Coffee heat rising

Angst

Layoffs? Market crash? Great Depression II?

by

It’s after 4:00 p.m. and no news has leaked from this morning’s meeting that was supposed to announce the occupational demise of all us year-to-year academic professionals. Sorta looks like my spies were right and my friend’s were wrong.

Meanwhile, a different chunk of the sky has stopped falling on our heads. Hevvin help us, the Dow Jones closed up 936.42 points—that’s 11 percent—and all of us have avoided having to put down our deposits on a campsite in Bushville (the latter-day Hooverville).

The outcome of either of these two ongoing dramas remains to be seen. Given the market’s vertiginous volatility, we all know it could drop 11 percent (or more…much more) tomorrow or the next day after tomorrow or next week. And given the mysterious ways in which the Great Desert University works, we peons all could be laid off any day in the same time frame.

So what does it all mean for you & me? Well, I dunno about you. But I’m not holding my breath until my savings return to their former level. Sure, I’ll be glad if they regain their value (since I’ll be needing them in a year or two…or a week or two). But I don’t expect anything.

One thing about pessimists: our surprises are always pleasant.

As for employment: your employer may be slightly less wacko than GDU, but my employer has wacked its last wack where I’m concerned. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that I’m rowing a leaky canoe. I intend to keep my job applications out there and add a few more to the mix. The first really good offer that comes across my desk will take me off the bailing team and put my feet on dry land.

The single targeted hire who was courted to take over our sister program has never bothered to respond to the (very generous!) offer sent to her a few weeks ago. One can only assume she’s waiting for another offer that she must consider more desirable, placing ours in the second fiddle’s chair. If this woman doesn’t accept, that program is as good as gone. And when it goes, our office will be at huge risk: nay, let’s admit we probably will go, too. The soonest we could be closed down is the end of December, when the other program may shut down if no accommodation with the interim director (who hates living in Arizona) can be made. The latest will be the end of next summer, when all our research assistants will graduate (oh so conveniently!) at once. If no Scholarly Publishing Program remains to staff our office, I will have to hire from the English department and then teach the new RAs the equivalent of a semester course in basic editing and another semester course in advanced editing (oh yes, all at once) with no increase in pay.

And guess what I’m ain’t a-gunna do?

So. If a bullet was whistling through the air and I somehow dodged it, I’m left to calculate how to deal with the sand dune collapsing under my feet. At least falling sand gives one a little more time to engineer an escape.

Interview No. 1

by

Yesterday afternoon I had the first interview in the new job search, for a program manager’s position at a prominent local cultural landmark. It seemed to go well. I think they liked me, and it certainly is a job I could do well. On the other hand, I’m pretty long in the tooth. The East Valley Tribune just laid off 120 employees, and so a great raft of people in “communications” will swarm across the land in search of jobs.

If I don’t get this job or something like it very quickly, I’m going to be in deep trouble. With the market tanking, my savings will not support me, not by a long shot. Apparently it can take up to three months after you apply for Social Security to start. If it is true that credit is pretty much nonexistent, selling my house or even borrowing against it to get enough to live on is an unlikely prospect. Unlike GDU’s HR people, the UofA tells retirees that RASL—the amount the state pays for unused sick leave—is considered earned income, not a retirement benefit, and so is taxable at your regular rate. This would cut the annual amount I’m supposed to get for that over the next three years to around $4,000. COBRA alone will cost $5,000 a year. I may end up without health insurance, since I may not be able to pay for it and also eat.

I do not know what I am going to do if I don’t get another job quickly.

At any rate, after the interview I wandered around the grounds and ended up in a monarch butterfly exhibit. There I met a meeter & greeter who was all alone and happy to deliver her lecture on the wonders of butterflies. When I remarked that I had just interviewed for a job, she said she had started there as a volunteer and wangled her way into paying work. She said she loved it; the place is a great place to work.

News from GDU is uniformly negative. The library director at the West campus has been replaced by a part-time interim director whose job, we are told, is to figure out what to cut. Librarians no longer have a budget to buy books, and the president is trying to spread the West campus’s library budget among all four campuses. Staff expect widespread layoffs in the near future.

While strolling around the gardens, I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful to work for a place whose management you don’t hate!

Well, we’ll see. I don’t hold out much hope. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Here’s what it looks like at the place where I’d like to work.


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?
7. Interview No. 1

Beating the layoff stress

by

For the first six or eight days after I learned about the rumored layoffs, I felt so stressed that my chest hurt. One day at the office I had to lie down on the floor for a few minutes when an anxiety attack started to come on. Determined not to end up in the ER again, I managed to get the feeling that I was about to pass out under control with some breathing and relaxation exercises. But that didn’t stop the scary ache in the chest.

Today, though, I’m feeling a lot better: no pounding heart, no chest pain, no sense of oxygen starvation, no distractibility, and no sleeplessness. For sure, yesterday’s call from one of the employers I applied to helped. Even if I don’t get the job, at least now I have some hope that my age won’t disqualify me from every job I ask for. That was a big worry.

Also, with amazing speed I’m getting more and more comfortable with the idea of not working for GDU—even if it means taking a lower-paying job. Matter of fact, that prospect not only looks less scary, it’s starting to look downright welcome. Although I personally have had relatively little to complain about (other than the months-long PeopleSoft fiasco, the [probably illegal] reneging on an approved job offer I made to a prospective employee, and the overall toxic atmosphere on the campus where I taught), I certainly have seen the administration treat many of my coworkers abominably.

The prospect of being somewhere else begins to look more attractive. So does the idea of a new job with new things to learn and do.

I’m glad I started the job search before any university-wide announcement came down and before I knew whether this next round of lay-offs will apply to me. Just doing something to help yourself, rather than hunkering paralyzed in the headlight while the train bears down on you, goes a long way to make you feel better. It gives you a little sense of accomplishment, and it jump-starts the process you’re going to have to put into gear soon, anyway.

The first cover letter and résumé took a good five or six hours to put together! I thought I was gunna die. If every job application took that much time, how was I going to manage the work for the day job? To say nothing of all the freelance work The Copyeditor’s Desk has taken on?

However, the next application only took 30 or 40 minutes, and neither of the other two took any longer. Because the jobs I’m seeking (with exception of driving the zoo train…) are in the same general family of work and they’re all at nonprofits or colleges, tweaking the cover letter and resuméis pretty easy. It’s just a matter of writing new first and last paragraphs for the cover letter, adjusting the “what I can bring to your job” paragraphs—deleting some of them, moving others closer to the top—and shifting the resumé’s “list of accomplishments” to highlight the items most relevant to a given job. After I realized this, I began to feel a lot more confident that applying for a series of jobs isn’t going to kill me.

And really: if I get an offer from next week’s interview and then learn I’m not included in the next set of layoffs, I may take the job anyway—even if it pays less than I’m earning. The recurring workplace flaps, which seem to come more and more often, are ridiculous. I don’t need to put up with this kind of grief. And besides, the prospect of starting something new is beginning to sound pretty good. Darned good!

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?
7. Interview No. 1

Unemployment for Christmas?

by

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

by

(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!

by

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.