Category: Home Ec

The friendly, albeit almost unintelligibly accented rep from Credit Card Services had a ten minute conversation with me: 10:35 is a call duration record!

The minimum balance has bounced back to $3500 and they’re touting a 6.9% rate. She was unwilling to discuss exactly how this works before I “qualified” myself, but I was unwilling to reveal my financial details before knowing more about Credit Card Services.

So we went a few rounds…

Somewhat surprisingly, she gave me plenty of contact information:

• Credit Card Services (“We work with [list of big name credit card companies]”)
• Orlando FL
• Callback 888-311-2249 (don’t call it, it’s not a real number)
• Anna Stakovic
• Extension 292
• ID 435

All of it bogus, of course.

Perhaps Anna married into her name, because she has a thick Indian subcontinent accent that wasn’t helped by boiler-room background noise and VOIP dropouts. Correspondingly, I was hampered by a soft voice that often required me to repeat myself, despite speaking slowly and, if I do say so myself, rather clearly.

Anyhow, poor Anna became increasingly frustrated, accusing me of wasting her time and repeatedly telling me that if I was not interested in Lowering My Interest Rates I should just hang up. So I asked her if she worked for the same Credit Card Services that had called me several (dozen? hundred?) times previously; to my surprise, she said it was.

She said that she would “do her best” to remove my number, but that, because she didn’t actually do the dialing, it might not have any effect. That agrees with what I’ve been told before: CCS is actually a demon-dialing front end for other scammers.

She dodged my question about why CCS doesn’t obey the FTC No-Call Registry rules, claiming that she was just qualifying me for a credit reduction, not actually selling me anything. She was unwilling to discuss the relation between CCS and my various card issuers, which might have provided the “prior business relationship” required to work around the rules.

Somewhat surprisingly, she simply wouldn’t hang up before I agreed that I had no interest whatsoever in Lowering My Interest Rates. I eventually agreed, she wished me a good rest of the day, and I suppose we parted as friends…

So I picked up half a pound of Grade B Madagascar Vanilla Beans from the usual eBay supplier, a 1.75 liter slug of the next-to-the-cheapest 80 proof vodka (“carefully distilled, then filtered through selected charcoal”) from the neighborhood liquor store, and scavenged some bottles from the basement stash:

The proper mix seems to be around 2 ounces of beans per 16 liquid ounces of 80-ish proof vodka, which nearly fill the two round half-liter (16.9 fluid ounce) bottles. The flat bottle on the right has the rest of that Devil’s Spring 160 proof rotgut, cut down to 90 proof, with enough beans to make the answer come out right for that volume. The leftmost round bottle has the remainder of the beans in the appropriate volume, which is why it’s half full. The little bottle is that one, minus doses for my hot chocolate & pancakes.

One motivation for using 80 proof vodka is that a teaspoon of 160 proof hooch brings a cup of hot chocolate right up around 3 proof. That earlier batch really didn’t have enough vanilla to be effective, but increasing the total dosage would put a dent in my already meager afternoon productivity…

Although the recipes recommend daily shaking for a month before the brew reaches equilibrium, I’m sure this is one of those exponential diffusion deals that’s mostly done after a day or three. These two bottles show the concentration on the next morning, after and before shaking:

Chopping half a pound of vanilla beans on the kitchen cutting board produces an interesting side effect: everything you cut for the next day or so smells strongly of vanilla, as does the entire kitchen end of the house, as do your fingers. Mostly, that’s OK, but we decided vanilla-scented onions were just plain weird and there really isn’t any justification for vanilla-flavored green tea.