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IMPATIENT PATIENTS: Beware of skinny envelopes in your mailbox. They’re worse than rattlesnakes. I got one a couple of months ago from my life insurance company. My premiums, it notified me, would be going from $235 a month to $7,000. That sort of math I can’t do in my head. It was signed by a guy named Phil Fields. When I called him to make sure this couldn’t possibly be correct, I would learn that Phil Fields is a strategic figment of the company’s imagination. The voice I got instead — I stopped asking his name after the fourth try — assured me my eyes were just fine and my reading comprehension spot-on.
Compared to all the skinny envelopes now being opened by untold thousands of county residents — courtesy of Donald J. Trump’s Big Bad Beautiful Bill and his “Show Me Your Papers” fatwa — my problems are a walk in the park. Theirs is a walk down the gangplank. Ascribing a solid number to those straining that gangplank is challenging, but the way I read the tea leaves in what’s loosely called the Central Coast, the number is north of 42,000…