April Fool's Day jokes from Dilbert creator Scott Adams

Some good stuff, but I'm amazed at how many people submitted the "desktop wallpaper snapshot" and "remove mouse ball" pranks.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/april_fools_jok.html

My March: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

March was a very good month for me. Three very good things happened, and one sucky thing. I’ll get to the last later.

First, I GOT A JOB! (but most of you know this) It starts Monday, and I’m really looking forward to it. The money will certainly be good and allow us to start getting rid of debt, but it’s more important to me from a psychological standpoint. It’s really easy to begin to doubt your skills when you’ve been out of your field for five years. I know I had great skills when it came to wrangling SQL Servers, but not being able to find a good job for so long takes its toll. So I’m glad this long, dry stretch is over. I still have to survive a year of probation, but that shouldn’t be a problem. As Deb said, I get to reboot my career!

And now that I’ll be living in Las Cruces, I’ll be able to attend the full university and finally get a Bachelor’s degree. So hopefully I won’t have any problems with getting a job in the future – I lost out on a lot of jobs by not having a degree! I'm not looking forward to spending so much time away from my wife, but we anticipated something like this happening early on when we started dating.


The second spiffy thing is that I SOLD MY CONDO! It doesn’t close until mid/late June, but that’s OK. The closing will kill my credit card debt, which really isn’t too terrible now that the job in ‘Cruces is starting up, and it’ll also get me a spiffy new 15” Mac laptop! Oh, it’ll also get my wife a spiffy new Mac laptop, but I’m in much more dire need of a replacement for my increasingly decrepit Thinkpad.


The third spiffy thing is I NO LONGER HAVE THE SHAKES! I think most of you knew that I was having a problem with largely uncontrollable shakes in my left arm and my upper torso. Well, all gone! To give a little history, this started four years ago or so. It was pretty mild at the time, and seemed linked to illness. I’d get a cold, I’d get the shakes. The cold would clear, so would the shakes. They got increasingly bad in early 2005, and as I then had health insurance, I started pursuing the source of it more earnestly.

I went to a neurologist. He eliminated Parkinson’s and some other diseases and declared that I had Essential Tremors. ET is a diagnosis by elimination: I don’t have this, I don’t have that, therefore I have ET. I had three MRIs, all that did was cost me a lot of money and prove that I didn’t have a tumor.

The shakes were now almost constant, though varying in severity.

At the end of January I caught a cold that became annoyingly persistent. I scheduled a physical for late February as I hadn’t had one in almost two years, and that was to include a full blood workup: I was assuming that the cold would be long gone by then. The cold became a sinus infection for which I got antibiotics and it slowly began improving. So I got the blood draw done before going to Phoenix in February for the Ren Fest. Late February was to be the physical, but I hadn’t fully recovered from the sinus infection. I kept the appointment so that I’d at least have a consult, amongst other things we discussed my shakes. We planned out a strategy to see if we could get to the bottom of this, having previously agreed that doing a physical wasn’t practical since I still was clearing the sinus infection out of my system.

Then as we were getting ready to call an end to the appointment, I asked if we could go over my blood work since it would largely be unaffected by my sinus infection. We started going over it and pretty much all the numbers were good. I usually have a disgustingly-low cholesterol, but it went up from 110 to 135. *sigh*

ANYWAY, something caught my doctor’s eye: calcium. He said that there’s a condition called something that I don’t remember that is caused by too much calcium and is characterized by… you guessed it… the shakes. At the time I was taking a multi-vitamin that supplied 5% of the USRDA of calcium. I was also taking a calcium/magnesium/zinc supplement in the hopes of staving off colds. It provided 100% USRDA of calcium. So I was taking 105% USRDA of calcium.

That was Thursday afternoon. That morning was the last cal/mag/zinc pill that I took. Friday I took the multi and that was it. And the shakes stopped that day.

I have now been shake-free for just over a month, and I can’t tell you how much of a relief it has been. I did not know how much it was weighing me down psychologically, but the load must have been huge, because I brightened up tremendously after they stopped. And this was before I got the job in Las Cruces, so I know how much of a change it was!


So the bad.... last Friday I was served with a lawsuit!

Most people know about home owner’s associations. They charge everyone a fixed monthly fee to pay for garbage collection, landscaping, keeping the roofs from leaking, etc. In the case of my condo’s HOA, they also pay for water and sewer. Well, I haven’t had a good income for a few years now and thus have not been able to pay my HOA assessments. Fortunately I’m a friend of the president and another board member. They understand my situation and know that I won’t stiff them. I had a written payment proposal on file, approved by the board, saying that I’ll pay when I can.

End of January I received a demand letter from the HOA’s attorneys. It basically said "pay up, submit a payment plan, or get sued." It gave 30 days to send in a reply. Before the deadline was up, I wrote up a letter saying that I’m still woefully unemployed (I had not been offered the job in 'Cruces yet, in fact, I thought I’d not done very well in the initial interview) but I’ll be paying $150 in March and that amount will increase to $200 in June. I sent the letter to the attorneys and a CC to the HOA board. Here I made a big mistake – I did not send the letter registered. And I did make a payment in March of $150.

So Friday I get served. I’m at my condo, Michelle’s in the bathroom, we’re going to work on my taxes. A knock at the door, I assume it’s Jerry or Mary and that they saw me walk in and came over to say hi. It’s not, it’s a process server, and I’ve been hit with a lawsuit. The attorneys went ahead and filed on me without getting approval from the HOA board.

The normal procedure for the board to collect on people who are way past due on their assessments is as follows. 1. Attorneys send a demand letter. 2. Person responds or doesn’t. 3. Attorneys meet with the board and say "this guy responded, this guy didn’t", etc. The board then decides what the attorneys should do. Normally, if the demand letter isn’t answered, a second demand letter is sent with dire threats. If that one isn’t answered, a law suit is filed to collect the monies owed. BTW, each demand letter is a charge to the owner’s account of $100.

Well, as previously stated, the attorneys went ahead and filed without checking with the board. Had they checked with the board, the board would have said "NO, don’t file against Wayne." Subsequent communications between Jerry (president of the HOA) and the attorneys reveals that (a) the attorneys claim that they did not receive my response, which is interesting in that the HOA received their copy, and (b) that even though there are other people sent demand letters who owed more money than I did and did not respond, I AM THE ONLY ONE THEY FILED AGAINST.

Also, if the attorneys had checked with the board and claimed that they hadn’t received my response, the board could have shown them their copy.


Here’s the deal. In AZ, if you’re served with a summons, you MUST reply in 20 days or you risk a summary judgment against you. So instead of leaving for home Monday, I spend it typing up and printing out a response to the case and going downtown to file it. BTW, there’s also a $24 filing fee. I knew Jerry would have the attorneys withdraw the case, but since they’d filed it without checking with the board, there was no way I could be confident that they would withdraw it in time. I had no choice but to file a response simply to cover my ass.

Part of the responding process is that you must serve your response to the plaintiff’s attorneys. Fortunately registered mail is sufficient for this. So my response was mailed Monday, I checked online and it was delivered Tuesday. Apparently on Tuesday the attorneys canceled the case and mailed copies of the withdrawal sent to the condo.


The case has now been withdrawn, though I haven’t personally seen the notice. Now I need to make sure that the case is purged from my records so that I don’t have to explain every time that I fill out a form that says "have you ever been sued or sued anyone".

Now my big question is whether or not to sue the attorneys in small claims court for harassment. I’m definitely going to file a complaint with the Arizona Bar Association over this matter.


So now I’m shake-free, I’ve got a good job starting in three days, and I’ll be rid of my personal debt in less than three months. The damn lawsuit is withdrawn. And I love my wife and she loves me.

Life is sometimes good. Maybe the universe decided that I had earned enough Good Doobie points that it was time for something good to happen to me. I’m really appreciative if that’s the case.