Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Allow me to tell you a tale of intrigue on the high seas…

A major naval power, protecting its interests in Asia and the Middle East, is patrolling international waters off the Gulf of Aden, just south of the Arabian Peninsula. Tensions are high - only days before, a pirate ship had hijacked a large ship containing valuable cargo belonging to one of the naval power’s allies, and a ransom demand is expected soon. The naval vessel comes across a suspected African pirate ship, and orders the ship to submit to an inspection. Predictably enough, the pirate ship refuses, and instead, opens fire. Returning fire, the navy ship hits the pirates’ ammunition dump, which catches fire, setting off a series of explosions which sink the pirate ship. Some of the pirates flee in a pair of lifeboats; one is later found without any passengers, and the other is never found.

Sounds like a tale of swashbuckling adventure from a time long gone, right? I’m sure you can almost see the Union Jack flying over the naval vessel, and the pair of nineteenth-century style wooden ships that were engaged in this battle. Heck, telling the story, I can practically see the hook on the pirate captain’s arm.

There’s only one problem with that vision of this story, though: this battle took place yesterday, between the Indian navy - currently the world’s fifth-largest - and Somali pirates.

For those who may not have heard, Somali pirates are becoming an increasing problem along what is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Attacks have increased dramatically over the past several months, including the hijacking of a Saudi Arabian oil supertanker, which was carrying roughly $110 million worth of oil, on November 15. All sorts of commerce is being impacted, from oil and wheat shipments all the way on down to Nintendo Wii systems and games. Things are so bad that shipping insurance has increased tenfold for cargo going through the region over the past year. It’s like the region has suddenly decided to go on a retro kick to a couple of centuries ago.

Given that we’re in the early phases of a major global recession, you’d think that the nations of the world would be uniting to stage an effective response to what is almost certainly just a rag-tag group of tribal warlord types who’ve decided to go for the big time. Surely, the combined naval power of nations like the US, the UK, India, and China could easily blast these idiot pirates to smithereens in no time flat, before they cause even more economic problems…right?

As of this writing…not so much.

Helping to prove their irrelevance, the UN has done nothing but issue a resolution asking its members to go fight the pirates, but telling them to do so in cooperation with the Somali government - which analysts have noted is part of the piracy problem (note that I single out the UN for their lack of real action because, if there’s anything they should be able to deal with effectively, piracy in international waters should be pretty high on that list). The New York Times is busy running articles telling the pirates’ side of the story, and the NATO warships that arrived in the region in October are only being used for defensive purposes. Confusion surrounding the international legal standards for dealing with these pirate scum has slowed the process of punishing pirates who are captured, and none of the world’s major naval powers appear to be interested in aggressively going after the problem. Proving that the world order is going completely upside-down, the French - they of such dubious military prowess that a Google search for “French military victories” produced a page asking if the searcher had meant “French military defeats” for some time - have provided the most bad-ass response thus far, including a commando raid that freed a pair of French tourists who were being held ransom by Somali pirates, while the Russians chose not to use force to help free a Ukranian ship taken hostage by the pirates.

I realize that the nations of the world can’t exactly just summarily execute suspected pirates, and that a full-scale attack on land inside that country is unlikely given the current global political environment (and the major military powers’ pressing engagements elsewhere). But for heaven’s sake, how difficult can it be to motivate enough countries to put together an offensive force to go and eradicate this problem (or at least make it unprofitable enough for the pirates that they dial back to a minimal number of attacks)? Has the civilized world become so weak that we can’t actually deal with a problem like this - which everyone agrees needs to be stopped - effectively? If so, I fear for the future of our world, and the insanity that is sure to ensue in it as rebel groups like this become more and more brazen.

If the last couple of days have seemed especially light on spam, you’re not just imagining things: thanks to the research of the Washington Post’s Security Fix Column and network security companies around the world, an Internet Service Provider responsible for roughly 75% of the spam on the Internet was taken offline on Tuesday.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: how could one company possibly have been responsible for that much spam without being detected earlier? As it turns out, many of McColo’s customer’s weren’t sending the spam directly through its facility; instead, command and control systems for massive botnets (groups of thousands of average PCs infected with particular types of viruses) operated out of the McColo facility, using its connection to the Internet to direct systems all over the world to send the spam.

While I applaud the efforts of the security researchers who found this company, as well as the Post writer who broke this story - particularly given the huge number of fake pharmaceutical, child pornography, and other illegal web sites hosted by McColo - I have to wonder if they didn’t actually waste an unprecedented opportunity by simply pulling the plug on this ISP. Instead, I would argue that they should have monitored the network traffic going to and from these malicious sites - especially the botnet command and control systems - until they understood the network protocols used to control the spam-spewing zombies around the world, and had had a chance to identify a large portion of the infected systems being used by these botnets. By doing so, they could have developed tools to find these botnets in action at other ISPs, and given providers a list of infected customers, who those providers could have shut off until their systems were cleaned. This sort of a fix certainly wouldn’t have been permanent - spammers are always adapting to evade the latest detection mechanisms - but it certainly could have made a much bigger impact on the worldwide spam problem in the long term.

Even so, I’m just glad to see the volume of spam I receive drop so substantially, even if it is temporary (I’ve gone from ~200-300 every evening between going to bed and getting up in the morning, for example, to more like 50). I’m sure everyone reading this agrees - we’re all tired of erectile dysfunction ads, Nigerian princes telling us we’ll be rich if only we supply our bank account details, and the random garbage that simply makes no sense at all.

That said, though, what can you do about the spam problem, especially if you’re not a network security professional like me?

The answer is simple, really: keep your PC secure, and tell your friends and family to do the same.

Of course, computer security as a broad subject isn’t that simple, or I wouldn’t have the great job that I do. Even so, there are a few basic things that anybody can to do help keep their PC safe and free of software that will turn it into a pawn in the global game of spam:

• Apply Windows security patches regularly: Go visit http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com today and ensure that all of the security patches listed there have been applied. If you see that you’re missing several, once they’re installed, go turn on automatic updates, which will ensure that at least security patches are installed as soon as they’re released by Microsoft.
• Use up-to-date antivirus: It doesn’t matter much which antivirus tool you use - just use one of them on a regular basis. If you think you can’t afford it, check whether your ISP provides some form of free anti-virus - many do these days, because it saves them money to have fewer infected PCs spewing garbage on their network - or use a free tool like AVG Free or ClamWin (a port of the extremely popular and highly effective ClamAV system to Windows). Even a once-a-month scan will find any really nasty viruses.
• Run anti-spyware software: The best product out there is Ad Aware, and their free version is perfectly sufficient. It will catch many things that a virus scanner might miss, and will help protect your privacy from programs that log your Internet activity while you’re at it.
• Use some basic common sense: Don’t open unexpected attachments in e-mail, even from people you know. Stay away from illicit web sites, like offshore gambling, warez software, and porn (if you must visit porn sites - yes, I know there are people like that out there - try to stay mainstream, because the weirder the fetish, the more likely the site has malicious software on it). The more you play it safe in your web browsing, the less likely you are to have something running on your PC that you didn’t invite.

If everyone in the world followed this advice, we’d likely see a permanent drop in spam volumes, since so much of it comes from infected home users’ PCs. I just hope that I can make a difference with some subset of the people out there.

After four days of working on them essentially non-stop - we’ve both had this Monday and Tuesday off - Holly and I have got the bulk of the paneling up in the dining room, but we’re not quite finished. Since it’s midnight here, and we’ve got a long day of work ahead of us tomorrow - but I know there are a lot of people waiting to see this - I’ll post a few pictures showing what it looks like now, with the back story to come tomorrow or possibly Thursday.

For those who may think that we’re wimps for not having completed this in four days…let me give you a sense of the chaos that has enveloped our lives while doing this project:

It’s been…well…intense, but I’d say it’s been worth it. You just can’t get results like this buying something pre-fabbed from Home Depot, and you sure can’t build equity like we’re doing with the kind of money it would take to buy these walls pre-done.

…isn’t nearly as entertaining as it may sound.

One of Holly’s biggest concerns about the paneling in our dining room is that, since it will have a flat shelf on the top at roughly 5 feet above ground level, someone will absent-mindedly lean on it as they’re chatting after dinner or whatnot, and in so doing pull it right off the wall. Since I actually took a piece of the doorjamb on the front door right off the wall some time ago, simply by having a loose screw in the door frame catch on it, her concern is a very valid one - with only finish nails attaching the shelf to the wall, any real weight on it would take it right off.

Trying to solve this issue, Holly discussed the matter with her grandfather - who built his own house, and is a skilled carpenter - and he made the excellent suggestion that we locate the studs in the wall and use wood screws to attach the supporting rail underneath the shelf to the studs. With that done, weight on the shelf would be pressed down onto the screws and transferred to the studs, which should support even the most rotund of individuals.

The only real issue we had was that, with plaster walls like ours, finding studs can be a tricky business - stud-finding tools are generally worthless, and tapping on the wall and listening to the sound that comes back is usually not much better. Holly’s grandfather had an excellent suggestion there, too: he said that studs are almost always measured out in fixed intervals from a given corner, usually 16 inches or so. He suggested that we could drill pilot holes into the walls starting at 16 inches off of the first corner, and working out from each side of that hole in half-inch increments or so, until we were able to locate and mark the studs. Once we’d determined the interval, he said, it should be a breeze - we’d just measure things out, drill to check ourselves, and be good.

The operative word, unfortunately, was “should”.

We started out at 16 inches from the corner on the longest wall in the room, figuring that it probably had the most studs. With no luck, I moved to one side…then the other…then back to the other…then…damnit, where the hell was the stud?!?!?

Hiding in a rather odd place, it turned out:

This stud wasn’t at 16 inches, like Holly’s grandfather predicted. It wasn’t at 15 inches, either, as seemed an obvious deviation from 16 inches. No, we had an obvious antitriscadecaphobe: the stinking thing was 13 inches from the corner. The rest of the studs on that wall were all roughly that far apart, too…but not exactly, because we had several instances where we measured out 13 inches from the last stud and found the next one more than an inch away - as you can tell from the futility we continued to experience in hitting the dang things right on the mark:

Yes, for those of you who are looking at the large version of the second image, that’s Holly’s handwriting saying “No Stud”. Some of the smaller portions of wall, where we have a door in the middle, only have studs at the corners, with gaps as large as two feet between them. Not exactly something that makes you feel good about the stability of your house, especially when said walls are exterior ones.

By far the most exciting part of the stud-finding process, though, came on the wall between the front room and the dining room:

Yes, folks, that’s a dimmer switch you see there on the right…which means that there’s a hot wire somewhere in that wall. Each time I got closer to it, I flinched a bit harder as I drilled into the wall. I’m just glad I found it when I did, because I doubt if I’d have been able to bring myself to actually drill directly below the switch - something about not wanting to be a live-action Wile E. Coyote, you know.

In the end, we realized that the lack of standardization in the house wasn’t something that has creeped in over the years - nope, it was built right into the house. The spacing between the studs actually ranges based upon which wall you’re dealing with, from 13 inches on the long wall all the way out to 19 inches on the opposite wall. Holly surmised that the builders measured out each wall, looked at the number of studs they had to put into it, and split things up evenly, which seems to me like the most charitable, I’m-going-to-pretend-they-weren’t-total-idiots answer anyone could possibly come up with. I just hope she’s right, because the alternative - that our house was built by morons - is just not one I really want to accept.

As a libertarian and a friend of many homosexual people, my opinion on the issue of gay marriage has always been clear: I’m all for it, just so long as I don’t ever have to be part of one (and preferably am not asked to actually attend one between a pair of men - sorry, gay guys, the sight of men making out just gives me the creeps, no matter how open-minded I am about the concept). More importantly, to me, the idea that people around the country have spent the last several years amending their state constitutions to explicitly ban gay marriage seems like a waste of time and effort on their part (it’s not like doing so has changed their lives for the better, or prevented them from becoming worse), and like another step on the road to abandoning the spirit of freedom and liberty that this country was founded on over two hundred years ago.

One thing that I’ve found particularly bothersome about the anti-gay movements of the last few years has been the heavy involvement of religious organizations in the campaigns to ban gay marriage. The Mormon church have been particularly bad offenders - as far back as 2000, local church leaders in California were actively encouraging the members of the church to do things like go and post signs in favor of Proposition 22 (whose nullification by the state Supreme Court prompted this year’s Proposition 8 state constitutional amendment). Given that one of the restrictions on tax-exempt organizations like the LDS church is that they may not endorse a given political candidate or piece of legislation (an issue that I had to tread carefully with during the 2008 election as the Mars Society worked to keep its membership informed of the candidates’ positions on space), the Mormons’ heavy-handed approach to politics has always bothered me - just not enough that I’ve ever wanted to do anything about it.

As it turns out, in the wake of Proposition 8 passing this past Tuesday, filing a formal complaint about the LDS church’s political activities just got a whole lot easier, courtesy of this blog. They’ve got pre-filled official IRS forms for filing a complaint about the matter, and link to supporting documentation for use in any complaint you may wish to make.

Presented with the reality of this very simple way to act on my belief that the LDS church has gone too far in its political advocacy, I’ve now been forced to decide whether or not they’ve stepped far enough over the line that I, as a citizen, should formally propose that the IRS levy what would amount to a fine of mind-blowing proportions (while the church has fought unsuccessfully to keep its finances secret, some estimates have put its income at $2 million per day - $730 million per year) by requiring them to pay income taxes.

I have to admit, part of me is conflicted about doing this, because of the arguments I’ve heard from some of my cousins recently while discussing Proposition 8 - which essentially boil down to freedom of speech issues. As much as I dislike the LDS church’s behavior on this issue, given their tax-exempt status, I’m an even stronger believer in free speech and the First Amendment; freedom of expression is one of the most fundamental principles of a liberal democracy, and I’m reticent to limit it under practically any set of circumstances. I’m also not exactly a fan of the IRS or the federal government, so I hate to sic them on the Mormon church, because it feels like it would be using something evil for my own ends - a hypocritical move at best.

At this point, I’d like to hear from anyone reading this - and I know that a large percentage of you are either Mormon by birth or by current practice - whether you think that the LDS church has overstepped its bounds as a tax-exempt organization far enough that it should be penalized by the IRS. The more input I have before I make a decision, the better, right?

Last weekend, as Holly and I were getting ready to start painting the dining room, we went ahead and took off the trim around the door on the kitchen side of the doorway between it and the dining room - we figured we were going to be stripping and staining that doorjamb before we paneled the dining room anyway, so might as well get moving with it, right?

The good news about the process was that it proved our suspicion that the trim around the door was not, in fact, original to the house: we found some of the hideous wallpaper that was in the kitchen underneath the trim, which means that either they’re not particularly old - I’m thinking a decade at the most - or that a whole string of owners have had really bad taste and/or a complete lack of motivation, since nothing else could explain allowing that awful stuff to stay on the walls.

What was really nuts, though, was the other item we found under the trim: Scotch tape!

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot!

Seriously, what thought process could have possibly produced the idea to use Scotch tape to secure the wallpaper to the door frame, or to leave it there before nailing up the trim? It’s about as useful as mascara on a monkey, and nowhere near as hilarious. I can only imagine the idiocy of the person that thinks to themselves, Gee, I’m not sure these nails will hold - better put some Scotch tape on things just to be sure!

What really boggles my mind is, if you’re going to tape your wallpaper to the door, why you’re not using duct tape to do the job. I mean, if it’s good enough for NASA, why wouldn’t it be good enough for your kitchen? It is, after all, one of the greatest materials known to mankind - seeing as how it can be used to remove warts, make an outfit for prom, and fix just about any piece of hardware on or off the planet - so why wouldn’t it pop right to mind when you need to tape something to your wall?

I suppose this will just have to remain one of life’s great mysteries. At least it will keep me entertained thinking about possible motivations while I stain the roughly 10 zillion pieces of wood necessary to do the paneling in the dining room…

After finally getting the walls in the dining room patched and sanded to the point of being as smooth as they were going to get (I finally gave up on a completely smooth wall when I realized that the actual surface of the wall itself was wavy - dang plaster), Holly and I sat down this weekend and started to paint it. Of course, even getting started was entertaining; just keeping our hanging light safe from the ceiling painting we were doing produced something that looked like a horrible, human-sized cocoon:

Luckily, Cobol was ready to help out and lighten the mood as we dug into the rather large task ahead of us:

Invisible Kitteh!

The more important piece, though, was that there was an immediately noticeable improvement in the walls as we started to get the initial coat of primer on. Keep in mind that we had actually scrubbed the walls before we primed:

By Wednesday morning (including a break for the bulk of Tuesday night to watch election returns), we’d got the entire room, ceiling included, covered in two coats of primer. Since we’re attempting to finish the room, paneling included, before Thanksgiving, we were eager to get moving on the actual paint, so I cracked open the can we’d bought back in August at the same time as the paint for the front room before we left for work that morning, hoping to at least get a wall or so painted up. Strangely enough, while I was expecting a light green color, the can greeted me with a rather stark red; it took some serious stirring to get it to come out to what it was supposed to be:

Honestly, I should have known better the moment I opened it - that sort of settling in that short of a time frame should have been some sort of a bad omen or something. I knew it didn’t look good in the can even once it was mixed back up properly, but I went ahead and put some on the wall anyway, hoping that maybe it would look better there.

Yeah, not so much.

We didn’t have a chance to snap a picture of just the ugly paint - partially because we had to get to work, and partially because we didn’t have the heart to record such ugliness. Holly said - and rather aptly, I might add - that it looked like someone had taken one of our nephew Eli’s diapers and spread it across the wall. If pressed to describe it myself, I’d say it was a cross between pond scum and really dark mud. It was just…well…awful. The only hope we had was that it would dry a better color, and that we could finish putting it up that evening if it did. Arriving home that evening, we both were on edge, hoping it would look good dry on the wall.

Somehow, it managed to look worse dry than it did wet.

At that point, we snagged some dinner and headed over to the magical world of Home Depot, where we visit so often that even the dude wandering the aisles trying to sell cabinet refinishing work recognized us. Since we at least had an idea of where we wanted to move away from, and roughly which direction we were headed, picking a new color was fairly simple; this time, though, we only bought a quart, just in case it was still wrong. Once we got it home and started to apply it, though, we immediately realized that it was exactly what we’d been going for. The best part of all was that it actually went right over the horrible, awful stuff we’d put on that morning, with no need for new primer:

Yin and Yuck

With the room now fully painted - at least the parts that will show above the wainscoting - we’re starting to feel like we might actually have a shot at making our Thanksgiving deadline. Now we just have to hope that we don’t run into any more crazy construction surprises between now and then.

While we were going through wood for our wainscoting in the dining room yesterday, Holly and I found a very bizarre piece of wood:

“Front” side

Closeup #1

Closeup #2

Back side

We have no idea how it got this way, but it’s utterly fascinating in its oddity. Since it was $5, we decided to buy it, because if we can figure out something do with it, we’re sure it will be cool.

That said, I know that at least a few people read this blog, so to anyone out there: what should we do with this thing? We’re open to anything, from functional to artsy. Leave a note in the comments section of this article (you don’t have to register, but I will have to approve the comment, to prevent spam), so maybe a few people can think on it together. If someone comes up with a good idea, and it’s feasible, we’ll do it.

OK, this one wasn’t so much trouble…but man, did the process make me think of the witches of MacBeth.

Much like every other fixture in our house, the hinges on all of our doors were completely covered in multiple layers of paint when we bought the place. Since they’re heavy-duty, old style hinges - with little decorative knobs on the top and square edges, instead of the corner-cutting circles you get today - Holly wanted to save them, and to save as much of the patina as possible while stripping off the nasty paint from them. A couple of months ago, she saw a tip on one of the DIY shows she watches about heating painted hinges in a crock pot with a lye/water mixture, which would make the paint come up without destroying the patina, and decided she wanted to give it a whirl.

Interestingly enough, lye is a very difficult item to come by these days. We started our search for it at Wal-Mart; after not finding it in the cleaning section, I asked some employees, whose response was “Lye? Naw, if we had that, we’d use it on those nasty bathrooms over there.” Home Depot doesn’t carry lye, and neither does Lowe’s. Since that’s essentially our selection of local hardware stores, we were starting to despair of ever finding it. Holly looked around on the web, found that trisodium phosphate is largely equivalent in terms of its cleaning properties, and so we started looking again; amazingly enough, not a single one of the cleaners we checked at Home Depot and Lowe’s had the stuff in it, or even a chemically similar ingredient.

This weekend, we finally settled on Greased Lightning Multi-Purpose Cleaner, which has sodium hydroxide, as the most likely cleaner to work in a fashion similar to lye. Whipping out a stew pot, Holly mixed the cleaner at a rough one-to-one ratio with filtered water, put the mixture on the stove, and brought it to a low boil. With it properly warmed up, she turned the stove to medium heat, dropped in the first hinge, and watched carefully for any sort of crazy chemical reactions, just in case.

Amazingly enough, within just a few minutes, the paint had begun to bubble up off of the hinge. Encouraged by this development, she dropped in a few other pieces:

After letting them all sit for perhaps 10 minutes, she pulled the first one out, to see just how much paint would peel up:

Everything but the very bottom layer of paint was easily peeled off using just your fingers (despite having been in boiling water, the hinges were cool enough to touch within a matter of 30 seconds or so). A used toothbrush took off a large chunk of the paint that was in contact with the actual metal of the hinges, though doing so was a dirty, nasty, difficult process that went flake by flake, with the toothbrush spewing blackened water with each stroke across the hinge. Further boiling did little to help with this process, either…even if it did make for an awesome-looking hinge stew:

After working with the hinges for a couple of hours, Holly came to a sudden realization: our grade #000 (extra fine) steel wool might pull the paint off better than a toothbrush, while still being delicate with the underlying patina. Figuring that it was worth a shot on the back side of one of the hinges (which, amazingly enough, did have paint on it), she gave the steel wool a try, and realized immediately that it was considerably faster than the toothbrush, and left no scratches on the hinge itself. In fact, they ended up looking amazing:

Of course, to keep in the spirit of complete non-standardization in our house, we realized that while most of the hinges are brass, one of the ones that we’ve cleaned thus far is actually copper. Since you’ll actually be able to see the difference on the same door, we’re now going to be reduced to going around the house, pulling hinge pins and cleaning them off, hoping to find an odd number of hinges in copper, so that we can have a matched set on all of the doors. Awesome, huh?

Many people - myself included, at one point in time - view drug stores such as Walgreens, CVS, Longs, Rite Aid, etc. as essentially interchangeable entities. They’ll go to whichever one is closest, or that happens to have the best sale going on at the time they’re looking to purchase something. After a recent interaction with Rite Aid, though, I’ve reached the conclusion that they’re a step below the rest, and that they won’t be receiving my business in the future.

Back in mid-September, Holly and I stopped by the Rite Aid on the corner of Columbia Pike and Walter Reed here in Arlington to snag her some nasal decongestant before work, since her allergies were kicking up something awful. I used my flexible medical spending account’s credit card to buy the stuff, since it’s clearly an eligible expense under the plan I’m with, and tossed the receipt somewhere in the car as I handed Holly the box and started the car back up to get to work. The whole thing was a complete non-incident, as far as we were both concerned (especially since the decongestant worked, and Holly was breathing better within minutes).

A week later, I got an e-mail from the company that administers the flex spending plan, asking me for a receipt for the purchase. I was surprised to see it: practically every store in the country that sells items eligible for flex spending dollars has installed a system that will automatically notify the company that issued the credit card if an eligible item is purchased and the card is flagged as a flex spending card. I haven’t had to submit a receipt for something like a prescription or band-aids in nearly a year now. Still, I figured it’d be no big deal - I make a point to save receipts for purchases like that for at least a month, just in case - so I went digging through the Mini for that particular receipt.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it; it must have accidentally fallen out one of the doors, or been scooped up with some other piece of trash as Holly and I were cleaning out the car. Annoyed at my luck - especially since I had found receipts for several other flex spending purchases that didn’t need verification - I decided to call up Rite Aid and ask them if they could get me a duplicate receipt. Given that I knew the date and time of the purchase to within an hour, the amount of the purchase, the store I got it from, and even the credit card number I’d used to make the purchase, I figured that they’d have a database somewhere that they could pull out a receipt from.

After a very brief hold on the line to corporate, the customer service person told me that they could indeed produce a receipt, but that it would take a couple of weeks for them to get it to me via the mail. Since I have 60 days from the initial receipt for a request until my card gets cut off for failure to produce documentation, I figured it was no big deal, and hung up glad to have run into someone helpful on the first try. As promised, an envelope arrived in the mail from Rite Aid a little over two weeks later; since Holly and I were on our way out to - you guessed it! - Home Depot on the evening it came in, I simply set it aside to worry about later, feeling good that it was only a matter of faxing in the receipt before the whole issue was fixed.

This morning, I finally got around to opening up the envelope that Rite Aid sent, so that I could get things squared away. Upon unfolding the single sheet of paper inside, I was horrified (original envelope included, with my address obfuscated, to prove this really came from Rite Aid corporate):

The Rite Aid logo - or even the words “Rite Aid” - appears nowhere on the page. The date listed on it is clearly when they printed out this “receipt,” not the date of the transaction (which appears nowhere on the page, not even on the line items listed). There’s essentially nothing that would indicate to my flex spending company that I didn’t just forge something in the hopes that they’d believe me.

The best part of the whole sheet, though, is printed in letters so tiny that they’re difficult to read on the image above. I’ll spell out the relevant columns for you here:

Um, excuse me? Paying attention guys? You just gave away a corporate secret, letting me know that you marked up the generic drugs 750%. WTF are you thinking? Better still, what kinds of proprietary information will you give me if I ask?

I have no idea if the flex spending company will accept this receipt, or if I’ll be stuck cutting them a check to cover this “ineligible” expense to avoid having my card turned off. All I can say for certain at this point is that, when you combine higher prices than even CVS (who are often twice as expensive as Wal-Mart for comparable items around here), poor in-store customer service, their unbearable stupidity in not having installed an automated verification system for flex spending items, and the mind-boggling retardedness of the receipt they’ve sent me, I’m avoiding Rite Aid like the plague from here on out.