I am retired!

Well, it took them only 14 more months than they said it would, but I am now a beneficiary of the Social Security Administration of the US Government.  In light of the President’s recent comments, I would like to assure the government that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Democratic Party that Trump says is “the greatest enemy America has” after Iran.

I had a good job in America back in the day, so my retirement benefit is 50% *more* than I was able to earn with Uber Eats Canada, before Uber’s IPO in 2019.  It’s like 3× as much as I could earn these days in food-delivery with Skip The Dishes (which I’m not supposed to do anymore, because the Americans are paying me to be retired and let the younger people work).  Hopefully soon, my wife will be applying for her own retirement benefit which is half the size of mine, so the two of us will be bringing in more than *double* what we were making when driving for Uber Eats together.  I expect to finish paying off the house this year and then we’ll be raking in the dough… to prepare for the steadily-mounting expenses of old age.

This — is an em-dash followed by “curly quotes”.  If you want to say that this proves I am an LLM, you are a fan of dehumanizing ad hominem attacks and you shall be 🈲 from commenting here.  You’re absolutely right and it’s not this, but that.  (This paragraph will cease to make any sense in maybe a year or two.)  No LLM would think to put two spaces after sentential periods, as people my age do.  I use   (or a binary U+00A0 character) to insist that web browsers obey me on this matter, so obviously I’m an ass.

 

☛  Overly-formal subheading that doesn’t belong on a blog  ☚

Let us return now to the HVAC difficulty that was once mentioned here.  So, the installer wouldn’t fix anything and the manufacturer refused to help.  Then the rebate inspector rejected my application because he thought the wrong kind of indoor coil had been installed, effectively doubling the cost of my home improvement.  So I filed my first lawsuit!  I asked for the rebate, plus the cost of hiring another HVAC guy (in March 2025) to finish-and-inspect the installation, plus the HELOC interest that I had to keep paying until the rebate arrived.

𝙇𝙖𝙬𝙨𝙪𝙞𝙩: Attempting to serve my papers, I discovered that my installer’s office-of-record has no posted hours because they all work from home.  I called the salesman and asked where to serve papers — he dodged the question.  Then I talked to his boss, who also dodged the question of where exactly I should send my papers and he wouldn’t admit to having seen my email with a copy of the paperwork.  Presumably this is because there is a 20-day clock that begins when papers are officially served.

The boss insisted that the coil was covered by the government rebate and his other customers had no difficulty getting paid.  He agreed to talk to the inspector regarding this matter.  Unfortunately, the inspector decided to take that moment to go on vacation for the entire month of August!

Eventually I got an email from the inspector, stating that he had talked to the installer and it seemed he had been mistaken in rejecting my application.  So then the app went on to the local methane (= “natural gas”) utility company (it’s a convoluted rebate system) and eventually I got the money in December 2025, about a year late.  It was more money that I had asked for in my suit; apparently I was eligible for an additional $2,000 somehow.

𝙎𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝘾𝙡𝙖𝙞𝙢𝙨 𝘾𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙩: So then it was time to tell my good news to Small Claims Court and cancel the lawsuit.  Problem: the suit no longer showed on their website dashboard.  They remembered that I once paid them $100 but there was no longer any indication of what they thought I was buying.  I tried entering the case-number they emailed to me — it was assigned to someone else!  I don’t think that a court should ever need to reassign 19-character case-file numbers!  Good thing I didn’t actually have to proceed with this suit.

Today I checked again.  Now my case is back!  But it’s not clickable and there is no indication of current status, even though small claims cases are supposed to be auto-cancelled if no notice-of-service is filed within six months.  So I can’t say I’m very impressed with the provincial court system.  Maybe I could have saved the $100 and just emailed the lawsuit paperwork to the installer without actually filing it.

𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙨: My heating system (which in the end cost *less* than I had been expecting) is working great and saving lots of money.  It automatically chooses methane furnace or electric heat-pump based on current outdoor temperature, fetched over the Internet because I don’t have my own temperature sensor.  Unfortunately, the Ecobee thermostat is unable to understand Time-Of-Use billing (why not?), so now I “need” to replace my living-room Netflix computer with a low-power always-on unit that can run Home Assistant automation to inform the thermostat over Wi-Fi how much electricity costs right now.

My home energy comes from domestic nuclear reactors, domestic hydroelectric dams, and methane wells (half domestic, half US imports).  Rates are set months in advance, so hopefully should be immune to Iran’s shenanigans.  We’ll see.