One year later I had long since contacted all debt holders and no one unknown had shown up to ask for money, so I felt it was okay to close the account so the bank could have a clean end to the fiscal year.

As part of my efforts to establish my credit worth, and hopefully buy my home of 20+ years, I have been working with a lady at a credit recovery place to assure I’ve not missed any unknown debt of my own lurking out there from trips to the emergency clinic and such. Today I called her and talked to her and she asked if I knew _________. That gave me a moment of pause, after some discussion about things she could not discuss but could only say “I can’t say anything” she referred me to another number and to talk to a specific someone in that law firm.

Okay, I immediately call the law firm and state what I am calling about and give the coded number that the other lady had given me. The lady at the law firm is totally confused for why it is even an issue since the debt is over 14 years old, well past statute of limitations, and was marked as being canceled and closed because the person in question is deceased. She marked it “canceled and closed” again, zeroed it out and said not to worry, that she would make sure it was all cleared up and I no longer need to concern myself with the issue.

I thanked her profusely and she emailed the other lady, who I called back to let know what the law firm had said. I was again assured that it was all taken care of and cleared up and not to worry about it anymore.

End result, after multiple calls this morning, is that the debt was canceled out and closed 14 years ago and should not have been showing up as a debt anywhere. I have to wonder just how many more false active debts there are floating about out there in people’s credit files mucking up the system.

But what actually happened and why?

Throughout Wednesday, January 18th, there was a coordinated effort on the Internet to display, in an exceptionally visual manner, what the Internet could look like if bills such as SOPA and PIPA were to be passed in Congress. At the heart of the Internet strike was freedom of the Internet. One of the most notable effects of the strike was the complete blackout staged by Wikipedia. Other sites, such as Google, simply placed a blackout bar across their name and allowed users to continue to make use of the site’s services.

So why the huge protest? SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are trying to do good things, the problem is that they are trying to do good by doing a lot of possible harm.

SOPA is more formally known as “H.R.3261 — Stop Online Piracy Act”. You can find it on THOMAS, or check H.R. 3261 – Stop Online Privacy Act which is where I located it as of the time I am writing this, or the THOMAS entry for SOPA at the thomas.loc.gov website.

The first thing you see under the heading of the bill is the mission statement of the bill:

“To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by
combating  the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.”

The first thing I have to think is – what other purposes?

The Stop Online Piracy Act, hereafter referred to as SOPA, was introduced in the House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 by Mr. Smith of Texas for himself, Mr. Conyers, Mr. Goodlatte, Mr. Berman, Mr. Griffin of Arkansas, Mr. Gallegly, Mr. Deutch, Mr. Chabot, Mr. Ross of Florida, Mrs. Blackburn, Mrs. Bono Mack, Mr. Terry and Mr. Schiff.

What concerns manyof those who oppose the bill is the manner in which SOPA seeks to stop online piracy. It is a long bill, so I will pinpoint areas I have seen that others have discussed, however, I encourage you to please read the bill for yourself.

I will be referring to the H.R. 3261 – Stop Online Privacy Act link in the following points:

Page 10.1 —-

Sec. 102 Action by Attorney General to protect U.S. customers
and prevent U.S. support of foreign infringing sites.

Sounds okay, right? I mean, we want our government to protect us, right? And they do have a few pages there that discuss how they find the owner of sites and order them to stop doing what they do not like. Then we get down to page 13, lines 21-25, and page 14, lines 1-10:

(i) IN GENERAL. — A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

Move on down to page 15, lines 11-20, and we have…

B) INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES.—A provider of an Internet search engine shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order, designed to prevent the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order, or a portion of such site specified in the order, from being served as a direct hypertext link.

Now it is possible that your favorite picture site will be compliant and remove all images that infringe on any copyrights, but if they don’t then the entire site is likely to be blocked by search engines so you can’t find them via a search engine anymore. And, even if you do have them bookmarked or the URL memorized so do not see why them no longer showing up on a search engine is a bad thing, page 15 line 21 kicks off another reason why you should be worried about SOPA.

That is where they specify that if you pay to use the legal parts of a website that has illegal content on it, that your payment network can still block you from making subscription payments to that service.  Ending your ability to subscribe to it from within the United States.

What is of concern to manyis that by providing any sort of service where persons can communicate (think about your favorite forum or social networking site), or post content for others to download (think about your favorite file or document or image sharing site), the site owner can be held liable if their site is used for illegal purposes. Not the entire site, if just a portion of it is used for illegal purposes.

It is good to have someone make sure that your site is are not being abused or used for pirating, but as SOPA stands now, I would have to completely close my sites to comments (including my forums) so I could read EVERY comment before it was posted or I would face a $2,000,000 fine and prison time. For multiple cases a $5,000,000 fine. (And note that the same bill has $5,000,000 as the fine levied for someone that intentionally causes harm or death to someone or who shares military or government secrets – WHY is murder and treason comparable in fine to sharing two songs online????? Shouldn’t murder and treason be a bit more serious than an artist losing the sale of a .99 cent song???)

If I just leave my sites (as I have been known to do – a LOT), and someone posts links to where a movie can be downloaded (which BOTs do, a LOT), then under the SOPA bill I am held liable and fined multiple millions of dollars, plus whatever the entertainment industry decides to fine me for their lost income.

I’m in the US, and as far as I know all of my sites are too, but if a site is not in the US, and the site owner is not in the US to be dealt with personally by the laws of the US, then the Attorney General can order search engines to block your ability to see the site. (Section 102(c)(2)(B) as indicated in excerpt above – (Page 15, Lines 11-20)) That means the Attorney General decides to black out sections of the online world to US citizens. For their own good of course.

The scary part is, we, the people of the United States, would be giving our government the right to decided what sites need blocked from us. How easily could that power be abused?

And that is just part of what makes SOPA scary. I can’t go into full details in this post, so for a very good look at just what SOPA would mean, check out Why SOPA Is Dangerous byChris Held over at Mashable. He breaks it down into easily understandable language, but you still owe it to yourself to read the full bill and see just what it has to say for itself.

This post is VERY long, so I am going to break this discussion into a series of posts. Tomorrow I will tackle the next part of it: the Internet Strike and what happened with websites all across the Internet going dark for a day. I think if you read SOPA between now and then, you will understand why the sites felt it was necessary before I can get that post made, but come back anyway, I have some pictures of some of my favorites that I will share in tomorrow’s post. Then tomorrow or Monday I will get to why the Justice Department took down Megaupload and what you should know about Anonymous’ strike back, and why everything might have just been poorly timed events that snowballed to create the chaos it did.

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.

Armed with the information I just spent the past three hours looking into, and given a few calculations on what I would be getting into if I went for a nursing degree, I have decided that it would be best for me to hold off on college for a few more months. In that time, I am going to make some calls to some folks in the field of work I want to get into, and take a few courses offered by them over the next few months that would have conflicted with college stuff if I was in college. By the time it is time to apply for college in the spring, I will be far better armed as far as knowing what I actually need, and will not waste $5,000 and a dozen credits going after a degree I might not even need for what I want to do, and if I hold off, I could still get an AAS in Human Services, which I think meshes much better with my goals, by the spring of 2014 if I want to go for it. I could likely get an AA and an AAS in Human Services by 2015, since so many of the required classes overlap.

Right now, however, I have canceled the placement test I had been going to take tomorrow – which would have cost me $15 and $10 in gas to take a test that I am not going to be needing after all – at least not until the Spring semester.

I still fully intend to get into caregiving, or rather to continue working in the caregiver field, I just am not going to jump so fast into a degree program that I might not even need. No sense in dropping myself $20,000 into debt in the next two and a half years if I don’t have to to get to where I want to be, right?