AMEX and AFLAC Leave Me Alone!

Late Friday afternoon I came back from some errands and ran into a buzzsaw of activity at work punctuated by - sigh - a call from AMEX Merchant Services. These guys call me every 3-4 weeks to "chat me up" and see if they can suck up my time trying to tell me how to use their services more (or something). It drives me fucking crazy because they don't leave a message and AMEX is very important to us and with fraud prevention I feel that I HAVE to call them back. Time after time it’s the same, “Hi Mr. Bahr, we just want to make sure that you are satisfied with our services and see if there is anything we can do to help your business grow?”


Now, usually I say something like, "increase my line of credit back up to where it was before the Great Recession of 2008," but that just leads to a greater time-suck that I know will not yield any results. (Kind of like going into your bank and they keep trying to refinance your mortgage - not hearing you when you say you are UNDER WATER). So, this time I just said, “you can help my business by not calling me each month to waste my fucking time by trying to see how else you can insidiously worm your way into my life and business. Just STOP CALLING ME!”


I won’t go into details but it was another few minutes before I just hung up. They are relentless.


Then there are those idiots at AFLAC (yes, the stupid duck people). What is AFLAC’s deal? They come into your company and offer (sell) your employees additional benefits (insurance). The pitch to the business owner is that we can claim we offer all these fabulous benefits but don’t have to pay for them nor deal with them. Of course not, the employees pay. It’s a very very clever way of simply reaching individuals and selling them insurance, under the auspices of our business.


And, about a year ago, we tried it. We gave our employees the hour off to gather in OUR conference room while the AFLAC rep pitched their products (no doubt earning our employees’ eternal gratitude). Bottom line? Could not get enough of our employees to sign up. End of story.


Except for this. AFLAC does not have their own sales force – they use outside independent reps, basically tons of fortune-seeking down-on-their-luck insurance salespeople. And they all get the same leads. (and this partially reflects the Curse of The Inc 5,000, where getting named to the list simply brings a boatload of useless sales pitches, hucksters, and boiler-room penny-stock pickers to your phone line.)


So, every 2-3 weeks someone NEW “from AFLAC” calls me.


“We already tried you and it didn’t work.”


“Well we have some NEW products! When would be best to come in, next Tuesday at 10 or at 11:30?”


“How about never? Does never work for you? Click.”


… and another thing!

So you want to explore your family tree?

A good friend asked me recently:

"I have an interest in my family tree. I looked at ancestry.com and have not committed to anything yet. I did, however, start the basic family tree on the site for free. I understand you have done (extensive) research and may have some ideas and experience with web sites. When you have time, I would be interested in your feedback."

Here was my answer, with notes on software and web sites.

I am assuming you want to build/record your family tree. The best programs are Reunion on the Mac and Family Tree Maker on a Windows PC. Family Tree Maker bought ancestry.com a few years ago so they are linked and it is a powerful pitch for using FTM. FTM just (finally) came out on the Mac. I would google for reviews of Family Tree Maker on the Mac if I were to go that route.

You may or may not know or recall that the reason I threw away my Windows (Dell) PC and got a Mac 3.5 years ago was because of Family Tree Maker. Well, not exactly but close.

FTM - at least back then - had a nice feature that automatically saved your work no matter what you did - meaning, after you opened up the program, did some work on your family tree, and closed the program, all changes were automatically saved. That was good....except that the program saved the files to their own special partition on the drive - like it's own separate file cabinet. One day I got a Trojan worm that I researched and realized it would take 6-8 hours of work to get rid of. So I called in The Geek Squad. They came, recognized the problem and "blew away Windows." (reinstalled it). They saved all the files in the normal places....but not the FTM files which were hiding in their own special little spot. And so. Ten years of work down the drain. Gone. Vanished. (I did not back them up becuase...I did not know where they were) That's why I switched to a Mac - no viruses, no worms, no trojans. Ever.

So, when I did this I found that.....FTM was not available on the Mac. I researched it and found Reunion was the best Mac program. I have it and use it but sparingly. Sadly, my interest is carefully typing in all of the basic info, getting the dates right etc etc has waned. I just don't have the heart.

OK, so Ancestry.com. This site is useful but it is also a typical internet money-suck come-on huckster site. Have you ever tried to look up a person on the web? Or a phone number? The most basic info is available free. BUT the REAL stuff you want is behind a paywall! And if you pay a little, they'll show you a little more. But then if you want, say, criminal reports....you can pay more....and then.... It's like Internet porn - (or....er....so they say!!)

So....I have not used ancestry.com for a while. There is a little available for free. Then they want your money. And they will keep wanting your money, endlessly. Let's say you want the ship your great grandfather came over on....buy the Ellis Island ship registry database. They will tell you if there are people named, say, "Bill Johnson" in the database. Why yes there IS a Bill Johnson in the database....buy now! BUT is it YOUR relative??? They have no idea. Of course they are motivated to have as much info as possible and as many names as possible to suck you in.

Ancestry.com also is big on linked family trees. Let's say my mother's cousin has "done" her family tree. Well that's almost the same as mine!! That can be a big help!! BUT sometimes these are inaccurate (I should say, "usually" they are inaccurate). So you might find a gold mine, you might not.

What I would do and I am contemplating this is pick the 6-month period or one year period when I am ready to dive into this stuff again and then buy a 6-month or 1-year subscription and get taken gleefully by ancestry.com again.Go ahead and prepare to spend maybe a few hundred dollars. MUCH of the stuff they have is in the public domain, but what the heck. It gives you a huge head start in some cases. It is certainly not all bad. The Web is the best friend and worst enemy of family tree research. It offers a wealth of information (for example, there are people who go to graveyards and copy down all the info on the stones and put the info on the web - invaluable!!), but lots of the info is INACCURATE. Real family tree research involves primary records: birth, marriage, death certificates and other on PAPER official records (think Obama!). You have to have the backup. I have a large tree on my mother's side and there are plenty of places on the web where amateurs who are linked some way in my tree (strangers) have things wrong. So you have to be careful with what you find on the web - use the web as a resource that leads you to some way of verifying what you learn.

Who should care? If you get it right, future generations will thank you and it's your unique personal history, shared only by brothers and sisters. Your kids will thank you.

By the way, the best place to start is free and it's called familysearch.org This is the Mormon site. You may know that the Mormons have the largest genealogical research facility n the world out there is Salt Lake. Why? I am told that the Mormon's believe that if you convert to Mormonism, then all of your ancestors were secretly Mormons too. Therefore it was important to them to know who your ancestors were! I have not confirmed this.

Hah - Now I have:

"The Mormon interest in genealogy is closely linked to their doctrine of baptism for the dead and their belief that the family unit will continue to exist beyond mortal life. Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. Once baptized, if the ancestor's spirit has accepted the Gospel, they will be able to be together with the rest of their baptized Mormon family in the celestial kingdom. For the Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit."

So, to answer your question. If you just want to fool around, go to familysearch.org. If you want to build a family tree using software, try Family Tree Maker for a PC (which includes 6 months free of ancestry.com I think) (although how deep they let you go is another story), or, on a Mac either Reunion of FTM for the Mac (which again has the ancestry.com free offer). Also, once you start searching around, there are many many many places to find stuff. Ellis Island ship registers are freely available for example. You just have to google and search around a little bit.

have fun!