March, 2004 

I’d like to devote this month’s column to some Public Service Announcements (PSA’s).

Let’s start with this: If you get an E-Mail that claims to be from PayPal or EBay asking for a lot of your personal information, just delete it. DO NOT reply to it and DO NOT provide any of the information it asks for. It is not from PayPal or EBay. It’s a scam and you will be ripped off.

Got it? Good. So much for that.

Next, I’d like to broaden the previous warning to include opening or replying to ANY E-Mail where you don’t recognize the sender or where the subject is nonsense. Have you noticed an increase in E-Mail with subjects like “fogging allusive antiquarian piddle alongside”? This is just spammers’ way of getting through your anti-spam filter. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can save yourself a lot of headaches by just deleting these messages without reading them. Note: I’m assuming that you’re not in the market to buy large quantities of Viagra or Vicodin. If you ARE, then perhaps you WILL want to check out these offers. (But I doubt it.)

Our next PSA deals with cell-phone safety. Let’s assume you’re driving a gasoline tanker down 36^th street and the truck flips over right in front of Pizza Hut. You get out of the truck (after carefully waiting for it to skid to a complete stop) and quickly whip out your cell-phone to order an extra large pepperoni pizza but then you remember all of those stories you saw on the Internet about static electricity from cell-phones causing cars to explode while their owners were pumping gas. Should you order the pizza or just walk across the street and order it in person?

Don’t be an idiot! You will most likely be hit by a car while attempting to cross 36^th street - use the cell phone instead. Rest assured that cell-phones don’t emit static electricity. This is an urban myth and there has never been a case where a cell-phone caused gasoline to ignite. (I don’t care WHAT you’ve seen on the Internet - people have TRIED to do it but can’t.) A more likely suspect would be the clothing you’re wearing causing a spark. (Don’t comb your hair while fueling!) Of course, if you hadn’t been on the phone while driving you wouldn’t have had the accident in the first place. So drive now, talk later!

Finally, I’d like to help prevent the following situation from happening to you:

Yesterday my wife and I were doing the weekly grocery shopping.  Everything was going along just fine until we got to the aisle where the tin-foil and plastic-wrap is. It was here that my wife said “I want to try that new “Press’n Seal” stuff from Glad.”

“OK” I said. It looked kind of interesting in the TV commercial so I figured “What the heck – we can try it.” Of course, it costs twice as much as regular plastic wrap and I was a bit hesitant based on our experience with their “Easy Cutter” or whatever it is thing where it has a built in ‘blade’ that does nothing more than make it difficult to cut a piece of plastic wrap.

To make a long story short, we bought a roll of it.

Let me just say that, now that I’ve used it, I'm going back to wrapping things in butcher paper. What a lousy product. First of all, the stuff has an adhesive property on one side so you’ll spend 10 minutes spinning the roll of plastic wrap around in a vain attempt to find where the end of it is.

Once you do find the end and manage to pry it loose from the roll, you’ll waste the first 3 or 4 feet because it’ll stick to itself as you try to pull it out of the box. It’s kind of like when you were a kid and tried to wrap your first gift and ended up with Scotch Tape all over everything but the present.

Assuming you finally manage to tear off a piece of the approximate size you wanted, you now have to place it in the correct position to seal around whatever it is you’re trying to wrap. Good luck! This stuff has a mind of its own.

Now you’ve got a mess of extra plastic wrap that’s trying to stick to anything it comes into contact with so you have to whip out the scissors to trim off the excess plastic and, of course, you can’t cut it because it sticks to the scissors!

What used to take seconds now takes over a minute. Gee…it’s SO CONVENIENT! NOT!

So save yourself some trouble and just skip this product.

That’s it for this month,