The senator is right! I DO have confidence to approach people in high places, but above all, to defend myself with my writings, etc. On my bone to pick with the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico (where I live) is how the Senator got involved in the first place. In this matter, VA Medical Center has wrongdoing and wrongdoing on its side, and I have right on my side, and that’s another reason why it’s easy to be confident. The other senator from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman and US Representative Heather Wilson (District 1) have been involved in this matter.

During this long ordeal, which has been going on for three years now, I have communicated with other people in high positions such as: Secretary of Veterans Affairs; the VA Inspector General; the governor of New Mexico; The Director of the VA Medical Center; a local judge, etc.

And it all starts with self-confidence in your writing skills and your attitude / skills, etc. But you will have to pay the price in time and / or money or both, etc. And, as time goes on … we all tend to forget what we learned in school. For me, it all started with an invitation in the early nineties!

I was invited to join Southwest Writers, by the then president of the organization, Eileen Stanton, who has sold more than 5,000 of her articles, to some of the major newspapers and magazines in the country, and has also written a book, etc. With more than 700 members nationwide, SW Writers has some of the most talented and accomplished writers in the country. It goes without saying … I’m flattered by the invitation!

I had been interested in writing for my last few years, so I decided to take some writing courses to improve my writing skills. So, in my 40s, I completed the following; Writers Digest Course; the National Writers Club course; a creative writing course at the University of New Mexico, taught by Eileen Stanton. To complete all of this, it took around 18 months and cost around two hundred dollars at the time. So if the reader wants to improve at something … (including writing), they will have to pay their fees!

I remember when I used to do my homework at work, during my lunch break. One day a co-worker came up to me and looked over his shoulder to see what I was doing and asked, “Didn’t you learn all that in high school?” I said yes, but that I wanted to learn it all over again, because I was interested in writing for the future. He just laughed and walked away. (Guess who has the last laugh?) Completing these writing courses is one of the best things I have ever done for myself.

I don’t think a year has passed out of the last 10-12 years, that I haven’t had to fight someone for what is right … and defend myself … the phone company; the cable company; the medical center; the auto club; the bank and others! And defending yourself begins with a well-crafted one or two page letter. But the well-written letter was not easy either.

When I was completing the writing courses, one of my instructors told me that I was too “conversational” with my writing … too “wordy” and that I had to cut words out of my writing. Well … exc-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-I know … for being a charlatan! I’m so sorry for being a charlatan!

What happened, is that my writing instructor, took one of my paragraphs and rewrote it in her own words … she said the same thing … and cut about a third of the words from the piece, etc. WOW! She called it “tight writing.” Now I could see what he was talking about!

This is very important, because if you approach people in high places … you cannot and should not waste their time! You have to be brief … get to the point … and say what you are going to say in the fewest words, etc. You must remove all gibberish! Because I’ve written so much in the last two years, I’m getting better at “strict writing” and can usually remove several hundred words from my articles and still get them to be understood, and so on. But it takes a lot of practice.

When I bought my first computer in 2001, it came bundled with MSN (Microsoft Network) for free for a year. I didn’t like MSN so it expired and that was it … or so I thought! Get this … 18 months after it expired, I got a letter from Microsoft, telling me I didn’t follow the TOS (terms of service) guidelines and they were billing me $ 48.00! THAT?

Well … well … well … now I was going to have to do, what I had done so many times in the past, and that was to write a letter to the Attorney General’s office (Consumer Protection Division) in Santa Faith, New Mexico. Let’s find out if Microsoft will get anything out of me! I sent a copy of the letter to Microsoft in Arizona, where it originated. Two weeks later, I received a response from Microsoft, and it was a nice letter informing me, that they had given me a credit for the $ 48.00 and that I did not have to pay it, etc. Isn’t it so kind of Microsoft? ? This is probably how everyone became a billionaire in the first place … $ 48.00 here … and $ 48.00 there from all the suckers in the country … and PRESTO … you’re an instant billionaire!

On another matter, regarding the local cable company, I paid the cable company and the phone automatically from my checking account. Everything went well for about a year, and then everything fell apart. I got a nasty letter from the cable company, telling me that I owed them $ 75.00 and that the cable was going to disconnect … and it was! THAT? How could this happen? The invoices were paid automatically.

It was time to write another letter to the Attorney General’s office, and everything I write starts with five or six pages … a real mess … and everything has to be edited into one or two pages that look civilized, etc. . I sent a copy to the cable company and two weeks after the cable was disconnected, someone knocked on the front door.

It was the cable guy and he told me he had a letter from his manager, giving me a credit for the $ 75.00 that I didn’t have to pay. He was also there to reconnect the cable, free of charge. The letter was an apology for the confusion and the credit given. The cable company had been very rude to me in the previous weeks, but I let the cable guy turn the cable TV back on, and over the next week, I returned the black box to the cable company and closed the account!

And finally … the worst letter I have ever seen is the one one of my sisters sent me, when I was in the Air Force training ground. This letter was ugly … full of misspelled words and grammar problems! I really don’t know how he graduated from high school, etc. If I wrote that wrong, I could never stand up for myself and write to people in high positions like people in Congress, etc. I would be too ashamed of my writing!