This is going to be a long post. I have several days of accumulated complaints. I'm back from my not so secret trip to a famous American city. I can't tell you which city, but I'll give a hint, it has L.A. as its initials. The highlight of the trip, by far, was meeting bloggers Megan and her sister, Annie, for dinner last night. We had the best time. But then, as Mrs. Sneed likes to say, we returned to our junkie lives. Why does aggravation arrive in waves, can anyone answer me that? First of all, we flew home on Southwest Airlines, which is usually, no, almost invariably, a pleasant experience. For those not acquainted with Southwest, they do not assign seats. Rather, you get a number in one of three boarding groups. A 1-60, B 1-60 or C 1 through however many seats are left. Today, we had B-10, 11 and 12. We should have been the 70th, 71st and 72nd passengers aboard a plane that seats 138. Unfortunately, LA was a connecting point on a flight from San Jose to Hooterville. So, when we boarded, there were through passengers already on. I walked all the way to the back of the plane looking for two unoccupied adjacent seats. Every row on both sides had one vacant or no vacant seats. It is the nature of travelers to take the window and the aisle, but leave the middle unoccupied. Finally I asked a friendly and professional flight attendant to help me because, while Mrs. Sneed and I could sit in non-adjacent seats, I had a nervous five-year-old in tow. Because Southwest only employs travel professionals, the professional flight attendant told me that she couldn't help me. She did make a half-assed attempt to ask the people in the last two rows to help. No one volunteered. Then, she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Sorry, there's nothing I can do". She also suggested that I should have preboarded with the families. Never mind that the guy at the gate wouldn't let us and that families get priority after 60 passengers have boarded. I was forced to announce in my loudest voice that I would place my nervous passenger in one of the open middle seats and that I would select the passengers who seemed least likely to be pleased by his presence. She found us two open seats a few seats apart. After we were seated, a guy next to Noah offered to switch with me and all ended well. Until we got to the parking garage and discovered that our car had a dead battery. It appears that someone left an inside light on for 5 days. Luckily, Noah's dad had come to pick him up at the airport and he saved us. Then, when I opened the accumulated mail at home, I found a collection letter from the dumb bastards at Verizon Wireless for $8.85, that I allegedly owe them from January 23rd. That's right, I was a Verizon customer for a single day in January. The account was set up in my name and the next day changed to Mrs. Sneed's name. Somehow in a single day, I managed to rack up almost nine bucks in charges. As outrageous as the charge is, it is more outrageous that the aforementioned dumb bastards didn't send me a bill for it. Instead the sent me a collection letter from their in-house collection outfit, IC System, Inc. Calling them proved to be futile. The website address they provided is a bad address and the dumb bastards at the regular Verizon number say they can't help. They can hang up on you though, as I found out. Apparently, the only way to pay them this $8.85 is to snail mail it. Dumb bastards, may be too mild a description. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky