Coffee heat rising

Month: April 2010

And the layoff beat goes on…

by

Via e-mail from The Kid, now employed in a full-time editorial job in the precincts of Our (former, in my case) Beloved Employer:

So we all know that the GDU budget is currently a mess. There are a lot of rumors floating around the department and school about cuts, very similar to what we saw right before we got canned. I stay out of all of this. I’ve got other streams of income and won’t be affected as drastically.

Today I receive an email from the Dean of the Business School that there will be a town-hall style meeting to dispel some of the rumors and get some facts out there.

This is where it gets interesting: a professor chimes in that, in the spirit of Obama-esque redistribution of wealth, she as a faculty member suggests an across-the-board cut in faculty salaries to keep the staff in place and at their current pay rates. Imagine that?!? My supervisor replied that she too agrees with this plan. Now a stream of emails have flown back and forth with a number of positions on the budget. But the fact remains, some people actually may value our work and would prefer the take a pay cut than lose us. Unselfish in America? Never thought I’d see the day…

Another “town hall”? LOL! How many of those performances are the poor deans going to be made to put on? These little plays layer unrealistic optimism (shall we say…) with a light sprinkling of straight talk to try to plump up morale among the troops. The degree to which they work depends on the degree of the listener’s gullibility.

Voice of Experience to Kid:

How much you believe the rumors…well, it’s ambiguous. Some of the stuff is just hot air, some of it is kinda prescient, and a bit of it is even true. Don’t recall whether I shared this with you guys, but about 18 months before we were canned I was told in no uncertain terms that we would be gone by that fall. Hm…that would have put us on the street in September of ’08. A departmental chair told my friend La Maya, who is tenured on the West campus, that he had been to a university-wide meeting in which Capaldi told them, in “confidence” and swearing them to secrecy, that by September of 2008 all academic professionals would be let go.

That’s why I started searching for jobs that summer, and that’s how I came to get interviewed for a program director’s position at the Botanical Garden. After weeks of worry, it occurred to me that I happened to know a guy on that committee, one of my coreligionists. The university had posted the minutes of the meeting online, complete with attendance, so I knew Bill had been there. Called him on the phone and asked him point-blank if that was what Capaldi said. Without a pause to think about it, he said no, nothing even vaguely like that had happened.

There’s really very little you can do when rumors are blowing on the wind, other than try to ignore them. And always to be on the lookout for another job. Listening to that shit can drive you nuts. It’s probably good to know in general that something is up, but if you think too hard about it, it’ll make you sick.

What a place! Good lord, what a place.

“Check’s in the Mail”: The checks that never return

by

About two weeks ago, I e-mailed the credit union to ask if some franked, printed mailing envelopes I had on hand bore an address that was still correct for depositing checks by mail. Several branches had closed since the CU had given me these envelopes, and I wanted to be sure the address remained valid.

Well, no: as a matter of fact it wasn’t. The “Contact Us” people sent me a fistful of new envelopes plus a fistful of deposit slips, with no comment.

The sole convenient aspect of working on the main campus of Arizona State University was that a branch of the credit union resided in the basement of the student union. The West campus, which is closer than Main, also hosts a branch, but it’s not a lot handier to my house than Tempe. Although it’s only a 15- or 20-minute drive away there’s nothing else over in that part of town for me to do: no stores that I frequent other than a Costco that’s even further up the road, a big gasoline-gulp away from the Costco where I normally shop. By the time you’ve made a round trip to nowhere for the privilege of dropping off a few pieces of paper with a drive-up teller, you’ve killed an hour of your time to accomplish rather little. I find that frustrating.

Unfortunately, some clients cannot or will not do direct deposits. I had a check from Google—their online system through which you can request direct deposit doesn’t work any better for me than for the many other people who complain that it doesn’t work—a dividend check from a limited partnership, and a check from a publisher, amounting in total to about $500. Having many other things to do other than drive an hour to shuffle paper, I used one of the credit union’s self-addressed envelopes and a deposit slip to send them in.

Bad. Never do that.

The checks are now lost in the mail or at the credit union. It’s been two weeks, and there’s no sign of them.

Day before yesterday, I called the credit union and explained that I had dropped the envelope in the mailbox outside the local post office a long time ago and would like to know if the checks were in transit somewhere in their office. The answer was no; their customer disservice rep asked me to go to the post office and ask if they could trace the lost mail. I said I couldn’t imagine they would be able to find one piece of mail among the millions of envelopes that pass through their system. He said well, that was the policy.

So yesterday I traipsed over to the post office, waited a good 20 minutes in line, and told a P.O. customer disservice rep this story. She shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” said she, quite predictably and quite reasonably.

“Why do you suppose companies tell people to go to the post office and ask about lost mail,” said I, “when it’s pretty obvious that there’s no way you find one envelope among a zillion?”

“I don’t know,” said she, “but they do it all the time!”

So, five hundred dollars worth of checks for deposit are lost. I called the partnership and the publisher, each of whom said they’d try to stop payment on the checks. Apparently if someone has already cashed them, I’m just out the money.

Where the Google payment is concerned, I’m probably going to have to eat that. AdSense has exactly zero customer service. There’s simply no way to reach a human being. Every question is referred to Google’s uninformative website.

At that website, you find an option to cancel payment for a check that hasn’t arrived. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell them that they need to stop payment on a check that has arrived but has been damaged or lost. To put through a stop-payment order, I would have to lie and say the check never reached me. But it in fact did reach me, and I endorsed it and tried to deposit it.

Google moves with the speed of a galloping snail when it comes to dealing with customer issues. It also is notorious for canceling people’s accounts arbitrarily for any real or imagined offense. Obviously, if the check reaches the credit union before Google gets around to stopping payment on it, Google’s people (if there are any) will think I’m trying to steal $157 from them. So, rather than having the whole Google lash-up canceled just as it’s beginning to earn a little money, I guess I’m just going to have to let it go.

Makes me mad as a cat!

At any rate, the moral of the story is simple: Never send checks to the bank in the mail.