Bankbooks and Financial Records: Things people say about themselves

Officer Canciverra of the Phoenix PD just came by to pick up a checkbook La Maya and I found on the ground during our morning stroll. The owner’s address is in Tempe, so pretty clearly it didn’t just happen to fall out of her purse.

Interesting, the things your checkbook says about you. People reveal a great deal about their lives in ordinary, insignificant-looking daily records. Lawrence Stone, a controversial and entertaining historian of Britain’s early modern period, applied this fact with great flair when he produced The Crisis of the Aristocracy, in which he concluded that the British nobility went through a period of hard times near the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. As a toddling researcher in England, I studied Prof. Stone’s work and then, in a graduate-studenty way, tried to go forth and do likewise.

Her handwriting suggests our Chase Bank customer is an elderly woman. She pays $800 a month for what she enters as “cash rent.” You can’t rent much in Tempe for that price. It’s a debit, not a credit, so presumably it’s what she pays for a roof over her head—probably a room or backyard studio in someone’s house. And that someone likely isn’t reporting the rent to any taxing authorities.

She has a number of relatives who share her last name. She paid airfare for several of them to come to Arizona last Christmas, and one of them received $100 as a Christmas present from her.

Another of her relatives, Donna, evidently was sick and disabled for a long time. Every month our checkbook writer paid $900 for Donna’s healthcare. In February, though, she voided the $900 check. A couple days later, she paid almost $2,500 to a mortuary.  

After that, a series of checks are voided and several transactions are corrected, as though she went through a period of confusion and, probably, grief. Donna apparently mattered a great deal to her.

Her last check was written on March 30, leaving a balance of around $32,500 in her account. Ominously, one check is missing between that check number and the top check in her check pad.

I hope she wasn’t ripped off, or if she was, that Chase made good on the forged check.

So it goes. Our little lives are full of quiet drama, aren’t they?

Should I bother with trying to save my job?

So I’ve cooked up a proposal that has an outside chance of rescuing our office and saving my job. The idea is that my sidekick and I will go on nine-month contracts, which would save the university a bundle of money, and that we would have only one research assistant, who would be hired 10 hours instead of the more usual 20 hours a week, cutting the tuition reimbursement (the real cost of running our operation) by 50 percent.

I haven’t submitted this to Her Deanship yet. At the moment, I’m wondering whether I want to.

Why? I’m afraid the deans will like it. They might actually buy it. And that would mean I’d have to keep trudging to work at the Great Desert University for the next three to seven years.

Not that such a fate would be worse than death. No doubt it would be better to hang on to a regular income, complete with health insurance and accruing sick leave (for which I get paid at retirement), instead of cobbling together a living with Social Security, investment drawdowns, and part-time teaching gigs. On a nine-month salary, too, if I quietly taught freshman comp at the community college my total earnings would be significantly more than I’m making now.

But I’m beginning to feel pretty confident that I can survive quite nicely in Bumhood. Why on earth would I want to keep working at a place that houses my office in a condemned building that still (months later!) stinks of the solvent used in the most recent asbestos abatement effort? Whose air conditioning has not been turned on despite 97-degree heat? Where we have no drinkable water (vile stuff comes out of the taps) and no place to get it but the public bathroom? Where parking costs almost $900, and where raises (few and far between) are immediately taken away through various creative increases in “benefits” and ancillary gouges? 

On the other hand, it’s a nice sinecure: I come and go when I please, and I sure don’t work very hard. But…without those RAs, my sidekick and I most certainly would be reduced to actually working. Heaven forfend. 

It would be kind of irresponsible not to at least try to save our operation. It’s the only such office anywhere in the world, as far as we know. No other university has anything like it. And getting it established took  years of politicking and lobbying on the part of faculty and some powerful deans and chairs. If there’s even a chance of rescuing it from the trashbin, I suppose it really would be lâche of me not to try. 

On the one hand, I think the heck with them. On the other: Michael Crow is not the only person who works for the Great Desert University…neither is his wife.

Funny switches servers tomorrow

Well, tomorrow’s the day of the big switch. Mrs. Micah is going to help me convert Funny to a monetized site (anyone wanna buy an ad, BTW?), switching to Bluehost in the bargain. I have no idea how this is going to work, and of course given my advanced level of technobumbling, the site may go down for a while. But not because I’ve forgotten you! One way or the other, Funny will be back. 

It will be interesting to see if this li’l blog can make any money. I’d be surprised, frankly. But really, even a couple hundred bucks a month would help! Every $2,400 it makes is one section of freshman comp I don’t have to teach! The delightful Poisoned Pen Press gives me about a novel a month to proof, to the tune of two or three hundred dollah. So it looks like the class load could be 3 and 2 or even as few as 2 and 2. 

Ugh. Teaching freshman comp until I can’t hold a pen any longer was not quite what I had in mind for old age! Ohhh well. Could be worse: could be lighting a campfire under the Seventh Avenue Overpass.

The other day when a cool evening was coming on (temps have been all over the thermometer the past couple of weeks) I saw a woman who looked to be about my age, her shopping cart parked as she tried to scavenge under some trees for firewood. Poor old gal. Makes freshman comp look mighty fine.

Sorta…

10 ways to layoff-proof your life

Yesterday as Cassie and I were walking to the park, we came across a neighbor in his front yard, putting the finishing touches on a new sprinkling system. He said his father-in-law had installed it, the old man having been laid off and needing work. Then he started to count off all the people he knew who were out of work, including the guy across the street who owns a big house on a half-acre of land fronting on the park. At least, we agreed, the father-in-law had developed a way to keep a little cash flowing into his pocket. The homeowner gave me his phone number, since our house downtown needs a watering system.

You can’t really make yourself layoff-proof these days. Even if the economy doesn’t land you in the can, an injury or illness may put you out of work. A friend who’s a nurse—supposedly a recession-proof trade—was hurt when a second-floor balcony at her rented home gave way under her feet. Memory impairment from the resulting head injury has put her out of commission for the nursing business. So, you’re smart to develop a few strategies, preferably well in advance of the fact, that will blunt the worst of the damage.

1. Establish a budget and keep track of your spending. 

Knowing how much you spend and what you spend it on allows you to figure, quickly, what your expenses will be, where you might cut costs, and how much you will need for bare survival. 

2. Develop at least one side income stream, and preferably more than one.

Each adult in the household should have a second income stream, no matter how modest. A second job or a skill that creates occasional paying gigs brings in extra cash while you have a job and can at least help if you suddenly find yourself out of work. Responsible teens may also be encouraged to build income streams, to the extent that these don’t interfere with schooling and healthy activities. Examples include blogging, selling crafts, mowing lawns, pet-sitting, babysitting, organizing yard sales, bagging groceries.

3. Keep your résumé up to date.

Goes without saying, doesn’t it?

4. Identify job boards and bookmark HR sites of companies or agencies where you might apply for work.

Do this even if you don’t expect to be laid off. It’s always a wise idea to think about where you might turn if you need a new job or want a better-paying one. Having thought this through in advance gives you a head start if the worst should happen.

5. Join and become active in trade groups.

Maintain a presence in the business community where you work, so that people will know you and you will know them. This, too, will give you a leg up if you have to seek new employment leads.

6. Build an emergency fund.

A second income stream will help with this. You probably should stash enough to live for at least six months. Given the current economic conditions, it might be wise to make this a higher priority than paying down debt.

7. But to the extent that you can, do pay down that debt.

The fewer payments you have to make, the longer you can get by on a reduced income.

8. Don’t rack up any new debt if you can possibly avoid it.

Make it do, use it up, wear it out: this is the time to kick on every frugal habit you know. If you don’t have a budget, start one now, and don’t buy any junk that you don’t absolutely need.

9. Stockpile.

A good freezer can be had for a couple hundred bucks. The one I bought a few weeks ago is the best buy I’ve made in years. It’s already cutting my costs, just by keeping me out of grocery stores. More to the point, though, by the time my job ends in December, I intend to have at least six months of food stored in the house, perishables in the freezer and staples such as rice, beans, and canned goods in the pantry. With any luck, it’ll be quite a while before I go hungry.

10. Plant a garden, even if it’s only in a few pots on the apartment balcony.

Thanks to the veggies that have grown in my yard all winter, it’s been months since I’ve had to buy lettuce. And the produce has been wonderful: fresh from the garden to the table. Freezing and canning these goodies results in a better product than I can buy at the supermarket and extends the garden’s value way beyond the growing season.

Taken together, these steps represent a strategy to prepare yourself for an unexpected job loss. Or for an expected one: they can ease your way into retirement, too.

Connectivity: Is Twitter a sign of poverty?

Have you read Virginia Heffernan’s article, “Let Them Eat Tweets“? In a flight of metaphoric ecstasy, she suggests that a craving for virtual connections reflects an individual’s real-life social poverty (citing Bruce Sterling’s remarks at a South by Southwest technology conference). People who have real wealth, whether of soul or of lucre, feel no great need to be linked in. “We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of [cyber-]overcrowding because—it suddenly seems so obvious—we can’t afford privacy.”

Be still, my swelling ego! This explains it all: I don’t do Twitter and I don’t do cell phones and I don’t do text-messaging because of my status as a member of the richly endowed elite!

I knew it, I just knew it.

LOL! Actually, what I know is that Twitter forgot my password, I couldn’t get in, and it’s taken the proprietors a month to answer my appeal to their “help” line. And I can’t afford a cell phone. And if I could, I can’t imagine where I would find time for texting. I haven’t even had time to open the message from Twitter responding to my call for help. 

It’s an interesting rumination, though, one that poses über-questions like “what is wealth,” “what is poverty,” and “WTF”?

The real reason I don’t have a cell (when people who live on welfare certainly do) is that I resist having everyone and anyone calling me wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. An ordinary land line is intrusive enough. Why would I want people jangling me up while I’m driving the car, sitting on the train, walking around, dining at a restaurant, working at the office?

Far from a sign of “a strong soul or a fat wallet,” that turn of mind strikes me as a kind of psychic self-impoverishment: surely if I were nicer, more generous, a better person I would be open at all times to the tendrils of everyone around me. I don’t have a cell because I don’t want one, and I don’t want one because of a certain social miserliness. That’s a long hike from spiritual strength.

And while the whole idea of Twitter intrigues me, it strikes me (more strongly than it intrigues me) that Twitter represents a gigantic hole into which to throw time. A space-time warp, so to speak. As I would not fling myself into a black hole to see what’s on the other side, so I feel a bit dubious about Twitter.

My guess is, though, that the poverty metaphor doesn’t apply. If you can find the time and energy to build virtual relationships, you probably have more social wealth than those of us who would rather not, thank you, tweet.

Check out Twistori, BTW. Interesting, in a hypnotic way.

Best month on budget so far!

Well, here’s a nice surprise: As this month’s budget cycle draws to a close, I’m $47 to the good in spite of having diddled away $275 on a swell leather purse. With five more days to go, all the food the dog and I need is in the house, and I shouldn’t need to buy gas or anything else for another week. 

Last November, I cut the month-to-month discretionary spending budget (i.e., all costs other than regularly recurring bills and utilities) from $1,500 a month to $1,200, planning to put the extra $300 into savings. At first, staying within the new parameters was a challenge. Most months ran into the red. Last month was the first success, but with only $11 to spare.

In microbudgeting, a month’s budget cycle (here based on the American Express billing cycle, ensuring that enough cash will be available to pay that bill in full each month) is broken into four approximately week-long chunks. Thus if you run in the red one week, the budget overrun can be made up in the following week. Theoretically.

The last week of this month’s budget slipped into red ink because of an unexpected $177 bill: Greg the Handyman had said he would install a houseful of blinds and then backed out, so I had to arrange for Lowe’s to do it. Greg’s hourly rate is a lot cheaper; had he done the job as agreed, week 4 probably would have been in the black. But because two of the other three weeks are deep in the black, the month overall is also in the black. 

I’d planned to pay for the handbag extravagance out of monthly savings, which just now contains more than enough for an indulgence. However, because this month’s budget is so fully in the black, ordinary cash flow actually will cover the cost and still leave the budget $47 in the black!

Ordinarily, a month with two large extraordinary expenses would put a $1,200 budget into the red. That’s why I put $200 to $400 a month into savings: to cover overruns. Had I not purchased the bag this month, the budget would have been $322 to the good. That is with a trip to the mechanic’s for car maintenance!

And—hallelujah, sisters and brothers!—that is an all-time record. It means that in ordinary expenses (as opposed to a certain wild extravagance), I spent only $878 this month. 

What accounts for such a wonder?

Well, first, because of the train I won’t have to buy another tank of gas before the end of the budget cycle. Ordinarily, gasoline runs about $75 for three fill-ups. This month, I’ve spent $41 at Costco’s gas pumps. If I ride the train to work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, trips to the Great Desert University will take all of $3.75 out of the remaining $47 next week.

Second, except for the handbag, I haven’t had any really large extraordinary expenses: no serious repair or veterinary bills. When you own a house and occupy it with a dog, some hulking budget-buster comes along almost every month.

Otherwise, I’m not sure. I haven’t gone into full ascetic mode at any time. The only explanation is the freezer + stockpiling, which has hugely cut the number of grocery-store runs. It’s the miracle of staying out of stores! The theory that going into grocery and big-box stores, even with a shopping list firmly in hand, leads to untold numbers of impulse buys seems to be true. 

If this isn’t a fluke and I actually can cut discretionary spending to under $1,000 a month without much pain, I may just be able to get by in unemployment retirement.

What d’you want to hear on NPR?

For several months, I’ve been participating in a series of National Public Radio surveys, which are always kinda fun and make me feel like I have some tiny voice in…somethingorother.

Today’s survey asks what kind of economic news we’re hearing and what kind we want to hear. At one point, it inquires what proportion of national news we’d like, what proportion of stories about individual citizens, what proportion of local reporting.

I guess I’m an awful crank, but you know…I could do with a lot fewer human-interest pieces. Today, for example, NPR focuses on the life and hard times of Ms. Sylvia Martinez, whose luck has been flowing downhill since she was laid off a $52,000-a-year job. “Fifteen days from homeless,” she’s victimized by a fire in an apartment above hers, which leaves her few belongings soaked and the ceiling down in the living room. She’s unsuccessfully assayed suicide, her grown daughter has fled (taking Sylvia’s grandchild), and on and on.

It’s not that I’m not sorry for the lady. It’s that I don’t think wallowing in stories like this serves any purpose. We know, already, that things are tough all over. Breathes there one American citizen who doesn’t have a relative, friend, or acquaintance affected by the collapse of the Bush economy? If we haven’t seen the equity in our homes disappear, if we’re not making payments on a mortgage that exceeds the value of the asset underlying it, if we’re not out of work ourselves, we certainly have enough people in our own lives who have been hurt by this disaster to understand what it means on a human level.

Please, dear NPR: Take your reporters off the sob stories and assign them to local coverage. Get rid of some of the gab-fests and replace them with in-depth local news programs. As newspapers close and local television and radio news stations deliver little more than advertorial and infotainment, we need professional, responsible, investigative reporting on the local level. We need news, real news, on all levels: international, national, and local.

Do you listen to NPR? If so, what would you like to hear more of? Or less of?

Potatoes ’n’ cheese

Now that we’re back in business here, I’d like to share a dish I invented a few days ago. 

Backstory: as much as I enjoy scalloped potatoes, they seem a little watery with all that milk and stuff squishing around. It occurred to me that you ought to be able to cook potatoes much the same way you make macaroni  and cheese: layered with white sauce and cheese.

The possible trap is that macaroni is already cooked, and so traditional macaroni-&-cheese bakes only about 20 minutes. Being at heart incorrigibly lazy, I didn’t want to have to precook the taters. So I decided to use a mandoline to slice them very thin, which I hoped would allow the oven to heat them more efficiently. This trick results in a lot of potato slices! To accommodate them, I used the largest flat baking pan in the house, preparing it with a liberal coat of butter.

Because of the amount of potatoes involved, I prepared a double recipe of white sauce, which I flavored up with a little New Mexico chili, nutmeg, and parsley. I pulverized about 12 or 16 ounces of cheddar cheese in the food processor, and then did two layers of potatoes, white sauce, and cheese, ending with the cheese. Didn’t have any bread in the house, so to make crumbs I crunched up some rice crackers. Actual bread crumbs would have been better, but the cracker idea worked adequately. 

The result is pretty darn tasty, and it made enough high-protein food to fill half the freezer:

Last night I had some for dinner, with a couple of breakfast sausages and a salad. Couldn’t be easier!

Here are the specifics:

You need:

• about 4 cups milk
• about 5 or 6 Tbsp butter (plus enough to butter the pan)
• about 5 or 6 Tbsp flour
• salt and pepper to taste
• dash of nutmeg
• a few tablespoons of fresh chopped parsley
• something for zing, such as ground pepper, paprika, or Tabasco sauce, to taste 

• about 8 or 10 thinly sliced small cooking potatoes, or more, depending on what’s in the fridge
• about  a pound (more or less) of tasty cheese, shredded 
• bread crumbs

Make the white sauce:

Heat the milk in the microwave or on the stovetop, as desired. It should be almost simmering. Heating the milk isn’t really necessary, but it speeds things along.

Melt butter in a pan large enough to accommodate the amount of milk you’re using. Add the flour and stir over medium heat until the butter foams. Don’t allow it to brown. Now stir in the milk. Heat, stirring, over medium or medium-high heat until the sauce thickens. While stirring, add nutmeg, salt, pepper, parsley, and any other flavoring you’ve selected.

Assemble the dish:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a buttered baking dish, lay down a layer of thin-sliced potatoes, using about half of them. Spread about half the white sauce over these, and then sprinkle on about half the shredded cheese. Layer the rest of the potatoes over this, and repeat the layering of sauce and cheese. Sprinkle some bread crumbs over the top. 

Cook:

Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. Test by poking the potatoes with a thin knife to assess whether they’re cooked to your taste. If not, let them bake a few minutes longer. Remember that if you take the pan out and allow it to set for ten minutes, the food will continue to cook from its retained heat. So, use your judgment in deciding when the potatoes are “done.”

Yay! Cox rocks!

What an amazing difference between Qwest’s customer service and Cox’s! 

Yesterday the DSL modem went down. Too busy in the morning to take on a punch-a-button labyrinth, I ran off to campus, where I learned the wonderful RA who recently moved into our neighborhood also had a lame connection. We assumed Cox was having an outage and things would be back up by the time we got home.

Wrong.

So about quarter to five last night, I dialed up Cox’s robot. Interestingly, this voice-driven robot has some capabilities to diagnose basic, commonly recurring problems. Last time I called, the robo-tech instructed me—correctly!—on how to fix the connection. Didn’t work this time, and so after repeating “representative” a few times, I got through to a real, live human being. And get this: the guy could speak English!!!!

Hah! Take that, Qworst!

It took him a few minutes of figuring, but shortly he suggested a series of simple maneuvers that magically brought the system online. It was so wonderful to reach an actual person, one who

a. understood what I was saying;
b. could make himself understood to me;
c. could figure out the problem; 
d. had an answer to the problem; and
e. did not try to cheat me or upsell me to a service I can’t afford.

It’s a miracle.

Funnier and funnier!

Remember we were chatting about the Great Desert University’s having invited the President of the United States to give this spring’s commencement address but announcing he hasn’t accomplished enough to deserve an honorary degree? 

Well, in response to the ensuing hoots of scornful laughter, that august institution announced that it would instead name a scholarship after Mr. Obama.

Okay, okay. Very  nice. Only…

It’s not a scholarship! It’s a longstanding financial aid program largely funded by federal and local grants. It administers Pell Grants. 

Heeee! These people have got to stop this. I can’t breathe between bursts of laughter! Funnier than a crutch! Do they have any idea how ludicrous they make themselves look, with their assumption that everyone on the planet is dumber than they are?