In the past few blogs we have covered hacking, phishing and getting all your personal financial information stolen. What fun. I could write more about it but I don’t know anything more. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten hacked in the first place. So let us concentrate on our second comic, which deals with monthly subscriptions. No not the kind like you have for People Magazine. The kind of subscription we’re talking about is the “Sign up now for Disney+ to see the movie of the hit Broadway show Hamilton for the low, low price of $6.99” type of subscription. I certainly fell for that one. And if you’re like me, you write yourself a note to cancel said subscription at the end of the month, and then promptly forget to do so. Some 18 months later you notice the $6.99 monthly charge and go about cancelling but then you find out Season 3 of Ted Lasso is coming up soon so…

I once remember reading about the most contentious divorce case in U.S history. I don’t see how anything could be more contentious than the John Wayne and Lorenna Bobbit case when she sliced off his…anyway, this particular case was contentious as well. It featured a multibillionaire and his wife who was suing him for most of the profits. The reason to bring this up is because he made his billions selling subscriptions to just about anything you could think of. Subscriptions to pens, razors, perfumes, pipe tobacco, cheeses, fruits, etc. Studies have shown that a huge percentage of people who sign up for a subscription keep paying for it in perpetuity.

In our house for instance we have a subscription for clean sponges. Four new ones every two months. As well as for the traveling Quip toothbrush replacement brush heads and replacement batteries. Spotify, all those streaming services like Hulu and HBO+ we pay extra for because we still have cable, and on and on and on. Did you notice that whenever there’s a “+” sign it means that you will now have to pay extra for what you were already paying for? Here’s two more ridiculous examples. We have a music service called Deezer which, like Spotify, costs about $9.99 per month, but promises better audio quality. But my wife listens to a lot of podcasts and Deezer doesn’t carry one she loves. So she signed up for Spotify. Instead of the one person plan for $9.99 there was a family plan for $12.99. She signed and said I could now stop paying for Deezer. I said, “Cool,” and promptly forgot to cancel Deezer. Now we pay a total of $22.98 for what used to cost us $9.99. I know, I’ll get around to it. She also gifted me her Amazon Kindle and mentioned she took a $9.99 monthly subscription and I could read any book in their catalogue (much like Spotify). I said great and then tried to cancel it, but have no idea how to do so.

I think John does not suffer from the same foolishness because he’s the one that knew about the app that gathers all your subscriptions in one place, and unlike Al, he didn’t forget the password. So that is all she wrote for this week. Stay tuned for next Friday when we do the first two parts of a 3-part adventure travel series. This is precisely the kind of thing people our age engage in, as long as their neck/back/foot/migraine/shoulder/elbow/ankle pain doesn't get in the way.

See you then. Oops, got to answer the door. It’s time for my water of the month delivery.

Andy and John