Category: Commentary

One advantage brick & mortar stores have over their online counterparts is that most are happy to split payment methods for you. Say you want to buy a new TV, but you want to use three $50 Visa gift cards and pay the rest in cash. Walmart and Best Buy would have no problem doing this, but it’s impossible to do on Walmart.com or BestBuy.com. Online, it’s either this Visa or that MasterCard, not this Visa and this MasterCard.

Although Amazon doesn’t offer a way to use multiple payment methods directly, there is an easy workaround: just use gift cards (or regular credit cards) to buy Amazon gift cards for yourself! If you order them online, you can have Amazon send them to you via email, so you can easily apply them to your own account. Using my TV example, you could convert the three $50 gift cards into three $50 Amazon gift codes, which would total $150 in Amazon credit. You could buy the TV using your gift balance and charge the difference to another card.

There are a couple of other reasons why you might want to convert a gift card to an Amazon gift card.

For one, your Amazon gift balance never has any fees and never expires. Although most Visa, MasterCard and American Express gift cards no longer have expiration dates or “dormancy fees” for not using them after a time, some still do. Plus, you can always lose or misplace a plastic gift card. If you’re a big Amazon shopper, convert a Visa gift card to Amazon credit immediately to ensure that you get the full value of the card.

Secondly, Amazon gift cards can be ordered in almost any amount. If you have several “leftover” gift cards with balances of $2.13 or $3.27, why not convert them to Amazon credit and get rid of the near-useless gift cards? Yes, you’ll have to process each card individually, but even $5 can buy you an MP3 album on Amazon, so why waste the money?

Like most families, my family had a few oddball rules. I’m not talking about typical stuff like “don’t hit your sister” or “wash your hands before dinner”. I’m talking about Cofer family specific stuff like “we only go to the Chinese restaurant on Friday nights” and “no talking while Dallas is on”.

One of my family’s strangest rules was “we don’t go to Six Flags as a family unit”. Six Flags Over Georgia is, of course, an amusement park. I was welcome to go any time with the Cub Scouts, and my sister and I were allowed to go together with the church youth group. We just weren’t allowed to go as a complete nuclear family. And that’s because the two times we went as a family our house was broken into!

The second time was pretty straightforward: a “friend” of mine smashed a pane of glass in a French door and let himself in. He made off with all my computer software and cassette tapes, which was odd because we spent 75% of our time together making illegal copies of the same. A few days later, some of my other friends found my (empty) cassette carrying case in the woods behind my “friend’s” house. They brought it to me, and my mom called the cops. My “friend” admitted breaking in, mostly due to a fairly severe cut he’d gotten under his arm from reaching though the broken pane of glass to unlock the door (he had hemophilia or type 1 diabetes, I can’t remember which, and his mom freaked out when he came home with the cut; as soon as the cops showed up at her door she put two and two together and he confessed).

The first break-in, however, was much stranger. My folks decided that the exterior of the house needed painting, so my mom called in a bunch of crews for estimates. She ended up going with a gang of clean cut, professionally attired, church-going dudes. They came out for the first day or two with no problems.

And then we went to Six Flags.

We came home that night, and there were no broken panes of glass or jimmied door locks. Everything seemed perfectly normal. But a day or two later my dad had to go out of town on a business trip, and wanted his pocket watch to go with a suit he was planning to wear. It was a Hamilton railroad watch, certainly not a Franck Muller or even a Rolex, but somewhat pricey all the same. More importantly, it had belonged to his father, and had immense emotional value. And he couldn’t find it anywhere. He didn’t have time to deal with it then, so he went ahead and took his trip.

I don’t remember how old I was at the time, but I remember my sister was too small for even most kiddie rides at Six Flags, and my grandmother pushed her around in a stroller most of the day. More germane to this story, I was young enough that dad going out of town meant that mom would let me sleep in the bed with her and it wasn’t weird yet.

And that’s where I was the night or so after my dad left. Mom was downstairs talking on the phone and smoking at the hearth, while I was sitting in her bed, in dad’s spot, reading a book (possibly this book, one of my childhood faves). Suddenly, there was a strange sound…

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

I had no idea what was going on, but it sounded pretty close. I got out of bed and dropped to my knees to peek out the window. And what did I see? One of the painters, supporting the end of their extension ladder! He had the ladder propped up against the side of the house and appeared to be looking up at someone on the ladder. But I couldn’t see who, thanks to a beam that jutted out of the Tudor style home. All I knew was that whoever was on the ladder was headed towards one of the bedroom windows… the room I was in at the time!

I freaked. I turned on every light I could find in the room and ran downstairs screaming. However, unlike my previous story, my mom believed me this time. She’d heard the sounds too. We found a couple flashlights and went outside, but nothing seemed amiss. We were both pretty scared though, so she called the police. She made me tell the officer what I saw, and it seemed like a pretty outrageous story until my mom said something like, “I don’t know what he saw, but I heard the noises myself”. She mentioned the pocket watch and the painters, and the cop promised to look in to it.

As I’ve always heard it, the police questioned the painters, and none of them admitted to anything. And since there was no evidence one way or the other, the police called my mom and said that there was little they could do. I mean, they could have dusted my parent’s bedroom for prints, but since the painters had been inside the house raising and lowering windows and painting trim their prints would have been inside anyway. And so nothing happened. The painters finished their job and went on their way.

But then the strangest thing happened. One of the little “chores” I used to do as a kid was to get the newspaper when we came home from running errands. My mom would stop the car at the top of the hill at our driveway, and I’d get out, run to the paperbox and retrieve that day’s Atlanta Journal and Gwinnett Daily News.

But one day, a couple of weeks after the painters had left, I found an odd envelope in the paperbox. I gave it to my Mom, who opened it, to find the watch and a letter inside. The letter apologized for the theft, and explained that a young member of the church had fallen ill, and the watch was stolen as a “love offering” for her care. The author (the letter was not signed) said that he’d given it to the church and had second thoughts. He spoke with the pastor and got the watch back. And now we had it back.

Bizarre.

The house I lived in from the time I was 6 months old until the time I was 14 was a perfectly normal suburban Atlanta house. In fact, one of the few things that made the house unique was the driveway: the house sat at the bottom of a sloping hill, and the driveway was fairly long by suburban standards. There were also gaslights next to the driveway: one at the top of the hill, by the road; one about halfway down the driveway, at a small bridge that crossed a creek; and one more close to the house at the edge of the carport.

Here’s a crappy Google Maps picture of the house. The top of the driveway is to the right. The two large trees on either side of the driveway (in the center of the picture) are about where the bridge is, and the house itself is lost behind vegetation. The gaslight at the top of the driveway is gone now, but you can see the black pole still sticking out of the ground where it once was.

One night, in late September or early October, between 8:30 and 8:45, my mom asked me to take out the trash. There were two bags, and since I was a little kid barely taller than the trash bags, I decided to make two trips.

Of course, since it was around October, it was completely dark outside. Aside from light leaking out from the sliding glass door by the kitchen, and a streetlight at the back of the property (put there, I assume, so that Georgia Power could find the transformer), there was no light at all.

I walked towards the trash cans and just happened to look over at the second gaslight, the one by the bridge. And there I saw a man leaning against the bridge. He was wearing ratty jeans and an old army coat that still had service patches on the sleeves. He had dark blonde hair, which was styled in a kind of “mini-mullet”, more of a “I haven’t been to the barber in months” haircut than a conscious style decision. He also had a bushy mustache a few shades darker than his hair. He wasn’t very tall, and was very skinny. He looked to be in his early to mid 20s. I just stood there and stared for a second, opening and closing my eyes to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. I even saw that he was smoking a cigarette, which was in his left hand. I saw him lift it to his mouth and take a drag, and the tip of the cigarette grew brighter as he puffed on it.

I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do! I quickly walked to the trash cans, which were made of metal, and in a cart, like this:

I put the first bag of trash in the can, then slammed the lid down as hard as I could. It made quite a sound, which I hoped would make the man run away. I ran back to the house as fast as I could, and didn’t dare look in the man’s direction. As soon as I got inside the door, I started shouting:

“Mom! Mom! There’s a man outside! He’s by the bridge and he has long hair and he’s SMOKING A CIGARETTE! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

Mom, of course, wasn’t buying it. She said that there was nobody out there, that I was just imagining things, that I wasn’t getting out of taking the trash out and if I made something like that up again I’d get a spanking! I was explicitly ordered to take out the other bag of trash.

Continue reading “It STILL Freaks Me Out!”

See what happens when I go out of town for a week?

As you may know from a previous post, I collected records in middle and high school. In fact, it was something I was known for. When a friend would bring a new friend I didn’t know to my house, they’d want me to show the new guy my records. And, believe it or not, it was such a common thing that I had a sort of “presentation” ready to go:

“This is a Japanese Duran Duran album… and this is a German Duran Duran single… and this is an Italian single from The Police … and this is a Venezuelan Madonna album.”

It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that people would often ask if the artists sang in Japanese on the Japanese records, or German on the German records, etc. Almost always I’d just say “of course not.. that’s silly”.

But there was this one time… I was trying to date a girl from Dacula, GA (and back then, Dacula was “the sticks”). The girl came to my house one day, and she brought a “friend” with her. This friend wasn’t a “real” friend, in that she hadn’t sought out this girl for her friendship. Instead, the friend was a girl from next door she’d grown up with. So while the girl I was trying to date was cool, but a little bit country, her “friend” was as REDNECK as the day is long. I don’t think she’d ever seen incandescent lighting or indoor plumbing before, because she looked at everything in my house and was like “GOAH! GOAH! GOAH MAN!” [Editor’s note: You know how Gomer Pyle used to say “Gooollllyyy”? “Goah” is the author’s attempt at spelling the first syllable of that word. “Gaw” or “Gaahh” also work, but don’t have the “redneck flair” that “goah” seems to.]

The girl I was trying to date told her friend about my records, so I gave “Redneck Girl” the presentation. Of course, she asked about Duran Duran singing in Japanese. I don’t know why, but I looked at her, and with absolute sincerity I said “Why yes, they do sing in Japanese. In fact, the reason Duran Duran are so popular worldwide is because Simon LeBon speaks 191 languages!” Redneck girl was like “Goah! I just though he was a purty boy British faggit, but he must be SMART!”

I wonder if the poor girl still thinks Simon LeBon speaks 191 languages.

My dad was in the Boy Scouts and the U.S. Army, so by the time I came along he’d done enough camping for one lifetime. To this day, the closest dad comes to “roughing it” is staying at a Courtyard by Marriott. And so, aside from a couple of grade school summers when my folks let me “camp” in a tent in the backyard, I managed to reach adulthood without camping before.

By the late 1980s, most Georgians who knew about Cumberland Island learned about it from local shows like PM Magazine or local TV sign-offs. Atlanta’s public TV station, WGTV, in particular had a sign-off which featured scenic scenes from around the state set to Ray Charles’ version of “Georgia on My Mind”. The once grand old homes, the wild horses and the beautiful, unspoiled beaches of Cumberland Island featured prominently in the sign-off, and so one day, in late 1990, I got the idea to go to there.

Of course, this was a lot more difficult then than it would be today. I had to send a letter to the National Park Service, who is in charge of the island. In return they sent me a form to fill out, which I returned. Several weeks later, I received passes which would allow me and two friends to spend no more than 72 hours on the island on Memorial Day weekend 1991 (it’s a nature preserve, so access is strictly limited). I went to the Georgia State University library to find a phone book for St. Mary’s, the town closest to Cumberland. I saw a hotel I liked and made reservations. Almost everything was done except the waiting.

As the date approached, I spent around $400 on a tent, ground cloth, sleeping bag, a nice flashlight\lamp combo, a camping stove, fuel, plates and flatware, an armful of dehydrated camping dinners, water purification tablets, a 5 gallon collapsible water jug, eco-friendly toilet paper, cans of insect repellent, a sweet Swiss Army knife, and a giant backpack to put all that crap in. Oh, and I got a shiny new pair of Doc Martens, too. I considered them “necessary camping supplies”, you see. And, to round out the ensemble, I had an of-age friend get me a bottle of tequila, since I was only 20 at the time.

Continue reading “My One Camping Trip”

Here’s a list of random things people said on the Internet last week. Explanations available after the jump. Note that all grammar – spelling, punctuation, etc. – are copied verbatim from the original.

Let me know if you like this, and I’ll see about making it a regular feature!

– “The family I’m living with here in Thailand – nobody eats beef. I asked why, and they say ‘it tastes like cow’. I have no idea what that means.”

– “Well that was a really long-winded way of saying ‘look, everyone, someone who doesn’t understand marginal cost’.”

– “It’s like there are two universes here. Ours where we don’t ruin rib-eyes, and the other where Spock has a beard.”

– “So this is the car JFK was assassinated in? Let me call a buddy of mine who’s an expert on cars JFK was assassinated in.”

– “I can’t stream porn because Xbox live is taking all the Internet. I thought having a male roommate would make life easier”

– “Michio Kaku, the Al Sharpton of physics.”

– “imagine the sandwich you would get afterwards…”

– “I hate Bono but i assume the rest of Ireland is great.”

– “Really, dude? You liked chocolate as a kid? That’s amazing. And you still like it now? Gosh, you must really like chocolate. It’s so rare these days to hear of someone loving chocolate as a kid AND still liking it well into their adulthood. It’s a good thing you found this flowing chocolate slurry at Golden Corral so you can partake in this lifelong passion of yours unencumbered and free.”

– “At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.”

Continue reading “Stuff People Said”