Leveta...Hugs & prayers for the family & friends she left behind. She is so beautiful in her picture, but I saw her beauty in your words of her before I saw the picture. God gives us special people in our lives to remind us how very precious this life is. My Aunt Mary had Downs and after my dad retired from AF lived with us until she passed in 2003 @ 45. She too always had a smile like your precious niece. She was a great judge of character too. We were all made better people by having known her.I miss her alot, but am so happy to know she is with the Lord & living it up !How special the message was your neice gave your family at the end.Gain strenghth in the knowlege she is surrounded by love & will be waiting for you....Hugs...Judy

How strange, qdog. I have never heard of such a thing, and rather doubt if it was a result of any kind of a class action suit or something similar. Money from class actions suits has always typically been mailed to me in the form of a check. The Electric Cooperative has reduced rates in the past, but the credit given was well explained in their news letter. I thought because i inquired about dropping the service to bundle with cable, they took action That would be my guess as to why they considered you a 'valued' customer. I'm wondering if the economy 'might' improve customer service, with the businesses hoping to hold on to their old 'valued' customers. My insurance agency called recently asking if I had gotten and reviewed the new 'lower' quotes they had found and mailed me some time ago. I thought that was quite nice of them. I ordered something off the net and last Fri I received an email that Fed-Ex had had a problem locating my address. I called Fed Ex and gave them specific directions, and added that I did not have my house number on my rural mailbox. Minutes later the on line vendor called to follow-up on the delivery problem. I told them that I was amazed at their customer service and them following up so quickly. Maybe we will all see some improvement in Customer Service with those we do business with. Sue

SCAM SCAM...eventually they ask for your credit card numbers. THEY HAVE NO STREET ADDRESS AND NO WAY TO HAVE YOU CALL THEM. The only recourse, I've found, is to report the number to the FTC. FIrst, register your number on the do not call list at http://www.donotcall.gov Once you have been registered, report each and every call, the date and time of call. It takes 2 minutes to do it. This company uses numbers in many, many area codes. I've googled at least 10 or more. All the same. I talked to the guy today and told him to take me off the list and he said I had to call my bank to request that. THIS IS ILLEGAL, people. According to donotcall.gov, You may file a complaint if you received an unwanted call after your number was on the National Registry for 31 days. You may also file a complaint if you received a call that used a recorded message instead of a live person (whether or not your number was on the Registry). AND I FIND THIS INTERESTING... "A consumer who receives a telemarketing call despite being on the registry will be able to file a complaint with the FTC, either online or by calling a toll-free number. Violators could be fined up to $16,000 per incident. "

Back several years ago, I bought a long-distance calling card. Don't remember the brand, I think I got it at WMT. It was ten cents a minute no matter where you called (except maybe overseas, but we don't know anyone overseas so that wasn't a problem for us.). You just dialed the number on the back of the card and then at the prompt, the number you wanted to call. Then I called Southwestern Bell (it's AT&T now) and told them I wanted the long-distance feature taken off my land line. The guy I talked to assured me he'd done what I wanted and then when I got my bill I found out he'd added a lot of services I didn't ask for. It took me a long time to get that sorted out and corrected. Eventually, someone made a long-distance call on the land line without using the card, and the long-distance feature was automatically placed back on my bill. I've been paying $6 every month ever since, for just having (but not using) this feature. I just haven't had the resolve to go through all that again. You can buy those pre-paid Go-phones, but if you don't buy new minutes every month, what you have left from the current month expire and you lose them. Frankly, I found the Go-phones a royal pain. Plus, if you do the ten cents a minute plan, it doesn't cost you to call someone else who has a go-phone, but they charge you a dollar a day for every day that you place a call from your phone. It all gets very complicated and I just wish somebody would come up with something simple, no hidden surcharges. I have a cell phone that we use for emergencies (grandson carries it, mostly, when he's out and about, in case he has car trouble and needs us). It costs $10 a month and .25 a minute for every call. Plus there are surcharges. So if we don't use the phone at all in any given month it's actually about $12 a month. We had the $20 plan that came with 100 free minutes, but we found that we didn't use that many minutes a month. With the surcharges, the bill for that was $24. It's a Consumer Cellular product. DD uses Virgin Mobile and has about the same kind of plan that we do. You do have to watch your land phone bill, too, for surprises. Where I was working last, before I retired, I had to arrange with AT&T to get internet service through them. For that I had to have a copy of the last bill (which I didn't normally see) so I'd have the information I needed to give AT&T. I noticed, on the last page, a "yellow pages" charge of $25. No one at the office seemed to know what it was for. When I investigated, I discovered that someone had called our business a year earlier, had spoken to someone on the phone that had no business authorizing any transaction and had offered them free internet advertising. Turns out the advertising was on some obscure website; it was free for one month only and then you would incur charges for every month thereafter if you didn't instruct them to discontinue. Of course no one did. For a whole year. Longer if I hadn't noticed it. The person who authorized the transaction had no idea that she had done so. She just thought she was getting some free advertising for the non-profit organization. Seems there's a scam every minute. --Ilene