Bad times

I spoke with a loan officer this morning. She had laid a demand on us for documentation and it sounded pretty serious. This was for a loan which was done last August, so there really hasn't been much time since it closed, but, nevertheless, she wanted her final documents.

So I had prepared the documents and readied them for delivery. At that point, neither Patti nor I could get through the automated phone service at the lender to get in touch with her. So I sat down at the telephone and started wading through the computerized messaging system until I finally could get to a human being, who, while he couldn't help me, could transfer me to another system which could lead me to another human being who could actually help me. Of course, I still had the voice mail system to leave a message for the person I needed to talk to.

Which, thankfully, got returned relatively quickly after that. At this point, I spoke with a nice lady in Texas and commiserated about the status of the economy and the sad prospects for recovery and the continuous rise in gasoline prices. We discussed the problems we have and how the situation doesn't seem to be getting any better.

It sometimes make you yearn for the common sense of a Ross Perot, who considered the ultimate product of NAFTA, which he opined would be an eventual drain of jobs to other countries. Everyone looked at Ross Perot and thought he was funny looking and funny talking and certainly no "Bill Clinton", who, in concert with the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, agreed to NAFTA and allowed tons of jobs to ultimately end up in Asia and Central and South America and a whole lot of people in America, living in a meaner, crueler world. And no one is doing anything because we recognize that we are in a global economy and the hard solution, posited by some like Newt Gingrich, is to upgrade your economy to service and science and forget the old manufacturing jobs we lost to time and evolution and NAFTA.

Add to that mix, the actions of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and his administration, with the basic consent of Congress, to wage war in Iraq, take control of Iraq, in a position that President Bush's father rejected because there seemed to be no practical way to extract us from Iraq if we decided to attempt to control Iraq. Now the prediction of the first President Bush has come true and we are mired in a messy situation which is too complicated for us to resolve, too ingrained in the topography of the Middle East to remove, too complex to bear a simple solution. And I am convinced that the attitude of the other Middle Eastern Countries and countries in other parts of the world who are antagonistic to us, like Venezuela, have caused a situation where the ceiling for gas prices is nowhere in sight.

And don't forget the desire of the major oil companies to make record profits on the gasoline and the desire of states to use gasoline as a source of tax revenue.

We are being held hostage by global economies and our inability to manage our micro-economy part of the over all whole. We don't grow our own food. We don't make our own clothes. We don't power our own cars.

Speaking of cars, I passed by one of the gas stations in town this morning. The price read 3.99 for unleaded. The station was full of large trucks and suv's. What are those people thinking? What are they thinking now? I put $20.00 worth in Cindy's car yesterday and it raised the level to a hair over 1/4 full. By the time I drove Cindy and me home, the gas gauge was reading something less than 1/4 full. I felt like the car was drinking the gas like Kate drinks milk sometimes.

At least I still drive a Toyota, manufactured in Missouri. How odd that you can take native pride in a Japanese car, because it was made in the USA. It is a strange world in which we live.

I did make the statement to the lady in Irving, that there were times when I got stuck in some computerized maze, trying to get to a human being to get through to my ultimate person, that I wish Dad had bypassed the thirty years in IBM and stayed on the farm. That's not really true, but just evinces my frustration with the decisions of many to allow the computers to handle the jobs of human beings.

I just want the sound of a human voice. The touch of a human hand.