Networking

I am sooo bad at it. Networking, that is. I just don’t do well with schmoozing. Any day, I’d rather sit in front of my computer and type. Not that I don’t enjoy other people—I do, as a matter of fact. It’s just that I’m not very comfortable around strangers: don’t know what to say, don’t want to say anything, want to get back to…gardening, cleaning house, editing copy, cooking, eating, shopping, playing with the dog, writing blog posts, reading a book, hiking a mountain, just about anything.
Written by Funny about Money. © 2009   
{sigh} It’s four in the morning. In two hours I have to get up and get ready to fly out the door so as to spend the entire darned day—SATURDAY!—at a book publisher’s convention. There are so many things I need to do and so many things I want to do and so many ways I don’t want to spend seven or eight hours sitting around listening to people palaver about how to market your book online. Augh! If we don’t pick up some business today, I am going to croak my peonie!!!

Okay, let’s think positive here. There must be some advice on the Web about how to network effectively. 

Hmmm…  Here’s a guy who suggests you need to make yourself memorable:

• dress distinctively or at least sharp (heaven help me: my clothes are memorable, all right, for looking dowdy and out of style because I can’t afford the latest new duds and I refuse to wear shoes that hurt my feet!); 

• “be fully present,” by which our author seems to mean you should sincerely pay attention to people (or at least pretend to);

• ask questions that cause your interlocutors to tell a story about themselves, an old reporter’s trick;

• find ways to repeat certain key words and phrases—videlicet, your name, your company’s name, your business or industry, your product, and your location; and

• contribute to the conversation, don’t just mumble semiconscious small talk.

Ah ha! I think that last is the stumbling block for me. I don’t have much to contribute to conversation and so tend to turn a lot of pet phrases like “is that so?” and “isn’t that interesting?” (not!). 

Another scribbler tells us you should “be genuine and authentic”; I guess that’s the same as my mother’s advice to “just be yourself.” Trouble is, most people don’t seem very impressed with “myself.” She (the writer, not my mother) advises setting some goals for what you want to accomplish at a networking event (that’s easy: get a second client who will feed us at least one new thousand-dollar assignment a month); visiting lots of groups (eeek! one isn’t enough?); holding volunteer positions in organizations (uh huh: soldiers have got something when they say “never volunteer”); and becoming known as a resource for others (comes naturally for us fonts of all wisdom). Seriously: been there, done that…have yet to get business from one of these events. 

Here’s another obvious piece of advice: follow up on business cards you collect with e-mails, phone calls, and personal contacts. And it’s another of those networking tricks I never seem to manage to make myself do. I’ve already got a stack of cards from ABPA meetings gathering dust around the house. Interestingly, none of the people who traded cards with me have tried to contact me, either, so I guess I’m not the only one who…well, would rather be dusting than doing this.

Is there ANYONE out there in the whole gigantic Internet who has anything intelligent to say about this?

…dear god… There’s an entire organization devoted to business networking. Of sorts. There’s a newspaper on the subject! 

But in answer to the basic question: No. Evidently not.

Unemployment + Chase Bank = Hell on Wheels

LOL!  I just KNEW it! 
Written by Funny about Money. © 2009   
As you may recall, my beloved employer, the Great Desert University, did its level best to ameliorate the pain of the unpaid furlough days it’s forcing us all to take by entering a Shared Work arrangement with the Unemployment Insurance Service.

This sounds great…on paper. Reality is a slightly different matter.

Although UI will, in due course, direct-deposit your money to a bank account of your choice, the first payment defaults to a debit card with Chase Bank.

Can you spell sweetheart deal, boys and girls?

I don’t use debit cards; I don’t want to use a debit card; I just want to get the $48 that allegedly has been deposited to this card out of Chase Bank and into my sweaty little paws, so I can carry it to the credit union and deposit it to a savings account, where it and the promised future direct deposits can sit until we see whether I get laid off or not. So, here’s what happens when I try to extract said munificent sum:

Dear ASK HR:

The debit card from Chase came in the mail, issued in response to the request for Shared Work payment for furlough days. I called the phone number on the information that came with the card. After about 15 minutes of jumping through punch-a-button hoops, I validated the card and got the access number and the PIN number.

For a number of reasons, I do not use debit cards. I have a credit union account, to which I asked to have the payments due me direct-deposited. Yes, I DO understand that the first payment cannot be direct-deposited. So now I have $48 on this debit card, which I would like to extract from Chase and manually deposit, in person, at the Arizona State Credit Union.

I drove to the nearest Chase branch. It is in a dangerous part of town where I would not ordinarily get out of my car—it is, shall we say, a lock-your-car-doors district. Stood in line interminably at the teller’s. Explained the situation, asked to withdraw the $48 that is supposed to be on the card. Jumped through some more hoops. And then what? She informed me the card was rejected. By now I’ve spent another half-hour dorking with this, for a total of 45 minutes.

Now she wants me to go to customer service, where I will be asked to dial the phone number on the card (which is the same punch-a-button hoop-jump number that has already fruitlessly consumed a quarter-hour of my time). I explain that I have work to do, and that the last time I called that number, there was no option to reach a person.

Back at my own phone, I dial a number for Chase listed on GetHuman.com. Eventually, I reach a person in the auto loan department. He connects me with a human being: in Pakistan or India!

Okay. After waiting 16 minutes to get through to this person, I explain the situation. He says he will connect me to a person in the Unemployment Office in Illinois. I explain that even though Unemployment Insurance is a federal program, in the U.S. it is administered by each state separately and that each state’s system is different, and so it will not do me any good to talk to the Illinois unemployment people. That notwithstanding, he insists on giving me a number in the Unemployment Office in Illinois. I hang up in frustration.

This little runaround has now occupied a good hour and a half of my time, not counting the time used fruitlessly to call a phone number at HR whose talking machine hung up on me before I could explain the issue. Nor does it count the 90 minutes spent sitting in a meeting listening to ASU and Unemployment Insurance representatives explain how to work the system, nor does it count the time I spent filling out forms.

When I’m working at ASU, I’m paid about $30 an hour. Thus, it has cost $45 worth of my time at ASU’s rate to try to extract $48 allegedly due to me. To make things more interesting, my actual, real-life freelance rate is $60 an hour. So, the truth is, I have now spent $90 worth of my time in an effort to retrieve $48 that has already been paid to me but which Chase will not disgorge.

I’m going to give up and write off the $48—I just don’t have time to kill this way. However, I would like someone to know how furious it makes me. I do not like to have my time wasted, and I especially resent being barred from retrieving unemployment insurance that I have paid for with my taxes and my employer has paid for with its taxes.

HR’s effort to cut through red tape and ameliorate the pain of the furlough days was a very good try and much appreciated by those of us who feel worried about our jobs and beat-up by the economy in general. However, it appears your time was every bit as much wasted as mine was. If a human being reads this message and has any clue how to reach an English-speaking human being at Chase (NOT another punch-a-button machine, NOT a foreign national who has no clue what I’m talking about!), please advise.

Don’t you love it?

Truth to tell, the exploit in the sub-working-class neighborhood where Chase directed me to its closest bank was as nothing compared to the misguided junket to our neighborhood Albertson’s, where I incorrectly thought the branch was located (they did used to have some branch bank in there, but it’s gone now—I won’t go into that store because it’s unsafe, and so I’d not noticed the bank’s removal). Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR cop cars were lined up in front, a couple of them left with their engines running. Inside, a gaggle of police officers were huddled with a guy who pretty clearly was a vic’ and not a perp. I surmised that he must have been robbed or at least pounced in the parking lot. Charming. Asked after the bank branch and was told to proceed deeper into the slum. And so, onward and downward.

Let’s calculate how much the futile effort to retrieve my $48 really has cost. 

Time consumed:

90 minutes: sitting in an informational meeting, filling out forms
15 minutes: navigating punch-a-button phone lines to validate debit card and obtain various secret numbers
30 minutes: driving to Chase branch and being repulsed
20 minutes: reaching a human being on a Chase telephone and being repulsed
15 minutes: writing the diatribe above

TOTAL: 170 minutes, or 2.83 hours

Value of my time as a GDU employee: $30/hour
Value of my time on a freelance basis: $60/hour

Value of time, at taxpayer rate, wasted  while I tried to retrieve $48 supposedly already paid to me:  $84.90

Value of time, at freelance rate, wasted while I tried to retrieve $48 supposedly already paid to me: $169.80

Tell me: is there anyone out there who doesn’t believe we’re living in a Monty Python show?

 

Security Doors: Yea or nay?

The last “safety alert” the head of our neighborhood group sent out reported seven burglary and prowler incidents over the preceding fifteen days. That’s one every two days. And it includes only the those that homeowners relayed to this guy, not every single episode on the police blotter.
Written by Funny about Money. © 2009
At least two sets of perps are watching residents’ movements. They wait until a homeowner leaves, then break in a back entrance, walk through the house to the garage, open the garage door, drive their car inside, close the door, and clean out the house. Then they drive away, unnoticed by the neighbors. One woman was ripped off royally in the time it took her to run to the grocery store. The latest victim was close to my house, and the perps who drive the green station wagon were recently seen peering over the back wall at La Maya and La Bethulia’s house.

Burglar alarms don’t help. One guy, knowing it would take the cops 10 or 15 minutes to get there after the security company called them, strode through a house with the alarm blaring—he had plenty of time to lift a laptop and rifle through all the papers in the owner’s home office. 

For quite some time, I’ve been quietly thinking about installing security doors on the four entrances in the back and on the side of the house, which cannot be seen from the street. Three of these doors are sliders; one of them latches but does not lock, and another will not latch or lock at all. All three Arcadia doors are alarmed and “secured” shut (more or less) with sticks in the runners. The back door is the worst menace: it’s a cheap Home Depot affair with glass lights and a single-cylinder dead bolt. Even I could bust through it: use my shoe to break a window, and then just reach through the opening and unlock the door.

I’m not fond of security doors. My feeling is that the burglars, not the honest citizens, belong behind bars. How can I say how much I resent feeling that I need to live behind bars, alarm systems, and glaring security lights when I have done nothing to deserve being locked up? But…on the other hand, if the guys across the street had had security doors front and back, they wouldn’t have suffered a home invasion, wouldn’t have been beat up, wouldn’t have been chased down the street by a guy waving a pistol. Security doors have other plusses, too. The one on my front door allows me to leave the door open to let the fresh air in on lovely days like today, and its ugly security screen lets me see out (sort of) without a stranger at the door seeing in. When someone rings the doorbell, I can open my front door to see who they are, but they can’t see whether I’m alone, how big I am, how old I am, or whether I have a mastiff standing at my side. These are good things. 

On the other other hand, when La Bethulia was here the other night, she remarked that a house she owned in Moon Valley had a pair of security doors over an Arcadia door. During the hour or so it took her to go out to dinner one evening, the perps took a crowbar to the lock and just broke it off. This left them plenty of time to go through her belongings at their leisure. So…it may be that security doors are not as secure as they look, especially with instructions on how to “bump” a lock available on YouTube. My locks, like most people’s, are vulnerable to this easy break-in technique; to secure all my doors, I would have to replace every deadbolt in the house with safer locks, not an inconsiderable expense.

And speaking of expense: security doors are not cheap. Most of them are plug hideous: they look either like prison doors or like a kitsch dealer’s wet dream. See what I mean?

Welcome to the Big House!

We wuv whales!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Titan Security Doors, the outfit my favorite door-&-window retailer does business with, does offer a couple of models (that’s two, count’em, 2) that aren’t excessively offensive:

Frank Lloyd Wright run amok

Okay, I don't hate this all THAT much...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At first I thought Frank Lloyd Wright Drops Acid would work, since the windows in front have a FLlW-like motif. But then La Maya pointed out that after you’ve looked at it for a minute or two, your eyeballs start to vibrate. Imagine two of those babies, back to back, spanning an Arcadia door. Ouch! Although We Wish We Lived on Nob Hill doesn’t in any way fit the house’s general mood, neither does it cause pain to the eyes.

The cost of these charmers is so outrageous that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. The window guy was here measuring a couple of days ago, but he still hasn’t called with an estimate. I figure he took one look around the place and realized there was no way I could pay to cover all the doors in back with the things.

Maybe the best strategy would be to put one on the kitchen door (which is just a regular exterior door) and a pair on the Arcadia door in the bedroom. This would secure the softest entrance, and it also would allow me to leave the bedroom door open at night, when the weather is nice. Then, if a miracle happens and I manage to hang onto my job for another couple of years, I can fortify the remaining two Arcadias. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to do the best I can to make it hard to open them.
Written by Funny about Money. © 2009

AMEX kickback comes through, and surprises

Nice timing for the annual AMEX credit-card kickback. This year it’s $210, which will almost make up for this month’s furlough gouges. One of our clients owes us $1,100, which hasn’t been forthcoming, but if and when that ever shows up, my half of the net plus the American Express rebate should carry me through the first three periods of reduced pay. 

So far, I haven’t gotten any static from American Express, despite reports of questionable practices from those quarters. I did use the card at a Walmart before I’d heard of AMEX’s data mining schemes, but so far they have not cut my credit line. Possibly that’s because it’s a Costco card. It’s unlikely that AMEX would risk alienating a major client by slashing its customers’ credit.

Hm. I’ve spent an incredible amount of money with this thing over the past year: $18,717. Of that, $1,187 went to gasoline, $448 to eating out (really??), and $14.75 to “traveling” (huh? I haven’t “traveled” in years). “Everywhere Else” racked up a total of $15,742.

Oh, this gets better: a Quicken category report suggests I spent $578 eating out! The $14.75 was for lunch in Prescott, when I drove an out-of-state friend up there, not exactly “traveling,” IMHO. Lordie! Who would think I’ve spent that much in restaurants? I try to stay out of them, and generally restrict eating out to twice a month, max—and for lunch, never for dinner.

Eating lunch out is pretty much out of the question during the week, because the on-campus chow lines sell nothing but junk food, which I don’t eat. There are only a couple of decent places to eat within walking distance of the campus, and one of them is very expensive. So, I usually go hungry over the lunch hour, since we have no refrigerator and no place except the public toilet to rinse out dirty dishes. 

Surprising. I’ll have to get a grip on that!

Cheap Eats: Grilled pork tenderloin

During the late, great stockpiling expedition, I picked up one of Costco’s vast packages of pork tenderloin: two connected freezer-wrapped packets that, when opened, each disgorge two large tenderloins, for a total of enough food to last one old lady about three weeks. I also bought enough potatoes to feed the population of Ireland for a week or two.

With a good two or three months’ worth of meat in the freezer, it seemed like a good opportunity to invite friends to dinner. I decided to scallop a couple handfuls of the potatoes and to marinate and then roast the two of the four tenderloins on the grill. Leftovers could go into the freezer. La Maya and La Bethulia brought over an incredible salad, and I unearthed some of the brussels sprouts I bought fresh at Thanksgiving, blanched, and froze. It worked pretty well. Check this out:

Grilled Pork Tenderloins

You need:

• 1 or 2 pork tenderloins
• lemon juice or wine vinegar (about 1/2 c for one tenderloin)
• olive oil (about the same amount as juice or vinegar)
• salt & pepper to taste
• fennel seeds
• garlic (one clove per loin)
• fresh rosemary or sage sprigs (optional)

Mix olive oil and lemon juice or vinegar, about 50-50. I used a cup of each for two tenderloins; this was more than needed. It can be refrigerated or frozen and used to marinate a future portion of chicken, beef, venison, or more pork.  Add some salt and pepper to the marinade, to taste. 

Slice the garlic into slivers. With a sharp knife, poke holes into the meat and stuff them with garlic slivers. Take about a tablespoon of fennel seeds and spin them in a blender or, if you have one, a coffee grinder reserved for grinding spices. Rub the ground fennel into the meat. 

Place the meat in an enameled or glass dish and pour the marinade over it. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Turn the meat over once during the marinating process.

Start a charcoal fire or turn on a propane grill. If you have some hardwood chips, soak these in water for at least 20 minutes before starting the meat.

Push the charcoal to the outside edges of the grill, so you will have a place to set the meat that is not directly over the fire. Toss on the hardwood chips, and then put several springs of rosemary, sage, or both onto the fire. Set the grates in place, and then place the meat on the grate so that it’s not directly over the hot coals. You actually want the meat to roast rather than barbecue—olive oil dripping on burning coals will cause a flare-up, which you’d like to avoid. Close the lid. 

Allow the meat to cook about 30 or 40 minutes. Turn it once during the cooking process. My friends ran a little late, and so these tenderloins cooked about 45 or 50 minutes—they came out just fine.

Slice the meat across the grain, into medallions. Serve with rice, pasta, or potatoes, a nice green veggie, and some salad. Toooo excellent!

Scalloped potatoes

I haven’t scalloped a potato since I was a young thing: it’s a very old-fashioned dish. La Bethulia was thrilled: “No one makes these anymore,” she exclaimed—and she loves them. They did come out pretty tasty. 

You need:

• four to six potatoes, depending on the number of diners and your mood
• about two cups milk  
• a lot of butter
• salt and pepper
• some fresh parsley, chopped (optional, I think)
• a handful or two of shredded Parmesan cheese

Wash the potatoes; slice them about 1/8 inch thick. (I used a mandoline, a very handy little gadget—you also could haul out the food processor, if you have one. A sharp knife, however, will do the trick). Drop them into a bowl of icy water as you’re working. 

Butter a flat baking dish well. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Dry the potato slices on a clean dishrag or paper towels. Lay down a layer of slices in the pan; dot these with butter, season with salt & pepper, and sprinkle a little parsley over them. Repeat until you run out of potatoes. Dot the top layer with still more butter, and pour in enough milk to just cover the potatoes. Then sprinkle a nice layer of Parmesan cheese over the top. 

Place this lash-up in the oven and allow to bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until the potatoes are cooked to your liking. The result is comfort food at its best.

Easy Brussels Sprouts

You need:

• frozen Brussels sprouts
• butter
• tarragon
• nutmeg

Melt some butter in a frying pan—more than enough to just cover the bottom of the pan. You’re going to braise these sprouts, which will cause them to take up some of the butter into their little sprout bodies. Provide enough for the purpose.

Place the sprouts into the pan with the melted butter. Roll them around to coat them well. Sprinkle on some dried tarragon and a little nutmeg. Turn the heat fairly low and cover the pan tightly.

Depending on how large the sprouts are, it takes about eight to fifteen minutes to cook. Stir occasionally, to be sure they don’t scorch on one side.  

La Maya made the salad. I don’t know how she made it. All I know is she showed up with a dressing made of 18-year-old balsamic vinegar, which was pretty amazing.

Word from On High: Stay Calm

Yesterday the Deans tried to do a little damage control. The six of them called a “town hall” meeting of academic professionals and other underlings in related nebulous positions. The conversation was pretty interesting, and I (for one: possibly the only one) came away slightly encouraged.

To understand the subtext, you need to know just how precarious the “academic professional” or “service professional” position is. These are full-time jobs that, even though they’re nontenurable and usually ill-paid, are considered quasifaculty positions. Some are nine-month (academic year) and some are twelve-month (fiscal year) appointments, but in either event incumbents stay at the whim of the administration. APs are exempt, meaning the bosses can fire you at any time, for any or for no reason. Tenurable faculty cannot be canned for nothing, and neither can classified (nonexempt) staff, for whom dismissal requires a supervisor to go through the tortures of the damned. Thus, academic professionals hold the university’s single most vulnerable full-time job. APs include librarians, program directors, certain researchers and instructors, and various oddments such as graphic artists and editors. 

Before the current president acceded to the throne, some APs were theoretically tenurable: these worthies had “continuing” contracts, as opposed the more typical year-to-year renewable contract. A year-to-year renewable means the university issues a new contract annually; a “continuing” contract is effectively permanent. As a practical matter, the search process is so cumbersome and such a hassle that most people on year-to-year renewable contracts, afloat on institutional inertia, hang onto their jobs as long as anyone else. But of course, a continuing contract is much to be desired.

Not surprisingly, most of the layoff rumors blowing through the halls have focused on academic professionals. The libraries have stopped acquiring books and have canceled all their periodical subscriptions, rendering librarians redundant—quite a few of them have already been canned. Starting in the middle of last summer, we have heard volley after volley of theories to the effect that some or even all service and academic professionals will be laid off. And, not surprisingly, morale among this group is at an all-time low; fear and loathing, at an all-time high.

The overall gist of the deans’ remarks at yesterday’s meeting was uncertainty. They admitted that they didn’t have a clue, but, while warning that more cuts are pretty much inevitable in fiscal years ’09 and ’10, they said they saw “cause for cautious optimism.” They insisted they are doing all they can a) to shield students from the worst effects of the disastrous budget cuts, and b) to minimize staff cuts to the extent possible. Those brief statements made, they opened the floor to questions. Videlicet:

What will happen if a state of financial emergency is declared?

The Board of Regents is the only entity that can do so. [This conflicts with the university's rules and regs pertaining to employees, which specifically state the university president can declare a state of emergency.] The deans do not believe this will happen in FY 2010, and the FY 2009 disaster has now been wrestled into a “manageable” state.

Will the furloughs continue into FY 2010? Or will they morph into a permanent salary cut?

No, and no. The furloughs created massive administrative headaches, leading the deans to conclude that “furloughing is not a good way to do things.” [Roger that, bosses!] They urged staff to keep in mind that our college plays such a crucial part in the university’s mission and operation that it has “a privileged position.”

Will the satellite campuses be closed?

Not likely. However, the College’s vice-president (i.e., our Dean of Deans) remarked that it would be preferable to shut those campuses than to damage services at the main campus.

About three weeks ago, the questioner, an instructional professional with a continuing contract, received a notice from the vice-president for personnel stating that her contract would be canceled and replaced with a year-to-year or even possibly a semester-to-semester contract. Other APs have not received any such message. What’s the deal?

The deans are discussing the issue with the Provost’s office. They are resisting this move, because they wish to retain APs [who do much of the College's scutwork]. If the College is forced to dismiss a lot of adjuncts—or if many of them seek work in the community colleges or the business world—we will be forced to close our doors.  To retain APs, the university is doing all it can to increase funding. Our funding sources, which include tuition revenues [especially from out-of-state students, who pay exorbitant rates] and external funding grants, are up. Tuition revenues are up; retention is up. One-third of the university’s revenue comes from tuition.

That’s great, but what about contracts for academic and service professionals?

What is on the table are six-month or semester-to-semester contracts. We will not know what comes of this until April. The Deans are not included in the discussion. The administration wants more “flexibility.” They want to be able to end contracts summarily. The service professional’s twelve-month contract, which requires a 90-day warning of cancellation, does not provide this. In April, all service professionals may be told that we will be hired from July through December of FY 2010. This has not been firmly decided, but it is certain that multiyear (“continuing”) contracts will go away.

Will changing the contract’s terms affect our benefits?

No.

The deans wrapped up the discussion by saying that although the worst is probably over, we’re not through the storm; some rough times are still ahead. Things will be clearer, they said, in six to eight weeks, mid- to late March.

Isn’t that sweet? In one breath they tell us the university’s operations depend on our underpaid presence, and in the next they tell us they’re about to remove the teensy bit of job security we had. Now, instead of not knowing from year to year whether we’ll have a job, we won’t know from month to month. In all their earnestness to reach out to staff and calm the waters, what they did was reiterate an old truth of academia: Universities subsist on exploitation.

We need a union.

Well, at least it appears that those of us who survive into FY 2010 will see our salaries return to normal. It also looks like there may be a fair chance my job will not be RIFed. To be OK in a premature retirement, I only need to hang on for another year. It would be ideal if I could stay in this job for another three to six years, but even a single year would suffice.

Moments of Fame

OMG! If you think PF bloggers have no fun, you have got to see Broke Grad Student’s Carnival of Personal Finance, which just went live. There’ll be no topping this one! Absolutely positively do not miss the “Guitar: Impossible” video. Well…no: don’t miss any of them.

Amazingly, Funny’s rumination on job happiness hit the top of the Editor’s Picks, for which I am awed and delighted. Today’s round-up is awash in original and well written articles. Check out Pimp Your Finance’s charming, clever, and wise What Would Bilbo Do? 14 Money Lessons from The Hobbit. The Strump rang my bell with Millionaire Bag Lady—been there, don’t ever wanna do that again! Your Money Relationship talks about how long to keep tax documents, always a conundrum for those of us who itemize and who have limited space to store mountains of paper. Single Guy Money has succeeded in staying off tobacco for a full month, a major accomplishment that we all hope leads to even longer success. 

Gotta race out to a meeting. Be sure to visit the Carnival for leads to lots of other great posts.

Food Futures! Three-month stash grubstaked

The plan to store and keep on hand three months’ worth of food got fully under way with a day-long voyage to every food and junk emporium within driving distance.

A week ago, M’hijito and I picked up the freezer at Costco, and he helped get it out of the vehicle and into its place of honor. Yah, I know: would’ve been cheaper to buy it off Craig’s List. But that would have a) entailed traipsing 30 or 40 miles across the Valley and b) left me with an unknown quantity. For a reasonable price—two hundred bucks—I got a brand-new unit with a warranty from a retailer that will take practically anything back.

Next steps were to estimate about about how much I would need to create a three-month stash of food and necessities, and then to reconnoiter to see how much  was already on hand. I created an Excel list of all the storable supplies I could think of and estimated (sometimes wildly) how much would be needed for one month and how much for three months—the one-month guesses because there’s no way I can afford to buy all of three months’ supplies of everything I use from day to day. Here’s a PDF of the result.

A check of the refrigerator’s freezer revealed a surprising amount of meat—over a month’s worth. Of late I seem to be eating less and less meat, partly because in the absence of a gas grill it’s more trouble to cook than it’s worth. My stash was heavy on pieces of steak and light on fish and chicken, so I decided to pick up some of those at Costco, where both are already packaged for freezing.

Based on how much I already had in the house, I made a shopping list in Word showing how much of each item was needed to supply one month’s needs and how much for three months. Some items were likely to be found at more than one vendor: some things Safeway carries, for example, might be cheaper at Target or Food City. And some items that I would like to buy in lifetime supplies don’t appear at Costco: demerara sugar (shown on my list as “crunchy sugar”) is one such. In those cases, I listed the possible sources in separate columns. Then I had Word sort the table first by Vendor 1 and then by Vendor 2.  This grouped all the things I needed to purchase by the stores where I thought I could find the stuff.

And then it was off to the high seas of commerce! M’hijito, having nothing much better to do with his time and needing to go to Costco anyway, joined the expedition as sherpa-in-chief. Thanks goodness! I don’t know how I would have hauled all the junk myself, or even stuck with the plan: it was 2:30 in the afternoon before I got home, and I’d left around 9:30 in the morning. 

Surprisingly, this enterprise cost nothing like what I expected. I’d planned to spend about $500 for the initial grubstaking of the project. But the grand total of charges from Costco, Safeway, Sprouts, and Target came to $375.36, only $75 more than my usual weekly budget. I still have to buy gas, which will cost about $25—but that’s still only about $100 more than I normally spend every week trotting around to supermarkets and big boxes. For that amount, I got a full month’s supply of food, and then some. 

But the truth is, the food alone cost significantly less: about $322. As part of the junket, I bought a number of nonfood items: storage jars, baskets to organize goods in the freezer, antibiotic ointment, trash bags, sponges, seeds for the garden. Three hundred and twenty-two bucks is not bad, for putting in up to three months’ of food.

Now we’ll see if this works! Can she stay out of grocery stores?

It would be ideal if I could cut trips to grocery and box stores to no more than two a month, after a first-of-the-month stocking-up foray. Because I have some produce growing in the garden—chard, lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, herbs—this just might work. It would be like living in Yarnell, my sun-parched brain’s idea of Bali Hai: clinging to the edge of the Mogollon Rim, you couldn’t very well drive 60 or 80 miles one-way to buy a few convenience items, and so you’d learn to make do between monthly expeditions. 

In addition to the obvious savings from simply staying out of stores and having to plan each shopping list carefully, I believe that storing up a cache of food and household supplies, which undoubtedly will grow as the months pass, will create a hedge against the inflation we can expect to come down on us with a vengeance. Whether that happens or not, at the very least it will be a safety net in case of a layoff, or against the time when I retire and see my income drop by about 60 percent. Any way you look at it, this appears to be a good idea.

“Job Happiness”: The oxymoron of the century

Recently a PF blogger held forth on a perennially popular topic, how to achieve happiness on the job. Sorry—I failed to bookmark the post and so can’t offer a link, but I’m sure some of you will recall reading it.
Written by Funny about Money. © 2009   
Coincidentally, shortly after that post went up, a friend whose research interest is the Latina experience in higher education (she tracks the progress of first-generation Hispanic women Ph.D.’s who stay in academia) told me about an article focussing on a particularly trying period that afflicted a campus where I used to work. Revisiting those events depressed me, but then, foolishly, instead of blowing it off I unearthed some ancient documents and e-mails that pretty much confirmed the article’s reports, a truly depressing exercise.

It’s hard to understand how any of us who worked in that place survived with our marbles intact. Matter of fact, several did not.

That one should quit one’s job and go somewhere else when one is unhappy is easier said than done, especially for academics. Jobs in higher education do not come along often, especially if your degree is in the liberal arts. Competition is fierce, even for poorly paid positions at podunk schools. It took me years—literally—to get out of that place. I applied for job after job, both in and out of education. At one point, I seriously thought of quitting and starting a housecleaning business.

Finally I got an offer for a tenure-track position. Given my three books in print and sterling teaching record, the department promised me a shot at tenure within three years. But: the job was in South Carolina, whose citizens occupied themselves by defending their right to fly a Confederate flag over the state capitol. It entailed a $10,000 cut in pay. The college provided a $2,000 moving allowance; three moving companies gave estimates in the $8,000 range to transport me across the continent.

The prospect of taking a massive pay cut and then forking up $6,000 to move, in middle age, to a part of the country where I knew no one and where the prevailing culture’s values would conflict with mine looked worse than staying where I was.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day and evening with another friend whose job truly does make her miserable. The operation where she works is so badly managed that the atmosphere has become toxic, and it’s hard to understand how its malignant supervisor has escaped notice from the higher-ups. My friend has decided to leave—wisely, I think. Even though she feels this is not the best time financially, her husband has a good job that is unlikely to go away and that will support them both. Eventually she probably will find something else, after she’s had time to recover psychologically and physically from the grinding experience she’s gone through.

She has put up with a great deal of suffering for a very long time, partly because of financial considerations, partly because (like any target of abuse) she has imagined her unhappiness is somehow her own fault, and partly because she doesn’t quit things lightly.

My take on this is that work is not called “work,” a job is not called a “job” because earning a living is intended to be fun. The whole idea that we can expect to enjoy our  jobs may be utterly misguided. If work were fun, we would call it “partying,” not “working.” Clearly, some jobs are less onerous than others. And some people delude themselves that they are having great fun on their jobs. But most don’t.

It strikes me that “job happiness” is a contradiction in terms. You have to put bread on your table. You can’t always just quit because your job sucks. 

How to deal with this? Several possibilities come to mind.

1. Find a way to become self-employed, so at least you have only one boss: yourself. Start a side job and quietly develop it into something that can support you, even if you have to cut your standard of living until you can get the business running. A friend of mine made a good living as a cross-country truck driver, but he imagined he should have a life. His coworkers scoffed when he quit his job to start a lawn business. Within a year, he said, he was earning more than he’d made driving big rigs and enjoying life a great deal more.

2. Or seek employment at outfits that do not actively abuse their workers.

3. Restrict the job to the workplace. Leave it behind when you walk out the door, and walk out the door on time. Do not work overtime, and do not take a job where you are expected to devote your entire being to your occupation. Draw a distinct line between “occupation” and “life,” and jealously guard your life.

4. In an unhappy job, do as little work as possible without risking dismissal. Perform the work you must do competently, but do no more than necessary. Take all your vacation time, engineering every three-day and four-day weekend you can manage. Keep a low profile, and get out of the place as soon as you can.

5. If at all possible, move to another job once every few years. Jobs that seem wonderful when you start soon grow old. The challenge of starting with a new company or building a new enterprise at least injects a little interest into the chore of earning a living.

6. Move up or move down. If what you’re doing looks like a dead end, find a way to tunnel out. To move up, take out a loan and go back to school; get training in something that will take you in a new direction. Or consider taking a lesser job, one whose sole purpose is to put bread on the table without requiring that you donate your soul to the devil. One man with a fine higher education, for example, discovered that his entire outlook on life brightened after he quit a career and took a job as a forklift operator. 

7. Retire at the earliest possible moment. When your mortgage and your car are paid off, it is amazing how little you need to live on. Get out of debt; build a pile of savings; learn to live frugally; get yourself under an inexpensive, paid-off roof; divest your life of clutter (physical and spiritual); and quit working.

It’s important to build a divide between you and your job. You are not your job! Your value as a human being is not determined by what you do for a living or by how much you earn. Getting that concept into your head—and truly believing it—is the real basis for happiness on the job.

Money, dollars, numbers, stress

Math is just not my thing. No: correct that. Arithmetic is not my thing. I can hold my own with algebra, geometry, and even trig. But adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing? The stuff drives me to despair. Under the best of conditions, reconciling my bank accounts makes my gut tighten up. The tiniest stupid mistake can result in an hours-long struggle with numbers, which sooner or later lose all semblance of meaning other than that they represent one huge stress attack.

The credit union made a mistake in a statement for one of my checking accounts. A $1,522 December deposit somehow got added into the January figures, pushing the opening balance way out of whack.

I traipse the December and January statements in to the credit union, where Shibu, one of the personable bankers who hang out there, says not to worry about it: don’t change the opening balance in Quicken but just enter the ending balance and then clear everything that actually has cleared. Oh…and…uhm…by the way…. when the Great Desert University’s furlough scheme cuts my paychecks, the fact that the figure doesn’t jibe with the amount I’ve been transferring will negate the automatic transfers I’ve been making, to shift funds into a different account. So, says he, henceforth I’ll have to make those transfers manually. All the other electronic funds transfers (which depend on that first transfer being done on time and correctly) will continue as usual.

Huh? say I. The amount I’ve been transferring is less than the amount of the paycheck, and there’s a large cushion in that account. GDU could direct-deposit a grand total of $5.99 and the regular transfer would not bounce.

Well, says he, it’s just because the incoming amount is different.

I go away, think about this, and return the next day. After hearing my argument to the effect that there’s no good reason a change in the amount of incoming cash should change the amount of outgoing cash as long as the account has plenty of money, Shibu agrees to set up a transfer that’s independent of GDU’s direct-deposited paycheck. The credit union will henceforth transfer $1,522 every 15 days. This should roughly coincide with GDU’s payday schedule.

Makes me nervous, because I sense that nothing will coincide with GDU’s anything, since the place is through the looking glass. However, I say OK and stagger back out into the sunlight.

Today I sit down to reconcile the cockamamie account. In the process, I go online and check what’s in that account. And what do I find but that the credit union transferred the reduced GDU paycheck of the 13th, which came in about $140 less than the normal figure. Nooo problem.

But waitaminit… $1,522 is now supposed to go over into the other account, too. And that will empty the first account, probably bouncing EFTs. 

I’m doing another furlough tomorrow and working from  home today. Don’t want to make a 30-mile drive just to rattle Shibu’s cage some more. On the other hand, I can’t afford to bounce utility payments. So, it’s onto the telephone lines, where I reach a clueless call center employee who tells me Shibu doesn’t have a telephone, because there are no incoming telephone lines to the credit union’s branch offices.

Amazing, how stupid they think we are, isn’t it?

Anyway, after long discussion, this worthy realizes he isn’t up to the task of figuring out what I’m trying to say. He calls Shibu, who several hours later calls me. Not to worry, says he: the first $1,522 transfer isn’t scheduled to happen for two weeks. It will then supersede the paycheck transfer. As a parting gift, he reveals the number for his direct (nonexistent, we’re told) telephone line.

WhatEVER. And, furthermore, we’ll see about that.

I feel a gigantic screw-up looming in the darkling woods. You can smell these screw-ups, sense them coming a mile away. Something is wrong here, and when it outs, it will really out. Payments will bounce, creditors will threaten, my hair will be torn. 

Mark my words.