No smoking!

What starts out as a simple story of self-defense in the home...

A would-be burglar who'd been scared off from one house by a 70-year-old woman found himself a few minutes later staring down the wrong end of a shotgun at another, police say.

And before the sun rose Sunday, Joshuah Scott Rutledge probably figured out that this northern Gaston County town wasn't ripe for the picking.

Rutledge, 26, of Oakboro was reportedly climbing through a bathroom window of a woman's home on the 3500 block of N.C. 27 in Stanley at 4:30 a.m. Sunday when the woman, who'd had her 70th birthday the week before, spotted him and scared him away before he could get inside.

He then apparently went to a house across the street off N.C. 27 on Watts Street, this time making it inside.

But once inside he found himself staring at Richard Osborne and an old shotgun that his wife's grandfather had once used to slaughter hogs. Whether the gun would still fire a shot remains in question.

Rutledge had pulled a bedspread down to cover him as he lay in the floor in a guest bedroom, Phyllis Osborne said.

But the couple could see his knuckles poking out.

"We told him, ‘If you don't come out we're going to blow your brains out,'" Phyllis Osborne said Monday. "We had to say it three times, but then he jumped up and said, ‘I'm in the wrong house. I'm in the wrong house.'"

At first Rutledge insisted he'd come to the house looking for a friend. Then he said he was there to meet the Osborne's daughter, whom he claimed to have met on the Internet.

But the Osborne's only daughter lives in Georgia, married to a law enforcement officer.

"I wasn't scared, I was mad," Richard Osborne said. "I was mad because he scared my wife."

The Osbornes have been married 30-plus years. He has a little trouble hearing, she can hear a squirrel walking across the roof.

When she heard something Sunday morning she knew someone had entered their home. Even after a quick lookaround produced nothing, she said she was sure something wasn't right.

Richard Osborne then saw the bedspread pulled down from the bed. Phyllis Osborne keeps an impeccable house.

"I'm very particular," Phyllis Osborne said. "My bed has to be made. Not a wrinkle in it."

Rutledge answered Mrs. Osborne with "Yes, mam," and "No, mam,'" she said.

Mr. Osborne had to punch him once and hit him twice with the gun. One strike with the gun came when Rutledge insisted on lighting up a cigarette while waiting on police to arrive, he said.

Since becoming fatherly, I have noticed that anytime I'm out with my son and come across puffing addicts, the words that come to my mind are something along the lines "freaking smokers" - usually not quite that nice. However, in keeping with my (sometimes) mentality of "facta, non verba", I think I like the idea of a shotgun stock to the side of the coconut.

When you come to a fork in the floor...

While I'm on the subject of bad customer service, I need to give a rather loud "Huh?" to some of the situations I've encountered recently while eating out. I was at a restaurant where, for one reason or another, there was a fork on the floor. Now I don't know about the sandbox where these people lived, but in my house, if there's an eating utensil on the floor, you pick it up. So you can imagine my astonishment when not one, not two, not even three, but four members of the waitstaff walk by it, acknowledge it by looking down, and just keep right on going. Two of the four even kicked it, and still did nothing about it - our waiter included. Finally a young lady walks from the other end of the restaurant picks up the thing, and takes it to the back.

The other situations all revolve around one thing - the waiter/kitchen staff messing up an order. A handful of times in the past weeks something ordered isn't brought out right (or at all). On at least three of these occasions, our waiter has disappeared after this, never gracing our table again with his presence, sending the busboy over to clean off empty plates and do refills; twice, the waitress has accepted the food back, yet never apologized; and on at least one oh-so-memorable occasion, the waiter plopped the wrong order down in the middle of our table (despite being told nobody ordered that) and just walked off mumbling what sounded like "somebody f*%&ing ordered it."

My final words of whine are more general in nature and deal with one rather annoying aspect of eating out with large groups - the automatic gratuity. What makes the restaurants think that just because we're in a group greater than 6/8/10/12 their server is automatically deserving of a tip? Mind you, I seldom leave anything less than 15% - 20% is the norm - and rarely have left anything at 10% or below. It just rankles me when I'm at a place with a big group and have a server who is so inattentive that the entire table's drinks are empty, yet I know they're going to pad their wallet that night with the automatic 18% gratuity added on.

Get Satisfaction

This was originally going to be a very different post. I had initially intended to use my little postage stamp corner of digital real-estate to take Snapfish.com to the woodshed with a 50 oz. Louisville Slugger. To shorten a lengthy story, my wife ordered something using a coupon and through a glitch in their system, the coupon didn't show up in checkout. So she contacted customer (no) service to get them to correct the amount charged her card. Their reply? No. Nope. No way. No how. Too bad.

So off to the internetz I went in search of a way to bring happiness to my humble home. Which led me to this gem of a site - GetSatisfaction.com. Instead of a website dedicated to collecting customer gripes and displaying them for all to see, they collect customer gripes... and the companies actually answer them. And in some cases, fix the problem or at least offer an amiable explanation.

So a thumbs down to Snapfish for their customer service on email and call-in center, but a huge thumbs-up for registering a couple of their guys who actually know what they're doing and take their job seriously.

On the new President...

O Crap.

Caveat emptor

Nebraska, the next frontier in gubment idiocy, has enacted a law that allows parents who no longer want their children to get rid of them:

Nebraska was the last state to enact a safe-haven law, which is intended to protect unwanted newborns from being abandoned. Some have interpreted the state's law to mean children as old as 18 can be abandoned because it uses the word "child" and doesn't include an age limit.

Health and Human Services officials, however, say they will not take in any children older than 17.

The Legislature plans to tackle the issue at a special session on Nov. 14. Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood said he'll introduce a bill establishing a 3-day-old age limit.

Well it's good to know the legislature feels a little bit of urgency on this matter. So much so that it's taking them another 11 days!!!

So let me see if I get this right - under the current law, you can drop off your bratty teenager; however, under the current law, the "try-before-you-buy" thing lasts til they're three. Is there a place for kids to take their stupid parents to when they've become too much of a... oh, wait... nursing homes...