u/Ray_in_Texas

I live in the mid-cities and filed a Texas Public Information Act request with the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office and the city of Hurst asking a simple question: did your Flock license-plate readers scan or log my vehicle in the last 30 days, and did anyone run a search on my plate?

Hurst PD answered in a few days: no records. Easy.

Tarrant County sent back a $72 invoice. The breakdown: 4 hours of "personnel labor" at $15/hr, plus 20% overhead. Here's the part that gets me — the same estimate lists zero pages of copies and zero programmer hours. So they're telling me it takes one employee four hours to type a plate number into a database and export the result, with nothing to print and no code to write.

Flock is a searchable system. You type in a plate, it returns the hits. The idea that a single query takes half a workday isn't a cost, it's a toll — and it's the kind of number that makes most people just give up and walk away, which I suspect is the point.

I've disputed it and I'm ready to file a complaint with the Attorney General's cost hotline if they don't justify the four hours minute by minute.

Anyone else here filed a PIA with the county? Did you get hit with the same kind of labor estimate? Trying to figure out if this is standard practice or just what I got quoted.

Edit.

Thanks to everyone concerned about my blood pressure, heart, how i spend my time, etc.

Some of you seem to think I am madly unnerved by this outrageous $72 invoice. While I did use the word pissed in a reply, that was to strong a word.

I made a casual request from my local government asking for a database search. One office responded with, I believe, an unreasonable fee request.

I then simply filed a request for them to provide justification for the seemingly high charge.

Nothing more, nothing less. I am not upset, distressed, or even perturbed. If they provide a reasonable, logical explanation for the high fee and why it will take four hours. I will say "Huh." Pay the fee, review the resulting csv file and move on.

Unless of course, they are tracking my every movement. That'll be chapter 2.

In the mid-'70s during NOE training in the Huey at Ft. Rucker, we used a very specific map folding technique. I cannot remember what we called it, took hours to compile.

Anyone happen to have the instructions?

Wishful thinking mode - off.

​

Last time I asked a question: who's caring for the caregiver?

This may be a part of the answer, and it isn't written for the caregiver. It's for the rest of us. The family, the friends, the neighbors, the folks at church, the coworker who sees them come in tired on a Monday. If you know a caregiver and you've been wondering how to help, here's what I've got. Four things. None of them cost a dime.

Start by asking how they're doing. When somebody's sick, all the attention runs to the sick person. Nobody thinks to check on the one doing the caring. So don't ask "How's your mom?" Ask "How are you holding up?" Then be quiet and listen. Don't jump in to fix anything. For a lot of caregivers, that one question is the first time anybody has really looked at them in weeks.

Keep inviting them out. Caregivers cancel plans. They have to. After the fifth or sixth cancellation, people quietly stop asking, and that's how a caregiver ends up alone. Don't be one of the people who stops. Ask again, even if the answer has been no ten times in a row. Every invitation tells them they still belong out here with the rest of us.

Tell them the truth about the job. Caregiving has no clock-out time, no weekends, no sick days, no lunch hour. It wears on the heart more than the body. Say it plain: "What you're doing is hard, and you're doing it." They need to hear that showing up counts, even on the days they snap and lose their patience. Nobody does this perfectly. Nobody. They already have a voice in their head telling them they're falling short. Be the other voice.

And push them toward small breaks. Caregivers tell themselves they'll rest once everything is handled. Everything is never handled, so they never rest. Nudge them toward twenty minutes. A cup of coffee that hasn't been reheated in the microwave twice. A chapter of a book. A call to an old friend. Ten minutes on the porch. Better yet, make the break possible yourself. Sit with their loved one for twenty minutes so they can step out the door. They've forgotten they deserve care too. Remind them.

Now, a word to the caregivers who found their way to this page. Some of you will never ask for help. Some of you have been asking for months and nothing came. Either way, you shouldn't have to keep carrying the request.

So don't say them. Pass this along instead. Email it to your family. Post it where your friends will see it. Print it and set it on the kitchen counter, or hand it to the person who keeps saying "let me know if you need anything." They mean well. They just don't know what to do.

Now they have a few ideas to get'em started.

Ray

(edited to accommodate the first responser's valid point)

As i mentioned in my other post, my wife Maria is a nurse. When her father got sick, she did what nurses do — she stepped in and took over. Many of you are doing or did the same things. Appointments, medications, the hard phone calls, the harder conversations. Everyone asked how her dad was doing. Almost nobody asked how she was doing.

I saw the same thing years earlier with my mother. When someone has dementia, all the attention goes to them — and it should. But the person keeping everything running — holding down a job, raising kids, managing a parent's care — wears down quietly in the background. Nobody hands them a chart. Nobody checks their vitals.

If that's you right now, here's what I wish someone had said to Maria, and to me: what you're doing is hard, and it counts, even on the days it doesn't feel like it. Rest isn't something you earn after the work is done. It's part of how the work gets done.

So this week, take twenty minutes that belong to nobody but you. Sit down. Have the coffee while it's still hot. You're allowed.

I thought I understood caregiving. I'd lived it once already — I lost my mom and my brother within three days of each other back in 2015, and my father in 2022. I thought that grief had taught me everything I needed to know about watching someone you love slip away.

Then my father-in-law got sick, and I found out I still had a lot to learn — this time from the sidelines, watching my wife.

She's a daughter and a nurse, and she did both jobs at once for over a year. She drove the visits. She translated the doctors' updates into plain language. She sat with her mother through the parts that don't show up in any care plan — the silences, the fear, the slow realization that this is how it ends. And she did all of it while keeping her six siblings "informed," which is a polite word for something much harder: making sure six different people, with six different relationships to their father and six different capacities to handle hard news, all felt like they knew what was happening and had a say in it.

I recognized that work immediately, because I'd done a version of it myself. As the oldest of my siblings, I'd felt the same pull during my mom's decline — that if I didn't hold the family together, no one would. But watching my wife carry it showed me what I'd missed the first time: how much of caregiving is invisible coordination. It's not just the hands-on care. It's the hundred small acts of translation and reassurance that keep a family from coming apart at exactly the moment it needs to hold together.

Her father passed in December last year, at 94.

For those of you doing this now — especially anyone coordinating siblings — how do you handle that part of it? The keeping-everyone-informed job? Because from where I sat, it looked heavier than anything in the care plan.