The first month, payment time on the dryer approaches and I get a call to remind me to come in and make a payment. Wait… what? No. I am not the one that got the dryer, someone ELSE rented it I should not even be on that contract. What happened? I got it sorted out – until the next month, when I was called again. I keep trying to sort it out, and so does the person that has the dryer, but Rent A Center does not comprehend that I am not the person who rented the dryer.

They just called me again.

Me: Hello?

Her: This is ___ at Rent A Center, this is just a courtesy call to remind you that you need to make a payment on the dryer.

Me: …. what dryer?

Her: You rented a dryer.

Me: No, I did not, ____ rented a dryer, not me. You should call them.

Her: Oh.

Me: What number do you have there?

She rattled off my number and said it was marked as “Courtesy call.” And another number and said it was marked as “Courtesy call.” Then she read off a third one, the right number.

Me: And what is that one marked as?

Her: Call about dryer.

Me: That is the number you should call.

Why can they not comprehend the basic detail that I am NOT the person that rented the dryer, it was someone ELSE. Both me and that person have asked, on multiple occasions, for them to call the person who rented the dryer, to list that person as the number one contact about the dryer, but the local store can not do that. I’ve even talked to the manager and explained the situation to him and asked him to please fix it – but he can’t seem to correct the referrer being listed as the renter.

I don’t get my free rental time as a referrer and instead I have to face the headache of having them calling me to talk about someone else’s rental. It is really starting to annoy me and tick me off. I’m not renting anything from them again, I’ll go to the other rental place in town and give them all of my business and future referrals.  Rent A Center just can not seem to understand my only part in the dryer was to ask if they had one and then hand the phone to someone else as a referring customer. I never signed anything or even saw the store people in person when the dryer was rented, and it was not delivered to my house, so they need to stop harassing me about it unless they can not contact the person who rented it. PLEASE, can they just try the other number first for ONCE?

First, the importance of knowing how to spell if you are going to be writing. Or at least using a spell checker, since most of the blatant errors I have been wading through were seriously blatant spelling errors.

Second, that someone can sue a third party for “loss of marital consortium”. …… yeah, I was stopped short when I read that. I had to go look it up, because surely it can’t mean what it looks like, right? Well… LexisNexis, the Iowa Law Review, defines it thus:

…. Loss of consortium is an action that has existed in various forms for centuries. ¹ At early common law, only a husband was able to bring a consortium action for the loss of his wife’s marital services. …..

…. The modern action for loss of consortium permits either spouse to sue for loss of the other’s love, society, affection, or sexual relations ….

So, uhh, yeah. It really does mean that a man can sue someone who he feels has caused his wife to stop performing her ‘wifely duties’.

Third, I just wasted a lot of sleep time that I will never get back, and the end result is being left wanting to speak up about someone that has in a roundabout manner dragged me into something I have no time or actual desire to be involved in. But tell me, how exactly does someone easily ignore having it implied that they are unethical?  How does someone ignore it when a person brings up their deceased mother and insinuates that she was a bad mother in how she raised her children, in how I was taught? How does one ignore insinuations by someone that never knew them or their parents that they were neglected as a child?

I don’t know. I have been trying to think for a while now if I should respond to the insinuations that were made about me, but I think I will try to leave that to others to respond to for at least a few more days. I will raise one question, however, since it is still puzzling me.

The person who made a not-so-round-about attack on my character and ethical position as an Internet Journalist, brought up something about Click Fraud. They outright accused someone else (not connected to my family) of having performed click fraud – which means boosting the number of clicks on something such as Google AdSense ads. Now the way they explained it was that someone had claimed to have clicked on someone else’s ads to make money… I have been an AdSense participant for many years, and I will tell you that in my understanding of the program, you can not go to someone else’s website and make money by clicking on the ads on that other person’s website. That person would make the money. So… how can the person in question that is insinuating click fraud seriously accuse someone else of making money by clicking on the accuser’s ads? I don’t understand that. And it is confusing enough that I apologize for the headache I likely just gave you trying to puzzle it through. I’ll go ask people in the Internet Advertisement Copywriting community.

I am going to go get an aspirin for the headache I have after the last seven hours of reading through posts that were attacks on myself via attacking my family, then get some much needed sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day, and I already lost far too much work time to trying to sort out what I had missed by not following what was being said about my family until last night. I’m still wanting to respond directly to the negative insinuations made about my ethical character, and the attacks that were levied against my mom. Instead, I will go get some sleep, and calm myself down, and yes, if you know my number, or instant messenger information, you can call and get all the details I am not posting here – just… wait until afternoon, please?

Oh, and, for the record. My name is Sandra Fikes. And yes, I do make money via my websites and blogs, and if I decide that the issue is worth my time I will be discussing it on a website that supports itself with advertising. I was quite content to ignore the situation, and would not even have bothered to read up about it for at least another month or two, had the person in question not made it a point to drag me into things, insinuated I am unethical, and made provably untrue and slanderous insinuations about my parents.

A lot of the time I had not even realized what I was feeling was depression, I just had no desire to really do anything more than I needed to do in any given day and pushed people away from me. Dark parts of my mind whispered that they hated me, that no one wanted to be around me, and in my depression I had no way to fight back – particularly when I am in a continual battle to not hide away from everyone and live my life inside my house. Yes, I hide it fairly well, but I am only a few panic attacks shy of being a shut-in. I steadfastly refuse to let myself become one, however, so even if it is just sitting on my porch to sip a cup of tea I make myself step outside when I find myself thinking that I could just live my life inside.

This inclination toward hermitage makes it very easy for me to listen when the voices say no one likes me, and that makes it rather hard to battle depression that leaves me feeling miserable and like my time would be better spent laying in bed than working. What is bad is that despite the fact that I knew that I was having issues with depression, have been battling it for years, I had not actually realized just how much it is affecting my work until I realized that I had not yet got my work back on track. I have been working, and making money at it, but when I step back and look at just how much I am making, it is just a bit over what the cost of my websites are. I am making enough that my sites are not costing me anything out of my own pocket (which is good since I can’t pay hosting companies with lint), but my sites are far from supporting me.

Part of that is my fault. No, it is entirely my fault. I let depression and feelings of low self-worth affect my ability to work. I allowed hackers to attack one of my websites when I was at the bottom of a depression and they left it in complete ruin. And yes, I do mean complete ruin. It was this website, which I am fairly certain has been blocked by a lot of search engines thanks to some bastard that hacked it and left some very vulgar and sexually explicit trash all over the site. I had not known anything was wrong with my own site until I hauled myself far enough above the depression clouds to start trying to work and realized that Google had banned the site from its advertising program.

My initial impulse was to ask them to reinstate the site, which I had torn down entirely and rebuilt from scratch, but then I decided that I should wait until I had rebuilt it some. And then the depression crept back in and I was left, once again, neglecting to get things done for I don’t know how long.

I am through with that. Or at least I am in a good enough mood today that I am telling myself I am through with it. I want to rebuild my sites, get them back up and moving along how they are supposed to be, and get back to working at a level that I am not only keeping my business from failing, but it is starting to turn enough of a profit to allow me to meet my bills once again.

So, I am going to start with a few websites that I have been managing to keep afloat, then expand outward from those once they are running smoothly. It is going to be a long slow rebuild, but I am determined that I am no longer going to allow depression to affect my work.

Yes, I am more than a little annoyed at that.

I did a lot of stripping down of the website and have started to just rebuild it from scratch. I hope to have it back up soon.

WTF? Another built in HP flaw?  I’m really starting to think HP’s are not put together right.  Gateway is looking better and better at the moment.  So, anyway, I was sitting here earlier tonight talking to a friend of mine and getting work done and the computer shut down *again*  No warning just POOF.  I tried a few times to turn it on, but only ever got as far as the Blue Screen of Death.  I gave up, finished talking to friend using lappy and worked on a holiday quilt for a while.

Tried the desktop again a few minutes ago to see if it was going to let me work and it won’t even make the monitor power up with a signal.  I don’t know what’s going on, but I think I’ll be asking Santa if he has anything left over for a new desktop computer from the rent-a-center.  Although I might aim for a $200 Wal Mart  special instead.  Less headaches I’m betting.  Anyway, I’m getting some work done on the Lappy, then getting some sleep.

Still ain’t had a chance to catch up on the writing course I am enrolled in.  ::::sigh::::

I had unlocked my wireless router for my sister to use while she was here a lot of the time back in September, and then never got around to relocking it because she was coming by off and on.  Apparently this month the neighbors somewhere nearby, or a kid on the back road, saw an open wireless connection and tapped into it.  I have my wireless security locked once again, but it was a nasty surprise to find out halfway through the month that I only had a half a gigabyte to get through the rest of the month when I usually average a bit over a gigabyte in that time frame.  I think I’ll make it, but I can’t watch YouTube or upload pictures to my blogs or all the other things I am so used to being able to get done in the month.  Shoot, even when I watch movies online and a few TV shows online I never went over 5 GB in a month.  This is just downright annoying.