Coffee heat rising

Angst

Life in the Big City

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Dang! Now I’m stuck in the house for an hour or so.

Burglar tools, 1875
Burglar tools, 1875

Thanks to a seemingly endless stream of missives from the neighborhood association warning of burglars who wait and watch on the street and then clean out your house when they see you leave on an errand, I’ve been checking all around before I drive my car out of the garage. At one point, our intrepid leader reported seven burglaries and prowlers caught in the act over a 15-day period—one every two days. Many of the perps arrive in pairs or groups; pretty clearly, some of this stuff represents organized gang activity. Others are singletons. The level of their determination to rip off the residents keeps step with the rise in the unemployment rate:

Neighbors,

 

I’ve received several emails and calls about an incident that occurred in the 8000 block of N 8th Ave today.

 

A 20-30 yr old Caucasian male approached two homes that we know of in the middle of the day. After ringing the doorbell and pounding loudly on the door but getting no answer, he attempted to drill thru the lock and pry open one of the doors. The homeowner was home but wisely chose not to answer the door for the stranger. When it became apparent he was attempting to break in, the homeowner yelled at the guy and he left.

 

I’m happy that he left and did not get into the house, but he’s still out there. Phoenix PD was called but the guy was long gone. They indicated they were aware of this guy and have been looking for him. We need to be especially watchful for this creep as it could be very dangerous if he gets into a house where the homeowners are home as he almost did today. If you see someone matching this description, call 911 immediately. You do not need to wait for him to do something. If he matches this description, call 911 immediately. If the dispatcher gives you any grief about it, tell them we’ve been told the police are looking for this guy and our Community Action Officer has asked us to call immediately.

 

The guy is 20-30 years old, white, about 5-10″, shaved head, dark, tightly trimmed goatee. His face was described as gaunt as you might expect a drug addict to appear. He arrived at the house on a red and black motorcycle, wearing a Yamaha motorcycle jacket and a helmet , carrying a backpack.

 

Be watchful, be safe, be quick.

{sigh}

Okayyy… Just a few minutes ago I gathered my junk to make a run on Costco, Sprouts, and Target. And what should I see parked about three doors down but an old beige Oldsmobile with someone sitting in the driver’s seat. Just a-sittin’ there, minding their own business, eh? Because I couldn’t see far enough to get the license plate from my front yard, I drove my van down there, wrote down the license number and car description, and then came back. The occupant had a shirt hung in the driver’s side window so I couldn’t get a good look at her. (Some of the perps of late have been women, BTW.) I wasn’t even sure it was a woman or a man in drag—the hairdo looked like a bad wig. It could have been a guy tricked out to look like a woman, by way of camouflage.

Damn it. I had a lot of stuff to do today, and I didn’t have in mind spending an hour or so waiting around for a cop to show up. That’s the usual wait time when you call 911 around here. Ohhh well.

In the protective coloration department, yesterday I realized that if I’m to continue shopping at the Sprouts, Costco, and Target in my general area, I shouldn’t be doddering around the parking lots with a purse slung over my shoulder. Since I charge everything, really there’s no reason to haul a bag around everyplace I go.

For a little old lady to carry a purse into the Sprouts or the Albertson’s shopping center down the street is like wearing a sign saying “Mug Me!” The Albertson’s is just creepy—I won’t go in there even in the daytime anymore. Sprouts’s parking lot is a bit sketchy, too. The Walgreen’s in that strip mall allows young toughs to loiter outside the front door, so when you go in there you have to run a gauntlet of threatening-looking men and boys, and you get to enjoy passing through a thick cloud of their cigarette smoke. They may be harmless fellows, but IMHO if you dress like a violent thug and affect the mannerisms of a violent thug, there’s a fair chance you are a violent thug.

La Maya had a close escape from a mugger at the gas station adjacent to the Sprouts parking lot, and then, more recently, she watched a hooker pick up a john in the parking lot. So, your choices are to burn gas driving into a better area, where the stores are nicer and the parking lots less littered with questionable patrons, or to take your chances closer to home.

dcp_23971So, realizing that when I shop I rarely use anything other than a credit card, I decided to disinter an old fold-over wallet and use it to carry the AMEX card, driver’s license, and Safeway nuisance card. It will fit in my jeans pocket, and as long as I’m wearing a shirt on the outside, the resulting bulge is unnoticeable. With any luck, the perps will prefer to knock over some other little old lady with her purse slung over her shoulder, and maybe leave me alone.

And besides, it has a benefit: one fewer piece of junk to drag around.

Of course, leaving my purse in the house poses the chance that it will be stolen, if indeed The Burgular decides to come visiting. But I have a weird little hidey-hole that is SO strange I doubt even a pro will think of it. So I’m going to hide the purse there whenever I go out.

Image: Burglar’s Tools Found in the Bank, Wikipedia Commons

Word from On High: Stay Calm

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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.

Money, dollars, numbers, stress

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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 $1,522December 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.
😉

Creepy, creepy night

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Three in the morning, how I hate it.

Woke up an hour ago. Night noises. The house creaks, snaps, pops, and crackles all night long, especially when temperatures drop sharply at night. The beams in the attic make bright snapping sounds, and the ductwork grumbles to itself. I’ve lived in houses that made settling sounds, of course. But this one takes the cake in that department. You’d think after 38 years the place would have done all the settling it’s going to do.

Then up pops a real unusual sound: like someone rapping on the door. Three distinct taps: knock knock knock. The dog heard it. Her head shot up, ears erect. She didn’t bark, though; and she is a barker. I figured if anybody tried seriously to get in, she’d fly into one of her yapfests.

Further noises were ambiguous: could’ve been settling sounds. The dog perked up to listen a couple of other times but still kept quiet. By now I was wide awake and listening for every freaking creak, groan, and whisper.

Twenty minutes, half an hour later, along comes the cop helicopter.

He buzzed the alley and yards on this end of the street for about 15 minutes. So, evidently someone else thought somebody was out there.

Charming.

The back door has a single-cylinder deadbolt and a doorknob lock—both highly vulnerable because the door has French-door style lights, pretty easy to knock in. I refuse to have a double-cylinder deadbolt on a kitchen door; it’s unsafe. The door is alarmed, so if anyone breaks in while I’m here, he’ll wake me and the dog and give himself a healthy shot of adrenalin.

The damned sliding doors are old, tired, and broken. Though they also are all alarmed, one of them doesn’t latch at all; another latches but doesn’t lock. They’re “secured” (such as it is) with sticks in the runners.

And of course, the back window: oh, the lovely back window. Whatever possessed developers to install aluminum junk like that? It also is a sliding affair with a flimsy latch—nothing resembling a lock. You can drop a stick in the runner and be damned. The glass is held in place with rubber weather stripping. All you have to do is slip a little slot screwdriver under the weatherstripping, quietly pull it out, and voilà! The glass pane will lift right out. In the wee hours of one morning, SDXB found a couple guys coming in his front window, they having gained entry that way. You wonder why he moved to Sun City?

{sigh} I probably should have security doors installed in back, and get Chip at Freelite to install a new, more secure—and double-paned!—window back there. His last newsletter showed he’s carrying some fairly snazzy-looking security doors with a Prairie School look to them. I really dislike security doors: I feel the bad guys belong behind bars, not us. But if I can find something that doesn’t look like a prison door, well…

Well, indeed…don’t even ask how much such a thing costs. A somewhat nonugly security door for a single opening is amazing. For the double-sized door you’d have to get to go over an Arcadia…OMG! This house has three Arcadias plus the kitchen door. And by the time I’ve spent myself stupid on security doors, I’ll still have the cheesy old single-pane tinfoil door the developer put in and the cheap double-paned Arcadia door Satan installed, a thing for which “low-E” is not an operative term.

It would be cheaper to wait until I’m canned and just take myself out to Sun City. Ugh.

I need to get a shotgun.

On the Mountain

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Yesterday, for the first time in many a moon, I took a much-needed hike up North Mountain, not far from my house. Besides having reached a peak state of out-of-shapeness, I’m getting fat, and the stress from the crescendoing din about the job situation is giving me a chronic bellyache.

As I was walking up the mountain (and starting to feel better), it occurred to me that I may be better off living on lots less income and living with lots less stress.

And the stress level, of late, has been measurable in astronomical units. In August we were told to expect an announcement around September 15 to the effect that almost everyone in my job classification would be laid off. Then the story was that the university’s president could not make such a decision without approval from the Board of Regents, which meets in the first week of December—hence last winter’s round of Christmastime layoffs. That date came and went. But now, in January, our rabid legislators, unleashed as our governor leaves to join President Obama’s cabinet, have decided to gut all three universities by way of taking out their loathing for Communists and Darwinists (which is what they think resides in a College of “Liberal” Arts and “Sciences”: not a joke!). Everyone’s salary is cut by 12%, and that’s just for starters. The president himself—no mere rumor-monger—has announced that 1,000 people will be laid off before the end of the fiscal year. Nontenure-track lecturers have already been told they will not be renewed after this semester; much more bloodletting is to come.

No wonder I feel like I’m going to throw up every time I eat! It’s not cancer: it’s GDU.

Reflecting on my career, such as it is, it struck me that if you count the years I was in graduate school, when I taught two sections a semester as a “teaching assistant” (read “slave laborer”), I have been working for the Great Desert University for about 25 years. There was an SAHM interlude where I freelanced, wrote three books, and worked on the editorial staffs of two large magazines. But otherwise, almost all of my work life has been spent at That Place.

And lemme tell you, working in any department of That Place is by definition stressful. When I was in graduate school, a “teaching assistantship” meant you were handed a set of books and two sections of 25 freshman composition students and told to build a course—unsupervised. There was a one-semester T.A. seminar, which carried no credit and which was a grand waste of time. By the time you prorated the salary over the number of hours this job entailed, pay was significantly less than minimum wage. But you got a tuition waiver. Since the Arizona constitution mandates that public education will be provided for citizens at a cost as close to free as possible, at the time a tuition waiver did not amount to much.

Teaching freshmen…OMG. In the first place, freshmen are not quite a step removed from high-school kids. If I had wanted to teach adolescents, I would have gotten a teaching certificate, not a Ph.D. in English. Freshmen face all the difficult developmental issues that high-school kids deal with—sex, friends, lovers, parents (complicated by the kids’ first solo flight into the world), teachers, drugs, alcohol, cars, race, class, gender, and all that—to which are added the vicissitudes of life as we grow older: deaths of friends or family members, abuse by love partners, money, failure, frustration. Poor little things. Well, freshmen tend to confuse the English teacher with Mommy, often because inexperienced composition instructors tend to give assignments that invite students to write about personal matters and hence, in the students’ not-quite-adult minds, to invite the instructor into their lives. Some of their issues are heart-rending.

Add to that the general illiteracy of the standard American high-school graduate, and you have one helluva job in teaching composition. Any day I’d rather clean house for a living!

Editing a research newsletter for the graduate college, which I did for a couple of years, was infinitely easier and pretty fun, except for our photographer, who was an evangelical Christian fundamentalist. He used to try to proselytize everyone we went out to photograph, often to embarrassing effect. While a friend and I were poking fun at his aggressive ridiculousness, we got word that the man’s only son, a winning young teacher with a doctorate in physical education who was roundly loved by everyone who knew him, was waiting at the stoplight at 44th Street and Osborn when a cement truck came along, rolled over on top of his car, and smushed him like a bug. Needless to say, our photog went even further off the deep end (he became convinced that God had arranged the extinction of his son to spare the son great suffering that had been scheduled for later in life), creating a situation that was not only sad but quite difficult to deal with.

Teaching upper-division students was a huge improvement over freshman comp, even though the course I taught most often was known off the record as “freshman composition for juniors and seniors.” When I returned to GDU after a 15-year hiatus, it was to a satellite campus populated mostly by returning adults, a very choice sort of student indeed. This would have been idyllic were it not for the course load and the chronic overenrollment of the writing sections: four and four, capped at 30. I taught four sections of writing courses—120 writing students at a time!—every semester, and usually picked up two more sections during the summer. To give you a picture, if 120 students each turn in a three-page paper, you are faced with THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY PAGES of gawdawful drivel to plow through. Not only do you have to read it, you have to try to comment intelligently on it; quite a trick, given the quality of the material produced by people who think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain State and World War I happened during the 19th century. Consider that you should assign at least six such papers, and you get the idea.

Soon I learned never to accept overrides, no matter how pathetically supplicants begged to be let into my overstuffed courses (National Council of Teachers of English guidelines specify no more than 20 students in a writing class). But occasionally the admins or the dean would quietly admit people behind my back. One semester I showed up and found FORTY-TWO students enrolled in a technical writing course! And in addition to that section, I had three others filled to their cap of 30 students. That’s 132 writing students. Again, by the time you prorated my salary over the 14-hour-a-day seven-day weeks, it came to right about minimum wage.

Now that I’m on the main campus editing copy for scholarly journals and supervising a small pack of graduate students, life is much better. Except for the swirl of layoff rumors. However, though things are relatively quiet now, this job has not been without its stressful moments.

Certainly, coping with GDU’s answer to Bartleby the Scrivener was one of the major causes leading up to the stress attack that put me in the emergency room and kept me lashed upfor a good twelve hoursto every cardiovascular monitor known to humanity. The Bartleby situation went on for four. long. years. By the time she quit, shortly after the 2007 Christmas break, I was becoming obsessive about the woman. Recognizing that she was quite literally driving me nuts, I had made up my mind that if I couldn’t force her out at the time of the spring 2008 annual review, I was going to quit myself.

Well, stress is a function of life. That’s so. But GDU is so far down the Rabbit Hole, so incorrigibly through the Looking Glass, that we come out thinking life is a function of stress.

Because the Red Queen said so. Off with their heads! Off with all our heads.

If I’m canned, I will not weep long. It will be a relief to get back to the real world, where the mountains to climb are made of granite and tackling them is good for your health.

Illustrations by John Tenniel
The Cheshire Cat over the Croquet Match: Alice in Wonderland
The Mad Hatter and the Dormouse: Alice in Wonderland
Alice Meets the Red Queen:Through the Looking Glass

Taxes! PeopleSoft! Garrrrhhhhh!

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Is there a way to express my hatred for my honored government’s tax system?

Just ran a Quicken report for my tax lawyer. Haven’t printed it out…I don’t even want to know how many pages it will generate. There’s probably not enough paper in the house to print the damn thing. I’ll have to hire an elephant and a mahout to deliver it across town.

Because of PeopleSoft’s proven unreliability—and because I’m pretty sure they got last year’s W-2 wrong—for the first time I’ve broken out all the details of my paycheck as a split entry under each salary deposit. I wanted a record that I could compare with the figures that appear on this year’s W-2. The result is a mosaic of new entries, some under income and some under expenses, an awe-inspiring mess. Many of these entries are directly deductible from my salary. Because my gross (instead of net, as in the past) salary appears under “income” and because Quicken categorizes refunds, reimbursements, the IRA withdrawals that immediately were reinvested (and so are a wash, tax-wise), and all sorts of other little bits of b.s. as “income,” this report makes it look like I earned almost $100,000 this year. Which, oohhhh believe me, I most decidedly did NOT.

To arrive at the real, piddling income, you have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. Nightmarish.

Why do we have to do this? Is there really some reason that every American, no matter how diddly his or her income, has to go through all the nonsense inflicted on our tax code to accommodate the very wealthy?

Maybe the Republicans had it right: just excuse rich people from paying taxes. If the wealthy few who could afford to hire lobbyists to instill these absurd complications in our tax law didn’t have to pay taxes, then the tax laws could be simplified and the rest of us would have a great deal easier time of it.

Let’s just give the obscenely wealthy a state—how about North Dakota? They can live there with no government and no taxes, they being, after all, wealthy enough to build their own private roads, airports, schools, and the like. Then the rest of us can go on about our business. Once you have a net worth of, say, $50 million, off you go to your mansion in North Dakota. And good-bye to all that.