Writinggal's Conspiracy Theories

I believed in Santa Claus until I was, I don’t know, 16? Like all kids, I weighed the options:

1. There’s this portly man who lives in the North Pole and he flies around with reindeer one night of the year and delivers presents to every single kid in the world—even in the remote areas of Cambodia. Oh, and he manages to fit down your chimney.

2. The entire adult population is lying to the entire kid population.

I chose to go with #1. I rationalized it with the old “the elves help him.” When I found out there really wasn’t a Santa Claus I started to become suspicious of everything—
particularly large, money-hungry corporations. That little Enron oops didn’t restore my faith either. I’d like to reveal some other scams happening right under our red noses:

Bank of America is stealing from you:
I know because they used to steal from me. It’s like the Office Space plan. They take about a tenth of a cent from all unsuspecting customers every so often and when you balance your checkbook and see you’re a few cents off, you blame yourself. Hey, you’re good at math, especially addition and subtraction! These aren’t logarithms, people (not that I know what logarithms are. Frank?) After awhile of always rounding down my balance, I got fed up. I started checking my bank account online every day—watching for the little withdrawals. And you know what? I never found them. You know why? Because BofA NOTICED I was online all the time and they figured they couldn’t mess with me! So don’t let ‘em mess with you.

There’s no such thing as a rebate from Sears:
We bought a washer, dryer and a refrigerator from Sears in July. We got free delivery with a mail-in rebate. Great! After the appliances were delivered we promptly mailed in our rebate and waited. And waited. After the allotted 90 days we called Sears: “Hey, where’s our rebate?” Surprise! They never received it. “It must have gotten lost in the mail.” That’s weird. I sent out 200 wedding invitations and none of them got lost in the mail. I send out over 100 Christmas letters every year and they never get lost in the mail. So Sears is telling me (very confidently I might add) that the ONE time I mail ONE thing to Sears, it gets lost? They tell me to fax it in. We do. I call a couple weeks later: “Hey, it’s me, Elsa. Where’s my rebate?” Double surprise! They never received it. “It must not have been processed correctly.” I get it, Sears. You’re counting on your customers to be lazy. We don’t want to have to deal with this. In fact, we might even forget about our rebate. But you obviously haven’t dealt with the Simciks, Sears! We will drive to your headquarters in Chicago if we have to. We WILL get our $50!

You’re not covered by insurance:
The medical insurance scam is similar to Sears in that they try to annoy you into paying. If you want them to pay you have to go through so much red tape, fill out so many forms and talk to so many automated answering services that you might be inclined to say, “Fine! I’ll just pay for it myself!” Plus, you have to go to medical school just to be able to fight with them: “What do you mean you won’t cover Dysplastic Nevi? I mean, I don’t know what it is but I’ve got it and you better cover it!”

I just wanted you all to be aware of these evil plots to take your money. And these are just a few of them. I could probably tell you about scams until Easter. Oh, and don’t even get me started on that bogus, basket-carrying bunny.