Pebbles in my shoe
You are not alone. The battles I face? I feel quite certain every last one of you faces similar struggles. You are not alone.
This year, this 2025, seems to find ways to worsen by the day. This post is not so much a personal rant as it is an acknowledgment that we in these United States of America have carved out a space that is bad for our physical health, damaging to our emotional health, and devastating for our mental health.
I’ve gone back and forth the last seventy-two hours about writing this. Woke up on Monday having decided to write it, but less to rage against my personal “machine,” and more to let each of you know you are not crazy, you are not alone.
What has been a vague undercurrent of apprehension turned into full-blown worry on January 21, 2025. Our president wasted no time undoing almost-250 years of the rule of law, of constitutional justice, of our imperfect country lurching forward as we have endeavored to become more just, more compassionate, more emancipated.
[Note: This is not a partisan post although it deals with injustice perpetrated by one arm of a single political party. This series of posts represents a call for bipartisan right-ness, for nonpartisan action.]
In five short months, our liberties have been infringed in the following areas, all of which seem to have come together in June 2025 to make this a Lemony Snicket sort of year for me, and likely for you as well.
Sludge. Dealing with customer service and tech support sludge has beaten me down.
Business finances. Trump’s tariffs and executive orders impacting the corporate world are killing my small businesses (including Center for White Rose Studies).
Personal finances. I am on the verge of bankruptcy, and I am not alone.
Misogyny. No longer do men reserve their condescension, arrogance, and too-much-testosterone for the locker room. It’s now out in the open. No flaming please. Not “all men,” and I am grateful beyond belief for those good men who do not participate.
No sleep. I specifically wrote “no sleep” instead of “insomnia,” because these days it is not a medical condition. My body and mind cannot un-tense.
Sludge.
This weekend, I read an article in The Atlantic that provided me with a light-bulb moment on this topic. Chris Colin’s essay entitled That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was On Purpose (gift article, no paywall) gave me the terminology I needed to understand the reason behind the utter weariness I experience every time I spend three or more days on the phone trying to resolve a simple issue.
It’s “sludge,” built into the customer service and tech support experience in an attempt to discourage customers from getting that refund, from fixing that bug, from correcting that invoice. If they make it hard enough on us — on you and on me — we will eventually say “f*ck it” and walk away. Leaving the company with a disgruntled customer, but with money in their pockets. They’re only paying that CS agent in the Philippines, Pakistan, or Tunisia $2.50-3.50 an hour. It’s a good trade-off if they can keep your $100 or $500. Or more.
My sludge this year has included the following (you will likely recognize my battles as your own):
Intuit raising the price for QuickBooks Enterprise “subscription” (SaaS for software that is not a service) yet again. Thereby forcing me to switch to their inferior product, QuickBooks Online. When they transferred my data, suddenly my balance sheet was out of balance. They — not I, they — transferred long-ago closed bank accounts with balances. They transferred retained earnings not matching original R/E. When I tried to run reports in QBE so I could spend three weeks fixing QBO, I found that despite the promise to keep data available for a year, it’s gone. I cannot restore my own backups, not even to generate Excel files for a re-attempt. I wrote more about this in a post on Now More Than Ever here.
After I cancelled QBO well within the cancellation window, Intuit has refused to refund the $80. I filed a chargeback on the credit card. They are ignoring me. I followed up with the local bank that issued the credit card. They said they cannot help me, I must wait for response from the people in El Paso. It’s “only” $80 and Intuit is counting on my giving up. Sludge.
Last year, I moved from a for-profit Microsoft tenant to a nonprofit tenant. It took six months to do so, because the Microsoft tools to effortlessly move data from one tenant to another is only available for free to “enterprise” companies, that is, to multi-multi-million dollar companies. Small businesses like mine do not qualify for that tool. So, manually it would be. Only to be notified last month that Microsoft is cancelling the nonprofit discount for its Microsoft 365 (including Teams and SharePoint) tenant. My six months of work were for nothing.
When I finished the data transfer, I cancelled all the for-profit Microsoft subscriptions, which were costing me $52.50/month. Although I was not using the for-profit tenant (even for data transfer) after early January 2025, per Microsoft I had to keep paying until April 2025. Whaddya know, in April they billed me again! I called the single person who had been helpful. He too checked and saw the subscriptions had been cancelled. But he dug further and found out that — Microsoft error — the licenses were still there. It took me THREE DAYS to get refund for everything billed to date as well as to ensure that they don’t invoice me going forward. Sludge.
Late May, six warning sensors came on all at once in my sweet little VW Tiguan. I wasn’t worried. When I bought the car, I also bought Volkswagen’s “Platinum” warranty for 85,000 miles or ten years. That warranty is still valid. And the warranty is with Volkswagen, not a third party (i.e., not an “extended warranty”). A month later and Blue Baby is still at the dealership. Turns out it wasn’t a simple fix. The sunroof frame was leaking. The leak rotted out the floorboard and insulation to the front passenger door, and shorted out the wiring. The dealership is telling me that the “extended warranty” will only cover the sunroof, not the wiring, floor, or door. A month of sludge. Still not done.
There are other smaller, “only a couple of days” issues that contribute to this year’s sludge. Colin notes that the term “sludge” was coined in 2008 by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Those two deserve a Nobel prize in economics. They’ve pinpointed something that is eating us all alive.
Colin writes:
“The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. ‘People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,’ he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.
“The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.”
In 2025, “sludge” became a federally sanctioned notion. No longer do we have the full force and power of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau behind us. It’s our own government that has disabled and discontinued work being done on SaaS- and other cyber-fraud. States with Republican attorneys general no longer listen to consumers. Their goal now? Protect the billionaires who back this regime. My letters to the Pennsylvania Attorney General used to get results. These days, his office ignores me.
Business finances.
In early May, I came up with a new (for us) fundraiser for Center for White Rose Studies: Blank greeting cards featuring quotes from White Rose friends, with a short explanation of the context of the quote. I announced this project in a short post entitled White Rose greeting cards.
Before placing the order, I discussed the notion with my good friend Gwen. She and her husband have often been part of a very small circle of “chosen family” over the past 50+ years. I value her input more than she knows. She thought it was a good idea. She and John made a donation to Center for White Rose Studies to cover the printing cost — quote was $250 in early May 2025.
So I set up the “product” on the online store of Exclamation! Publishers with price of $32.50 for a pack of six, two each of three designs. Because of my history as an old CFO, I’m pretty darn good at calculating landed product cost. The $32.50 took into account: Freight and shipping from printer, envelopes, mailing supplies, and Shopify’s percentage. Center for White Rose Studies would not get rich off these cards, but we would see modest income. These days, every little bit helps.
Between the initial quote and placing the order, tariffs were not only announced, but they kicked in. The printer’s cost for paper, ink, coating, shipping, and price-per-clicks (part of the print equation) increased dramatically. Due to tariffs. My print cost alone more than doubled. In six weeks.
If either Exclamation! Publishers or Center for White Rose Studies were mega-corporations, the price increase would have been smoothed out. Printers are able to absorb some of the tariff hit for long runs (generally 5000+). Mine was an extremely-short run of 108 copies. There’s no room for them to absorb costs.
Although my costs doubled, I could not charge $65 for a pack of six. I settled on $54, but that is still too high for most people. But what am I to do? Sell at a loss?
Printivity is my printer. I am giving them a shout-out because their work is consistently excellent. Not one word here is negative or reflects badly on them. They are NOT a multi-billion company that uses printers in China or customer service in Tunisia. No. They hire US-based agents. They print in US print facilities. But paper, ink, and coatings are not manufactured in the USA. I respect their business model, while simultaneously understanding that they too have a tough row to hoe.
They compete with companies that do farm out work to China or Mexico, that do use substandard substrates, that do force you to deal with people you can barely understand who are sitting at CS farms in Pakistan.
Tariffs don’t hurt the mega-corporations that back door to the Trump administration. They only hurt small- to mid-sized businesses and the people who buy from them.
It’s not just tariffs, but I’m focusing on tariffs because it’s immediate. This regime does not care about SBEs. The sooner everyone admits that out loud, the clearer the discourse will be. The longer we deny the effects of gutting the Small Business Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the harder it will be for SBEs to recover. Not just mine, but yours too.
Personal finances.
Keeping this section short. Only to say, working for Exclamation! Publishers and Center for White Rose Studies is not sustainable. My salary has been deferred for years. I spend about $1800 per month (average — some months more, some months less) out of pocket on CWRS and have been doing so since June 2021. This has wiped out the equity from the house in Vegas I sold. This has wiped out my pitiful savings. This has devastated me.
It has worsened since January 2025 — effective March, Social Security payments (my only income for now) have been delayed by a week. Instead of third Wednesday, it’s now the fourth Wednesday. In 2021 it was the second Wednesday. Every week delayed “earns” the US Treasury an extra week of interest — on the backs of senior citizens. Note that the payment I received on June 25 was payment for MAY 2025 Social Security. Imagine if your employer paid your salary four weeks after month’s end.
I have enough to last until August 15, 2025. After that, I don’t know.
I am hardly alone. I hear horror stories from friends. I read them here on Substack. I am deathly afraid of becoming yet another “old woman” living out of her car. It could happen. All too easily.
Misogyny.
If the issues caused by sludge, business finances, and personal finances were not bad enough, recently I seem to have become a punching bag for misogynists. Luckily — and do I ever mean luckily — it’s all via DMs, emails, and verbal attacks. These are a trigger for me because I worked for a particularly nasty boss for eight years. I am still recovering from the PTSD caused by his narcissism and public verbal abuse. So I mean it when I say I am lucky it is “just” via DMs, emails, and verbal attacks and not in person in my home or office.
One particularly nasty email last week felt like piling on in a week where I’m dealing with Volkswagen, Microsoft, and more.
Why is your organization SELLING print versions of this information? Certainly, it is not to provide the profits to the individuals directly involved with the White Rose (on either side of the issue). Those who were actual MEMBERS were executed in 1943. The rest would be long dead by now.
Wouldn’t it be more ethical and expressive of devotion to the concepts of freedom the members of the White Rose gave their lives to uphold to offer this valuable information to the public at large FOR FREE?
$42.00 for each transcript of the Gestapo Interrogations (of which I saw 10 different ones at first glance) seems a bit excessive.
After all, Hans and Sophie Scholl didn’t SELL their leaflets, did they?
Edited to add: For the first time in thirty-one years of doing this, the poison pen letter writer apologized. A real apology, not a “I am sorry if I offended you” apology. Blew my mind. As demoralizing as his original email was, that is how uplifted his apology made me feel.
Now the other two, the one who called me stupid and a miserable person, the other who started off by saying, I know I shouldn’t write this, but I feel compelled to do so? Nah. I will never hear from either of them.
I am curious how this poison pen writer thinks I am supposed to support myself. He surely has never donated to Center for White Rose Studies. And he clearly doesn’t know the White Rose story. The White Rose students (not just Hans and Sophie) received the equivalent of $40,000 from Eugen Grimminger in support of their work — $10,000 for each month of work. The soldier-students also each earned $2500 per month, more when they were in Russia. And every single student was further subsidized by their parents, Hans and Sophie alone receiving an additional $2000+ per month from Robert Scholl.
Not to speak of the $16,000,000 that the very-Nazi Inge Scholl received from the US government for the “Geschwister Scholl” archives. Damn. I would like to have that sort of support!
Again “luckily” — I do not have to tolerate this man’s self-righteous derision on a daily basis. But it also is not exactly a morale booster.
This sort of sanctimonious blather seems only to flow from the pens of men. What is it with an excess of testosterone that causes this? It’s only worsened since January 2025, when the Misogynist-In-Chief has made it all right for men to demean women this way.
And yes, I am grateful, grateful, grateful for kindhearted, truly-intelligent, considerate men who do not condone their misogynist brothers’ denigration of women. If you are one of those men who supports smart women with backbone who speak the truth, THANK YOU.
No sleep.
When I worked at “that place,” I was doing good for my sleep app to show five hours of sleep with 65% sleep quality. My mind and body were literally dying.
Since June 2022, I’ve been in a better place. Gettysburg provides green space, with birds and flowers to brighten my day. I am no longer living in a desert biome, nor am I in a work environment that sucks the life out of me.
My recent struggles — especially sludge, business finances, personal finances — make it hard for my mind to shut off at night. It’s affecting my sleep, which in turn is damaging my physical and mental health.
On Thursday, I will post what I am doing and will be doing to combat all of the above, to rid my life of these pebbles in my shoe. Short version: Water always finds its channel.
In closing to this post, one that has been most difficult to write without sounding whiny (at least, I hope it does not sound whiny):
Thank you to the following people who have stood beside me, who have supported me with money and with brainstorming, who are my “chosen family” even as I’ve lost my mom to dementia and my brother to (who knows what?) and cousins to MAGA-mania.
Gwen and John Miertschin, friends since 1969. I don’t know what I would do without you. Clare Colquitt and Joe Rodriguez, Clare a friend since 1974, Joe since 2009. You speak your minds with wisdom and kindness and have provided mental and financial safety net more than once. Kathy Eaves, friend since 1969 (and “chosen family” since 2021). You’re not only my almost-twin, your intelligence and insight have always steered me right. Jennifer Rosenfeld, new friend since May 2023 but mishpachah since beginning of time, soft-spoken strong woman who cares about justice and truth. Jo Horne, friend since 2012, newly-restored to my life in 2023, the only CWRS board member who believed in ethics and who affirms historical truth.
Some people would be lucky to have just one of you in their lives. My life is rich because of all of you. Thank you. You are much more than safety net, much more than conversation partners. I am beyond lucky. I am blessed.
And yes, I do in fact listen to you!
Coming on Thursday: Going barefoot.
© 2025 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact me for permission to quote.
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Not whiny at all Denise. These things need saying, and sharing. Hoping for better days ahead.