilet was the Luftwaffe as I launched a mighty blitzkrieg- hellbent on porcelain annihilation.

Wow. That was a lot of confusing war/feces/Nazi metaphors at the end there.

Update on Sherlock

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on April 1, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
in Mrs. ACW, devil cat, money and suhmuhmuh bitch
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So this morning Mrs. ACW was staying home because she wasn’t feeling well and I realized that giving Sherlock his medicine was completely up to me. Considering that we normally have to wrap him in a blanket until he’s completely immobile, I wasn’t relishing the task.

I prepared his medicine in the plastic syringe (sans needle) we were given. It’s just like a tukery baster with graduated milliliters on the side. And let me tell you, this thing makes it easy to give him his medicine… when he stays still long enough.

I picked him up and he was fine with everything until he saw me reaching for the syringe. He squirmed and wriggled out of my arms and bolted. I was able to eventually wrap him up in the throw rug we keep by the back door (you have to get creative when you need to immobilize a stubborn cat) and give him his medicine. And like usual, once he had swallowed his medicine I went to go get him a treat. I put the treat on the floor, he ate it, and then he vomited a pink, foamy mess all over the floor. Considering the medicine is pink, I was pretty sure what the problem was.

“You little bastard”, I thought to myself, “you finally figured out a way to get around taking your medicine.” While I was contemplating whether I should give him another dose since he spewed almost all of the first dose, he vomited again. Again it was a horrible pink foam, and it was way more medicine than I had given him that morning. Worried, and running late for work, I rushed Sherlock to our vet, who is luckily, right down the street from our house.

While I was explaining to the vet what had happened, Sherlock started making this horrible growling and gagging sound. Like he was hacking up a hairball or something. And then right in front of the vet he does the foamy pink vomit thing again. The vet grabbed him, took him to the back, and left me sitting there with the cat carrier and a counter-top full of pink cat vomit. A few minutes later an assistant came in and cleaned up the vomit, so I asked her how Sherlock was doing.

“Well, he never stopped vomiting after Dr. [Veterinarian] took him back there, so they want to start prepping him for surgery.”

I just about collapsed. I had no idea what was going on and they were asking me to allow Sherlock to be prepped for surgery. So I called Mrs. ACW and woke her up to let her know what was going on, and while I was going though the whole story with her, the vet came back in to give me an update.

“We’ve got Sherlock sedated, but we need your permission to prep him for surgery and to operate.”

“Operate on what!? I don’t even know what’s going on here!” Meanwhile Mrs. ACW is now crying on the other end of the phone.

“We checked Sherlock’s chart after we took him in the back to control his vomiting and found an error in the dosage of antibiotic he was given. It’s got way more antibiotic powder than it’s supposed to have. Somehow he was given the dosage for large canine rather than a feline. We need to perform an endoscopy soon to see if the antibiotic has eroded his stomach lining. If it has, we’ll need to operate to try and minimize any internal ruptures.”

“Yes! Go! Whatever!”

I was in such shock that it took me a few minutes to get pissed about how negligent it was of them to give Sherlock the wrong dosage of medicine. I wanted to punch the doctor in his fucking face. I don’t even know how much this is even going to cost. Does anybody know a good lawyer that practices animal law?

UPDATE: We just picked up Sherlock from the vet, and he seems a little woozy, but okay. He apparently had his stomach “scraped” and was put on an IV to dilute the effect of whatever antibiotics were still in his system. Apparently he can’t eat anything over the next few days, and we’re only supposed to let him drink water, but they said he might just sleep for the next few days. They did say that he’d probably never be able to eat regular cat food again. We’re going to have to buy this prescription cat food and then grind it up into a paste so his stomach can handle it.

I’m just kidding. He’s totally fine, and as big a douchebag as ever. There was no vomiting. April Fool’s suckers.

Of popped-collars and douchebags

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on March 31, 2008 @ 9:46 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, beer, bitches, devil cat, house, money, people are idiots and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 9 Comments

Saturday morning I woke at the crack of 11am to wrestle my cat to the ground before Mrs. ACW gave him his medicine. And by “medicine” I mean a savage beating. And by “a savage beating” I mean the anti-biotics that are supposed to be degunking his pee-maker.

Because I’m a cheapskate I opened the curtains rather than turning on the lights, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a car full of early-twenties popped-collar douchebags parking across the street from my house. The three of them got out of their late model E-class Mercedes featuring 18-inch z-rated tires and chrome rims. As would any rational person, I immediately hated them.

A few minutes later they returned to the car, opened the trunk, and got out a thirty-pack of Keystone Light and a white trash bag full of assorted swill. I wanted to burst out of my house, run into the street, and beat them to death with their canoe beer* and then take a dump on the hood of their car.

Given their beer choices, I was clearly witnessing the triumph of money over taste. I decided that life was too short to waste any more time on thinking about them, mentally wished them a happy afternoon pickling their livers, and went about my day.

Later that day Mrs. ACW and I left to go over my brother’s house to finish our taxes, and from there we went to see a play our friend is in.** After the play we went out for drinks with some of the cast, so we didn’t get home until about 2am.

As we were pulling into our driveway I noticed that someone had left the visor down in the Mercedes, and the lights on the visor were burning brightly, and looked like they would be doing so all night. And then next morning my theory proved to be correct. There was a tow-truck parked in front of the Mercedes, but alas, no popped-collar douchebag.

Eventually the tow truck left and the popped-collar douchebag emerged, and I have to admit that my level of schaudenfreude was so high that it was almost able to manifest itself physically. I was wandering around the house sneering at the thought of this douchebag having to pay out the nose to have his car towed just to be told that he had a dead battery and one of his idiot popped-collar douchebag friends could have given him a jump. The darkest part of my soul was giving birth to bitterness incarnate.

Then the better part of me thought, “It’s not his fault he’s a complete and utter douchebag with all the fashion sense of Meghan McCain. I’ll go give him a jump.”

Before I could go get him another tow truck came back, hauled his car up onto back of the truck, and drove away.

Oh well. At least I tried to do the right thing, even if it took a few hours. Also, I’m pretty sure he’s still a collar-popping douchebag that drinks shitty beer and has more money than taste, so maybe I’m still glad I didn’t help him.

*Drinking beer like Miller Lite, Bud Light, Keystone, Milwaukee’s Best Light, etc. is like making love in a canoe. Fucking close to water.

**Shameless plug. This play was hilarious, and our friend is in it, so if you’re looking for something to do, this is a cheap and highly-amusing way to fill your time.

Shaking out the cobwebs

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on March 24, 2008 @ 9:17 am
in Mrs. ACW, POS Tercel, meta blogging, money, school, suhmuhmuh bitch and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 13 Comments

Things are busy around here, so I don’t really have a lot of “teh funny” that you’ve come to expect from other websites, or “teh mediocrity” that you’ve come to expect from mine. I should really look into what it means when my goal is mediocrity and I am still constantly under-performing. Eh, maybe some other time.

Anyway, the three big things holding me up right now are:

1) Schoolwork. I’ve added a thesis-level paper to my workload for the the semester, because I have to complete it before I graduate, and the work I already had for this semester was pretty light so I figured, “What the heck?” The heck is, school work now owns my free time.

2) Sherlock has some sort of urinary tract infection or constipation or something. He’s in and out of the litterbox all the time. Mrs. ACW is taking him to the vet today to see if we can’t uncork the bits that ironically make him so irritating in the first place.

3) My car. I’m buying my grandfather’s car so I need to sell my old car to cover some of the cost. I haven’t been able to find anyone within my extended family that seems to need a car, so I’m turning to you, the unwashed masses of the internet. Run, don’t walk, to the nearest ATM, checkbook, or money order location and try for a chance at owning a prime piece of ACW memorabilia! Seriously though, if you know someone who has a teen that needs an extremely dependable but not-at-all flashy starter car, or if someone needs an around-town car that gets great mileage, please email me and let me know and I can give you the specifics. I’d apologize for essentially putting an ad for a used car on my blog, but it’s my blog, and if you don’t like it, you can eat a bag of dicks. Also, please buy my car.

BGE Peak Time Rebate Program

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on March 7, 2008 @ 9:33 am
in Mrs. ACW, awesome, devil cat, horror, money and nerd stuff
. 9 Comments

So Mrs. ACW and I have been selected to participate in an energy-saving experiment with Baltimore Gas and Electric this summer. BGE selected about 1000 homes at random to participate in what they call the “Peak Time Rebate program”, and we were lucky enough to be one of them.

Basically, it works like this: BGE will run the program for 12 days between June 1 and Sept 30. Essentially, they’ll let us know by phone, email, or even text a few days in advance when a “peak day” is coming. (Can you believe that? Text? I’m shocked at their acceptance of modern technology.) Then, when the peak day rolls around all we have to do is reduce our energy usage between 2pm and 7pm.

“Ha ha, sucker,” I can hear you saying now, “They’re just duping you and some other suckers into reducing your energy so that they don’t have to brown-out the state for a few days this summer.”

Yeah, I was skeptical too, but they’re providing incentives out the ass. First of all, just by calling to see if I qualified to participate in the program they gave me $15. Not bad for 5 minutes worth of work.

Next, they’re going to refund me for every kilowatt hour I reduce off my average usage. So if they measure that I normally use 1000 kWh per month and on a peak day I use 5 or 10 kWh less, they’ll pay me about $1.16 for every kWh reduced. That means $5.80 or $11.60 (or more) for doing nothing! Even better, there’s no penalty if I don’t reduce my usage during peak days. At this point my plan is to flip all the breakers on everything except the refrigerator on “peak” days. I don’t care if the cats suffer for my cash.

Once the experiment ends in September, and if I don’t bail out, which I won’t, they’ll pay me another $100 just for participating. This is on top of whatever I earn through reduced usage and the $15 they paid me initially.

Finally, the coolest part of the experiment are the tools they’re giving me to help reduce energy usage. They’re installing a device on my air conditioner/heat pump that will cycle on and off while the air conditioning is on. The air conditioning will stop, but the fan will keep running for a few minutes to blow around the already cold air, then the AC will kick on again, then off again while the fan stays on, etc. So they’ll be saving money FOR me. How can I lose?

The other cool thing that we get is an Orb! When I read about these in Wired a few months ago I thought, “Man, I’ve GOT to get one of those.” It keeps track of any number of things, but in this case, it’ll be our energy usage. So we can see if we’re using more energy than we need to be using and I can yell to Mrs. ACW, “Hey, the orb is red. Stop doing whatever you’re doing! Jerkass.”

I know I’m totally nerding out here, but I’m totally psyched about this, and can’t wait to see how it goes. And there’s really nothing nicer than getting paid a fat wad of cash for having a lower energy bill.

More from the funeral home

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on March 4, 2008 @ 9:39 am
in bitches, family, money and suhmuhmuh bitch
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One would hope, at this point, that the anger would have diminished somewhat, and I guess it has, but not quite as much as I would have liked, due primarily to the ineptitude of the staff at the funeral home.

On Thursday my family prepared for two 2-hour viewings of my grandfather from 3-5 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. Our family was invited to show up early because my aunt was having a really hard time with the whole thing, and wanted extra time to personally spend with my grandfather without a bunch of other people around. Upon arrival at two o’clock we were happy to see that the lights in the funeral home were on. There had been some power outages in the area, so we were worried about the lights at the funeral home. Before we arrived the funeral home assured my family that they had candles placed around the room and that it would be “dim”.

While my aunt drifted over to be with my grandfather, the rest of us gathered around a television to watch a slide show I had created from old pictures that my brother had scanned in. I had used iMovie and applied a liberal usage of the Ken Burns effect, and everybody seemed pretty happy with the result. Then, at 2:10 p.m., the lights went out.

“Dim” does not begin to describe the situation. Like many funeral homes, this one did not have any windows in the actual viewing room, so our room was lit by indirect ambient light from the front doors, two battery powered emergency lights, and about 6 or 7 small candles.

At 2:30 the emergency lights went out, so all we had were candles and the ambient light. If you think funeral homes are creepy, you should try hanging out in one with all the lights out. Finally the good will of my family broke, and one of my other aunts approached the funeral director.

“The lights have been out for 20 minutes. What is you back-up plan?”
“Well, the power is out in the area, and we can’t really control that.”
“That’s not what I asked you. Do you have a back-up plan for this type of situation?”
“No.”

Having just lost her father, my aunt didn’t have the energy to fight, so she found my brothers and me. My older brother and I approached the funeral director and asked what he was going to do. It took all I had to not punch him when he said there was nothing he could do. My older brother said, “No, that is not acceptable. You need to go buy a generator and get the lights on in this room. Now.” He said he would have to ask his manager, and while he disappeared we conferred about what we would do depending on when the lights came back on. We agreed that we’d ask for $1200 if the lights weren’t back on by the end of the first viewing, $2400 if they weren’t back on by the beginning of the second viewing, and $3200 if they were still off by the end of the second viewing. The price was based on what we paid for the viewing, and then we doubled it, that way even if we only got 50% of what we asked, we’d still get a full refund. We suspected they were keeping their fingers crossed that the power would come back on and wouldn’t have to shell out for a generator.

While we were waiting they lit a friggin’ oil lamp and placed it by the casket. Aside from the horrible odor, we had nothing to worry about except for the oil lamp tipping over and setting the whole room on fire. When the oil lamp started to fade they balanced a flashlight on the same table and pointed it at my grandfather. I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how infuriated I was to see my grandfather like that. Also, please keep in mind that the rest of the room was still dark, still lit only by a few flickering candles.

Finally at 3:41 p.m. a generator was connected to lights by the casket. At least anyone who wanted to see my grandfather wouldn’t feel like they were in a third-rate haunted house. The odd thing is, though, that lights in the hallway and in the other viewing rooms were on. As far as I could tell, ours was the only room in the whole place that was still dark. I’m not sure what that was about, but it didn’t help matter to see other rooms brightly lit when ours was still dark.

At 4:23 p.m. full power was restored to the building. Our room was completely lit, and for the next 35 minutes we were able view the slide show and have conversations with our family and friends without having to use candle light or a flash light.

The way I figure it, we were without power for 143 minutes out of a possible 180 minutes, amounting to almost 80% of the time we were there. I think were entitled to at least 80% of a refund for the viewings, if not more. It’s not like we can have another viewing next week. That was it. That was the only time we had. The stress and discomfort of spending so much of that time in the dark physically manifested itself in my relatives.

I’m not quite ready to say exactly where this happened, depending on how the bill is settled, but I’ll let you know what happens. Also, to prove I shouldn’t play the lottery any time soon, my dad’s uncle died on Sunday. I wasn’t close to him at all, and am not really sure if I ever even met him, but I’m pretty sure that my dad is beyond exhausted. A sister, father-in-law, and uncle within three weeks is un-fucking-real and I’m not sure that anyone should ever have to deal with that.

I’m as tired of writing about it as you are of reading it

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on February 26, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
in atheism!, bitches, family, money and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 27 Comments

So yesterday I went to the funeral home with my brothers, my cousin, my mom, and all my aunts and uncles. If you know anything about funeral arrangements, you know it’s the worst parts of buying a car wrapped up with all the fun and excitement of the death of a loved one. It is every bit as sleazy, scammy, and manipulative as you would imagine it could be.*

I’m glad my brothers and I were there, because had we not been, I think my mom and her siblings could have been suckered into a whole bunch of unnecessary expenses, some of which they were suckered into regardless.

It all started when the funeral home started pressuring us into getting my grandfather embalmed. Actually, it started way before that. The death industry has managed to subtly spread the myth that not only is embalming necessary for a body to be presentable, but that it may even be required by law. In Maryland, it’s not the law. There is a stipulation that “extended viewing” would allow the funeral home to require embalming, but nowhere is “extended viewing” defined. When my family sat down to have a discussion about whether or not embalming was necessary, the misinformation was coming out of the mouths of my relatives. “If he’s not embalmed we can’t have an open casket,” or “If he’s not embalmed he’ll start to stink,” or “If he’s not embalmed we won’t be able to bury him.” From what I can tell, all of these are inaccurate. Embalming is expensive ($1600 in our case), unnecessary where cold storage is available, unnatural, and bad for the environment. Does anyone has experience with a viewing and an non-embalmed body? I’d love to hear it.

The next big ticket item that can be ignored, one that we managed to keep our family from purchasing unnecessarily, is a vault. In Maryland a vault is not required, but a graveliner is (I think). A graveliner essentially keeps the ground from collapsing as the coffin degrades, and it keeps some moisture out of the grave, as well as keeping any degrading material of the body or the coffin out of the ground. It’s essentially a box in the ground that the coffin goes into. A vault is a box that goes inside the graveliner, and then the coffin goes in the vault. They start at about $3000 bucks for plain concrete and then go as high as $20,000 for fancy stuff with copper or bronze linings and embellishments. They try and sell you on the vault by saying that without it “weather” could get into the coffin sooner, essentially forcing you to visualize the deceased rotting in the ground. In our case it would have been an especially bad decision to buy a vault because our grandfather won’t even be buried with us at the graveside. The cemetery only does burials once or twice a month, and all the bodies delivered to the cemetery before that day are buried then, no visitors allowed. We wouldn’t have ever seen the vault even if we purchased it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if numerous families had purchased vaults, only for that money to go into the pockets of funeral salesmen. Don’t let a funeral director tell you that a vault is required unless you’ve read the law and know he’s right. In Maryland, he wouldn’t be.

Eventually we got to the coffins themselves, and that was a horrible process in and of itself. They try to sell you on all this fancy, polished, filigreed nonsense, when all you want is something simple and respectful. My older brother asked for a book of cheaper options once we reached the end of the first book and the cheapest option was $3000. We were told that the book we were looking at was the only book available. Then my mom told a story about when my grandfather was making arrangements for his sister and the funeral director then told him that the option he had picked for his sister was “nice”. “No,” he barked in reply, “Not nice. A necessity.” After that story the funeral director magically found a book of cheaper options. My family eventually settled on something for about $1,400 that looked remarkably like a similar option available for $700, but my mom and her siblings took a vote and opted for the more expensive one. I’m still not sure why. It’s not like you can go to a funeral and remember what the casket looked like, or that you could (or even should) look at a casket and guess how much it cost. Just build me one out of plywood. It’ll be good enough.

But that’s the thing about coffins, everybody wants to think that with a nice enough vault, graveliner, and coffin, the body will stay perfect forever. In fact, the funeral director kept talking about how some coffins had gaskets and how others did not. He was really pushing the gasket thing pretty hard, I think for the same reason as the vault: to scare people into thinking of their loved one decomposing. Well guess what? We all decompose. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. You’re going to be rotting in the ground regardless, and all this bullshit they try and sell you does nothing but prevent the former husk of your loved one from doing what it does naturally. You’ll never see them like that, so why do you even give a fuck? Are you concerned that they’ll check out the digs you bought for them if they come back in spirit form? Why the fuck would they do that? They could haunt themselves up season tickets for the Ravens and the Orioles. They could haunt themselves up a nice little spot in a strip club. They could haunt themselves up a seat in a movie theater. Why would they want to bother seeing the nonsensical shit you bought for them? They are dead! It doesn’t matter what they liked, or what they hated. They’ll never see any of it.

Finally we came to all the small details nonsense that still managed to cost an arm and a leg. A bouquet to go on top of the coffin? $200. A book for people to sign with their name and address? $40. Prayer cards? $80 for 200. And while I’m on the topic of prayer cards, what the hell are they all about? They’re like funeral trading cards. I really don’t understand why people take these things, and I REALLY don’t understand why they take 3 or 4 at a time. It’s just a card with a name, two dates, and a prayer on it. You can make your own for free, AND you can pick your own prayer! I tried to push for only getting 100, but my uncle insisted we get at least 200. I’m glad they only went that high. I can just imagine a box of 500.

My grandmother is still learning of the loss of her husband, hundreds of times every day. Fuck anyone who would dare spin that into a good thing. Comments are back on.

*Here’s Penn and Teller’s evaluation of the death industry on Bullshit. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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