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City Life

Ready for some tasty, er, unspoiled column leftovers?

By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published December 31, 2005

In the spirit of "Out with the old, in with the new," here's stuff that didn't make it into a column in 2005 but that inquiring minds like yours would surely want to know:

Tampa as seen by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: In a March travel piece about spring break in Cancun, Dowd, the author of Are Men Necessary?, began with two spring break experiences, both bummers. The first was in Puerto Rico, the second in - you guessed it. In her words:

Another year we went to Tampa. It was so awful that my only memory is of a local guy complaining to his friends about me: You tell this girl dirt's brown, she's gonna argue with ya.'

Hmm. I would have thought this was the type of guy Maureen would go for. As for the arguing, it may have been about what city she was in. He said Clearwater Beach, she said Tampa. Because, for Pete's sake, nobody goes to Tampa for spring break.

Hurricane Katrina as seen by a University of South Florida assistant registrar: This was in a cutline, so you might have missed it. In a Sept. 10 story in this newspaper about displaced college students who had come to study at USF, a photo shows the assistant registrar, Rick Boyd, at orientation standing at a lectern wearing a suit, tie and a gold metal hat with big bull horns.

He is quoted as saying, "This situation has been a down. I wanted to remind them, you're a college kid, have some fun."

Katrina - a down?

Less than two weeks post-Katrina, the students' colleges underwater, their friends scattered all over the country, academic careers in limbo and who knows what else, the unsmiling students are looking at him like, "Huh?"

Budgeting fun with Florida DNC: In response to my August column on Florida's Do Not Call program, the public information director from the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services sent a letter to the editor, in which she explained that the department "must live within a fixed budget" and therefore only the most egregious offenders could be pursued.

Nevertheless, she writes, "with more than 6-million telephone numbers on Florida's Do Not Call list, this program has made a tremendous impact."

Six-million at five bucks a pop? That's $30 million a year. And the initial fee is twice the annual renewal, $10, so the DNC's annual take is more than $30-million. I think I could live on that.

Dial M for Marge: In response to my complaints in various columns about not being able to get a real person on the line, a friend sent me a Web site that lists companies and government offices - all the biggies, Bank of America, Social Security. It gives you little tricks for bypassing those awful phone menus and getting a human. It's not always dial "0." Sometimes it's "00," sometimes another number or letter or a combo of letters and numbers. Also on the site are general tips, like hitting the option for Spanish, which often gives you a bilingual human, or instead of dialing that black hole "customer service," dial "investor relations," "office of the president" or "sales." Then ask to be transferred.

Does any of it work? You be the judge. The site is www.paulenglish.com/ivr "IVR," in case you didn't know I didn't, refers to interactive voice response.

Got free time? Become a counterscammer! And in response to my November column on those Third World moguls who e-mail us their bizarre pleas to let them send us millions of dollars? A reader e-mailed me a Web site devoted to scamming the scammers. It offers detailed how-to suggestions, scam baiting tips, photos sent by scammers and an archives of letters sent by counterscammers. The object? To waste the scammers' time, therefore diverting them from scamming someone not as smart as you. The site is hilarious: www.419eater.com And 419 is the area code of Nigeria, purported land of scams.

That's all I can do for you this year.

Happy 2006!

Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sandrathompson1@mac.com City Life appears on Saturday.

[Last modified December 31, 2005, 00:47:16]