Coffee heat rising

Angst

Unemployment for Christmas?

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Rumor has it that a big announcement is coming down: along about mid-October, the PtB (Powers that Be) will announce that everyone in my job classification is to be laid off. That’s a lot of layoffs, even for a gigantic learning factory whose student body is larger than the entire populations of most of the state’s counties.

The jobs in question are so poorly paid that all Our Beloved Leader would have to do is cut the six-figure salaries of his trophy hires by 5% to make up the part of the payroll that goes to the likes of us.

The rulebook that governs the university’s operation specifies that employees in this category have to be given 90 days notice of nonrenewal or dismissal. Conveniently, if O.B.L. makes this announcement on October 15, our time will be up on the last day of the semester, December 15. This will keep the donkeys in harness until they finish their current round of plow-dragging.

I’ve already found a job to apply for: $15,000 a year less than I’m earning, but at least it’s an income, and the place is only about five or ten minutes from my house. Truth to tell, I could cheerfully forego 15 grand to be free of the hideous commute to lovely downtown Tempe. Last night the freeway was gridlocked; plodding home across the surface streets into the glare of the setting sun took well over an hour. Besides, GDU will owe me $17,500 in tax-free severance pay, to be doled out over three years. A third of that sum added to the proposed new net annual pay will add up to a larger net than I’m now taking home.

Plus the coveted new employer pays ALL your health insurance, AND it offers a “cafeteria plan” that gives you an extra $600 to put toward three pay-it-yourself plans…one of which is a flex plan. So in other words, if you want the flex plan, you don’t have to pay for it out of your regular salary. And, interestingly, instead of automatically taking 7% out of your salary (and matching it) for a 403(b), this outfit offers a simple IRA for which 3% is deducted…leaving you with dollars to put into your own Roth IRA.

So, weirdly, even though the gross pay is lower, the net may be about the same or even higher, with or without the extra income from GDU’s good-bye gift.

It remains to be seen whether this rumor is true. This evening at the Arizona Book Publishing Association shindig, we sat at the same table with a GDU colleague who was privileged to attend our Dean’s meeting with the chairs. She reported that Her Deanship announced, as she had promised to do, that our office is seeking a new client journal.

If our dean’s boss is about to can me, which will shut our office down, why is she telling the world we’ll take on new work? A very limited number of possibilities present themselves:

  • She hasn’t been told about the plan.
  • She is pretending not to have been told about the plan.
  • She doesn’t know what my job classification is.
  • They don’t plan to include me among the cannees.

None of those scenarios is out of the realm of possibility. In fact, they’re ranged in order from most likely to least likely.

WhatEVER.

Next week I’m meeting with my financial adviser to figure out how I can survive if I don’t get another job. This weekend I will fill out a job application, update the résumé, and write a cover letter, to be shipped off to the proposed new employer on Monday. And I will finish editing a freelance client’s copy, earning another $500 this month. The Copyeditor’s Desk is attracting a surprising number of clients—tonight I believe we may have picked up two or three more—and the truth is that we may manage to develop this business well enough so that neither of us will have to work for the university. Or for anyone else, besides ourselves.

The Continuing Saga…

1.Unemployment for Christmas?
2.Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3.Rumors start to fly
4.On the trail of the elusive job
5.Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?

Small glimmer of light in the tunnel

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(Hope it’s not a headlight!)

Yesterday evening I walked Cassie past a foreclosed house a block to the west. The place has always been trashed: the people who lived there for years took pride in running it down, and so by the time they were tossed out, it was quite a mess. The “For Sale by Lender” sign has been up for several weeks.

Curious to look inside, I kicked the back gate open and found…lo! brand-new double-paned windows and Arcadia doors! A brand-new heat pump, merrily humming away in near silence. Through the windows, some of which still had the manufacturer’s plastic wrap clinging to the glass, I could see new cabinetry, appliances, and countertops in the kitchen. The house was tiled throughout with attractive Saltillos. A closer look at the structure revealed brand-new roofing, and it had a new paint job inside and out.

Dang! It looked pretty darned nice. Only things remaining to be done were to install a shade structure over a large patio slab, to revive the landscape, and maybe to put in a couple of shade or fruit trees. Since the grass is already pretty much dead, it wouldn’t take much to xeriscape the yard.

So I was standing in front thinking maybe I should consider buying that place, since it’s offered for significantly less than I could net on my house: it’s smaller (less work! lower utility bills!) and all the other houses around it are well maintained. Archie, the resident across the street, is a right-wing crazy, but that’s OK: for unknown reasons, he thinks I’m a right-wing crazy, too, so as long as I don’t disabuse him I’ve got a friendly neighbor. Pretty quick along came one of the other dog-walking regulars, a neighbor named Mike.

Mike knows what’s going on around the neighborhood, in extended detail. The house, he says, is in escrow: selling price is allegedly $260,000.

“That will pretty much set our prices for the next few years,” says he.

“Yup,” say I, knowing that now there’s no chance of escape.

Mike said the lender had put about $60,000 into the place. Some time back, Archie said he’d talked to the rep, and his story was that the upgrades cost $30,000. Assuming the tile floors were already in, I’d say thirty grand for the roof, air-conditioning, windows, and kitchen is closer to the truth.

Well. If the outfit that ended up owning that decrepit rathole fixed it up to this extent, maybe the same thing will happen with Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. Even a coat of paint on the outside would help: the place is a wreck. Right now the girlfriend has mounded the weeds she’s pulled during the past three or four weeks into a big haystack on the driveway. Somehow she manages to drive around the stack and park her car on the slab the between the closed garage and the stack—how, I can’t imagine. The garage, of course, is packed with junk, so there’s no way to get a vehicle in it. Take that back: about two weeks ago, Dave hauled away enough debris to get his pickup in there, but the mother of the new baby can’t put her car in out of the heat.

So maybe there’s hope: if a lender has to clean up a property to unload it, maybe the outfit that ends up with the Weed Arboretum will at least clear the brush and paint the tired (not to say “exhausted,” “debilitated,” or “comatose”) exterior. That would sure help a lot.

Mike has done a lot of renovating and upgrading on his house, another half-block to the west and dangerously close to the coming construction mess. Asked what he thought would be the effect of the train track project on our property values, he said he was disgusted when the City refused to give fair consideration to the residents’ request to turn the streets now opening onto 19th into cul-de-sacs but instead ramrodded its own half-baked concept past everyone’s objections.

During the construction of the trolley-car tracks, he said, our property values will drop significantly, and the foreclosure situation will drag values down further.(He’s calling it the “trolley”; I call it the “train”; no one who thinks the scheme is the biggest boondoggle to grace Arizona since the Freeway to Nowhere calls it by the City’s pet name, “lightrail.”) However, he has learned that neighborhoods near completed segments of the trolley-car tracks already are showing increases in property values. So, the folklore to the effect that trolley lines improve property values may contain a grain of truth.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I felt a little better about things after exploring the partially upgraded little house and imbibing Mike’s optimism. Maybe we’re not on a handcart to hell but on a roller coaster, instead. Roller coaster rides generally climb back up after they’ve gone down.

Thank goodness! And . . . gasp!

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Two scary envelopes arrived in the mail today: one from the county tax assessor and one from my financial manager. I figured both would bring bad news.

And yea verily: even though the sale value of my house has dropped $50,000 over the past couple of years, the assessor’s biannual estimate of its value has gone up by $33,000, raising my taxes from the $1,500 I paid when I moved in about four years ago to almost $2,100.

However, this moment of gloom was relieved by a report from the redoubtable Stern and Reimer, who, despite the drumbeat of unnerving economic news, contrived to make my investments earn $2,265 in August.

LOL! Just about enough to pay the taxes!

In fact, I have the tax money in hand, accumulated by dint of a $300-a-month setaside from my paycheck. So I can pay the assessor this year. But next year: ????

The $3,600 annual impound into a savings account is to cover property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. It used to cover annual car registration, too, but because my car is now eight years old, I can pay that out of cash flow. If my car were newer, I couldn’t do that.

Now the problem is . . . the combined cost of 2008’s property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance will come to $3,700.

And three hundred bucks a month is pushing the envelope of what I can afford to set aside. State employees received no merit or COLA increases this year, and will not as long as the economy is in the toilet. In the past, we’ve gone several years at a time with no raises whatsoever. So: they raise our taxes, but they don’t raise our pay.I haven’t retired yet, and already the basic cost of keeping the government from confiscating my home or my car and providing enough coverage to rebuild if the aluminum wiring sets fire to the joint is passing my ability to pay it.

What this demonstrates is what I’ve already begun to suspect: I will not be able to stay in my home in retirement.

If there was any question about that, this tax bill answers it, plain and clear.

Unbundled! Qwest strikes again

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So, I’m reading my Qwest bill and notice some long-distance calls to Austin, where I know exactly no one. I also want to find out what they want me to do with the useless modem the Filipinos sent and to cancel the $3.99/month roadside assistance plan that recently proved to be ludicrously useless. After dialing the customer service number printed on the bill, I again make the acquaintance of Qwest’s damnable robot, which eventually puts me through to one “Josh.”

Amazingly, this “Josh” speaks English. Yea, verily: he’s a native speaker. In the course of probably 40 minutes spent gabbing and wasting time on hold, I learn he grew up in Las Vegas and presently is living in Logan, Utah, where he works in Qworst’s call center to support his lifestyle as a ski bum.

The Josh brushes me off about the unidentifiable long-distance calls but agrees to discontinue the laughable roadside assistance disservice. Along the way, he remarks that he can save me money on the phone bill. Figuring he wants to sell me something (he does, but not till later), I rise to this bait. How, I ask, does he propose to do this?

“Well,” says he, “I see you have DSL, cell phone, and a land line. I can bundle them together, and it will save you $10 a month.”

“They are bundled,” say I.

“No, they’re not,” says he.

“The only reason I got the DSL was because Qwest sent an ad touting its cut-rate bundling. I called your company and specifically ordered the bundled service, and I was told that was what I got.”

“Look at your bill,” says the Josh. “If it doesn’t say ‘bundled service’ on the front page, then you don’t have bundled service.”

“The bill is unintelligible,” I observe. “None of it makes any sense at all. It is a document designed to confuse the customer.”

The Josh does not deny this. He proceeds to do the bundling thing, and now magically my bill drops by ten bucks a month. Not wanting this lucre to burn a hole in my pocket, he suggests I upgrade my cell phone service. I say I never use the cell phone and the only reason I got it is that pay phones have pretty much disappeared and I have to drive an aging car across a freeway to get to work; the cell is only for emergencies and I don’t need an upgrade. He then proposes I get their TV service. I say I don’t watch TV.

He is incredulous.

“You don’t watch television?” he squawks.

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.” This is a slight exaggeration, but the Josh need not know it.

Discouraged, he now suggests I replace the old, perfectly functional modem with the new one, which I haven’t yet shipped back to Qworst. I say I’m not looking forward to fiddling with a CD and the connection, which invariably gets screwed up, and I can’t afford to be offline over the weekend because I have to do a blog carnival.

“What’s a blog?” the Josh inquires.

Beginning to suspect the man smokes something that doesn’t have nicotine in it, I ask him if he’s serious. He insists he doesn’t know what a blog is. I try to define blogging in one sentence.

He says for nine bucks, they’ll send a service guy over to install the modem. I say “sold!”

Now—get this!—he tells me I must immediately ship the free modem the Filipino staffer has ordered back to Qworst, so that the service dude can replace it with another modem, which will cost me $100. But lucky me! Qworst will be sending me a $50 rebate coupon!

Oh, thank you, honored phone company!

Not until I get off the phone do I realize that the Josh has figured out, during the course of conversation, that the modem in the box is the same kind of modem the service person will install, that at one point he subtly backpedaled to maneuver me into letting him replace it with one I have to pay for, and that the Josh probably gets paid by the amount of junk he can sell to the customer.

So here’s what we have:

In August 2006 I ordered what was presented to me as a bundled set of services. This “bundling” never happened. The result was that for the past two full years I have been overcharged $10 a month for a service that was misrepresented to me. That adds up to a $240 overcharge. More recently, I was made to jump through an hour’s worth of hoops while two marginally English-speaking technicians tried to figure out, over the telephone from their stations half-a-globe away, what was wrong with my DSL connection. Their assessment was wrong. Incorrectly thinking my modem was on the fritz (in fact, Qworst’s serviceapparentlywas down, something the company had not bothered to share with its men and women in Manila), they sent me a new modem, telling me it would be free of charge providing I shipped the old one back. This device is a newer model. A stateside Qworst customer service person smoothly switches out this free modem for an identical one, to the tune of $100, promising a $50 rebate. So, all told I’m out $290 in fraudulent and questionable charges.

Charming, eh?

If there was any question whether the robot voice expresses the disdain with which this corporation’s leadership views the Great Unwashed, interaction with Qworst’s live voices quickly dispels that.

Insurance: Never a dull moment

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Just got a notice from the Great Desert University that my health insurance plan–the only one that covers my doctor–will be dropped this August. Thank you so much, beloved employer.

Well, I knew it was too good to last. After a long series of health insurance fiascos (including one year when the only provider they offered was so awful that none of my doctors would accept it-one doctor refused to see me at all, even after I offered to pay him out of pocket), the state started self-insuring a couple of years ago. They’ve had an EPO plan run by Schaller-Anderson, which, incredibly, covered all my doctors, including the Mayo Clinic, for a monthly premium of $24. This was a huge improvement over the $220 I was paying for the PPO, which sorta allowed you to go to your choice of doctors but two years ago quit covering the Mayo.

When Aetna acquired Schaller-Anderson a few months back, I thought “Okay…say goodbye to that!” Right on.

So now I’ll either have to find another doctor (which I do not want to do) or once again buy incredibly pricey insurance on the open market. The last time I bought my own insurance, I ended up with an MSA (medical savings account) plan. Though it offered total flexibility and generous coverage, it was very expensive–premiums were about $250 a month, and you had to deposit $1500 a year to a savings account with piratical fees. It’s probably moot, though. At this point in my life, I’d be surprised if I could get health insurance outside a group plan at all.

Other than the Mayo, healthcare providers in this state leave a lot to be desired. When I had acute appendicitis, I almost died while sitting fruitlessly in the waiting room of a much-touted major regional medical center. After sitting there over four hours in exquisite agony without even so much as a triage, I left and got some friends to drive me to the Mayo Clinic’s ER-the EMTs would not take me there, even though it’s no further from my home than the Third-World hospital that offered no medical care. By then the infection was very advanced and my appendix was about to burst. The Mayo’s physicians performed emergency surgery, and the care I received was excellent from beginning to end. And “end” could have been the operative word: for older adults, a burst appendix is a life-threatening event with a much higher mortality rate than for younger victims.

I want my choice of doctors, and I want to be able to see the doctor I’ve been seeing for the past 40 years, who happens to practice at the Mayo. When HMOs first started to take over the healthcare industry in this country, he saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall. Coincidentally, the Mayo opened its Scottsdale clinic about then. He had been trained at the Mayo, and as soon as he could he rejoined that organization. It’s a hellacious long drive for me to get to his office (the hospital is much closer), but I must say that the care I’ve received by and large has been worth it.

he state, of course, would like to herd us all into HMOs. I will pay out of pocket before I go into one of those things.

My mother died hideously in the “care” (a term best used ironically) of the first HMO organized in Arizona. As it developed, the doctors had a financial interest in the operation: if it made money, so did they; if it lost money, they lost money. So, it ran powerfully contrary to their personal interest to diagnose a patient with an expensive terminal illness. They simply refused to admit the obvious–that she had cancer. And it was so obvious, my cat could have diagnosed it. But the problem was, if they allowed that she had cancer, they would have had to treat her, and that would have cost the HMO a ton of money. So they denied she was sick at all-the day before they were forced by my father’s demands and the implicit threat of a lawsuit to open her up for an exploratory, her doctor told me and my father that that my eminently sane and practical mother needed a psychiatrist. When he did find her (predictably) full of cancer, he dropped her cold. They stopped providing doctors to see her or to advise my father and me on her care. I had to openly threaten them with my lawyers–repeatedly!–to get even the most basic nursing care for her.

She would have died anyway, but she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Thirty years ago, there wasn’t much they could do for cancer, but they did have pain-killers. Even had they refused to treat her, they could at least have given her morphine, so she didn’t lie in bed suffering the tortures of the damned through the last weeks and months of her life.

After that and some other amazing experiences in the American healthcare system, I’m very picky about the kind of insurance coverage I get. I’m willing to pay to the max to get coverage that will allow me to go to any doctor I choose and that will pick up the tab for the astronomical bills presented by the kinds of illnesses one is prone to later in life.

So, this time around I’m going to look at concierge practices, where you pay a fee upfront in exchange for getting a doctor’s attention. In theory, you can get appointments promptly and the doctor schedules more than 10 or 15 minutes to talk to you. You still have to keep your insurance, but you might be able to get a lower-cost plan or even just a major medical plan. The annual fee is usually around $1,500…but that’s a far cry from the $2,640 a year I was paying for the PPO that canceled my doctor.

There are a number of drawbacks to concierge medicine, one of which is the obvious social issue: it pushes the practice of medicine even further toward elitism. The rich get care; the rest of us take what we can scrounge up, which often ain’t much. In my part of the country, precious few doctors subscribe to this system, and it’s hard to know what their qualifications might be. Or disqualifications. In the MDVIP network, for example, most of the physician members in my area practice at John C. Lincoln hospital, a scary affair whose Dickensian ER is…well, overworked, shall we say. That’s where a doctor decided, after a cursory exam and no tests, that the appendicitis just starting to make itself known must be inflammatory bowel syndrome and prescribed a drug whose manufacturer’s label said, loud and clear, that it was contraindicated for women with my symptoms. I can hardly wait to go back there!

Do I demand “Cadillac care”? You bet. It’s my life and my health we’re talking about here. And in America today, “competent” care is defined as “Cadillac care.”

By and large the offerings are abysmal. In Arizona, for example, only one hospital has been rated by HealthGrades as truly excellent: the Mayo. John and Cindy McCain go to the Mayo. You and I don’t, because our insurance won’t cover it. Three hospitals were rated as “distinguished” (a cut below “excellent”) for their clinical practice: the Mayo, Scottsdale Healthcare-Osborn, and Del E. Webb in Sun City. Only one of those is even remotely within driving distance of the central part of the city, where I live. In the entire state, just three landed “distinguished” ratings for patient safety: the Mayo, Yavapai Regional Medical Center in Prescott, and Yuma Regional Medical Center.

I guess I could get bare-bones major medical coverage and then pay my doctor at the Mayo out of pocket. In only two years I’ll be eligible for Medicare, which does cover the Mayo. If I raid my savings and pay off the Renovation Loan now-meaning I won’t be buying a car anytime in the near future-I could take the $220 a month I would be paying for the PPO and set it aside to pay medical bills. It’s awfully risky, though…all it would take is a heart attack or a tumor to bankrupt me once and for all.

I also could sign up for the flex plan, which in the past has been a bit of a waste. I sure do hate to cut my take-home pay drastically, given that it provides me a grand $29 of play in my budget. Contrary to claims, I’ve never found the flex plan did a thing to save on income taxes; every time I’ve subscribed, it just meant cash gouged out of take-home pay that I was forced to spend on medical stuff whether I needed it or not. This has led to many unnecessary doctor’s visits and purchases of redundant pairs of glasses.

I’m thankful that I can afford to pony up $1,500 for access to a doctor, if indeed I decide to do so. But…am I the only person who thinks that this is a damned ridiculous pass for the alleged greatest nation on earth? If America is so great, how come we can’t provide decent health care for all our citizens, at an affordable price?

1 comment left on iWeb site

TM

I agree. My father has recently had some major health problems and was transfered from a Mesa hospital to Scottsdale-Osborn, one on the “distinguished” list. He had to remain in the hospital for 10 days and the discrepancy in care was startling. Even the food in Scottsdale was better. In our society, unfortunately, the almighty dollar rules all…even for products and services such as healthcare.

Estate Sales: The canary in the mine?

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La Maya and I drove out to Scottsdale this morning, at the crack of proverbial dawn, to attend an estate sale that looked pretty enticing. Pictured on the organizer’s site was a bedroom set in the mode that M’hijito has described as desirable, plus various other interesting-looking loot.

When we got there, we found a half-renovated house in a (relatively!) downscale neighborhood of a ritzy part of town, the pool green and the pickin’s slim. The kitchen was devoid of valuable finds; the tools were old and worn; the bedstead was the wrong size and the bedroom set was cheaply made junk.

That notwithstanding, La Maya is not called the Queen of Estate Sales for nothing. Her discerning eye spotted a handsome loveseat, chair, and ottoman in butter-colored leather. After some study, we decided it probably was a quality product. She nailed all three pieces for $425, a fine 20 percent off the marked price. Not only that, but the estate sale organizer ate the tax.

Although we were numbers 24 and 25 in line to get in the door, no more than ten or twelve people were ahead of us. Evidently the ticket number they started with was higher than 1. It took two trips to haul the furniture. The second time we arrived out there, the furniture-lifting person had gone off for a break, and so we sat with the estate sale company’s owner for a while, helping to calculate tax and hand out bags to the few buyers.

And “few” was the operative word. Over the past several weeks, we’ve found ourselves at the head of the estate-sale line, even when we arrived after a sale was slated to open. This is in vast contrast to the normal experience, where you may arrive a half-hour or an hour early and still wait to get in the door through three or four rafts of people who got there first.

Gina, the estate sale proprietor, echoed other organizers in saying that business was very slow: plenty of sellers but few buyers. She was practically giving things away-name a price for a piece of loot and you could walk with it. Gina said people are not buying, and that times are tough in the estate sale biz. What she does is considered effectively wholesaling. “Retailers”-read dealers in antiques and used furniture-are really suffering. She said her biggest buyers, who indeed are dealers, are in deep trouble.

So, we might add, was her client. They evidently had purchased the house speculatively, figuring to fix it up and turn it around for a profit. Before they were done, though, they fell into bankruptcy. They had completed maybe half their renovation work on the unimpressive little tract house. In one bathroom, blue masking tape around the paint job was still in place, only half-pulled off. A sloppy plaster repair stood out on the ceiling where some defunct fixture had been removed to make way for recessed lighting. The pool water was green, slimy, and evaporated several inches below the tile line. Old dirty carpet remained on the floor.

Understand, an estate sale is a gold mine for two sets of people:

  1. those who are in the business of reselling “antiques” and used furniture (in general, one and the same thing); and
  2. frugalists, folks like you and me looking to furnish our homes and our lives with nearly new, upscale products at second-hand prices.

When neither of these are in evidence, well…it’s not a good sign. It means consumers are not buying. They’re not buying from businesses that sell second-hand goods and genuine antiques, and they’re not buying yard-sale items. When bargain-hunters quit looking for bargains, IMHO, it indicates people are either really hurting or really scared.

Well, at any rate, La Maya scored a lovely pair of luxurious leather seating pieces. They transform her family room, and she is very pleased.

Nevertheless, we worry. We worry.