The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Godlmighty. It’s like living in some retrograde Southern state during the 1950s. Doubt me? Check out this example of Arizona civility, a fine performance by the products of our state’s fine educational system.
Image: “We Are All Loyal Klansmen,” sheet music cover. 1923. Public Domain.
Godlmighty! Yesterday I realized that Fidelity never sent my April 403(b) drawdown. So now on Monday I have to try AGAIN to get those people off the dime.
What torture! I just hate bureaucratic runarounds. I hate them even more when the bureaucracy is private instead of governmental. At least with the government the employees are usually trying to accommodate you.
I have talked to CSR after CSR after CSR—every time you call, you get a different person, and you never can get through to Person 1 who told you X or Person 2 who told you Y. I have asked and been assured now three times by three different people that the drawdown required by the State of Arizona would be made correctly and would be direct-deposited in my checking account. The result is that since last December I’ve gotten two checks sent in the mail. And this month I’ve received nothing.
It just makes me so angry. We originally had the option to invest with Vanguard in its 403(b) plan. As soon as that became possible, I moved most of my 403(b) funds over there, because all my nondeferred savings were at Vanguard, whose fees are low, whose profits are handsome, and whose customer service is excellent. That lasted all of a year—I guess Vanguard must have been too competent to work with Arizona State University.
If I weren’t afraid the state would deny me the rest of my RASL, I’d roll the money over into my big IRA now. In fact, my financial advisor and I hatched a plan to have them roll a portion of the drawdown over to the IRA, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing battle with the bureaucrats about that, mostly because I wanted to see how I would get by in the summer before cutting the drawdown from $500 to $100.
Presumably, though, that wouldn’t have happened, either. The only way I’m going to get the money where it belongs is going to be to roll the entire amount over. And I’m really afraid that’s going to get me in trouble, since the woman who administers the RASL program insists that to be eligible you have to be drawing what she calls a “pension”—i.e., a monthly drawdown from the state’s 403(b) plan.
I’ve concocted a new plan, though. To wit: leave enough cash in the 403(b) fund to cover the time between now and the date the last RASL check is issued, but roll the rest of it over. There are only 22 months remaining, and so the most I’d have to leave in there—assuming I continue the drawdown I’m currently making, which I’d actually like to cut—is $11,000.
Whatever I decide to do, though, next week I’m going to have to bang my head against the bureaucratic wall again. I’m royally sick of that!
God, how I hate waking up in the wee hours of the morning! Is anything, anything more annoying and frustrating?
I’m so tired I’m almost sick, and I can. not. sleep. Part of it is worrying about losing a chunk of cash in the mail just when I have to get a new crown…that money would have about paid for the dental work. Now I’ll have to raid savings to cover it. Part of it is worrying about how I’m going to get another raft of papers graded around the mass of choir rehearsals and performances that will occupy the rest of this week. Part of it is being pissed at having to get my teeth crowned as a result of all the bruxing I do out of stress and frustration. (LOL! “Why do the heathen grind their teeth?”) Part of it is worrying whether the IRS got my tax payment, since that went out in the same mail as the lost checks. Part of it is annoyance that Fidelity’s online statements are not current and that there’s no way to figure out which of the several accounts they’ve got up there corresponds to the money fund for which I have a book of checks, one of which I used to pay my taxes. Part of it is that it’s going to rain again, so the air is a little humid and vaguely uncomfortable. Part of it is disappointment that (I think) Funny lost the current March Madness round at Free Money Finance. Part of it is hunger. And part of it is just old-lady insomnia.
Yesh. At 9:30 this morning—now only five hours away—another mountain of muzzy student papers will come to light on my desk. The day will be occupied with classes through 1:45, at which point I have to drive to Costco for gasoline. Then it’s off to rehearsal.
This week the choir had rehearsals last night and has another rehearsal tonight, a performance tomorrow night, rehearsals and performance Friday, rehearsal and performance Saturday, rehearsal and two performances Sunday. When exactly I’m going to find time to read the mountain of student papers, to say nothing of my client’s first two draft chapters, I do. not. know!
Yesterday I didn’t get to his dissertation because I spent the most of the day writing the post that will come online in about two hours and arguing with the credit union and the post office. This morning at three o’clock I was in no condition to edit copy. And still am not: I’ve killed the last hour and forty-five minutes writing posts to cover the next two days.
Let’s see… 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., that’s four hours. It’s now almost 5 o’clock. If by some miracle I can get back to sleep until seven, maybe I could eke a full six hours out of the night before I have to go to class.
{grump!} It’s not like I didn’t have enough screwing around to have to do…
Apparently the Post Office lost an envelope sent to the credit union containing three checks, one for my personal account and two for the Copyeditor’s Desk account. It was a printed envelope from the credit union, so the address was correct, and I distinctly remember checking to be sure each item in the the fistful of mail I stuffed in the mailbox had a stamp on it. So I guess all those checks are just gone. Today I’ll have to call the issuers and tell them to stop payment and send me new checks.
Problem is, one of them came from Google Adsense, where it is dead impossible to reach a human being. The only way to make Google reissue a check will be to go to a particularly annoying, frustrating website and claim never to have seen the thing. Doing that will mean
a) I’ll have to lie, because I most certainly have seen and endorsed the damn thing, and
b) it will be another two months before I get another payment.
Problem with using the Google web annoyance is that if I claim not to have received the check and then it arrives at the CU and gets deposited, then it will look like I’m trying to steal from Adsense. Google is notoriously inclined to simply cut off customers it thinks aren’t dealing straight with Adsense. So, I guess the better part of valor is just to eat the $157.
Damn it. The specific reason I did this was that it is a freaking hassle to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus just to deposit a couple of checks. It consumes gas unnecessarily, and it expends pretty close to an hour of my time. The West campus stands in the middle of a down-at-the-heels bedroom community with no commerce where I might get any other errands done while I’m over there. I take that back: there’s a Costco in that general direction, but it’s an extra stretch and more wasted gasoline up the freeway, and a Lowe’s and a Home Depot at the freeway intersection. Not that I shop at either of those places much anymore.
So, to avoid hassle I’ve brought a basketful of extra hassle down on my head.
But the big concern about this is that when I drove over to the nearby post office and dropped that envelope in the mailbox, I also mailed my tax returns. Yesh. Both the personal and the corporate returns. For both the state and the feds. And I sent Tax Lady her payment in the same outgoing mail drop.
It looks like TL cashed at least one of her checks, the one I wrote on the corporate checking account; the second was written on a Fidelity money market account, along with the check to cover the federal tax. So if she got her envelope, presumably the Post Office didn’t lose everything I tried to send that day. I’ll have to get into the Fidelity account online—another fine little hassle—to see if the feds have cashed the check for their pound of flesh.
Where the PO is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t call any kettles black. I add my own extravagant incompetence to everyone else’s. It’s a wonder the human race gets anywhere at all.
Yesterday in my senility I utterly FORGOT that the 101 students were supposed to be at the library hearing a talk from our most accomplished and lively librarian! We blew away an hour and a half chatting about research methods in the classroom, and none of us, not a one, remembered that we were supposed to be elsewhere. That was because…
a) I had totally spaced any memory of this appointment; and
b) When I posted an announcement to the young things in BlackBoard, I forgot to hit “e-mail to all recipients,” and, as usual, none of them checked the class announcements board.
So, this truly wonderful librarian showed up in the computer classroom and stood around for half an hour wondering where the hell we were.
Arghhhh!
Yesterday, too, I had such a blinding headache I began to wonder if I was having a stroke. It actually made me dizzy…felt like I was listing to the right as I was trying to drive and walk. Wasn’t, though; it just felt that way.
And of course in this general state of misery I had a meeting before classes and then had to drive from North Phoenix to South Scottsdale after spending four hours in front of classrooms full of late-stage adolescents. There Poisoned Pen Press gratefully accepted the novel I’d just finished editing but had no new work for me.
Fortunately I have some paying work to do today…though I will say, I don’t feel like doing any work, much less of the paying variety.
Driving from pillar to post yesterday, I was regaled by Tony Judt’s unholy tale of his trials with ALS on NPR’s Fresh Air. It’s a gut-wrenching story. You’d like to say you can’t even imagine what it would be like to live through such a horror and then die of it. But you can: Judt describes it with vivid clarity.
It’s one of those moments that brings to mind one’s own mortality. Please, God, let me drive my car off a cliff, let me die in a plane crash, let me drop dead of a heart attack. I think if I received a diagnosis like that, the first thing I’d do is pick up my father’s pistol and blow my brains out. Judt at least has his family around him and apparently has the resources to hire in-home nursing care. I have no one but my son, who has to work and could not devote three to ten years to caring for a dying woman. He would have to leave me to waste away alone in a nursing home.
Having chosen not to exit pursued by a bear, Judt—an eminent historian—has written a new book addressed largely to young people, Ill Fares the Land. The NPR site features an interesting out-take from its introduction. Says he:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
Just so.
The news of the day continued with reports of crazed right-wingers planning to murder police officers and foment a rebellion against the federal government. That, to my mind, is far scarier than anything our enemies among the fundamentalist Moslems can do. IMHO, unless something is done about the growing schism in this country, within 20 to 50 years we will be looking at civil war.
To top it all off, I got a truly nasty e-mail from someone on the choir informing me she doesn’t know who I am and does not care to hear anything from me. F*** you very much.
Sometimes I get out of patience with life.
This afternoon the head of our neighborhood association sent this interesting report from one of the residents:
My family and I live in the northwest part of the R*** P*** neighborhood. At 5:15 pm my five children were home together as their dad was working and I’d gone to a school function—about 20 minutes after I left with a girlfriend, whose son was also at my house, a beat-up black Cadillac or that type of car pulled up right in front of our driveway and one man got out and came to the door while three others waited in the car. My oldest daughter (15) watched the man come up to our front door and knock—she didn’t recognize him and got the little ones (4, 3, 19 months) together in my oldest son’s room (11). My son’s room is right next to the front door and he could see the man, in his 20’s, white, buzz cut with light brown or reddish hair and wire glasses. He was also wearing a green shirt that said “Carp” on the back. My daughter said the man didn’t seem too clean and had nothing in his hands to suggest selling something. She said the passengers saw her through our front window and one in the back seat was texting on the phone. The man knocked and then rattled the doorknob for approx 7 to 10 minutes. The man looked into my son’s room through the window and my oldest daughter shut all the shutters and curtains and called the police, but the man and his friends left before the police arrived. My daughter saw the car turn around and drive towards 19th ave. Luckily, we have an alarm and my daughter set it after the police left so she could feel a little safer.
My girlfriend and her son and me and my children were all in my front yard for about an hour before we left to go to the school function, so it makes me think our house was being watched. The odd part is that we had two cars parked in front of our house, so it did look like someone was home. (Normally the cars aren’t there.) Then again, the man definitely saw my daughter and son and heard the younger ones. It seems he wanted in the house.
I’m only going into so much detail because of course I feel terrible that I wasn’t home, but also because it seems like our house was targeted. I’m concerned that these people wanted in the house, that it was daylight, there were obviously children home, and in fact a neighbor’s bike was near our front door but it wasn’t taken.
Holy mackerel! That’s one of the scariest stories I’ve heard in the 17 years or so that I’ve lived in this neighborhood. During that time, we’ve had two home invasions that I know of, but neither involved Bad Guys going after a clutch of children.
The northwest section of the neighborhood is not very good. It’s an area that’s been severely thumped by a series of unhappy circumstances: a slummy supermarket that went unregulated by the City despite chronic code violations; a huge, noisy intersection over which the cops like to park their helicopters while chasing perps; proximity to a set of apartments that have been allowed to turn into tenements and to a blighted district that’s your basic war zone; and most recently the corrosive destruction wrought by the unfinished and apparently never-to-be-finished lightrail train tracks. It was harder hit by the depRecession than any other part of the neighborhood, with the result that even more of the housing than before has been turned into rentals—and they already had plenty of weedy, run-down rentals.
Because of the blighted rentals, it’s reasonable to suspect these characters meant to visit one of their drug-dealing colleagues and had the wrong address. On the other hand, if the mother is right in thinking they were being watched, then obviously they knew only children were home. In that case, it’s very creepy.
I walk the dog at night. And when the weather is nice—as it has been today—I like to have my doors and windows open. Guess I’m going to have to rethink those behaviors…
Despite imagining that this morning brought some sort of Insight to the effect that I need to quit hanging on to pennies and try to invest something in building my little business enterprises…Jayzus!
This evening at Compline I was reminded that tomorrow we’re supposed to be doing a potluck surprise party for one of the veteran choir members. Oh god. I don’t have any party food and I don’t have any time to fix stuff like that, so that means I’m going to have to go out and buy something, and my grocery budget for this week is spent and then some, since I blew most of my food budget restocking my much-depleted Hoard. By the 21st, when the new February-March discretionary budget cycle started, I was out of everything from beans to toilet paper and so spent two hours at Costco buying everything in sight. Ohhhkayy…
Then I was told that afterward we’re all supposed to go down to Trinity Cathedral to continue the celebration at the concert that’s going on there tomorrow evening.
These concerts happen continuously, and you have to be fairly affluent to be able to drop $20 here, $30 there, and more every time you turn around. I can’t afford to go out to lunch, for godsake, much less trot around town to expensive evenings in performance halls.
{sigh} I was dismayed enough to blurt out that I just couldn’t afford to do that, and I got a look like I was a man-eating whale that had just flopped up the sidewalk on the lam from Sea World.
Well, said they, the cost has been reduced to ten dollars.
Yeah.
And that amount the COBRA bureaucrats told me I’d be paying each month? Wrong! After I went down to the COBRA office and forked over the $313 they announced I was to pay at first of this month, this week they served me with a past due notice for another big chunk of dough and then demanded over $200 for next month’s premium!
That alone might have been manageable, but combine it with the grocery restocking mission and you have…yes! Penury!
Everybody’s got their hand in your pocket. And that also would be OK, if there were something in the pocket for them to lift. But right now they’re scraping out the lint.
What concerns me is that if I take $2,400 out of the money I squirreled away to carry me through this year and to serve as a stopgap when (not if) expensive emergency bills arise, there won’t be enough to protect me.
All it will take is one huge veterinary bill, one spate of dental work, one car accident, one transmission failure, one small housefire, one good storm that blows the devil-pod tree onto the roof and I’ll be screwed. Screwed, screwed, ge-screwèd!
Speaking of dental work, one reason the COBRA bill is so high is that they didn’t cancel the Delta Dental, as I’d asked them to do (because I knew I couldn’t afford it…). Confronted with this little surprise, I decided to keep the coverage—only another two months remain, and I may be fixin’ to extract a fair amount of benefits from that outfit.
They will cover half the cost of a crown. That’s still not enough to keep the dentist from bankrupting you: half the cost of a crown is still $400 or more. But it’s better than the full freight.
I’m still grinding my teeth. Damn it. I thought the tooth-grinding would stop once I got free of the University from Hell. But noooo. Two more molars are cracked, and a crown that was put on another of the molars I split in my exuberant jaw-clenching is broken. So that’s three new crowns I need.
That’s $1500 or $2000 right there, and we’re only in February.
How do I get off this train, anyway?