Few things are more frustrating and demoralizing than watching other people get away with colossal, mammoth, audaciously loathsome scams. Nobody likes to be played for a fool.

A deranged and delusional woman with excessively augmented lips that make her look like an algae-eating sucker fish, has — with professional help — produced 14 children. When asked how she is going to manage the task of raising them, she says she is going to "love each one of them all day long," which pretty much sums up her parenting skills. Nevertheless, she asked Oprah for a regular spot on her TV show as a consultant on parenting, to help pay the bills. She is also considering a porn flick and hopes for a TV reality show.

Huge companies lose billions of dollars of our money, and are rewarded by the US government with huge loans of — guess what? — our money.

A much sought after financier named Madoff skims $65 billion of his clients' money, and only a few million of it can be located.

For most of us, these are staggering concepts; the mind boggles when contemplating how $65 billion could be stolen, and then just disappear. The only way most of us can relate to a number like 65 billion is by counting the number of bacteria produced by a sinus infection.

Our lives are not the stuff of such grandiose schemes, and like the little drones that we are, we trudge hopefully along, struggling just to get what we've already paid for.

No grand schemes are needed to shortchange us; at our level of existence, a sub-species of the scam artist or con-man can do the job, though perhaps he is much less nefarious than the heavy hitters. But maybe not.

Most of us have had to deal with The Explainer.

When winter came here in Hagerstown, the heat went on in my lovely condo. And stayed on…loudly and constantly. But it never got warm, at least not down here where I was living.

"It's state-of-the-art," said the heating contractor who installed the system.

"I measured, it's 65 degrees at the floor, and at the ceiling (11 feet high) it's 89. My feet are numb."

"Heat rises," he explained patiently.

"There's no heat down here to rise. Am I paying for the heat on the ceiling? And what about the fan? It's like living in a wind tunnel!"

"The fan distributes the heat. You need to understand how it works; you'll get used to it."

I'm old and I'm cold, and all I understand is that I should be warm. After three visits, he discovered the vents were installed upside down and the fan could be turned down slightly to reduce the noise, and he would pay the extra hundred dollars I spent to heat the ceiling.

The shutter man tried the same trick. When my income tax refund came, I allowed myself to order interior shutters for the huge bay window. The shutter man looks like an adult cherub and is cheerfully deferential to his elderly clients. But when the shutters were installed, each one was at a different height, and an uneven gap of light showed at the window sill on two of them.

"The shutters are perfect," he explained. "It's the windows that are crooked. I didn't build the windows."

"I thought when I ordered custom made shutters, they would fit these windows! I could have bought those plastic things at Home Depot and nailed them up myself, and it would have looked as good as this! And you're going to charge me to make it right?"

He was insulted. I told him how the situation should be corrected, and after a sudden change of strategy, he came back the following week to fix it.

Does this happen to men? Do women have an invisible Be Patient With Me, I'm Stupid sign on their foreheads that only contractors can see?

About a week after I moved in, I learned that I'm the only buyer in this building, that the others are tenants, and the woman upstairs has small children, and there really isn't "extra insulation" between the units, and the nice young man on the top floor belted his old lady one day and brought the police thundering up the stairs during a visit with my grandchildren, and the new couple downstairs has both a pit bull and a Weimaraner, and the roof over my deck isn't really a roof — water and grime from the deck above trickle down on me and my patio furniture — and when it took two days for the walk to be cleared after our only winter storm, I took a hard line with the building owner.

But Skip is a world class Explainer. And apparently, he is also emotionally fragile. He said my complaints hurt his feelings.

"This project is my heart and soul. I put my life into this building and it hurts to hear you criticize it. I am so stressed; I just can't listen to any more." He advised me to communicate with him only via e-mail.

But then, after six months of listening to the kid upstairs run laps in his four-pound sneakers, watching the trash cans fill and overflow (tenants do not put the cans at pick-up sites), and pups pooping in the parking lot, Sensitive Skip pressed the detonator on my arsenal of complaints.

"I can't make your life perfect," he said, and, "You have to learn to live with other people."

And then he presented me with a bill for $500 because he "forgot to cash my deposit check last August," when I bought the condo.

So I wrote him a little note. A big, flaming, scorching, blistering letter, actually:

Skip! Please be clear on this: You have not been asked to make my life perfect.

Making my life perfect would entail finding me a suitable job; selling the financially draining rental properties in New York; finding a primary care physician who accepts my insurance; paying for the $2,500 of dental work I suddenly find I need; and an attitude makeover for my son-in-law — just to begin.

You are tasked only with providing me with a "luxury condominium," for which I paid a premium price. What I "have" is an expensive condo in a "project style" apartment building.

I did not pay the somewhat exorbitant purchase price to live in the projects. I will persist in my efforts to live in a "luxury condo," (that's what it says on the sign in front of the building), with an appropriate level of comfort and civility.

And I have persisted. Skip has switched from explanations for the failures to promises to correct them. Mainly, I suspect, because he wants to start showing the building again, and he can't risk a woman crazed by noise, dog poop, and undelivered luxury bursting out of #202 every time he brings prospective buyers through.

I take walks around the lake in our lovely little park, and admire the beautiful designs on the geese who seem to be serenely making their way across the lake, until they get close, and you can see how energetically their little webbed feet are paddling.

Sometimes, I watch the swans, graceful and dignified, like the charming and decorous senior citizen I hope to become. I'm tired of paddling.