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stephenjaymorrisblog · 5 years

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Disclaimer: All names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Larceny Incorporated

February 15, 2020

By Stephen Jay Morris c/w Pamela Amodeo-Morris

©Scientific Morality

Moving is a nightmare, as many of you know. Try moving across the country. You do what you can to cut corners and save money. However, the axiom rings true: you get what you pay for. In this conservative era of laissez-faire idiocy, there are dishonest hucksters hiding in the back offices of hundreds of warehouses. Pamela and I were victims of one.

When we walked away from our home in Oregon, we ended up living in mobile homes in the Southern California desert for six and a half years. Living in a mobile home is a heartbeat from homelessness. Many mobile home parks are ghettos for poor white people. I pity the poor, but some of them are damaged people who get on my nerves.

Our first home was not in a park, per se, but was on a residential street of a small city. The coach, as park managers and owners reference these homes, was situated on a large, privately owned, corner lot. Its street was near a major intersection, where police and emergency vehicles’ sirens screamed day and night. Druggies and drunks would walk past our walled yard all hours of the night, shouting threats at each other, and dark figures in old cars would frequently park just outside our bedroom window late at night, engine idling and gangsta rap blasting from their sound systems. Unlike most mobile homes in the desert, which are primarily landscaped with small rocks and concrete, this one was heavily planted with fruit trees, rose bushes, shrubs and plants. The landlord, who was an elderly man, was a great collector of native and non-native plants and trees. He paid a neighbor to come and water the property twice weekly, and more during the intense summers. It usually took the guy about three hours to complete the task. We finally moved from there when the landlord wanted to reoccupy his property.

Since 2012, our primary goal had been to move to New York. We wanted to be near Pamela’s family and within driving distance of New York City. But, with tight finances again dictating our fate, we rented a second mobile home in the same town. (Just before this move, we got sidetracked a bit and almost moved to Texas, to be near Pamie’s sister. In hindsight, though, everything worked out for the better.)

Unlike the first rental, this mobile home was situated in a large, beautiful, well-managed park, tailored for the 50+ community. It was a great improvement over the latter: spacious, insulated from the downsides of city-life, and owned by a responsive, absentee landlady. However, the homes here were situated very close to one another on small, leased lots. With our focus steadfastly fixed on New York, we unpacked only our basic living necessities. The vast majority of our belongings remained boxed and stored inside the home, in a large, unused area apparently intended as a recreation room. As such, it resembled a warehouse.

The neighbor to the right of us was a loud mouth, Trump supporter. Every morning, he sat on his front porch, cell phone to his mouth, loudly berating the ills and failures of the Obama Administration and the country’s “nanny state.” He initially tried to hustle me in his efforts to find customers for his “car repair business.” He soon got the message that I was not interested in his business or his company. Lord, have mercy!

This move was supposed to be temporary, but we ended up living there for three and a half years. I had my heart attack in the small backyard at the end of our second year there. My beloved Golden Retriever passed away there 14 months later.

All the while, Pamela searched relentlessly for a New York home. She worked with several realtors and finance brokers via phone and email. She even flew east twice to look at potential houses. Finally, when a move looked imminent, Pamela searched found a long-distance moving company that quoted us a price at about 50% below the competition! I’ll call them “L.A. Bowel Movers.” The salesman, or “move coordinator,” called himself Jeremiah. I immediately thought that Mormons owned the company. Like Howard Hughes, I trusted Mormons. Well, I later came to learn that this was no Mormon outfit. We trusted Jeremiah. We sent him a deposit and booked a move.

However, as time went on, potential new home deals fell through. We spent loads of money on required house inspections. But one house after another, something would go awry. We canceled and rebooked our move with Jeremiah at least five times, and each time, he promptly and without incident, inked a new date for us. Jeremiah was a charming guy, affable and easy-going. Usually, that would be a red flag for me. However, anxious to buy our very own home in New York, I was suckered in.

Switch and bait: One thing I found odd was that this company hadn’t sent anyone to give us an on site estimate. Jeremiah had provided it by phone and email, based on details Pamela gave of our current home’s size and the gross weight of our belongings recorded in past moves. That was yet another red flag we ignored.

Cut to moving day. We were aware of the company’s policy: No goods loaded until 50% of the total move balance was handed over. Payment could only be made by cash, cashier’s check, or postal money order. Another red flag we overlooked. Pamela had already obtained a cashier’s check in the required amount.

The movers showed up 30 minutes late. The truck they brought was 26 feet long, much smaller than we’d expected. We soon learned that it was intended only to accommodate the total cubic footage and weight on which the original phone estimate was based, with room to spare. Our entire load would later be transferred onto a contracted mover’s semi-truck. Well, the moving team’s lead man, Jose, surveyed our entire household’s possessions. He then informed us that more space would be required on the truck to accommodate everything; approximately 546 more cubic feet. This, of course, translated to additional costs of over $3,100. We panicked; we didn’t have the extra funds! They had us over a barrel! After several phone calls were made between Jose, his boss, Jeremiah and us, Pamela and I discussed our dilemma in private. We were stuck. We had no choice but to pay up and get the truck loaded. Our new home was scheduled to close in six days, we had a plane to catch, our lease was up, and we had a team of people depending on us! After some protests, we obtained an option to request a discount. The lead man’s boss accepted it, we agreed for the move to proceed, and we handed the cashier’s check to Jose. During this entire ordeal, five workers sat in front of the house, waiting for their orders. It seemed as though they’d been through this before. Funny, the movers ultimately managed to load all of our stuff onto every cubic inch of the small truck. Go wonder.

Cash only: Fast forward: we successfully arrived in New York and, after several hotel stays, we were invited to be guests at our realtor’s home while awaiting the closing of our new home and arrival of the moving truck. This home’s very remote location left us with no cell service, which was the sole means by which the mover (driver), Don, could reach us. Fortunately, there was a land line we could use while there. We phoned the mover and, with great difficulty, we provided that phone number to him. Immediately, a communication problem with the mover became evident, as he spoke with a heavy mid-Eastern accent in very broken English; his comprehension was even less. He informed us he would be arriving in five days.

Two nights before the expected arrival date, Don phoned to inform us that he would be arriving the next morning, between 7 and 10 a.m. This meant we had to hustle, get to bed early, and arrive at the house in time to meet him. Well, we arrived at 7:15 a.m. and waited. After almost two and a half hours, we decided to leave, figuring he wasn’t going to show up. Just before we got into our rental vehicle, we saw this semi-truck coming up the road. They arrived at 10:30.

To our astonishment, there were only two guys to complete the delivery: Don and his partner. Just the two were going to move our voluminous amount of stuff from the truck and into our new home! Don, the leader, was an unctuous dude who was short in stature with the biggest Napoleonic complex I had ever witnessed! As we came to soon find out, he also had a persecution complex and argued with us several times in his broken English. Pamela would instruct him how to set up furnishings and he would either ignore her or angrily dispute it. It was below 30 degrees out, but he insisted that we turn off the heat and leave all of the doors open the entire time!

The other major hurdle was the requirement for the means of payment. Total due was over $5,200. We had been instructed, only after we’d left our former home and place of banking, that the driver would only accept cash or postal money order. We had neither, and had no easy access to our funds. We were limited by our credit union to withdraw no more than $2500 a day. We’d already obtained that amount the previous Friday, after great effort and a long drive in the snow and rain, from and to our remote guest house. But, now, while the move delivery was in progress, we had to leave the movers alone at the house to travel again to areas unfamiliar to us. Finally, we were finally successful in purchasing the remaining funds at a post office in the form of postal money orders. We returned and paid the funds to the mover, obtained his receipts, and painfully endured the project through its finish at 9:30 p.m. We were so frustrated, defeated, and exhausted that we told the movers to simply leave us to finish assembling the furnishings that were still lying in pieces on the floor.

When it was all over, I was pissed off and Pamela was exhausted. As time went on, we found damage to some of our furnishings. We opened boxes and found more damaged goods. When it finally came time to use our clothes washer, it made a terrible banging sound. We ended up going to the laundromat twice. A repairman later found it had been damaged during the move.

Not only did the movers fuck us over, but our vehicle transport company also ripped us off. I won’t get into that right now. If you are telling me that capitalism is superior to socialism, I will reply that that is similar to comparing Scarlet Fever to cancer. Both diseases should be cured.

Unless I become a millionaire, I will never move again.

#moving #consumer rip off #autobiography #poets of tumblr #Stephenjaymorris

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robertvasquez763 · 7 years

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Bad Buggies and Ballyhoo: Bashing through the Desert in VW-Powered Off-Roaders

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If Baja California resembles a dog’s hind leg, then Ensenada would lie near the top rear of its thigh, while La Paz finds itself nestled in a crook at the top of its toes. In 1967, a motley crew of dudes set off down the peninsula in search of glory and bragging rights. There wasn’t much in the way of cash involved; the level of danger was high, the chance of mechanical failure, very high. Twenty-seven hours and 38 minutes after leaving Ensenada, Vic Wilson and Ted Mangels crossed the finish line in La Paz in a Meyers Manx, having covered 950 filthy miles in the little Volkswagen-powered buggy.

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Class 11, the choice of strident retronauts and staunch masochists.

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Then, as now, a variety of vehicles contested the race, which began as the NORRA Mexican 1000 Rally and morphed along the way into the SCORE Baja 1000. Modern off-road racing vehicles have been divided into classes, and the most rudimentary of them all are the Class 11 cars. Stock-bodied air-cooled VW Beetles running a 1600-cc engine that could’ve been just as easily built in the late Sixties as it could be today, Class 11s are slow, violent, a hoot, and an enduring testament to the fundamental toughness of Ferry Porsche’s basic design. They can, at least, utilize the independent rear suspension introduced by Volkswagen at the end of the 1960s. The Class 9 cars make do with the old-school swing axle.

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More obvious than the swing axle, however, is the 9’s bodywork. There isn’t a whole lot of it, and it shaves about 1000 pounds compared with the weight of a Class 11 machine. There’s a lid over your head that also happens to serve as the door, some flat pieces attached to the tube frame, and well, that’s about it. A near stock Bug suspension is bolted to the front, and a tight little gearbox sits in front of a 1600 built to the same restrictions as a Class 11. In the car I was to drive, there was a total of eight inches of suspension travel out back—four compression, four rebound—and the ride is even more violent than that of a Class 11. On the upside, the light weight means that it has a tendency to skip along the tops of whoops. And out on the 10-mile course laid out for us by Cody Jeffers of Mojave Off-Road Racing Enthusiasts, if there weren’t rocks, there were whoops. Sometimes there were rocky whoops.

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The apple of our dusty eye: the stalwart, archaic, and brutal Class 9 buggy.

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Class 9s have another interesting tendency: They’ll basically high-side themselves. Motorcyclists know the high side and fear it. On a bike, it happens when the rear wheel starts to slide out from underneath the rider, gets traction, and then the suspension quickly compresses and unloads, throwing the rider from the motorcycle as if he’s been launched by a trebuchet. Wonderfully, a Class 9 buggy is capable of a similar feat. In sketchy sections under too much power, the car gets a disconcerting side-to-side oscillation going. If it gets wild enough, one side of the suspension quickly loads, then unloads itself. Combine this with the light weight of the thing (somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 pounds dry), and it’s easy to see how it could potentially end up on its roof.

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After watching my performance in the Class 11 car, which basically consisted of pushing it as hard as I could and hoping for the best, Cody Jeffers took me aside and kindly and calmly suggested that such tactics wouldn’t work in the 9. As he was doing so, a fellow journalist rolled in, lamenting the yellow little car and finally, in a fit of dusty exasperation, exclaiming, “Just bury me in it.” Another had become disenchanted after stalling it in a wash. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I did, however, reach into the bag on the back of my motorcycle and pull out a pair of Alpinestars SMX-1 summer riding gloves, figuring the thin palms would do a decent job of approximating driving gloves, given the steering kickback the others had complained about.

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The wee shifter is over there on the right.

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I clambered up on the wheel, onto the fuel cell located between the seat and the engine, and down through the roof. I fiddled with the five-point harness while Cody hooked up my radio and plugged the fresh-air blower system into my helmet. Racing clutch to the floor, I fired up the old flat-four and putzed out of the pits.

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It felt a little bit like that first live performance with a new band. You’ve practiced, you’ve screwed up, you’ve practiced a bit more, and now you’re on a stage with nothing but wit and skill to guide you. But letting a crowd down is one thing. Hanging upside down from a racing harness while the guy whose buggy you’ve rolled comes to extract you is another.

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The first stretch of the course saw me bounding down a straight path. The wheel bucked and kicked, but with a little hand pressure to keep it on line, the car tracked true while desert scrub whipped by on either side. A right turn, and I was up into the rocks and whoops. Baseball-sized rocks could be driven over; basketball-sized rocks were to be avoided. My breathing went shallow, and I couldn’t seem to make it any deeper until I aced a section at speed and involuntarily Wooo!ed in delight. After that, the breaths came normally. Apparently, if you need to kick-start your lungs in the desert, impersonating a twentysomething female hepped up on pumpkin spice lattes and Fireball whiskey does the trick.

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The technique for dealing with whoops is as follows: punch the gas up the micro-hillock to lift the front; let off to let the car float down the other side. In practice, the technique has you tapping the throttle almost like a mid-tempo kick drum. I got a little too aggressive, and the car started the side-to-side oscillation Cody had warned me about. I gently backed out of the throttle, let the car calm down, and dug back in. Later, I mentioned to an off-road racer friend that taming the car and getting back into a rhythm made me feel like a hero but that I didn’t know whether that was because I was a newbie. She replied, “No, I totally do.” Knowing that it’s a lasting feeling makes me want more.

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Our course was marked by black arrows marked on blaze-orange placards, and while I’d been around the track as a passenger and a driver in the Class 11 machine and then suffered through an exhibition lap in a Class 5 Unlimited Bug—a tube-chassis Beetle powered by a hogged-out flat-four capable of more than 80 mph in this terrain—I didn’t have it entirely memorized. I missed a turn, came to a stop in front of a sizable creosote bush, thought that I didn’t want to deal with finding reverse in the tight transmission, then realized, “Hey! I’m in a freakin’ buggy!” and just drove over the poor plant to get back on course.

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When I was 10 years old, there was nothing in the world I wanted more than a Tamiya Fox R/C buggy. So I scrimped and I saved for the better part of a year, bought the car the day after Christmas 1986, spent the rest of my school break building it, and then had to wait eight more months until I had enough money to purchase a radio, battery, and charger. In short, the 1/10-scale buggy was one of the prized possessions of my childhood. Eventually, I put a ’67 GTO body on it, because I am from the Central Valley. At one point, tearing up a hill in the Mojave Desert, I had a thought: “I’m in the Fox! I’m the little plastic dude I painted 31 years ago!”

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I knew the hill with the jump at the top was coming soon. The smooth face of the serious rise in front of me looked like it. I was about 90 percent sure it was the jump. Perhaps foolishly judging that 90 percent is the better percentage of valor, I committed. Cody’d warned me to get out of the throttle if I left the ground. Hammer down, the small yellow buggy bounded up the hill, crested the rise, and caught sweet, sweet air. Right foot up, stuck the landing, back into the power, and on toward the last bit of the course. Tearing toward the pits, there were a couple of nature-made drainage ditches to be aware of, not easily visible in the desert sun. In the interest of avoiding calamity, I dialed back the pace.

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Into the pits, engine off. I’d been so occupied out on the course I hadn’t realized just how stupendous the whole experience had been. It was akin to the night Bob Mould invited me onstage to sing “Makes No Sense at All” because he’d blown his voice out. After the song ended, I stepped off the stage and just stood there with my hand over my mouth. A guy smiled and said to his date, “He just realized what he just did.”

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Baja Blitzkrieg: Taking the Reins of a BMW X6 Trophy Truck in Mexico

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The Burrito Cannonball

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Volkswagen: News, Reviews, Photos, and More

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Power- and weight-wise, a Class 9 car isn’t that far off a loaded up Harley-Davidson tourer, yet the experience is like riding a four-wheeled dirt bike. Throttle-induced weight transfer rules the day, steering inputs alone are largely suggestions, getting a buggy around the course requires merging with both the machinery and the landscape. Eyes down the course, foot in the gas, make the thing skitter and dance across the terrain instead of plowing through it. I was geeked; I hadn’t been so utterly thrilled in a vehicle in a very long time. It beat lapping Daytona in a Ferrari 488, or ripping around New Jersey Motorsports Park on a Yamaha YZF-R6. Cody unfastened the roof hatch, and I clambered out gracelessly, fairly well pummeled after 40 miles around the course during the afternoon. Jeffers allowed that most of the people who drive Class 11s are in their teens and early twenties. I’m 41. I asked anyway. “Cody, how much does one of these things cost?”

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“About six grand.”

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“Don’t tell me that. I can afford that!”

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The 2017 Baja 1000 starts in Ensenada on November 14. I won’t be there, but, man, am I ever dreaming dreams of Class 9 glory.

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via WordPress https://robertvasquez123.wordpress.com/2017/10/10/bad-buggies-and-ballyhoo-bashing-through-the-desert-in-vw-powered-off-roaders-2/

#Engines #Bad Buggies and Ballyhoo: Bashing through the Desert in VW-Powered Off-Roaders #car #engine

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jesusvasser · 7 years

Text

Bad Buggies and Ballyhoo: Bashing through the Desert in VW-Powered Off-Roaders

Class 11, the choice of strident retronauts and staunch masochists.

The apple of our dusty eye: the stalwart, archaic, and brutal Class 9 buggy.

The wee shifter is over there on the right.

Baja Blitzkrieg: Taking the Reins of a BMW X6 Trophy Truck in Mexico

The Burrito Cannonball

Volkswagen: News, Reviews, Photos, and More

“About six grand.”

“Don’t tell me that. I can afford that!”

The 2017 Baja 1000 starts in Ensenada on November 14. I won’t be there, but, man, am I ever dreaming dreams of Class 9 glory.

- from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2g5lgq3 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Performance Junk WP Feed 4

0 notes

eddiejpoplar · 7 years

Text

Bad Buggies and Ballyhoo: Bashing through the Desert in VW-Powered Off-Roaders

Class 11, the choice of strident retronauts and staunch masochists.

The apple of our dusty eye: the stalwart, archaic, and brutal Class 9 buggy.

The wee shifter is over there on the right.

Baja Blitzkrieg: Taking the Reins of a BMW X6 Trophy Truck in Mexico

The Burrito Cannonball

Volkswagen: News, Reviews, Photos, and More

“About six grand.”

“Don’t tell me that. I can afford that!”

The 2017 Baja 1000 starts in Ensenada on November 14. I won’t be there, but, man, am I ever dreaming dreams of Class 9 glory.

- from Performance Junk Blogger 6 http://ift.tt/2g5lgq3 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Performance Junk Blogger 6

0 notes