Well, I didn't learn about the "poison pill" until I got home last night. That's the language in the state House's version of the pay raise repeal --- inserted either through incompetence or on purpose --- that could torpedo the entire thing.
Was I angry? No. Bears get angry when you poke them with a stick. Hornets get angry when you knock down their nest. I wasn't angry. I was in a white-hot furious rage.
I felt like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction: "I'm Superfly T.N.T., I'm The Guns of the Navarone, I'm a mushroom-cloud-layin' mother- ... "
(Ahem.) Well, you get the idea. I was sore.
What in the name of Samuel W. Pennypacker is wrong with these clowns? From the Harrisburg Patriot-News:
Despite the differences, many lawmakers insisted yesterday that this is not a charade intended to let them tell constituents they had voted to repeal the raise, while keeping it on a technicality.
"I am not that cynical," said Rep. Kate Harper, R-Montgomery. "I intended to repeal the pay raise, and I believe everybody did."
Rep. H. William DeWeese, who cast one of just two votes against rescinding the raises, said in a news release that he hopes those people who disagree with his vote "will recognize that I was consistent.
"I believe that it was the only honorable thing for me to do." DeWeese, D-Waynesburg, stated in the Thursday release.
Am I supposed to get all warm and runny over the fact that the Pennsylvania General Assembly gave back the pay raises that they shouldn't have given themselves in the first place?
Let no one lose sight of the fact that those state senators (in the Mon Valley, Jay Costa) and representatives (Paul Costa, Joe Markosek and Ken Ruffing) who voted for the pay raise --- and who have now voted to repeal it --- didn't change their minds because of an attack of conscience.
They only decided to give back the money because they got caught.
As villagers prepared effigies, boiled oil and sharpened the tines on their pitchforks, the brothers Costa, Mssrs. Ruffing and Markosek, and all of their cronies heard the rumblings of mutiny and said, "You know, maybe we can get by on $70,000 per year after all."
I don't call that altruism. I call it "saving their own hides," and I say, to hell with it.
I can almost admire the only two people in the Legislature to vote against repealing the pay raise --- Reps. Bill DeWeese and Mike Veon --- for their honesty.
Many of their colleagues wanted to stick it to the taxpayers as long as they could get away with it, but chickened out at the last minute. DeWeese and Veon stood up proudly, wrapped themselves in the Pennsylvania state flag, and defiantly gave their constituents the bird. Bully for them.
I'm a simple guy. So allow me to make a simple analogy: You have a small business and catch one of your employees stealing from the till. You confront them with their dishonesty, fire them, and threaten to call the police if they don't give the money back. They hand over the loot. Would you then re-hire them?
Of course not. Personally, I'd have a difficult time ever trusting them again.
Many, but not all, of our state legislators got caught with their hands in the state cookie jar. (It's worth noting that Mon-Yough reps Jim Casorio, Marc Gergely, David Levdansky and Harry Readshaw, along with senators Wayne Fontana, Sean Logan and Bob Regola didn't vote for the pay raise, and several of them were punished as a result.)
So, do you want to re-hire them when they're up for re-election?
I sure don't.
Besides, have you heard so much as an apology out of anyone? "Gee, I voted for the pay raise, but I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. We should be satisfied with our already ample paychecks."
Well, there haven't been many (or any) apologies because they're not sorry. And many of those legislators who voted to repeal the raise are mumbling that they only cast their votes because the "process" used to enact the raise was wrong.
In other words, they still think they deserve the money, and no one is ruling out trying to pass another pay raise in the near future.
If they voted for the pay raise in the first place, throw 'em out. The fact that they voted to do the right thing now --- at the point of a gun --- shouldn't make us forget what they did wrong in the first place.
Don't let them play you for a sap. Educate yourself. If you don't know who your legislators are, for goodness sake, find out. And find out if they voted for the pay raise.
Sure, they'll try to bribe you with cheap trinkets before their next re-election campaign --- jar openers and emery boards --- or try to impress you with constituent services (like driver's license forms) that they're required to offer anyway. Don't be fooled.
Because while they're handing you a free state highway map with one hand, they're picking your pocket with the other. And is a free map worth $100,000 a year to you? Personally, I'd just as soon join the AAA.
...
Meantime, guess who attended the official state dinner at the White House held in honor of HRH Prince Charles? None other than "Mr. Lynn C. Swann, Commentator, ABC Sports Collegiate Football," and his wife.
If I'm Bill Scranton III, I'm jumping up and down on my hat and cursing right now. I get this sense that the Republican National Committee has tapped Swann as their chosen candidate to go up against Ed Rendell next year.
...
On a happier note: Join Vince Sims of WPXI-TV and Dr. Curtiss Porter, president of Penn State McKeesport Campus, at a book sale tonight at the Westinghouse Recreation Center, Greensburg Pike in Forest Hills. Proceeds benefit the Carnegie Library of Braddock, which is in urgent need of your support. Numerous local authors will be there with signed copies of their work, and new and used books by other authors will also be on sale.
I have long advocated supporting small, local businesses instead of big, national chains, even if it cost me some extra money, and even when I've been mocked by friends and family. Call me old fashioned, but I agree with what Garrison Keillor wrote in Lake Wobegon Days: You might like the Calvin Klein jeans you bought at the mall, but Calvin is not going to come with the rescue squad when your house catches fire. The guy who owns the store in town might.
So I buy groceries at the supermarket down the street --- the one my friend Dan calls "The House of Rancid Lunchmeat" --- even though I know I could probably save 10 or 20 percent and find a better selection at one of the two Wal-Marts near me. (The cost might be my eternal soul.)
That said, I went over to the dark side of the force yesterday. After two years with an independent telephone company, I'm dumping them for the biggest, baddest monopoly of them all, Verizon. (If they're not the Dark Side of the Force, then why is James Earl "Darth Vader" Jones their spokesman?)
I'm not going to mention which phone company I had, except that they aren't far from Our Fair City and they bill themselves as a "hometown phone company." Well, that may be true if your hometown is Amityville, because their service (at least in my experience) has been one horror show after another.
Call the company's office to ask a question, and you spent several minutes punching through various voice mail options, only to learn that the person you needed to talk to had gone home for the day. If you actually reached a human being, after numerous attempts, they either didn't know the answer or cheerfully gave you the wrong answer.
...
Yes, cheerful. The one thing they've had going for them, despite their incompetence, has been their relentless niceness. Oh, sure, they couldn't provide service that would have been acceptable in a third-world country, but they were very friendly about it.
When I moved last year, I called several days ahead of time to make sure the telephone was hooked up at the new house. A nice lady --- I'll call her "Barbara" --- took the information and assured me that two days later, they'd disconnect service at the old address and connect it at the new address.
Three days later, a repairman was nowhere in sight. I called the phone company: "We don't have anyone named Barbara here," said "Susan." Well, could I put in the order with Susan? No, I could not. Susan would have to have Bonnie call me back. Bonnie assured me that, absolutely, positively, they could move the phone line two days hence.
Two days hence, they disconnected the old phone, all right. But they didn't connect it at the new place.
Called back. Talked to Tracey, who said they didn't have a "Susan" or a "Bonnie," but they'd surely connect me by the end of the week. Will there be a message on my old number, saying that I'd moved? Sure, Tracey said, full of sunshine and chipperness.
Yep, the phone worked the next day. But people started calling me at work: What happened? When they called my old number, it said it had been disconnected, and no further information was available. So I called "Tracey." If you've read this far, you know what happened next. "John" said they didn't have a "Tracey" there, and there was no work order on my account asking for a re-direct message on my old number. Couldn't they do it now? Nope, said John, full of apologies. It was too late.
For this "service," I paid $65 to have my phone line moved from one address to another.
...
Even the simplest task seemed to be beyond their ken. Take ordering phone books. That's a pretty simple job, I think. You call up the phone company, ask for a phone book, and they mail it to you. At this phone company, I called the office, navigated 47 layers of voice mail, and reached "Bob," who happily took the information, wrote it down onto a piece of paper, hung up the phone, and then went out to the hallway, where he turned my order into a goddamned paper airplane and sailed it out into the lobby.
The final straw came this summer. I arrived home and found the message light blinking on the answering machine, but when I played back the messages, all I got was a nasty humming sound. I figured the answering machine had died, until I picked up the telephone, and heard the same nasty buzzsaw noise on the receiver. So I unplugged all of my phones and went outside to the telephone network interface box, where I disconnected my wires and plugged the phone directly into the company's wiring: The noise was on their line.
The noise vanished that night. Then it came back. Then it vanished. And then a few days later, I lost all service --- no dial tone, no nothing, except some static.
...
I called the phone company. "Joe" at repair service assured me that a repairman would be out the next day. Three days later, I had dial tone, and I was perfectly happy until a bill arrived at the end of the week for $155. I called the phone company in a white-hot fury. "Our repairman didn't find any trouble when he got there," "Hank" said. "So you were billed for an unfounded trouble call. The problem must be in your home wiring."
"The problem is not in my home wiring," I said. "When I unplug my wiring from your network, and listen to your lines, the noise is still there. How do you explain that?"
"Well, it certainly sounds like it's in our network, then," he said. Would he take the charge off of my bill? No, he would not.
The following day, the buzzsaw noise returned, and it's been more or less a constant presence ever since. It's a lot of fun, and very professional, when your boss calls the house and you get to scream back and forth over what sounds like a B-29 revving its engines in the background.
The company's repair service very sweetly said they'd investigate ... for another $155. Maybe, they suggested, I could keep a record of when the problem occurred? That would help them track down the source. So, I started taping the interference, in preparation for filing a complaint against them with the FCC, the state Public Utility Commission, and anyone else who would listen, up to and including the Department of Agriculture.
Then I called my "hometown phone company" ... only to learn that they'd sold my account to another provider in Philadelphia.
...
Well, that was it. I put up with this for more than two years because this was a local company, but if they weren't local any more, either, then screw them. I began investigating other options for local phone service. You know, Pennsylvanians have a choice now for their local utilities.
I started by visiting the state's website, utilitychoice.org, only to find that the state let the domain name expire, and it's been taken over by someone else. Another website, operated by the PUC, is full of dead links and incorrect information. (One company I called said they offered Internet service, but not phone. Another said they never offered service in Allegheny County. Several have gone out of business.)
I also called the biggest independent phone company in the Pittsburgh area, whose name will not be mentioned here, either. Despite the fact that their service map clearly shows that they operate in the Mon-Yough area, the salesperson couldn't seem to locate my address in her computer. She's "checking" on the problem. I expect she still will be several days from now, but they've lost a sale in the meantime.
You call this utility choice? Some choice! I say "ptui" to these choices. Yes, the other phone company was cheaper than Verizon, but my phone only worked about 50 percent of the time, and my bill sure wasn't 50 percent cheaper.
By comparison, Verizon was a breeze to deal with --- frankly, they always have been, in my experience, dating back to the Bell Telephone days. They're charging me $12 to switch my service, not the $65 my other company charged. They even caught me in a weak moment and asked if I wanted DSL service ... I didn't, but they offered it to me for $7 less than I'm paying for my current dial-up connection. And they're sending a free DSL modem.
I guess I'm giving up my current Internet provider, which I've had since 1997, and which I've been largely happy with over the past three years. (I wasn't always happy under their previous ownership.) The company is Winbeam in Greensburg, and I would not hesitate to recommend them.
...
So, I'm hooked back up to the Death Star, starting tomorrow. Hopefully, the problems will go away --- or if they don't, at least, perhaps, someone with an IQ above room temperature will be handling them. I don't mind if they're evil, so long as I can actually complete an intelligible telephone call (making my calls sound intelli-gent is probably beyond even the abilities of George Lucas).
And if it means I've betrayed my principles, well, feel free to call me up and complain. At least I'll be able to hear you.
You are on an archived page of Tube City Almanac.
Click the banner to return to the front page; or click here to visit Tube City Online.
Published weekdays (usually), except holidays (and when we have something better to do) at McKeesport, Pa., by Tube City Online LLC, P.O. Box 94, McKeesport, Pa. 15134.
Opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors, and do not necessarily represent those of any organization. No warranty is given or implied for the information and opinions contained herein; the reader uses that information at his or her peril.
Except where noted, all contents are copyright © 2003-2008 Tube City Online LLC, a limited-liability company chartered in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. No content from Tube City Online may be reproduced in whole or part in any digital or print publication without express permission, except that short excerpts may be used with attribution in commentary or for critical purposes.
Tube City Online is edited by Jason Togyer, member National Writers Union, Society of Professional Journalists, American Radio Relay League and National Radio Club.
Also, objects in Tube City Online may be closer than they appear. If Tube City Online is swallowed, seek professional help immediately. Stop use of Tube City Online if condition persists or worsens. Tube City Online is produced in a facility that also includes Peanuts. Do not expose Tube City Online to open flames and keep it out of the reach of children. Do not back up, as severe tire damage may result. Not responsible for lost or stolen articles. Tube City Online is still not a significant source of saturated fats or Minnesota Fats.
