Lando Calrissian had problems with his betrayal of Han Solo and company to the Empire, but at first it was only about the deal. The one he thought he was getting. The one that fell apart as soon as it began. Sith Lords, it turns out, aren't into being honorable about anything.

Guess what? In a recession, companies are out to get you. Or, more importantly, any excess cash you might have sitting around. If you want to know the pecking order of who gets paid back first, it's the biggest fish eating the little ones. And they don't really care if they eat all the little fish. Someone else can worry about overfishing.

I used to think "trickle down" economics was about the richest people pissing on everyone else. I think they've decided cannibalism is better.

A few months back, I sent my credit card payment in like usual. I pay it off every month. I haven't paid interest in years. My payments have never been late. I've had this one credit card for almost fifteen years.

For some reason my payment took two weeks to get to the credit card company. Coming in one day late. I was hit with a $39 fine and interest on the outstanding balance (that they carried for one day before it was paid off). And I got a nice ding on my crystal clean credit report.

Was the post office to blame (bills I sent on the same day hit my checking account a full week before my credit card check)? Was it lost in the mechanics of the credit card payment department? Did it take a trip around the world? We will never know.

A call took care of the fine (one time amnesty) but not the interest. So now I am paying something called a "minimum interest" fine each month. $1.50 a month. My account is supposed to have no annual fee, which this seems to be. I am currently changing my credit card company.

So I sent my credit card payment early the next month. It got there in three days.

I split the local paper with my brother. He gets it at his house, and I pick it up at the end of the day after work. In essence, I'm reading yesterday's news tomorrow, but it keeps me informed about local stuff (and I do the crosswords). The web ain't good at this at all.

We'd discontinued the paper for a few months after the subscription price jumped over fifty percent. They ran a promotion where if you got a year subscription, you'd get $54 in Isotopes bucks (the Isotopes are our AAA baseball team). That seemed like a good offset to the higher subscription prices, so we bought back in.

The Isotopes bucks never showed up. And on holidays, the relief paperboys skipped my brother's house. When he called about not getting the paper, the first thing they asked him was "would you like to set up automatic bill payment?"

On Friday I was helping to test software on retail terminals. Three of us were in a small room offsite, and the occasional e-mail sound would chime on our phones. One e-mail was from corporate, describing the health care costs for the next year. We kind of shrugged and went back to work. Then, a little while later, another e-mail from corporate came across. It assured everyone that the prices were, in fact, correct.

So one of the guys looked at the e-mail attachment. And thus began a short silence of disbelief. Our health insurance out of pocket costs are going up over 700%.

Shortly I will join the ranks of the uninsured, health wise. I've paid in (admittedly, not a ton--$22 a month) to my current system since July 2008. I've never used it. Never seen a doctor. Never gone to the emergency room. Never gotten prescriptions. So now paying $2400 a year for something I don't use doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I'm pretty sure I can find use for that much money elsewhere.

Has our coverage really cost this much more in the last year? Has my company decided not to subsidize our health care? Am I playing Russian Roulette with my health? And, finally, why is it again we don't have a public option for health care?

I gotta call my cable company this week and get my bill reduced for another six months. Because the squeaky wheel gets the most grease.

Matt Worley doesn't get this whole deflation argument.