State of Contentment: Being a Jerry

I've been seeing this commercial for State Farm insurance lately on television (away on business for a week and the hotel has cable) where a guy who has wrecked his car calls State Farm to report the incident and the State Farm agent reminds him that he has changed insurance companies. He cries and states that he misses the agent on the phone.

This commercial brings back the memory of when I switched from State Farm to GEICO. When I called to cancel they switched me over to the head agent in their office (which will remain nameless) who told me that I would be back.

This is just a little confirmation post to let the world know that switching from State Farm was the best move I ever made. I now have a choice to talk to a person or NOT. Which was the biggest problem with the State Farm agency that I was with. The only choice was to talk to one of the ladies (who were both very nice) but were instructed or otherwise motivated to give you the hard sell on insurance you didn't have... every time that you called... even just to pay your bill. After a while it got old telling them no repeatedly, because no the first time just isn't enough. Obviously I didn't realize how much I needed the insurance so they felt the need to tell me repeatedly. It got old. I switched. Never been happier!

Preemptive Blocking

A while back my wife had posted a pro-gay marriage chain-posting to her facebook wall. One of her friends who shall remain namelessly blocked had a lot to say about what my wife had posted. She is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that rather than the bible being her source of guidance that it should be the guidance for legislature to pander to her personal interpretations of said book. She began responding to my wife's wall post (remember this is on my wife's wall, not the Fundy's) about how gay marriage was wrong and it wasn't in God's plan.. blah blah, ad nauseum.

You can probably tell from my tone that my wife's friend and I were not in agreement on the subject and I, of course, made myself vocal by responding to her posts. I pose logic, she poses belief and we go back and forth five or six times until she finally sends me a private message and blocks me AND MY WIFE! Before that moment I had no idea that you could block people on facebook. And I want to thank that person (you know who you are!) for introducing me to that feature.

Since that time I have blocked quite a few people. At first it wasn't too many. I started with blocking an old friend that I had parted opinions with. He had decided to take a parent-ly role to my daughter's posts. So rather that go into it with him and argue I just blocked him. That way I didn't have to see his posts and he couldn't see mine. It was perfect (and still is) it's like we don't exist to each other on facebook.

The next block came around the time of the Charlie Sheen explosion. I had made a comment on someones post about Charlie and was soon after reprimanded by his ex-wife. A quick block took care of even having to respond to her idiocy. This was looking pretty good.

One of my wife's best friend's kids is in the Navy studying nuclear power. After the Japan earthquake and subsequent meltdown I commented on a common friends post about how hydroelectric power is safer than nuclear. Navy kid started going off on how an area has to be flooded to reserve the water and that an earthquake could result in flooding. And some how that proved that nuclear was safer than hydroelectric. Really?!? Guess what... no argument. Yep, I blocked him. Easy Peasy.

That's when I started blocking folks that I wasn't yet friends with but knew I would have harshly differing opinions with.

When my number of blocked people became double my number of friends I bragged to my daughter about my preemptive blocking methods. She called me a scrooge. I took it a little hard because I expected some level of praise for keeping conflict to a minimum. I started to doubt my methods and considered unblocking everyone I had blocked.

Then I read this facebook post:

Dalai Lama 

Peace is not just the mere absence of violence or disturbance. It's when there is a possibility of conflict, but you deliberately avoid violence and adopt methods to solve the problem through peaceful means. That is real peace.

 Preemptive Blocking = Active Peace

All is well.