Dr Copa

From what I’ve been hearing, the average American is now suffering from bad credit and is being bombarded with offers from credit repair services.  These offers give the impression that all that is needed for credit repair is to sign up for their program, and with a wave of a magic wand the bad credit will disappear.

I think it is very sad because credit repair information is something that should clearly state that if someone has bad credit because they have missed payments on a loan, that these services will not magically repair their credit!  What these services basically provide is information about how you can get a copy of your credit report and dispute anything on the report that might be in error.  If all of the information on your credit report is correct, and your credit is still bad, then these services cannot help you!  What we need to do is to figure out how to pay off those debts so that our credit will improve over time.  Just as with fixing the nation’s economy will not happen quickly, neither will getting out of personal debt.  The sooner we realize that and deal with it, the better off we will all be.

Have you noticed that when you call a large company that you almost never get a real live person quickly?  I recently was calling my health insurance company to try to get information about some of the claims that they should have received and processed.  I found that instead of the traditional “press 1, press 2″ prompts that I’ve become accustomed to, I was getting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. 

My ivr customer experience was frustrating in this case because the machine could not recognize what I was saying.  I think that I speak English perfectly well, but my wife says that I have a pretty thick New England accent.  Very aggravating if you are supposed to speak answers into the phone and the machine on the other end keeps replying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your answer.  Please repeat…..”  I got frustrated and handed the phone to my wife, who does NOT have a New England accent.   She even found herself having to repeat her answers several times for the doggone thing to go through!  I think there are some improvements to be made in this kind of system!

A more exciting advance in self service technologies is the voice recognition biometric technology.  This type of technology is used in security situations – it is like taking fingerprints of your voice.  I think this will be a great tool in the area of banking and law enforcement!  This can help law enforcement track down suspects who have gone so far as to go through plastic surgery to change their appearance!

Recently my wife went into the basement to scrounge around. I don’t really know why she went down there in the first place, but she brought up an old box full of doo-dads. I think these were items that she got as hand-me-down trinkets from her father many years ago. Included in this box were a lot of 1896 Sweet Corporal cigarette buttons with flags from different countries on them. We think that they are probably worth a few dollars, and I’ve been trying to figure out some kind of worth by “googling” them, but I am not having much luck at all. Very discouraging!

The other day my wife asked her friends where she could go to get her diamond ring cleaned for free. Where we used to live in New England, she would get it cleaned for free at the local jewelry store. They all laughed at her! They said that NO jeweler in town would clean her ring for FREE! After the laughter died down, they started talking about the different jewelers in the area, and how much they charged to clean jewelry. Then one of them said “Well, you know, the Warrenton Jewelers store might clean it for free, why don’t you try them?”

So today my wife was running errands in town and she swung past the Warrenton Jewelers store. She went inside and asked the very nice woman (who she later learned is named Jackie) who greeted her “How much does it cost to have my engagement ring cleaned?” Jackie joked “A million dollars!”

Well, my wife KNEW (or at least feverently hoped) she was joking so she slid it off of her finger and handed it to her. Jackie looked at it and said “give me a moment, I’ll clean it for you.”

My wife looked around the store (and fell in love with their beautiful rainbow sapphire jewelry) and before she knew it, Jackie was handing her ring back to her. They chatted for a few minutes about personal stuff (kids, jobs, power outages, being new to the area. My wife learned that Warrenton Jewelers only opened in town last October.) When my wife asked how much she owed for the ring being cleaned, Jackie said “no charge.” Well, my wife was thrilled about that!

So, Warrenton Jewelers, thank you for cleaning her ring for free, and welcome to the area! I hope you do well. We’ll be back.

My elderly mother lives alone.  She is an independent woman, but I worry about her.  More than once I’ve heard about how she’s fallen out of bed, or tripped and fell on her way from the living room to the kitchen.  She really should have someone living with her!  But she won’t hear of it; unless it is a family member, such as myself.  Well, there are times I think my wife would be more than happy to let me move back home with my mother, but I really don’t have any plans to do that! 

I do think it would be a good idea for me to have a talk with my sister and mother about subscribing to the Life Alert service.  Unlike the standard alarm system where the client wears a panic button that they push if they fall down or need help, the Life Alert system also has a fall detection sensor.  If the client falls down, the alarm is triggered.  This system would bring great peace of mind to many people; I know one of my greatest worries is that my mother might fall down and lie in pain for hours, or even days before anyone finds her!