Here’s Your Sign

I know, in this day and age we are not supposed to call people names. But sometimes you just have to. Comedian Bill Engvall made a fortune with his Here’s Your Sign gig, so I guess if he could point out the stupid things people say and do, I’ll give it a try and see what happens. The only difference is, these are all real questions and conversations I have had in the last six weeks or so.

An RVer sent me a text saying that he had lost one of the pins that secures his car to his tow bar, as well as the circular latch pin that holds the other one in place. He said he couldn’t find a Camping World or anything like that where he was in North Carolina and wondered if he could use heavy duty industrial zip ties until he gets to Florida and can replace them? He added that the zip ties he has are rated for 250 pounds. I wanted to say, sure you can, as long as the car you are towing doesn’t weigh over 200 pounds. You need that buffer, just in case. But I didn’t. Here’s your sign.

I was contacted by another person who said the CO (carbon monoxide) detector in their motorhome keeps going off and is driving them nuts. She said it is so shrill the cat is puking. They put a fan in front of it, hoping that would do some good, but it didn’t. Her husband wanted to know how to unplug it or take out the battery or whatever they could do to make it quiet. I told them to open all windows and roof vents and get out of the rig immediately and turn off their propane until they could have a competent RV repair person out to inspect it. She replied that it was a Friday and they couldn’t get anybody out until Monday. I told her to go stay in a motel until then, but she said her husband is a tightwad and wouldn’t waste money on something like that when they have their own bed to sleep in. She also said that if they open all the windows the noise will bother their campground neighbors. Trust me, it won’t bother your neighbors nearly as much as all of the sirens will when first responders come to remove your dead bodies from the RV. Here’s your sign.

I know that all RVers aren’t quite as foolish as the two above, but here’s a third one, believe it or not. A woman who has corresponded with me off and on for quite some time with a litany of complaints about campgrounds and fellow RVers told me that she’s very upset because for the second time she has mistakenly pumped gas into their diesel dually pickup. She thinks the gas stations should do something to protect people from making that kind of a mistake. Uh… they do. They have signs that say Gas and Diesel. I guess it doesn’t do any good to tell you here’s your sign, you probably wouldn’t read it anyway.

Now, I’m not picking on RVers. Keep in mind we were fulltimers for  over 18 years. And yeah, I made a mistake or two along the way. In the interest of fairness, here’s a fellow author who just can’t figure out why things aren’t working out for him. He participated in an online self-publishing workshop I was part of a while back, and I could tell by his comments then that he wasn’t being very realistic. He’s been e-mailing me wanting to know what he’s doing wrong with his book. I looked at its description on Amazon, a rambling three paragraphs that uses the word “and” at least three times in every sentence, uses “there” instead of “their” twice, and we won’t even talk about the punctuation! The cover is also very generic, just black type on a white background. And here’s the kicker, his price is $24.95.

That’s right. He expects to get that from an e-book with a lousy cover and written at a sixth grade level. His reasoning it is that if he can sell just 100 copies a month, he will double what he is getting on Social Security. I suggested that he get a real cover made by a professional artist, invest in proofreading and editing, and drop his price down to $.99. That way he would at least have a chance of attracting a reader or two and could hopefully build a following with some more books in a series. He told me he has no interest in writing any other books, marketing them is his thing. And he is damn sure not going to spend money on something that is not selling now. He just wants me to tell him how to sell the one he’s got out now, at the price he’s got on it. Here’s your sign.

RVing, or writing, or just stumbling your way through life is hard enough. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.

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Thought For The Day – Sometimes I look at people and wonder how they managed to fit all that stupid into one head.