Bear Paw Meanderings

This is going to sound like a whine column but I can see why people no longer answer their telephones. It used to be that when the phone rang you answered it. Now days I call someone and I get an answering machine 90 percent of the time. I asked a good friend why he didn’t answer the phone and he said there were too many crazy people calling him.

I answer my phone and he is right. I think I get a scam call at least once EVERY day! Of late it has been a man with a far Eastern accent who tells me that there is something wrong with my Windows operation on the computer. I hang up on him.

Or, there is the IRS Detective Scumm who says he has launched a criminal investigation of me because I have not paid my taxes. I hang up on him too.

Then there is the insurance legal scam. I and 90 percent of Havre got a new roof on my house after a July 4 hailstorm in 2015. I thought I had found a reputable firm to replace the roof. Their bid was $7300.00. I thought they were a reputable firm; they were just in so far over their heads that they did a shoddy job. What they said they would do, like clean up behind them, they never did clean up at all!

Then they started having to do things on the roof to bring the roof up to code. That meant that the original bid ended up costing my insurance company around $13,000.00. I asked the insurance company if roofer’s invoices were not too high? The insurance company admitted they were and said everyone’s were and there was nothing they could do about it.

What a joke that was! I got my premium notice for the coming year this last week. I had been paying $700.00 a year. Next year I am paying $950.00 a year if I continue to take the insurance.

I am finding less expensive insurance but it makes me boil to think that roofers get away with murder and I have to pay because I am the poor homeowner.

Try using the phone book to look up a name. Or, even worse, try to get information. I got charged over thirty dollars from the phone company last month and never did get the phone numbers I wanted! My sister says that phone books and information is obsolete. These days people get that sort of information from the internet.

It is a strange new world out there and one that I don’t much care for at all.

The only thing I can say is that young people will never know how good we all really had it when we lived in the shadow of the Milk River in the 1950’s.

Those were the days. We thought they would never end.

They came to a screeching halt!