Wanted: Artificial Intelligence Sherriff

Posted on 20/03/2026 by Grumpa Joe

Last night I watched a 1975 movie called “Rooster Cogburn” starring John Wayne and Katharine  Hepburn. The plot reminded me of the many westerns I watched in black and white as a kid that involved a stagecoach robbery. Today, while reviewing my American Express charges, I found one for $309. The only large charges I have like that are from the local supermarkets. This charge was listed as

EZ TEXTING 690550110Santa Monica CA$309.00
  

There was a time when I used a texting service to communicate with my fellow Lions members, but I never spent more than $25 for a mass text. At the usual rate of a nickel per, this meant I must have sent 6180 texts. We have only 75 members, and that pencils out to 82 messages per member. There is no way I ever sent that many text messages to anyone in my life. The Republicans running our country, however, easily send me that many texts daily. They never ask for money, but there’s no way to leave a message without checking a box linked to a donation. Clever these people are. If only they were that clever at outwitting the Democrats.

Anyway, this line item presented a challenge. It took me about twenty minutes to outwit the Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot before I was able to release some of the steam building in my aged cranium. Here is a transcript from this conversation I had with Alliyah, the chat agent holding a gun at my head.

  • Today • 1:19 PM

Hello, thanks for reaching out. We will be with you shortly.

  •  
  • EE

EZ-Bot Enhanced joined • 1:20 PM

  • Hi, thanks for chatting in today!
  • EE

What do you need help with? Please choose one of the following:

EZ-Bot Enhanced • 1:20 PM

  • Find help with Knowledge Base
    • My account or message is under review
    • Transfer to Live Chat
  • Transfer to Live Chat

Sent • 1:20 PM

  • EE

Please enter a detailed description of your inquiry, and I will contact an online Agent.

EZ-Bot Enhanced • 1:20 PM

  • I received a charge of $309.00 made on 2/27/26. Please tell me what this was for?

Sent • 1:22 PM

  • Transfer requested at 1:22 PM
  • EE

EZ-Bot Enhanced left • 1:22 PM

  • AF

Alliyah F joined • 1:24 PM

  • You are now connected to an agent, thank you for waiting.
  • AF

Hi, my name is Alliyah and I’m with the EZ Texting support team. I’m sorry to hear that you got charged on your account. No worries, I’m here to help! Can you please provide your email address or account ID?

Alliyah F • 1:25 PM

  • What is the charge for $309. on my american express card on Feb 27 2026 made for?

Read • 1:25 PM

  • AF

Can you please provide your email address or account ID?

Alliyah F • 1:26 PM

Read • 1:26 PM

  • Thank you for providing that information! Upon checking your account, the charge was from your annual plan which is the Launch Plan.
  • AF

And your annual plan got renewed on February 25, 2026.

Alliyah F • 1:27 PM

  • Please cancel that renewal?

Read • 1:28 PM

  • AF

I can go ahead and cancel it, are you not going to use the service anymore?

Alliyah F • 1:29 PM

  • No, I am no longer in a position that requires me. to mass text.

Read • 1:29 PM

  • I understand, I have now canceled your account and moving forward, you will not be charge again, and please be informed that as part of our sign-up process, all users agree to our Terms of Service, which include our no-refund policy. This policy states that once a subscription is processed, we’re unfortunately unable to issue a refund—even if the service is not used afterward. Please refer to this link (https://www.eztexting.com/terms).
  • AF

For this one, aside from canceling your account, is there anything else I can assist you?

Alliyah F • 1:33 PM

  • I have read the terms you pointed me to. I do not recall signing up for automatic renewal, and I would not have used the service knowing that an AI bandit would hold me up for such a huge amount of money.

Read • 1:36 PM

  • AF

I understand, please be informed that EZ Texting’s only payment method is auto-renewal and it has been since the day you sign-up for our service. I understand how important this is to you but again, I apologize, we don’t have a way to refund it anymore.

Alliyah F • 1:38 PM

  • If there was such a thing as an AI Sheriff, I would have you arrested and jailed for theft.

Read • 1:42 PM

  • AF

I’m sorry, the only way for you to not be charge before was to canceled the account before the renewal date but on this one, since there were no cancelation, it is automatic for the plan to auto-renew. I’m sorry but this is from our policy.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ While searching the net to find this useless link, I saw several that contained the word ‘Apple’ in them. With Apple’s backing, they are sure to be a winner. I now understand why.

In my last note to this foreign agent, I invented the Artificial Intelligence Sheriff (AIS). There is no doubt that the AIS will become a reality as more and more helpless senior internet users have their pockets picked.

Beware, my fellow senior citizens, and be certain to read the fine print in those endless pages of rules we blindly agree to when downloading an application that will make our lives easier.

To Apple: Please include a feature(button) on your computers that, when pressed, would automatically blow up any website I deem to be an Internet Bandit. It would please me immensely, even if all it did was light up my screen with a loud “BANG!”

Sincerely:

Artificial Intelligence Sheriff, AKA, Grumpa Joe

Filed under: Aging, Democrats, family, Republicans, Seniors | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

Chasing Villy, Will, Bill

Posted on 04/03/2026 by Grumpa Joe

Sadly, my brother Will died this week. From this point on, I guess I can no longer say I am chasing him. He was born seven years before me, and when Mom had me, I finally filled the void left by our older brother Joe. I’m sure by the time I was old enough to talk, he didn’t want any part of me. My mother probably enslaved him to watch me, feed me, change me, and whatever else a mother would use her oldest child to do for her. That might explain why he became very interested in school and in helping the nuns after school, or any activity that would excuse him from being home.

Villy-Willy-Will- Bill, Little Brother Joe, and our baby sister Maria

My recollections of Will, or Villy as Mom called him, are vague, beginning in grammar school. Our bonding time during those years was limited, and my recollections of him pushing me around the block in a buggy are nil. The gap between us seemed to stretch, growing longer and longer. When I started first grade, he was in seventh grade. When I reached eighth grade, he had finished Leo High School, the University of Illinois, and was in the army and stationed in Germany. I finally remember writing him letters when he was in Germany.

I finally finished college in 1961. By that time, Will was married, working, and raising a family. Our time together was limited to meeting at our parents’ house for birthdays and holidays. The gap between us was huge, but by then, people were calling him Bill rather than Will.

Somewhere around 1969, the gap closed. I had begun working at Panduit, and Bill was searching for a new job. At a family party, I told him to try at Panduit. Unbeknownst to me, he did. Soon after, I was sharing the lunch table with Roy Moody, VP of Engineering. I thought it strange that he wanted to know about Bill. Three weeks later, I met Bill in the hallway at Panduit. We finally caught up to each other. Bill and I worked in separate departments, but we saw each other and spoke almost daily for the next 35 years.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, family | Tagged: , | 7 Comments »

Snow Flakes Falling

Posted on 25/01/2026 by Grumpa Joe

Outside my office window, the snowflakes fall ever so gently, continuing to accumulate. My mind wanders back to the 1980’s when I sat with my children looking out at a similar scene. The temperature was a bone-chilling eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping. The coming night promised to put us into a deep freeze. The garden scenery was as pure and white as freshly laundered linen. Hey kids, “lets get dressed and go outside to build a snowman.”

“Put on your boots and snow suits,” their mother exclaimed. The three of them began digging for their snow gear. “I’ll race you,” said Steven, the oldest.”

“Mom, I need you to help me. Steve and Jacque are ahead of me.”

“That isn’t fair, Mom. Said Steve. “You are helping him just because he is little.”

“Get over it, Steve. He is only three, and he doesn’t even know what a snow suit is.” Despite Mom’s help, Mike came in dead last. She had to shake him into his sister’s old snow suit, and as chubby as he was, it was a tight fit, with the zipper a struggle to close. His older brother and sister stood laughing as they watched Mom shaking him into the slightly undersized suit. The boots were another challenge, but Mike was able to pull them on by himself. Dad was the clear winner, since he jumped into a snowmobile suit that fit him loosely. He helped the three of them finish getting dressed. Mom would dress after them and join in the fun later.

“Hey, kids, I have a better idea: let’s use the toboggan.”

I pulled the toboggan off the ceiling hooks and dropped it into the snow at the front of the garage. “Steve, you sit in front, and Mike, you get on behind Steve, and Jacque, you are the caboose.”

“Aww, I want to be first,” squealed Mike. As always, he felt the need to compete with his older brother. “Jacque, please make sure Mike does not fall off.”
“I got him, Dad, don’t worry.” As always, she assumed care for her baby brother. She often climbed into his playpen and held his bottle for him so he could concentrate on sucking the formula down.

“I’ll tow you to get started down the driveway and give the rope to Steve.” The driveway was a long, curving slope that flattened slightly at the street and continued across and down into Dover Circle, where it ended in Fleckenstein’s driveway. “Ready, here we go.” I pulled them as hard and as fast as I could for about 10 feet, then handed the tow rope to Steve. Whee! They all shouted as they picked up speed and raced to the end of Dover Circle. The whole trip lasted less than a minute, but the kids loved it.

Mom joined us just as they coasted to a stop.

At the top again, I pulled rank and sat in the driver’s position, and insisted that Mike sit between my legs in front, while Barb sat behind me. Steve pushed us to get off to a good start. As we crossed Aberdeen Road into Dover Circle, the toboggan veered sideways, and we flipped over into the culvert and rolled to a stop. We couldn’t stop laughing as we got up from the snow and began brushing furiously. “Let’s do that again,” said Mike. I helped Barb up and asked if she was okay. “I’m fine,” she said. “But you can use some lessons in driving.”

We left the toboggan to the kids while Barb and I began rolling a snowball into a snowman. Eventually, the kids got tired of dragging the sled up the hill and joined us to make their own snowmen on the front lawn.

Memories like this are great, and I am amazed that this 54-year-old flashback is still as vivid as if it were yesterday. At the same time, these memories beset me with melancholy because Barb has been gone for twenty-three years, and our daughter Jacque for 12 weeks.

Filed under: Aging, family, grief | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

A Beautiful Sunny Day

Posted on 30/10/2025 by Grumpa Joe

Today, turned into something remarkable. I was rolling around in bed trying to find a spot where my hip wouldn’t hurt when Lovely appeared and shook me awake. “Don’t you remember that you promised to take me for my blood test this morning at nine?”

“Okay, okay,” I answered, “I thought you were only kidding.” I rolled over my aching hip and out of bed. We were on our way at 9:06 a.m. Before we left, however, she weaseled me into taking her to the last Farmer’s Market of the year in LaGrange, IL. One of her girlfriends has been bragging about this market all summer long, and she reasoned, since we are going to Blue Island this morning maybe we could swing by and see what Aldona has been talking about. The hip pain must have affected my brain, because I reluctantly agreed to take her.

The Cook County Health Clinic in Blue Island is about thirty miles closer to home than her doctor’s office in downtown Chicago. We pulled off the interstate and drove to Western Avenue in Blue Island. I turned onto Western and spotted an open parking space, so I took it. Previous experience had taught me that if I saw something within one block of the clinic, I should seize it. If I hadn’t, I would have wound up circling the blocks of narrow crowded side streets for ten minutes looking for an opening.

The sun shone brightly, and it was a balmy fifty degrees without a wisp of wind. We enjoyed the one-block walk to the clinic. A pleasant young lady security guard, all of four-feet-ten tall, guided us to where we needed to go. I wondered if she was carrying a weapon; it might have explained why she looked as wide as she was tall. The lab was in the basement of this three story brick building every floor of which was dedicated to various diseases. The elevator opened to a miraculously empty waiting room. As we sat waiting another elderly couple arrived. A tall black man pushing a short fat black lady in a wheel chair. I noticed how attentive he was to her needs. For some reason which I will not argue with the old couple were called in first. We sat and watched for our turn to come up. The lab door opened and the elderly couple exited but stopped. The old man helped the lady out of the wheelchair and then stood behind her. She stood hunched slightly forward holding a plastic cup and stared at the door in front of her. Her eyes were fixated on the door, but she looked as though any movement of air would have knocked her down into a face plant with the floor. Finally, she stepped to the door and grabbed the door knob. She successfully entered the rest room to donate her urine for testing.

Lovely got called next, and as I waited, the old man wheeled over, parked the wheelchair, and sat next to me. I noticed he wore a sweatshirt monogrammed with “SJC Basketball.” I leaned over and asked him if his shirt referred to Saint Joseph’s College. He looked at me, stunned. “Yes, it does?”

“What year were you there?”

He laughed and said, “No, I didn’t attend; my daughter did. She graduated in 2017.” I explained that the reason I asked is that I attended school there in 1956-57. In the next ten minutes, we became fast friends as we shared some tales about the school. His daughter was on the SJC basketball team all four years she attended. He told me he drove the hundred miles to watch every home game while she was at school. Her graduating class of 2017 was the last year the school existed.

We discussed how schools have changed over the years. “There was a time when men were restricted to the lobby of a women’s dorm, then when my youngest daughter attended the University of Illinois, men and women shared rooms on the same floors.” I told him that when I started at Saint Joe’s, it was a coed school. There were 780 men and one girl. Finally, the restroom door popped open, and the little lady shuffled out, looking like she would fall on her face the whole time. That’s when he told me that she was his older sister and that she was ninety-seven years old, he was eighty-eight. That is when I went into shock. He was a year older than me but much more spry and younger looking.

We arrived at 53 LaGrange Road at 11:00 a.m. The farmer’s market circles the city hall. The street-level municipal parking lot was jammed, and I was forced to use the three-story garage. I finally squeezed into a space at the 2.5 level. The market was well-attended, and many vendors were still selling. Most of the stalls hawked food, honey, soap, and doughnuts, but there was one farmer with fresh vegetables. Lovely and I split up because I had to take a call from my son-in-law. He reported that my daughter’s conditioned worsened from yesterday on her birthday when we visited and he was forced to up her morphine to give her relief. She has been fighting brain cancer for ten years and has run out of treatment options, and is now in hospice care.

Just like that, my beautiful sunny day darkened.

Filed under: Aging, Biography | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

A Wild Seven-Year-Old’s Dreams

Posted on 12/10/2025 by Grumpa Joe

GREAT WHITE HUNTER

Those long, hot summer days on the farm challenged my imagination to the limits. Every day I had something to do, yet it felt like I had nothing to do. I call that boredom. One of my favorite daydreams was to be a pioneer. I dreamed of carving out a place to live in the wilderness. My games all centered on pioneer life.

The back acreage on the farm was very wild. Gramps had a small vineyard and an apple orchard, followed by a field of blackberries and another of boysenberries. Behind that, the farm was more primitive. My seven-year-older brother Bill has a different recollection of the farm. When he was my age, Mom and Gramps tilled the entire acreage. They kept chickens, pigs and a cow. Gramps also had a horse named Nellie. By the time I was born and old enough to recall, the neat little farmstead had reverted to nature. It was wild and very overgrown. Witness lines still defined the fields. A path coursed between them, but not much else.

The soil was extremely sandy and dry up to the edge of the woods. At that point, the terrain dropped into a wetland. The grasses that grew there were easily two feet taller than me, and the large swarm of Mosquitos and bugs attacked me each time I went exploring. The forest folded around the wetland. A creek wound its way out of the grasses and disappeared into the forest, dividing the property. The geological map of the area indicates that the creek is intermittent, meaning it dries up during the summer. I never saw it completely dry, but often I could jump across the flowing water. Most of the time, crossing the stream meant finding a log jam to balance on as I stepped from log to log. It was never really deep water, but who wanted to get wet. If I came home with wet socks and shoes, Mom would know and lecture me on the dangers of being in the woods alone.

Once across the creek, I climbed a sandy knoll and came out of the woods into a sandy lea. The forest again surrounded the opening. It was in this clearing that I explored the fringes near the trees. I often picked up items of interest as I walked. One time, I picked up a funny-looking grey stone. The surface looked chiseled. I didn’t think much of it at the time so I dropped it into my pocket and forgot about it.

As I explored the woods and the clearings, I was always on the lookout for animal tracks. Yet, in all the years I spent on the farm, I never spotted a wild animal. I found tracks in the sand every time I explored in the back. Deer tracks were abundant, and once I found some huge, wide prints that I imagined were from a bear. Most likely, they were from a large dog.

Later, I pulled the stone from my pocket and looked at it more closely. Every day, I looked at the stone. Finally, I realized that I had found an arrow point. That really got my juices flowing. My play shifted from pioneering as a settler to that of the Indian. I hunted the forest for slender Sassafras trees, which I fashioned into a bow and some arrows. The best I could find were sassafras trees. They were very straight, but brittle. When I put tension on the stem to bend it into a bow, it would snap. Gramps watched me, and noticed my frustration. He disappeared for a short time, and came back with willow stems that were the right size. They were very flexible. He helped me make a bow. Making the arrows is another story. Finding stems that are perfectly straight without a bend or a kink is very hard. I did the best I could to make arrows from both sassafras and willow. I stripped all the leaves and the bark from the stems, then notched the heavy end to fit the string. The bow and arrows took me several hours to make. I could hardly wait to test them. My arrows didn’t have a flint stone tip or a feathered quill. When I shot one, it cartwheeled or flew sideways till it dropped. Playing this way taught me that the Indians knew a lot more about making bows and arrows than I did. It didn’t occur to. me that they spent generation after generation perfecting the art on a daily basis. Nor did it dawn on me that when the weapon is the primary means to secure food, the hunter tries harder to succeed. My attempts to make a bow and arrows went on and off that summer, and a few summers after that.

Each time I uncovered an arrowhead, my interest in making bows and arrows renewed. The year after I found my first arrowhead, I came upon another one. This time, I picked it up much closer to the house. The new one was easy to identify because it was more complete and had grooves at the base for tying it to the shaft. It was in excellent condition. Only the tip of the point was missing.

Indians were skilled at tracking animals, so I began to do the same thing. Whenever I found deer tracks, I followed them until I got lost in the brush. It wasn’t long before a pattern emerged, and I knew exactly where to find tracks. Even with all of my tracking and traipsing through the woods I never spotted a living animal on the farm.

Years later, after Mom and Dad retired to the farm. Dad told me that he saw deer come up into the yard to eat apples from the trees in the orchard.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Characters I knew, family | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

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