not a phone call

I got a phone call yesterday from someone who claimed they were from PG&E, my utilities vendor, and said I was owed a rebate. I've gotten rebates before, but not via phone call. They said they needed to verify me by having me read some code from my bill, adding that this was not my personal information which is private.

Uh-huh. I said that nobody from PG&E would need to verify me that way and that this was a scammer, and hung up. But I later thought I should have played along, pretended to get my bill, and then said, "It's a seven-letter code, and it reads F ..." I think you can guess what the other letters would have been.

why I spent Labor Day in the Calgary airport

This is TMI, but I've found in the past that telling other people about your travails may amuse them.

Usually when you fly from one country to another, you arrive, you collect your baggage, and then you go through customs/immigration. That doesn't happen when you fly to the US from Calgary. Instead, there's a US Customs station embedded in front of the international concourse in the Calgary airport, so you go through customs first. That fact was my downfall. ( Read more... )