I was wrapping up my shopping experience at a grocery store when Clancy texted me to ask that I pick up some medications at Walmart. That extended by shopping trip to a second location. It was going to be a short trip, though. It worked out just as well for me because I had forgotten to restock the babyfood.

I noticed that there was something in the bottom of my cart when I pulled it out, but didn’t think that much of it. It wasn’t until I was putting the babyfood into the basket that I saw that it was an iPhone. An honest-to-god iPhone! In a shopping cart at Walmart. Go figure. I put it in my pocket while I finished picking out the babyfood and contemplated what to do about it. I basically had three options:

1) Finders keepers, losers weepers.

2) Hand the phone over to customer service.

3) Attempt to contact the phone’s owner on my own.

The advantage to #1 was NEW PHONE! Yay! Except that it was an iPhone, which I have no use for. Except that it might be fun to play around with one, mightn’t it be? It was an old iPhone, though, I think. I think? The only way I could really tell was that it seemed to be the classic iPhone size and had mediocre resolution on the display. There wasn’t a whole lot I could learn from that. Oh yeah, and it would be wrong for me to keep it. Someone purchased that phone and needed it. Stupid morality.

The advantage to #2 was that I could simply do it and be done with it. No more iPhone to worry about. The concern was that it would not actually find its way to its owner. It might instead find its way into an employee’s hand. Now a part of me wouldn’t mind that. Walmart employees are notoriously paid and their jackpot would probably mean a lot more to them than it would mean to me. They might even like Apple products. Presumably so, if they went to the trouble of stealing it. On the other hand, as with #1, it was somebody’s phone and they probably needed it. I felt like I would probably have more luck if I tried to contact the owner myself.

I was leaning towards #3. I surfed the phone and discovered precious little activity on it. I thought about texting somebody to have them have the owner of the phone contact me. But there was only one text conversation in the phone and it involved an assessment of the quality of illegal substances from a particular supplier. I searched the contacts and saw maybe ten entries, including Mom and Dad (listed separately). So I texted Mom and Dad saying that their son or daughter had lost their phone and here is how I can be contacted to get it back.

I noticed that the battery was running low, though, which was a problem because I don’t have a charger. I also wasn’t going to go buy a charger for this little project (and beyond which, wouldn’t have known which charger to buy). I could probably find someone who had a charger and charge it and leave it on waiting to hear back or… something. It was all getting rather complicated, though. What were the odds that I would get everything together versus the odds that they might, I don’t know, figure out that they must have lost it at Walmart and go up to the customer service deck.

I got a response from “Mom” saying “Ain’t none of my kids phone.” That, combined with the dying battery, and the desire to get on with my day, landed the phone in the customer service of Walmart on my way out the door.

I was out shopping the other day and I realized that I needed some Mountain Dew. The problem is that the Mountain Dew at Walmart was ridiculously expensive. I would be going to a competitor in a few days, but needed something to tide me over until then. I ended up getting a six pack of Cola.

As you can see, I don’t mean Cola as short-hand for Coca-Cola or Pepsi and I don’t mean that I got Sam’s Choice Cola. I mean that I got Cola. That’s what it’s called. In white lettering with silver outlining and red shadow on a blue can with black dots. Cola. They didn’t even feign an attempt at trying to brand it something the way that various convenience stores do (Big K Cola, Sam’s Choice Cola, etc.). The only indication of its mysterious origins is that it was bottled by Cott Beverages, of Tampa, Florida.

It’s so generic it almost makes me feel like I am in a movie. Because absent product placement, all their cans usually say is “Cola.”

For whatever reason – community spirit or a lot of suckers in the region – Arapaho was a hub of telemarketing activity for fundraisers, pollsters, and the like. I never got as many calls as I did while I was out there. Arapaho is a big military state and so veterans organizations call a lot. Plus, I answered that pollster once and that was blood in the water as far as they are concerned.

There are many conveniences of living in the eastern timezone. Now, when I am dealing with various family and friends in a different timezone, it’s always a later timezone. Last week I had a Google Hangout with my aunts and I got to do it at 9pm because it was earlier in their timezone.

The downside is telemarketers. We still have our (Mountain Time Zone) Arapaho phone number. We also have multiple Arapaho phone numbers, which means that we are on everybody’s list three times. And when they call at eight o’clock, our phone goes off at 10.

There isn’t much that sets me off like rocking the baby to sleep and having a telemarketing call at 11pm reversing the progress of the baby falling asleep.

When Lain was born, our parents chipped in and bought us a pretty nice crib from Graco. During the process of moving from House #1 to House #2, the screws to said crib got misplaced. Since we weren’t going to stay in House #2 for very long, we didn’t really sweat it. Our first house here in Queenland, on the other hand, we will be in for at least a year and perhaps longer. Plus, baby turned 1 a few days ago and we’re going to need to start moving her over to her own bedroom instead of the playpen/nap-pen by our bed.

The screws hadn’t turned up, so I contacted Graco. Graco, in turn, said that even though it carried their brand name, they didn’t actually make the crib and instead it was made by a company called LaJobi. LaJobi couldn’t help me until I tracked down some information from the crib. That took a while because the crib was still in a mountain of boxes. When I finally did, they told me to call them.

Here is how I think the conversation went: I told them that I would like to purchase a screw set for the crib. They said “Let’s check and see if we have that in stock” which they did. They took my credit card information for the $35 the screws would cost.

I hadn’t asked how long it would take it to arrive, so I decided to give them the 6-8 weeks I consider to be the maximum. That came and went, and it still hadn’t arrived. I called them back to find out that this is how they thought the conversation went: I told them that I would like to purchase a screw set for the crib. They said “Let’s check and see if we have that in stock” which they did not as it was on back order. They may or may not have taken my credit card information, but they delete credit card information after 24 hours. I went back and looked and sure enough, the $35 had never been charged.

Basically, they said that the interaction was put into their system as a backorder. did I misunderstand them? It’s possible, though I am sure they took my credit card information and I certainly left the conversation thinking that my screws would be on their way. Anyway, they said that the screws were still on back order. However, they would open a new crib box with a set of screws and send that to me, since I had been waiting so long.

I was really impressed that they would do that, since that would mean that they couldn’t sell the crib from which they got the screws until they got more screws in. I almost felt bad since apparently this particular set of screws is such a hot commodity. And since it was our own fault for losing the screws in the first place. I was very appreciative, gave them my credit card number, and then waited the 7-10 business days it would take for them to get the screws to me.

Then, nothing. And I check my records, and once again we were never charged.

Now, as I say, it’s my own darn fault for not keeping track of the screws during the move. Neither Graco nor LaJobi have any obligation to offer replacement parts. But it’s been three months since they first (I am pretty sure) said that I would be getting the screws. If they can’t replace the parts, I wish they would have just said so and we could have made plans accordingly, instead of planning for the arrival of the screws.

In the end, it worked out. Over last weekend, when I was waiting to call LaJobi back and giving them a piece of my mind, the screws magically turned up. It’s possible that had LaJobi been straight with me, I would have purchased a new crib by now. It’s also possible that I would have gone on a blitz and located them. I can’t even boycott LaJobi going forward since we didn’t intentionally buy their product in the first place. We own a lot of Graco products and I had previously looked at their brand favorably. While they weren’t the ones that gave us the runaround, though, they contracted with the ones who did and that makes me less likely to buy their products in the future.

On the other hand, I will say these two things for LaJobi: First, the crib is pretty awesome. Good work on that. Second, the LaJobi people were very polite and pleasant and had they not been telling me things that were not true, I am big into customer service and the customer service would have had me buying LaJobi in the future.

Matt Walsh, a blogger and radio personality, wrote a piece about parenthood that is getting some traction among people I know:

[H]er kid bumped into a display and knocked a bunch of stuff onto the ground. I started to help pick it all up, but she said she wanted her son to do it because he’s the one who made the mess. Touché, madam. Nicely played. A lot of people would buckle under the pressure of having sonny going psycho in aisle 7, while, seemingly, the whole world stops to gawk and scrutinize, but this lady stayed cool and composed. It was an inspiring performance, and it’s too bad you missed the point because your feeble mind can only calculate the equation this way: misbehaving child = BAD PARENT.

I’m no math major, but that calculus makes no sense. A kid going berserk at a grocery store doesn’t indicate the quality of his parents, anymore than a guy getting pneumonia after he spends six hours naked in the snow indicates the quality of his doctor. Grocery stores are designed to send children into crying fits. All of the sugary food, the bright packaging, the toys, the candy — it’s a minefield. The occasional meltdown is unavoidable, the real test is how you deal with it. This mother handled it like a pro. She was like mom-ninja; she was calm and poised, but stern and in command.

My views are in-line with Walsh’s here. As long as I cannot readily identify something that the parents are doing wrong, or did wrong, I tend to be pretty forgiving. Thss was true before I had kids, but is especially true now. Lain has been a little darling and we haven’t had any incidents of uncontrolled crying, so it’s not that. Rather, it’s that I am reminded daily how un-malleable they are at a young age. We haven’t had that not because we’re awesome parents, but because we have a remarkably peaceable kid. We may not be so lucky next time.

Due partially to my own background, I would much rather have to deal with a crying kid than have the parents cave in to the crying kid. One is an inconvenience at the moment. The other is Everything That Is Wrong With Contemporary Society (if I may be a tad hyperbolic). I remember an incident many years ago where a father and son had I guess established a protocol that when they refilled the gas tank, they’d go in and he could get a cheap candy. They walked in, the father said to pick something from the cheapest section. The kid – in this case, we’re talking late grade school – blew a gasket. “I don’t want those candies. There’s hardly nuthin’ in’em. There’s hardly nuthin’ in’em! The father tried to explain or negotiate, but the kid took on one of the most irritating whining voices I have ever heard. The father grabbed the kid and marched him out of the store. The sound of that kid still haunts me, but it was worth it just to see what the father did.

Now that story isn’t entirely on-point, because it is an older kid than what we’re talking about, I think. Also, because the father could leave. He didn’t need to be there.

One of the subchapters in What To Expect When No One’s Expecting involved the conflicts between parents and non-parents in areas where there are high concentrations of the childfree. He chose particularly egregious comments and statements that made the childfree seem quite entitled (“I shouldn’t have to put my dog on a leash, you should have to put your child on one” and the like) but these were particularly gross examples of comments I have heard over the years. By way of example, Megan McArdle argued a couple years ago that people with young children shouldn’t fly.

It was not an argument that was well-received among parents. I wasn’t a parent yet, but I objected to it, too. In part because I knew then that we would fly our baby around repeatedly. Theoretically, flying is not something somebody has to do, like shopping. But once-in-a-lifetime opportunities would have been lost if we hadn’t. That, to me, trumps McArdle’s right to a baby-free flight. Clancy was tired and exhausted, but nonetheless played with the baby nonstop on a leg where she was particularly grumpy. I’ve seen parents do less, and parents show a pretty blatant disregard for their crying child.

There are also cases where taking children somewhere is almost entirely optional. Being a parent means, among other things, that you don’t get to do everything that you got to do before. Or if you do them, it’s with the understanding that you may have to stop at any point. Clancy and I have made the point to ourselves, several times, that any time we go out to eat and take the baby with us, we will have to be prepared for an early ejection or to eat in shifts while the other one walks her around.

Outside of that, though, kid will cry. It’s one of the prices we pay for the fact that they will also be chipping in for your retirement.

I may have mentioned this before, but when we relocated from one house to another in Arapaho, the automatic payment system we had in place couldn’t follow us. I had apparently been grandfathered in to a payment method they no longer had.

But have no fear! They had a new payment system. The only catch was that it cost a $6 a month “convenience” fee. I’m not going to fret too much over $6 a month, especially when our electricity bills were effectively cut in half with the move, but it always kind of irked me.

You know what’s convenient? Getting paid every month on time. That’s convenient.

But perhaps not as profitable as $6 a month or hoping people make their payments late and getting late fees added up.

I am presently reading Jonathan Last’s What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, which is about depopulation the the perils of the population bust. I thought I would pass this bit along:

On the western side of the country, the state of North Rhine Westphalia is suffering similar problems [of depopulation]. It has has been strugging to find enough workers to care for its bumper crop of retirees, forcing the state to take some radical steps. For instance, the government instituted a program to convert local prostitites into eldercare nurses. As one official told the British Medical Journal, “It’s an obvious move, since prostitutes possess good people skills, aren’t easily disgusted, and have zero fear of physical contact.”

Back when I was living in Deseret, I saw an ad in the local paper about a couple of workbenches for sale. $10 a piece. The ad said they would make good computer desks. I went there with the intent of buying one, which is all I had room for, but ended up purchasing both because $10. That was the best purchasing move I made that year. Possibly ever. The desks have since followed me on five moves. They’re perfect computer desks. Legroom underneath where I could place the computers. And they were easy to break down and transport. Because they were workbenches, they were sturdy as all get-out. It felt like they were never going to die and as long as they didn’t, I fully intended to use them.

The movers destroyed them. I don’t mean that they failed to pack them properly. I mean that they destroyed them. For better packing, they tore out pieces that were not meant to come off. I don’t think I am going to be able to put it back together. Finding a suitable replacement looks like it will cost between two and six hundred dollars. Each.

I would put in a claim, but but I am not sure I want to raise a stink. The whole billing process was rather opaque, but what we believed we would be paying was considerably more than we paid. Over $1200 more, in fact. Ordinarily, when this sort of thing happens, I am very quick to insist that we pay the full amount. But we don’t know what the full amount was. It wasn’t explained to us. The contract had multiple amounts on it. I can’t figure out how they came up with the figure that they did.

I’m not usually the guy that does this. In fact, my conscience has been eating at me and I have been mulling over what my obligation here is. I am the guy who last fall drove back to the tire place to explain to them that they had under-charged me by $300.

But now… they destroyed my workbenches. (And some lamps, and a bookcase…)

All is not lost, though. I’m not going to be able to replace the workbenches, but since I live near actual cities, there are a few options on Craigslist. Under $100 to replace both. Which will give me something to use while I look for the pieces of the workbenches and see if maybe I can put it back together.

A frequent topic of conversation lately over at The League is compensation for organ donors. Sally Satel, a recipient of an uncompensated donation, recently made the case for compensated donation at Slate. This post isn’t about the merits of that particular argument. Rather, it’s about this passage:

Kidneys can be donated by the living. Indeed, roughly half of all donors are friends or loved ones of recipients. To induce more strangers to save a life, compensation could again be provided by a third party and overseen by the government. Because bidding and private buying would not be permitted, available organs would be distributed to the next in line—not just to the wealthy. By providing in-kind rewards—such as a down payment on a house, a contribution to a retirement fund, or lifetime health insurance—the program would not be attractive to desperate people who might otherwise rush to donate on the promise of a large sum of instant cash.

One of the concerns about compensated donorship is that it would end up preying on the poor and desperate. I have my doubts that it would, but it’s a concern sincerely felt. And there are a number of reasons you would want to keep financially desperate people out of the loop, not the least of which is that they’d be more likely to lie on their application so that they would be accepted. Satel’s proposal would indeed sidestep this by forgoing the promise of cash and in favor of things that would be more appealing to middle class folks and less appealing to the hard-up.

As I said, though, this isn’t about compensated donation specifically. Rather, it’s about some of these incentives and why I am less than sure about them.

By virtue of being (until last Friday) a physician trained for rural medicine, Clancy is eligible for all sorts of loan repayment programs. Which, since we’re in the upper five-digits in debt, sounds nice. One problem with this, though, is that the pay in the places that offer these incentives are typically low and by taking a job in a less rural, wealthier place would mean more money with which to pay back the student loans to begin with. You could up the student loan repayment, except for a couple of things.

First, the faster the student loan is repaid, the quicker the doctor is likely to leave. Which sort of becomes self-defeating, in a way. I mean, when the repayment is done, they actually take a hit in pay.

The second is that programs like this encourage weird financial behavior. It would be in the Himmelreich-Truman household’s best interest to pay off the loans as quickly as we can. Wouldn’t it? The bank gets its money and we don’t have to worry about interest payments and everybody is happy. It doesn’t make sense to hold on to the money while owing others… except that under these programs it starts to make sense.

Let’s say that we cut a check right now for the entire balance of the student loan debt. But then, the job she next takes has a loan repayment system. Well, that money is not transferrable into cash. So, in essence, by having made good on our debt, we’d be forgoing future income. Yet if we don’t pay off the debt, or as much as possible, and there is no repayment system in whichever job she takes, then that’s cost us money, too.

Yet if loan repayment were converted into cash, it would become even more apparent that the inducement is insufficient for the money-motivated. And, of course, it would also end up going to those who aren’t in it for the inducement who know just shrug off the student loan repayments that they aren’t getting. And lastly, in the same way that we like actual gifts better than cash at Christmastime, there is something nice about getting something specific. So maybe, as inefficient as it is, loan repayment works as well as the alternative anyway.

At least, until or unless we come up with a system that more genuinely and thoroughly rewards physicians for working in places that physicians don’t generally want to work. That would require an overall that the PPACA debate suggests that we are just not ready for.

I end up reading a lot of reviews for new smartphones because I am a geek and that is the sort of thing that interests me despite the fact that I am not really in the market for a new one.

The constant emphasis in the smartphone world is on the thickness or slenderness of the device. Almost uniformly, slender is considered better. Which is great, up to a point. I have to confess that when I hold some of my earlier smartphones, I am taken aback by how thick they are. I wonder how it didn’t bother me.

Here is the problem: The increased thinness has come at the expense of sturdiness. Which is a tradeoff without normative value. Except when it reaches the point where the phones are so fragile that you have to put them in a case. At that point, it really sort of defeats the purpose of it being thin to begin with, doesn’t it?

I remember a review of phones that on the one hand talk about how nice and slim the phones are. They also talk about how nice or not-nice the exterior of the device is. And yet then also talks about how “of course you will want a case”… presumably to protect the phone which is to slim to reliably survive being dropped. And certainly covering the exterior they were complementing.

I cannot tell you how many times I dropped my Samsung Stratosphere and the HTC Touch Pro 2 I had before it and the HTC Fuze I had before that and the HTC TyTn I had before that. None of them broke after repeated drops. They got chipped around the edges, and the battery and/or stylus would eject, and sometimes the latter would get lost, but that would be about the extent of it.

I dropped my Samsung Galaxy S3 once and only once without its protective coating, and it has a crack all along its front. For a while I had it in a protective case, which made it sturdier but defeated the purpose of the phone being so thin. I am willing to bet that if the S3 had a keyboard, the screen wouldn’t have cracked just as the screen from the Strat never cracked. Or even without a keyboard, a little more thickness in the device might obviate the need for an even thicker case.

I suppose this will cease to be an issue once we have the sapphire or Gorilla-Glass screens, or something similar, which will make the devices more droppable. It’s still an odd disconnect, though, in my view.