New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

While watching Channel 9 News the other evening I saw one of those stories that I just have to comment about. This is a perfect example of the kind of story that can get me cursing and making obscene gestures towards the TV.

The story is set in Hampton, NH, where cats and other small pets are apparently turning up missing in numbers that are considered in excess of the norm. Many of them seem to be disappearing when they are let out to roam around the neighborhood after dark.

The town’s animal control officer strongly suspects that coyotes are to blame for the missing pets and Channel 9 dutifully provides some menacing footage of coyotes roaming in residential areas, no doubt planning their next evening meal of kitty cats and Chihuahuas.

Then comes the part of the story that gets my attention. A woman who owns a Dachshund is obviously worried about her pet winding up on the menu and she would like something done about it.

The reporter on the story says that this particular resident would like the town or the state to do something about the situation. The resident is then given a chance to speak for herself on the issue.

“I’m not for killing anything, so let’s relocate them to where they can live their lives not in a residential area,” she proclaims.

OK, that’s where it hits the fan for me.

Can she possibly be serious? She wants the town or the state to come in and spend taxpayer money to relocate coyotes because they are a threat to her dog? Which is probably more of a nuisance to the neighborhood than any wild critter ever was, with barking and droppings deposited about and whatnot.

This is exactly the kind of nanny state mentality that strongly influenced my move out of Massachusetts and into New Hampshire. Oh mighty big government, help us with our every little problem! Is it any wonder that freedom in this country is being gradually eroded? It’s because people like that don’t want freedom, they want to have their every little want and desire taken care of for them. Lord knows, you don’t want to get your hands dirty!

As far as I know, coyotes are in their native territory here in North America, while our domesticated cats and dogs are not. It’s long been known that domesticated cats are a big problem for the native songbird population, so I find it a bit ironic that nature is beginning to turn the tables a bit and now coyotes are learning to prey on the cats that have been preying on songbirds and other native species of small animals.

I’ve had my share of problems with wild critters on my large, rural property. I’ve had skunks digging up my grass in search of grubs to eat, chipmunks stealing strawberries from my garden, wild turkeys roosting on my back porch and leaving large collections of droppings and moles tearing up my field.

Guess what? I solved these problems on my own with no help from the town or the state. I don’t normally like to kill critters either, so I purchased some live animal traps and relocated a few skunks and chipmunks. I’ve been chasing the turkeys away whenever I see them around the house and they are showing up on my porch far less frequently. I also managed to work out a plan that allows me to “ambush” moles and unearth them with a good, sturdy pitchfork and dispose of them. Critter problems pretty much solved.

If you want to keep your pets safe from wild critters either keep them in the house, put a fence up around your property or go outside with them to keep an eye on them. Don’t be whining that you want the government to send out some $90,000-a-year biologist to solve your problems for you and cause my taxes to go up. Or even a $25,000-a-year part-time Fish & Game intern or whatever.

The Hampton animal control officer summed it up perfectly at the end of the story. He said something to the effect that we will just have to learn to live with these wild critters. At least someone’s got the right idea.

Grow up and take the initiative required to solve your own little problems like this. If you want the state to do every little thing for you, move down to Massachusetts or move to the city where there aren’t so many wild critters. Then you may have to worry about them being run over as a result of all that city traffic. But take heart! Maybe you can lobby the city or the state to build a little doggie or kitty bridge or tunnel so your pets can cross the street safely!

When high-speed Internet was introduced in my area about 6 years ago, I was thrilled to finally dump my slow dial-up service. There was one thing, however, that I really missed about my old dial-up service.

I was getting my dial-up service from Earthlink (formerly Mindspring) back then and they had a very nice spam filter which literally stopped all spam from reaching my in-box. That particular filter is also known as a white list, and just like it sounds, it is the opposite of a black list.

With white list filtering you are able to configure your e-mail account so that it rejects every e-mail message except those coming from the e-mail addresses that are on your white list. It is the absolute best way to stop spam.

My new high-speed Internet access was provided by Adelphia when I first got it and unfortunately, they did not offer white list filtering. The spam filter they offered was reasonably good, but spam would sneak through every so often.

When Adelphia went bankrupt a while back (the company was run by crooks) the service in our area was taken over by Comcast. Although I am no big fan of Comcast, I was very happy to discover that they offered white list filtering for e-mail accounts.

One of the first things I did was to set up white list filtering on my main Comcast e-mail account. I have never received a single spam e-mail message on that account as a result. Until a few days ago that is.

Imagine my surprise when I received a spam e-mail message from some Canadian pharmacy outfit that was pushing, what else, Viagra! I stared at the message in disbelief. How could they have gotten around my white list filter?

It did not take too long to figure it out. When the spammers sent the message, they put my e-mail address in the “From:” field. In other words, it looked like a message that I sent to myself.

It’s quite trivial to send an e-mail message with a phony “From:” field and spammers have been doing it for a long time. In fact, it happened back when I had my Earthlink account because I had put my own e-mail address on the white list in case I wanted to forward something to myself for some reason.

With the Earthlink account, it was a simple matter to just remove my e-mail address from the white list and that was the end of the spam for good.

With Comcast, this is not the case. Apparently, the Comcast white list filter includes your own e-mail address by default and I could find no way to remove it. In fact, it does not even show up on the list!

I wish I could say I am surprised. It looks like Comcast has found yet another way to prove that they suck.

I’m not sure I am going to even take the time to report this to them as a problem since I don’t usually get a satisfactory answer from them when I have taken the time to report something to them.

Most of the the Comcast customer service people I have talked to so far have been utterly clueless and spend most of their time trying to convince me that whatever problem I am having is the fault of Microsoft or the company that made my PC. Apparently, the one training class they require their customer service people to attend is called “Passing the Buck.”

Unless Comcast closes this white list loophole, more spammers are going to exploit it and the white list filter will become useless. Nice going, Comcast! I’d really love to see you spend more time fixing your problems and less time passing the buck.

Talk about timing! I just posted last night that I had not heard from any telemarketers for the last three weeks ago and guess what. Yes, this time it was from 800-553-1077.

This one was a little different. When I picked it up, a recorded voice told me it was a call for “telemarketing purposes” and was for some kind of “special offer” from National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh, PA. The voice also informed me that I could call 800-553-1077 if I wanted more information about the call or something like that.

After the recording the line was just silent. I hung on for a while to see if someone was coming on the line that I could complain to but it just hung up on me after 30 seconds or so and a few clicks on the line.

See my previous post about how these telemarketers use automation to make telephone calls to their victims. This one took the extra step of having a recorded message to at least let people know where the call was coming from and what it was for. I’ll give them a little credit for not subjecting me to the “hang up” calls that most of the other telemarketers seem to be using.

I did call the number right back and an automated system allowed me to add my number to their “Do Not Call” list, which I did. Of course, it takes 5 days to process and 30 days for my number to be completely removed from their telemarketing system. More on that later.

As I’ve been saying lately, all this telemarketing started due to our “relationship” with CitiMortgage. We refinanced our mortgage back in January and the mortgage was then sold to CitiMortgage.

CitiBank/CitiMortgage has been on my list of lousy companies that should be avoided for many years, so it was just a stroke of bad luck that our mortgage was sold to those idiots. It appears my reasoning for adding them to my “crappy company list” was quite justified and I see they have not changed in the intervening 25 years or so!

OK, so maybe I am a little slow, but the more I thought about this situation, the more it started to make sense to me. Let me explain.

The “Do Not Call” laws that were enacted a number of years ago must have really put the damper on the telemarketing business. There must be millions of people on the “National Do Not Call” list and I know from my days in real estate that companies are serious about abiding by the law and not calling people who are on the list unless you had permission. It was drilled into our heads that we were not to violate the “Do Not Call” rules. Ever.

Making money certainly gives birth to creative ideas and sure enough, it appears that some companies have discovered the loopholes that allow them to call consumers even if they are on the national “Do Not Call” list.

As you may know, the “Do Not Call” rules do not apply if you have a “relationship” with a company. And since CitiMortgage is the company holding our mortgage, we have a “relationship” with them. This means that they can call us for telemarketing purposes despite the fact that our number is on the national “Do Not Call” list. If we tell them to add us to their “Do Not Call” list, then they can no longer call us for telemarketing purposes.

But the sneaky tactic that is being adopted these days is that the companies themselves are forming “relationships” with other companies like this fire insurance company that called today. Therefore, by extension, these other companies also have a “relationship” with you and can call you for telemarketing purposes. Pretty sneaky, eh?

Now this is speculation on my part concerning what kind of relationships these companies actually have. I don’t know of CitiMortgage owns these other companies that have been making telemarketing calls to our home or whether they are just forming “relationships” with each other to exchange lists of customer phone numbers.

Another thing is that I can’t imagine is where this “please allow 30 days to be removed from our telemarketing system” crap came from. That is the biggest bunch of B.S. I think I have ever heard and the telemarketing lobbyists must have paid off enough CongressCritters to get that written into the law.

Think about it. We live in the age of the Internet. Instant e-mail. Instant shopping online. Instant downloads. Everything happens so fast these days and since I worked in the computer industry for about 25 years, I know how long it takes to update a database.

These automated systems that are making the phone calls are no doubt working off of these phone number databases when they make calls, so flipping a bit or two in the database to change a “Do Call” number to a “Do Not Call” number is a very trivial matter and it should happen the second (actually less than that!) I pressed “1″ to confirm that I wanted my number added to their “Do Not Call” list. This “30 days” crap is just to cover their asses in case they don’t get around to doing it right away. Or perhaps it is just to give them another opportunity to call up and annoy people a little more.

What this means for me is that I am going to have to go back to giving out phony phone numbers when dealing with many companies. I used to do that all the time because I did not want the telemarketing calls and these sneaky tactics of forming “relationships” with other companies to skirt the “Do Not Call” laws is starting to become quite annoying.

I never used a phony phone number that actually belonged to anyone else. I certainly did not want to be subjecting some other poor soul to these annoying phone calls, so what I did was look up a ISP (Internet Service Provider) that provides dial-up Internet access in my area. I would then locate their dial-up access phone numbers and adopt one of those as my phony phone number. When some company called to annoy me with telemarketing, instead they (or their machines) would just get that annoying dial-up modem squeal and never manage to reach me.

Thanks to sleazy stunts by sleazy companies like CitiBank/CitiMortgage, it appears I may have to go back to my old ways. If that is what it takes to stop the calls, that is what I will be doing.

Well, looks like I was wrong about this one.

I’m sure it was telemarketers, but I have not received any other calls from them so far. It’s been a few weeks, and in my experience, telemarketers are more persistent and would have called back by now.

I am now wondering if the call was connected with the other telemarketing calls I was getting thanks to CitiMortgage.

I did let CitiMortgage know that I did not want any more telemarketing calls and I am wondering if that message made it through the bureaucracy in time to put a stop to the calls from 702-520-1214 shortly after the first one.

Since I have not received a single telemarketing call since then, I am more convinced that they were all started due to those inconsiderate buffoons at CitiMortgage. They really know how to treat a customer, eh? Annoy the hell out of them by unleashing a barrage of telemarketing calls on them.

If you are considering a mortgage or a re-finance, my advice is to steer clear of CitiMortgage. Unless you like being bothered by telemarketing calls.

I’m in my recliner and watching some TV in my living room when the phone rings. I am watching the local news station that I get directly off the roof-top antenna so I don’t get the Caller ID display that my Dish Network DVR serves up when we get a call. Figures.

Since my wife is sitting in the kitchen near the phone, I ask her to check the display and see who it is. By this time the phone has rung 3 times and one more remains until the answering machine picks up.

“Upgrade Now” she says to me. I don’t know what the heck she is talking about, so I probably said something intelligent like, “Huh?”

 ”Upgrade Now, that’s what it says,” she tells me.

Sounds like it could be a telemarketer so I decide to just let the machine get it. I know my wife, and I know she is not going to pick it up either. If it is important, I figure whoever it is will leave a message.

No message was left on our machine. Another sign of a telemarketer!

Naturally, I decide to research 702-520-1214 a bit on the net, and sure enough, this looks like another number I’d rather not see on my Caller ID.

Curiously, there are reports of two types of telemarketing calls that unfortunate recipients have reported coming from this number.

The first type of call does not seem to have attracted the same level of attention as the second type of call. The first was reported by a few folks to be some kind of sales pitch for satellite TV or something.

That kind of make sense to me since I did receive a telemarketing call a couple of years ago claiming to be from Dish Network and trying to sell me more programming.

As a Dish Network customer has been very happy with the service for the 8 years or so I have had it, I knew Dish Network had been told to add me to their “Do Not Call” list and I was more than a little ticked off when they called.

Although I was never able to get a definitive answer about who actually called me, Dish Network claimed they did not make the call and that there were some ‘unscrupulous’ independent dealers out there who did not follow the rules and were calling people that were on the “Do Not Call” list and violating the rules.

The whole thing just seemed fishy to me and I was never sure if it was indeed Dish Network that had called or not. Being happy with their service for so long, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In that sense, a call from “Upgrade Now” that some have reported has to do with satellite TV, sounds like it might make sense.

The trouble is that the second scenario also makes a lot of sense to me.

There were more reports about the calls coming from 702-520-1214 being about some kind of extended warranty plan for automobiles.

If you’ve read my recent entries here about telemarketing, you will know what I am talking about.

And, if this is indeed about extended warranty plans, I have a good idea whose to blame for the call. My dear friends at CitiMortgage!

I am not going to go as far as accusing them just yet, but it sure is suspicious since I have received telemarketing calls in the last few days that were orchestrated by CitiMortgage and were about extended warranty plans.

These weasels from 702-520-1214 will surely call again, just like the last bunch of morons who called, and when they do, I will attempt to extract as much information from them as I possibly can.

I will be surprised if the mark of CitiMortgage is not on this latest call, but if it isn’t and this is just some random telemarketing call, I will likely be filing a complaint against them since I am on the national “Do Not Call” list.

After getting virtually no telemarketing calls for the last few years, it is hard for me to imagine that CitiMortgage is not the dark force behind this one as well. If so, I will surely have some more thoughts to share about that outfit!

You might want to take a gander at this article that I discovered when I was researching this latest call. It’s only a few days old and reports on the extended warranty telemarketing calls that are coming from this number.

Knowing that another call from 866-266-9317 would be coming as sure as the Sun would rise, I had some time to ponder my next move.

Another call from these annoying idiots came Saturday and I did not pick it up since I had not decided on my plan of action quite yet. Who knew that telemarketers have so much work that they need to work on weekends? There must be many more people out there that need to be annoyed than I had dared to imagine!

I distilled my options for dealing with the next call down to two: I would either yell obscenities at them and tell them to never call me again and hang up or politely ask them to put me on their “Do Not Call” list.

I settled on option two because I knew it would greatly improve my chances of getting some information from whatever unfortunate telemarketing monkey was connected to the outgoing call that was bound for my telephone.

Sure enough, at about 10:20 this morning the telephone rang and that familiar number, 866-266-9317 appeared on my Caller ID display.

The woman on the other end sounded a bit soft-spoken and may have even been someone who was not enjoying her job much.

It also seemed that our connection was not that great, and although I could hear most of what she said, there were times when it was hard to make out what she was saying.

Not surprisingly, she asked for me by name and I told her she was talking to the person she was seeking.

She then launched into her sales pitch, which was quite brief. It started with the obligatory “I’m calling on behalf of CitiMortgage” and then she mentioned a “special offer” and asked if I wanted to hear more about it.

At that point I said, “Can I ask you a question?” and she said “yes.” I then asked if she would do be a “special favor” and put my name on their “Do Not Call” list and never call me again.

She agreed immediately and informed me that it may take “30 days” to get my name off the list and in the meanwhile, I may get a call or two. And of course she said she was “sorry” for the phone calls. Yeah, I bet.

I then told her that I hoped I would not receive any more calls and she then rattled off something which I did not totally understand, but ended with her reading me a phone number: 800-474-4047.

I believe the gist of it was that I could call that number if I wanted to complain to someone about the phone calls.

I then asked her what company she was working for and she started with the “I’m calling on behalf of CitiMortgage crap again.” I then told her that is not what I wanted to know and asked her what company is she actually calling from.

During this point in the call, it was kind of hard of hear her, but she said something like “Influence” or “Enfluence.” I asked her to repeat the name and when she did it sounded like the same thing and it seemed like our connection was getting worse, so I thanked her and said goodbye.

My first action upon hanging up the phone was to plug 800-474-4047 into a search engine and see what came up. Sure enough, a company called “Ocwen” came up as the owner of that number. They are somehow involved in the mortgage business and most likely have some relationship to CitiMortgage.

These big companies probably like having lots of smaller companies in their structure in case they get caught screwing over consumers or something and they can just throw that smaller company and its employees to the dogs and perhaps avoid tarnishing the name of the parent company as much. That’s just speculation on my part, of course.

The first Ocwen web page I was directed to as a result of my search (www.ocwencustomers.com/InsuWarnt/more_warr.cfm) advertises insurance and home warranty plans. That ties in with what I had heard about these phone calls being a pitch for some warranty plan for appliances or something.

I guess I don’t have to mention what I would suggest Ocwen do with their stupid warranty plan.

Although it was not an extensive search by any means, I poked around on the net looking for a reference to a company called “Influence” or something like that, but came up with nothing.

I suspect the company in question is some big telemarketing company that makes their living by bothering people. If anyone has any information on that company, feel free to leave a comment and let me know. It’s kind of fun to find out the names of the outfits that are doing stuff like this.

This all comes back to what a crappy outfit CitiBank is. The reward I get for having my mortgage sold to those pinheads is being annoyed by telemarketing calls for crap I don’t want and would not even consider.

Once again, you can be damn sure my next mortgage will not wind up in the hands of CitiMortgage. They just suck too badly to ever do business with again and I’ll be sure to go out of my way to tell others to avoid them like the plague, no matter what kind of service they may be offering.

I must admit that being on the national “Do Not Call” list has done wonders to reduce telemarketing here in my home. For the past few years, telemarketing calls have been very rare here in my home. A true blessing.

There are however, loopholes in the “Do Not Call” laws that allow for telemarketing calls in some circumstances. The circumstance I want to talk about is the dreaded “business relationship” loophole.

If you have a “relationship” with a company, they are allowed to call you for telemarketing purposes unless you tell them not to. Apparently, a “relationship” means doing business with them, like buying something from them or whatever.

Not all companies that I have “relationships” with are obnoxious enough to make telemarketing calls to my home, but some certainly are.

Yesterday our phone rang and the number that showed up in the Caller ID was 866-266-9317. I was not near the phone at the time and my wife picked it up after looking at the Caller ID since she thought that it might be a call for my son who had applied for a job at a local company recently.

Now these 866 or 877 or 800 numbers always set of my internal telemarketing warning alarm because they are obviously from a business of some kind. In my experience, calls from these kinds of numbers are usually calls that I don’t want.

When my wife answered the phone, there was nobody there to talk to her. She said “hello” and waited a few seconds for a response that never came. She then hung up the phone.

Calls where there is nobody there to talk to you are also a good giveaway to a telemarketing call and it is very likely that you will be getting a call from that same caller again soon. And there may be nobody there to talk to you the next time they call either. More on that later.

After my wife explained the details of the call I went immediately to my PC to enter the phone number into one of the search engines. This can be a great way to identify the owner of a number that shows up on your Caller ID unit.

Sure enough, I was linked to a forum about telemarketing calls that identified the calls as coming from one of CitiMortgages “partners.” In many cases, this is corporate speak for other companies that some of these big greedy corporations own.

Apparently, CitiMortgage — part of the CitiBank “family” of companies, if you have not figured that out — is not making quite enough money in the mortgage business and has branched out and is offering other wonderful services for consumers. Oh, how filled with joy I am!

According to the information I found on the Internet, this particular call is a sales pitch for some lame appliance warranty plan that they are offering with the payments being conveniently added to your monthly mortgage payment. Oh heavens, my prayers have been answered!

I knew that more calls would be coming from these pesky idiots, so I went to the CitiMortgage website last night and logged into my account and sent them a message asking them how I can be put on their “Do Not Call” list so that I do not receive any telemarketing calls from them or from any of their wonderful “partners.”

I received a response via e-mail from CitiMortgage this morning advising me that they had gone ahead and placed me on their “Do Not Call” list. Finally, some genuine good news.

So I’m outside on my ladder today installing a vent for the air conditioner I was installing in my son’s room. My wife and son had gone shopping and my other son was playing on his computer with headphones on.

Yes, you guessed it — the phone rings. Knowing my son probably would not hear it and considering the possibility that it could be my wife on her cell phone, I hurry down off the ladder and into the garage where the nearest phone was. A phone, as you might imagine, with no Caller ID unit.

When some guy asks for me by name, I know it is trouble. When I tell him that he is talking to the person he asked for, he launches into his sales pitch by telling me he is calling “on behalf” of CitiMortgage. I guess that is supposed to make me feel at ease or something.

Sure, I am just thrilled beyond reason to hear from the gigantic mortgage company that is making a fortune from me by ultimately collecting a hell of a lot more money from me than the sale price that was listed on my house.

Before the jackass on the phone gets too far into his pitch, I tell him I don’t accept telemarketing calls. At that point, he pauses a moment and then says something like “I have not even explained the offer to you yet.”

Well, obnoxious telemarketers who get me down off a ladder don’t deserve the chance to present their offer to me so I told him “No thanks,” said “Goodbye” and hung up the phone before the idiot could utter another word.

What’s interesting is that when I looked at my Caller ID a while later, I saw that the call was listed as “Out of Area” (on some units it will say “Unavailable”) and was not the 866-266-9317 number I had expected.

A while later the phone rang again and this time 866-266-9317 did show up on the Caller ID. I was outside this time so I did not get a chance to answer it, but my wife, seeing that number, did not bother to answer it.

Now I am left to wonder, was the call I answered today from the same outfit that had called from 866-266-9317 or was that call a different CitiMortgage “partner,” which would mean I have two of these outfits calling me around the same time.

By the way, if you call 866-266-9317, you will get some kind of automated system with a friendly female voice telling you that if you want to be excluded from any further telemarketing calls, you can just leave them a message and they will gladly add you to their “Do Not Call” list and you will not hear from them.

This message is quickly followed by a voice that tells you the “mailbox is full” and you will not be able to leave a message, just as other people had reported on the Internet forum I found. Pretty sleazy, eh?

As I mentioned a while back, we re-financed our home back around the beginning of the year. We did the refinance through Lending Tree, who I was actually pretty happy with, but they then sold the mortgage to CitiMortgage and the junk mail has been coming steadily ever since. And now the telemarketing has started.

CitiBank was an outfit that has been on my list of companies to avoid doing business with for years. Back when I was in my teens or twenties, I had screwed up some of my bills and a payment to a CitiBank credit card ended up being a bit late. CitiBank was the only credit card company that had ever called me to badger my about a late payment and to this day remains the only one that has ever called me regarding that subject.

I was pretty determined to never do business with them again, but there is little you can do when your mortgage is sold to those weasels.

I guess the next time I get a mortgage, I will have to take whatever steps are required to see that there is no possibility that my mortgage will end up with CitiMortgage. Since we probably will be moving in a few years, I will probably get the chance to follow through on that before very long.

I’ve known for years that CitiBank and their “partners” suck and now these telemarketing calls have proven it once again.

Listen up CitiMortgage or CitiBank or whatever name you want to be known by. I’m on the national “Do Not Call” list for a reason, and that reason is that I do not like getting telemarketing calls. Period. Ever. Not from you, not from anyone.

I would think that a big company like yours would have someone, somewhere within your organization with the smarts to figure that out. Obnoxious telemarketing calls only make people like me more determined to avoid dealing with you ever again. Do you understand that?

By the way, see my previous message about my conversation with a telephone company employee that revealed to me a little bit about the mechanics of how these telemarketing calls are made.

The increased rate of foreclosures does not seem to be showing any significant signs that it is slowing down.

Foreclosure rates are still high in many areas of the country amid reports that mortgage giants like Countrywide are feeling the effects of the trend in their bottom line which has resulted in the company tapping a $11.5 Billion credit line and facing the possibility of laying off employees.

Around the country, the numbers are not terribly encouraging:

In San Diego County, California, foreclosures were up to 2,896 for the first half of 2007, compared to 445 for the same period last year — a 551% increase!

Find Foreclosure Listings Online

In Osceola County, Florida, foreclosures are up 100% from May 2006 to May 2007. Not as bad as San Diego County, California, but still quite an increase.

In Fremont County, Colorado, there have been 200 foreclosures so far this year. It took until November of 2006 to reach that number.

Personally, I’m not surprised to see this dramatic rise in foreclosures. In recent years, some lenders have pushed adjustable mortgages pretty hard and some homeowners found themselves in over their heads when rates started increasing and their mortgage payments increased with them.

Apparently, cell phone companies are acting like a bunch of toddlers in a sand box who just cannot get along with each other.

I say this because not every cell phone company will allow cell phones from other companies have access to their cell phone network. Heck, I don’t know if there is a single cell phone company that allows access a cell phone from any other cell phone company to access their network.

I bought a cell phone because I want to be able to use it to make a call. And I want that call to work no matter where I am.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am having problems making calls simply because there is no cell phone coverage in some areas. Hardly! I’m very well aware of the fact that there are areas that just don’t have coverage due to lack of towers or the terrain. We have that problem in quite a few locations around where I live. But that’s not what I am talking about at all.

What I am talking about is being in a location with very good cell phone coverage and still not being able to make or receive a call because my phone is not allowed to access the cell phone network in that area.

This, as far as I know, is because the company that I get my phone service from does not have an agreement with the company that owns the network in the area where I am trying to use my phone.

Like I said before, I have a cell phone because I want to be able to use it! No matter where I happen to be — as long as there is cell phone coverage there. Is that asking too much?

Apparently so. Recently we drove from Southern New Hampshire into Vermont and then north on Route 91. As soon as we were west of Keene, NH, my cell phone was completely useless.

All the way up Route 91 I was not able to make or receive calls on my cell phone until we reached White River Junction, where it seemed to work OK and then once we were past that area, it was useless again all the way up to Route 89 and right up to our destination not far from Montpelier.

All that time I could tell that we were in areas that had good cell phone coverage because the signal meter on my phone indicated that. It would show me that a good cell phone signal was present, but the signal meter was blinking on and off, which in my experience means that there is coverage in the area, but my phone is not allowed to access it.

This is the year 2007 isn’t it? If I take my cell phone on a trip with me, I expect to be able to use it no matter where I am in the country as long as there is sufficient cell phone coverage there. All this greed-driven nonsense needs to stop and it needs to stop soon.

I don’t know if this is a problem in other parts of the world, or if the U.S. is embarrassingly behind the times as we are with broadband Internet access. As usual, we end up behind the times because of corporate greed. The driving force behind just about everything that happens in this country — including our politics by the way!

I don’t care if I have to pay $1 a minute or whatever if I want to use my cell phone in the far distant Kingdom of Vermont, or in any other location in the U.S. I’d be willing to pay extra for that important call I want to make. And in those cases, all I want to do is deliver a brief, important message to someone, like “I’ll meet you at exit 26,” so it really isn’t going cost me a fortune to do it.

I’m not one of those people you see out and about with a cell phone plastered to my ear most of the time. I make very few calls on my cell phone and when I do make a call, it is usually for a good reason and not just to call someone and say “What’s up?”

Although I have not actually tried it, I trust that my cell phone would be able to make a call to 911 even in an area where my phone is not allowed to access the service. I believe that is mandated by law, and that’s a good thing, but these cell phone companies should stop acting like children and make sure that every cell phone in the country can access the service anywhere in the country that it happens to be.

We Americans do travel from time to time and being unable to use our cell phones just because I am in another state is completely ridiculous. Get your act together and grow up, cell phone companies!

At first glance, I thought the latest sleazy-looking item that showed up in my mailbox was from good old Pat Haines at N.M.E. This time, I was wrong.

It appears that AARP, otherwise known as the American Association of Retired Persons, has taken a page from the N.M.E. playbook. Go ahead and compare this recent mailing (pictured here) that we received at our house to an N.M.E. mailing that we received over a year ago.

Since this is a tactic that is being used by more than one organization in an effort to get these letters opened, that suggests to me that this technique works.

An organization like AARP, with millions to spend on effective marketing campaigns probably knows what they are doing.

I a bit disappointed to see an organization like AARP stoop to using tactics like this, which I consider sleazy.

As you can see, they use the same “OFFICAL NOTICE” language on the front of the envelope, which is just a total crock. There’s absolutely nothing “official” about this bit of junk mail. The idea, of course, is to make recipients believe it actually is some kind of official letter from their auto insurance company or some regulatory agency.

Then there’s the “Auto Insurance Premium Adjustment” crap across the top that suggests to the recipient that perhaps their auto insurance rates have changed or something. Another total crock.

Notice how they do not include the return address on the front of the envelope? Naturally, when someone sees something like this from AARP, they will know it is just another one of the endless promotional pieces that this organization bombards people with as they are getting close to, or have just turned 50 years old. That, if I am not mistaken, is the age of eligibility to become an AARP member.

The return address is on the back of the envelope, of course. Since I never open an envelope without checking the return address, I knew pretty much what to expect when I opened it and probably would have just shredded it without opening it had I not wanted to talk about it here.

So what is really in this important-looking envelope? As you might suspect, it is just a sales pitch for an auto insurance policy that is being offered by “The Hartford” insurance company in association with AARP. Real “official,” wouldn’t you say?

It must be harder and harder for junk mail senders to get people to open up the envelopes they send out these days. I can think of no other reason for AARP to use tactics like this.

Although neither my wife or I plan to join their organization, their reputation (which I did not regard highly to begin with) just took a nose dive as a result of this sleazy stunt.

Maybe I’m not like most other consumers, but I don’t like it when I think someone is trying to trick me.