Thought this was gunna happen. Yesterday the City’s water department sent me a second bill for this month, bringing the total hit to $214.
Cute.
Earlier this month I learned that someone had turned off the water service to my house and restarted it in their name. The CSR at the water dept thought I was a new tenant in the house. I explained that I’ve lived here for five years and have no intention of moving soon. She said they’d fix it.
So last week along came a bill for $130. That’s about normal: though it’s the highest bill I’ve ever had in this house, it’s only five bucks more than last July’s, and the water rates have gone up twice over the past year. Yesterday—Saturday, of course, when no one’s in their business office—I got a bill on a different account number with the same read date, dinging me for another $87.34!!!
The $130 bill is unitemized: where it’s supposed to list the number of gallons used this month and last month, it says “0.” The $87 bill shows I used 2992 gallons, about 15 percent of the normal amount for the dead of summer.
I suspect they’ve added the “someone’s” water bill to my normal bill.
Happy day. Now I get to spend half of Monday morning doing battle with those people, and probably getting nowhere. If they give me any guff, I’m calling the state AG’s office and reporting that someone stole my identity to get free water.
The water bill is normally astronomical at this time of year. We’ve had day after day of 115- to 118-degree weather. Every plant in the yard has to be watered every single day, and some potted plants have to be watered twice in a day to be kept alive. I’m determined to see the butternut squash through the summer: it has some tiny baby squash, and if it survives, we may get some fall produce from it.
The tomato plants are still alive, but their fruit literally cooks on the vine. The three vine-ripened tomatoes I’ve salvaged have tasted sweet but the pulp is strangely dry: unjuicy tomatoes. La Bethulia was right that chard will live in the heat…but it’s very, very unhappy stuff. The basil and the thyme are OK. Everything else is suffering terribly.
I could have bought a year’s worth of fancy vegetables at Whole Foods for what the water company is charging me this month!
Comes the following from my sidekick, in the e-mail:
After the furlough and the new deductions they’re taking…I’m netting about $200/week. I’m going to do the bare minimum. It’s just not worth it. I’m going to have to find another job soon. I can’t live on this.
Think of that. This talented young woman, who in working 50% FTE for our office has handled not one, not two, but three scholarly journals (one of whose content is partially in Spanish), has a master’s degree from the Great Desert University and a set of highly sophisticated editorial skills. Tells you a lot about how GDU values its master’s programs, doesn’t it? And about how it values its employees.
Some time back, she remarked that she earns more in a five-hour shift waiting tables at Applebee’s than she does in a week at GDU. Now, I expect, she earns more in about two hours.
A week or so ago, she got a notice from PeopleSoft, the faceless contractor to which GDU has outsourced its payroll functions, to the effect that they’d just discovered that for the past year they’ve failed to withhold her required contributions to the state retirement system, which in this right-to-work-for-nothing state amount to 9 percent of the employee’s salary. They tried to blame this on her, claiming she had not gone to a “new employee” meeting when she was switched from graduate research assistant to classified staff (thereby incurring a large cut in pay) and so had not “elected” the mandatory retirement.
Say what?
In the first place, she was not a new employee. Having worked in our office doing the same work for the prior two years, she had no reason to think she was regarded as a “new” employee.
In the second place, classified state employees here have no choice of retirement plans. They are eligible only for the Arizona State Retirement System, a defined benefit plan, and they are required to belong to it, willy-nilly. There was nothing to “elect”! GDU and PeopleSoft should have automatically withheld her retirement contributions, as a matter of course.
GDU has pulled some nasty stunts on employees over the years I’ve observed it in action. I can’t say this one takes the cake. But it comes close.
It comes close because she is paid so frigging little in the first place that it’s insulting. Then to confiscate practically her entire salary…it’s just inexcusable.
Is there any question why morale is in the sub-basement? Is there any question why the place is collapsing inward on itself? And is there any question why this city hosts therapists whose entire practices consist mostly of GDU employees?
No wonder I grind my teeth till they break.
If I could see my way clear to survive between now and Medicare eligibility, I would quit Monday morning. Let them find someone else to lead the sheep to the slaughter.
In fact, I probably could quit in September. Apparently you can claim COBRA if you can say the reason for your leaving is that the job changed enough to make it unacceptable. And as far as I’m concerned, this kind of treatment of my staff is unacceptable. At that time, the nine-month COBRA discount would carry me through to my 65th birthday. The combination of four sections in the community colleges plus the amount GDU would have to pay for my unused vacation time would amount to only about $1,495 less than my salary in the last quarter of 2009.
It’s 115 degrees out there, and I’ve driven from pillar to post through it. First went over to GDU’s deferred compensation provider. Turns out this is a benefit available to government employees, which you can add to your 403(b) or state retirement plan, allowing you to shelter more of your money than the modest amount most states match. When the employer emits a piece of compensation that you’d like to defer, the employer has to withhold and pay FICA and Medicare. The guy I talked with said I could indeed defer payment of my $5,300 worth of vacation pay and the first payment toward the $19,000 GDU owes me for unpaid sick leave. However, he did not know whether deferring these chunks of compensation would protect me from having Social Security benefits docked in 2010, a buck for every two bucks of unapproved income.
So, it was off to the Social Security Administration, a hefty drive from the mid-town offices of the insurance company that handles the State of Arizona’s deferred compensation scheme.
There a Social Security CSR, the first person I’ve spoken to about this who seemed to know what he was talking about, said that even though FICA and Medicare are withheld by the employer, deferring the pay does cause Social Security to ignore it when figuring that year’s Social Security benefit.
Hallelujah!
This will allow me to teach as much as I need to without losing a large chunk of Social Security. It means I will not have to use the back vacation pay and the first installment of RASL (unpaid sick leave is paid out over three years) to live on. Though I may not be able to invest the money optimally, at least it won’t go away and it can be folded into retirement savings to help support me through my dotage.
GDU, a.k.a. Our Beloved Employer, has to sign off on Form SSA 131, which states that the RASL and vacation pay is pre-2010 income. Knowing GDU, I will have to find the form, track down someone over there with measurable IQ, and then raise hell and put a block under it to get them to do this. No one at GDU seems to know the answers to these questions; the university has laid off so many people at HR that the survivors have no idea what they’re doing. Sometimes when they don’t know the answer to a question, they’ll guess and tell you something that’s dead wrong. Sometimes they’ll frankly tell you they haven’t a clue.
More about deferred compensation: I learned you can open an account and just have it sit there as a vessel, waiting for the RASL and vacation pay. That is, you don’t have to contribute anything out of your paycheck. That’s a relief! With a major life change looming, one has other things to do with a paycheck than to let it sit for a couple of years. Management costs, BTW, are nominal and in some cases nothing.
So: if anyone reading this is in the same boat…
A government employee faced with early retirement, when the amount you can earn and still receive Social Security benefits is strictly limited, can shelter severance pay with a maneuver like this:
• Open a deferred compensation account, if you don’t already have it. • Have your employer sign and submit Form SSA 131, which certifies that your severance pay represents payment for work performed before you start receiving Social Security. • Have the severance pay rolled over into the deferred compensation account, realizing that FICA and Medicare will be withheld. • Let it sit there until you reach “full” Social Security age.
At that point you can withdraw part or all of it, as you please, without affecting your Social Security benefits. You will have to pay regular income tax on it when you draw it out of the deferred compensation plan, but by then your income will be so penurious the taxes likely won’t matter much.
Getting disentangled from the Great Desert University and onto Social Security is a nightmare hassle! Right now I have an inch-thick folder of information, instructions, and policies about retirement, and it’s growing. There’s another folder full of paperwork specific to Social Security and Medicare.
Today I learned that when the state of Arizona pays me the first of three payments for my accrued sick leave (known appropriately as “RASL,” as in “you get to rassle around trying to collect this”), I will owe FICA and Medicare taxes on it. And, even though it represents money earned in 2009, it will not be paid until 30 to 90 days after my job is terminated.
Canning Day is December 31. That means the RASL will come in 2010, after I’ve started collecting Social Security. And that means the $6,355 payment will count as part of the maximum $14,100 I will be allowed to earn in 2010.
This will mean that in order not to have my Social Security benefits docked, I will have to refrain from teaching three of the six community-college classes planned for 2010. And that will mean I will have to use the RASL to live on, rather than putting it into retirement savings, as planned.
Item: I can’t afford to stand down from teaching next year. When you do that, you drop off the departmental chair’s radar, and you may find yourself never being hired again. I know: this has happened to me before. Next year I will need to teach as many sections as I can get, so as to build a track record that will get me hired in the future for as long as I can dodder into a classroom.
Item: I need to put that RASL money in savings!!!!! My investments are down more than $120,000 from where they were a year or so ago, and they certainly aren’t going to regain that in the six months I have left to work at GDU. I just can’t afford to substitute RASL for teaching income.
The university will owe me a little over $19,000 in RASL. This amount will be paid in three annual $6,355 installments: in 2010, in 2011, and in 2012. I will reach age 66 in May of 2011; after that, the dock-your-Social-Security trick stops.
Plowing through the stack of policy statements on RASL, I see that a) you can delay applying for RASL as long as 180 days after you’re terminated, and b) you can defer the first year’s payment (and only the first year’s payment) by rolling it into a deferred compensation plan. And c) the second and third annual payments are disbursed on the anniversaries of your first year’s payment, which comes 30 to 90 days after the state receives your application.
So, to avoid having my Social Security benefits dinged by the RASL and to avoid being forced to use the RASL for living expenses, I’ll have to put two maneuvers into play.
First, I’ll need to delay applying for RASL until the middle of April, so that the soonest possible time it would be paid is mid-May, after my 66th birthday. If I fail to do that, then the second RASL payment will also arrive before I reach the “full” retirement age of 66, and I’ll be dinged for that one, too. If I time my application so that the first RASL payment arrives after May 7, 2010, then the second RASL payment will not arrive until I’m 66, at which time I can earn as much as I want (or can) without affecting Social Security income.
Second, I’ll need to establish a deferred compensation plan before my job ends. This is required. That may mean that even though the damned furloughs just ended, I’ll have to continue having my pay docked. That I will get the money back sometime in the remote future is irrelevant to the fact that I need all my paycheck to stash savings to live on after I’m fired.
The deferred compensation plan is managed by a private provider. That means, of course, that there’ll be fees involved. So I’m going to have to pay someone for the privilege of letting them take my money away from me. Isn’t that sweet?
That’s just the start of it. Then there’s the realization that because I’m being canned in December I have to apply for Social Security in October in order to get the payments started in January. But I will not get my last paycheck until after January 1, because of PeopleSoft’s obnoxious lagging pay scheme. Furthermore, because of the furloughs, the gross amount on an October paycheck will not reflect accurately what GDU will pay me over 2009’s twenty-six pay periods. Nor will I have statements from my freelance clients, nor will I have any clue how much my S-corporation will pay me between September and December 31.
So, how will the Social Security Administration calculate my benefits, when no accurate statement of my 2009 pay will be available until after those benefits are supposed to start?
Then there’s the business of all the vacation pay the SOBs owe me: $5,287 worth. This payment also will come forth in January, 2009.
Will that be held against my Social Security earnings, even though it represents pre-2010 income? Can that amount be rolled over into this deferred compensation plan?
And if I have to roll it over…my GOD! I intended to use that money to cover COBRA. If I have to roll it over into deferred compensation, I won’t have anything budgeted to pay for health insurance between January 1 and May 7, 2010. I’ll have to dig into my retirement savings to cover that.
The more I look into this stuff, the more questions come up and the more unfair the whole mess looks. No wonder I grind my teeth all the time!
This is totally off-topic, but have you seen the photo that appears on the front page of the Home section in today’s New York Times? Look at it closely, and then consider that it runs over a story asking the slightly titillating question of whether letting kids run around nude is OK. It made me wonder where the heck their editor was, and what on earth he was smoking!
Personally, I don’t think letting your kids trot around the house or the fully fenced backyard in the altogether is some sort of moral issue. Nudity isn’t especially objectionable in my book, and nudity among small children is benign enough. But… I think we have to consider the context of the society in which we live.
First, many Americans do consider a state of undress to be some sort of moral issue, and they are abhorred at the very thought of nude three-year-olds running rampant across the landscape. We may consider that to be their problem. But really: civil people don’t go around offending other people’s sensibilities on purpose. It’s common courtesy to teach your children to dress modestly in public and before guests.
Second, and more to the point: we live in a culture that is inundated with sexual imagery, much of it quite violent. We know that a surprising number of adults—women as well as men—develop unhealthy cravings for small children, and that quite a few will act on these cravings. Teaching the kiddies some modesty is, alas, the better part of valor.
To my eye, the Times‘s photo is pretty sexualized. Am I crazy? Note the position of the little boy’s hand vis-à-vis the thigh of the man standing near him, and the handsomely exposed legs of the woman in the foreground. Maybe I’m nuts…but IMHO the Times‘s Home editor should have exercised a little discretion.
This morning after visiting the Social Security Administration to apply for a replacement SS card, I dropped by the Paradise Valley Community College campus to find out a few of the things I need to know: how to schedule time for the li’l students to visit the library and how to get set up in BlackBoard, the online learning tool where faculty can post course docs and students can turn in papers electronically.
Truth to tell, I was dreading it: expected a day fraught with hassles. The prospect of enduring a series of runarounds in the 110-degree heat, when what I most wanted to do was find an air-conditioning vent and stand under it, did not fill me with joy.
But nay! Hang onto your hats, folks: people were nice to me there!
Lordie. I hardly know what to make of it. The librarian (who at the moment had little to do) got up and gave me the grand tour, sat down at a computer with me and got me into the system, showed me how to sign up for library time. Then he personally accompanied me to one of the IT gurus, to whom he introduced me. From her I learned about a whole week of faculty learning seminars in August, some of them for really neat stuff. They were both very generous with their time and behaved as though they actually liked their jobs.
Weird.
At GDU, a newbie can’t get people to explain things for love nor money. When you ask how to get something done or where to go to find out, the answer invariably is “I dunno. It’s not my job.”
When GDU hired me to establish our office, they expected me to buy furniture, computers, printers, scanners, software, office supplies, reference works, and even the phones and ethernet connections. One woman in the dean’s office was assigned to find us office space, which she eventually did—in the engineering building—but she wasn’t very gracious about it. She acted like it was quite an imposition, even though that was her job…which has since been eliminated. Getting the phones installed was a memorable headache: it took a week or two just to find out where I was supposed to call to apply to have them installed. It then was another couple of weeks before they got around to doing it. Ethernet entailed a similar runaround. And the furniture…oh god! Don’t ask.
Think I’m making this up, don’t you? Well, I thought it was “just me” for the longest time: must be my curdled personality turning people off. Then my friend who had founded and developed a nationally prominent graduate editing program retired—this program functioned more or less as our sister program, because we hire(d) our research assistants from its students, providing rare, nicely paying twelve-month support for three graduate students. The new guy showed up, and we became soon became cordial. Pretty quick he’s asking me how to get this, that, and the other thing done. He voiced exactly the same complaint. No one would tell him where to go or how to find out how to do the most basic things!
So I felt weirdly gratified when the new director, who was an affable, gregarious fellow hired to run a prestigious program with national visibility, ran into the same brick walls. At least it wasn’t something I was doing.
At any rate, it felt very strange to have people who never saw me in their lives act as though they cared whether I lived or died. The pay’s not very good, but it’s beginning to look like the trade-off is huge: working someplace where people aren’t miserable in their jobs.
