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Job interview?!?

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This afternoon a phone call came in: one of the westside community colleges.

Was I the person at this number who had applied for a full-time teaching job in the English department there?

Why, yes…

Was I still interested in the job?

Absolutely!

Seconds later, she had me signed up for an interview next Tuesday afternoon.

Well. That was a surprise. It’s been three months since I sent in that application. I figured never to hear from them. By now, I imagined, they must have hired whomever they had in mind when they started the search. Because the community college district’s application form requires you to enter the dates of your degrees and the inclusive dates of all your jobs, there’s no way you can hide your age from a search committee. They don’t have to see me to know I’m too old to restart a teaching career.

It’s so radically unlikely they’ll hire me that for a moment I was given pause: why jump through the interview hoops when what’s on the other side of the hoop is a brick wall? On the other hand: why not? Nothing ventured, nothing et-ceteraed.

Truth is, I’ve pretty much adjusted myself, mentally, to the idea of not working full-time. I wonder if I really want a full-time job.

On reflection, though: cobbling together a living with adjunct teaching, Social Security, blogging, and sporadic editing adds up to more than full-time work at very low pay. Just now I’m hardly doing any work for the Great Desert University but I’m putting in 12- to 15-hour days, every day: seven days a week. There’s not even time to clean the house. The only breaks I’m getting from the work are choir practice on Wednesday evening and senior choir performances on Sunday morning.

Today I made a conscious decision to loaf. I should’ve been reading student papers but just couldn’t face it. A day of idling meant…

• writing two blog posts
• contending with the daily onslaught of e-mail messages (about 70 on a slow day);
• downloading and unzipping two files from our India client, after Tina’s system wouldn’t break into them;
• inspecting and assessing them, then sending them along to her;
• cruising news sites and PF blogs in search of some inspiration for the next post;
• finishing a proposal for an online course at PVCC;
• chatting with a client editor over the phone;
• reading the rest of a detective novel’s page proofs, about 100 pages…

Oh, and repairing the toilet, after having made a run on the hardware store for parts.

It’s safe to estimate that a nine-month salary at one of Maricopa County’s colleges would start at about what I earn on a twelve-month contract at GDU. The amount I earn today, over twelve months, was about the average pay for community college faculty eight or ten years ago. On a nine-month basis.

A full-time teaching job in the community colleges would entail actual work, something I’ve learned to evade delegate in my present position. However, 15 hours a day of nonstop labor on various freelance and contract enterprises strikes me as something akin to work. And the pay works out to something less than minimum wage.

If I have to work that hard, I might as well be earning a decent living and, while we’re at it, getting a few benefits. Maybe I could afford to hire a plumber to fix the toilet.

Google grabs authors’ works

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Wrote it

The other day, what should I come across but the entire text of my book, The Essential Feature, online and available for free through Google Books.

This book is not out of copyright. Though I don’t earn much on it—just a couple hundred bucks a year—it does represent my labor and, given that I’m about to be unemployed, I do happen to need the money. Evidently Google did unto me as it has done unto untold numbers of other authors who absurdly imagine they should be paid for their product: checked the work out of a library and stole every word of it.

Google has entered into a settlement in a lawsuit over this theft. After looking into it, I decided it’s best to do nothing, rather than to agree to the settlement’s terms. If you enter into the agreement, you may (or may not) receive some pittance as a share of the profit Google reaps by selling your works. However, you lose all future rights to any further claims against Google for its future profits on or future infringement of your copyright. So it doesn’t look like an especially advantageous arrangement. Nor does it appear to be worth the sheer hassle factor involved in trying to enter a claim.

RobertSidney
Wrote it

Why bother to write? If someone can come and take your work and profit on it with no more than a polite “screw you very much,” what is the point in existing as a professional writer?

The answer to that, my friends, is “none.” Those of us who enjoy reading books and magazines written on the professional level—as opposed to self-published tomes from amateurs and hobbyists—can say goodbye to that little pleasure. And say hello to another stage in the dumbing-down of America. All you young wannabe writers: shelve that dream and get yourself an MBA.

If you went into a grocery store and stole a head of lettuce or a package of steak, you would be arrested and prosecuted. Same if you went into, say, the Boston Store and lifted a few additions to your wardrobe. Retailers don’t put up with theft. But because the product is words, apparently it’s OK to steal.

Wrote it

Peter Osnos, writing for The Atlantic, concedes that the settlement “provides payment now and procedures for the future that assure the rights of those who create material to benefit from the use of it.” But, he adds,

. . . the accord also—in the view of its critics, led by the Justice Department—gives Google far too much of a role in determining the digital fate of an enormous trove of books; in effect, an immediate virtual monopoly and too much of an advantage going forward. In the year since the agreement was announced, the image of Google as the happy face of all matters digital has turned into something less appealing: a dominant corporate enterprise that has used its collective brilliance in technology and marketing to suppress competition while it prospers as others do not.

So much for “do no harm,” eh?

Packaged it; contributed to it

Meanwhile, the legal wrangling continues. The Department of Justice recently challenged the settlement in view of its significant antitrust implications. As DOJ notes in its filing,

“First, through collective action, the Proposed Settlement appears to give book publishers the power to restrict price competition. Second, as a result of the Proposed Settlement, other digital distributors may be effectively precluded from competing with Google in the sale of digital library products and other derivative products to come.”

Contributed to it

Among other things, anyone who does not opt out of the settlement loses their right to derivative uses of their work. This is  not inconsiderable. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, for example, is a spinoff from a magazine article. Because the author of the original piece of journalism retained his copyright in the article, he shared in the profits of the enormously successful book and musical that derived from the first work.

Also at issue are the millions of so-called “orphan works” whose copyright holders no longer exercise their rights. Under the settlement, Google obtains ownership of those rights.

Patent lawyer Gene Quinn eloquently puts the point on this pencil:

To force all those who do not opt out to lose those rights, both with respect to digital distribution and with respect to derivative works is unconscionable. A settlement like this would strip rights away from copyright owners simply because they do not participate in the case or settlement. That would be an enormous taking and redistribution of property rights to a private corporation on an unprecedented level… Make no mistake, the rights are owned and they would be lost through massive redistribution to benefit Google.

Yeah. Like he said!

What’s a master’s degree worth?

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Associate editor and business partner Tina sends a link to this interesting discussion. The main post itself has several links to relevant, equally interesting posts and conversations.

Given the astonishing burden of student loans that too many young people are saddled with—M’hijito’s roommate’s girlfriend, for example, remarked that she will graduate from a top-quality institution with a master’s degree in international business and $1,400-a-month student loan payments—assessing the “value” of graduate education is not a crass or pointless exercise. It’s well and good to love learning for learning’s sake and so to feel that the graduate school experience is irrelevant to one’s vocational prospects. However, once that graduate school experience ends, you still have to pay for it. You still have to keep a roof over your head, put food on your table, and foot the considerable cost of raising a family. When young people are saddled with five- and six-figure student loan debt, they should reasonably expect the financial investment in graduate education to pay off with jobs that will support them.

“That, unfortunately, is too often not the case. In our current economy, there simply aren’t enough decent jobs (or jobs at all) to accommodate the rafts of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s that learning factories like GDU crank out each year. Certain degrees, like an executive doctorate in educational leadership, make for more employable graduates than others, hile some degrees, such as the M.B.A., need to come from a top-tier (read “wildly expensive”) school even to get the holder hired, to say nothing of commanding an upper-middle-class starting salary. And some degrees, to be blunt about it, are simply fraudulent: they’re money-making scams perpetrated by administrators solely to extract as much cash as possible from as many suckers as will bite.

For example, GDU has a much-ballyhooed interdisciplinary master’s degree that has virtually no entrance requirements and virtually no substance. Students in this program, which the university advertises as something that will help working adults get ahead in their careers, pay a $200 per credit surcharge, on top of the regular graduate tuition and various extra charges (all GDU students, for example, pay an extra fee to support the athletic program). Since a standard graduate course carries three credits, every single course you take in this program costs you $600 more than any other student on the campus would pay for it. Students enrolled in the program take a few core courses taught by the program’s director and then fill out their card with electives in regular departments. One elective is U.S.-Mexican border history. A student in this exotic interdisciplinary program may sit next to a History Department graduate student who pays a full $600 less to be in that classroom. Because the program is pretty fluffy and leaves one with a master’s degree in nothing recognizable by another university or by an employer, its value is highly questionable. IMHO, it’s a scam.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t pursue a master’s degree. Or a doctorate, or a J.D., or degrees in nursing, public health, history, English, library science. To the contrary. Graduate education has—or should have—real financial value in addition to the intellectual adventure and polish that students rightly expect to gain from it.

After altogether too many years in the ivied halls of academe, I would advise those who are thinking that now is the time to go back to school for a master’s degree, a professional degree, or a doctorate to plan very carefully. You need to develop a two-pronged planning scheme:

1. Intellectual and spiritual planning

The prospective graduate student should ask Why, really, do I want to do this?

• Do you want to pursue a subject because you’re crazy-passionate about it, so much so that you don’t care whether you can ever make a living at it? (There’s nothing wrong with this, BTW.)

• Do you feel a graduate degree will make you look smarter to people who matter to you? (You’d be amazed at how many people with Ph.D.’s wanted, at heart, to prove to someone that they weren’t so stupid after all! This is not a good reason to go to graduate school.)

• Do you want a graduate degree because you hope it will open the door to an interesting line of work, whose pay doesn’t really matter as long as the job doesn’t bore the pants off you?

• Do you want the degree because you think it will open the door to high-paying occupations, whose remuneration very much does matter?

• Is it that, at the grand old age of 28 or 30, you still don’t know what you want to do when you grow up and you’d like to take a couple years in graduate school to figure that out? (Chances are you won’t figure it out then, either—precious few of us ever know what we want to do when we grow up!)

The answers to these and similar questions not only bear on your choice of major, they bear on financial issues, too. To make a just-barely-living wage in teaching, journalism, or library science, for example, requires a master’s degree, but it doesn’t require one from an expensive university. As long as you can put food on your table, a vocation that calls to you need not earn a ton of money. But…maybe it shouldn’t put you in hock for the rest of your life. And surely Tucson, Buffalo, or Austin is as good a place as New Haven to take two years to seek the meaning of your life. On the other hand, if a high-powered corporate career is what you’re after, then you probably need a degree from a world-class institution—a costly program may pay for itself within a few years after you graduate.

2. Financial planning

Bringing your real motives into sharp focus goes a long way toward deciding how much to spend on a degree and how to finance it. First, of course, you now can decide whether you truly need a degree from a prestigious (i.e., expensive) school or whether an in-state public university will suffice.

• Consider that even lukewarm public universities often have one or two first-rate—even world-class—programs. The University of Arizona, for example, has one of the premier programs in astrophysics on the planet. Psychology programs at Michigan, Cal-Berkeley, Illinois, UCLA, Minnesota, Indiana, and Washington rank among the top twenty in the U.S. Cal-Berkeley, NYU, North Carolina, Indiana, Washington, and Maryland’s MBA programs have shown up among the top twenty. Don’t discount your home state’s public schools, especially if you’re in a place in your life where one master’s degree is about as good as another. Check university rankings for schools in your state and for public universities whose out-of-state tuition is more or less within reason.

• If nothing close to home has a program that suffices, investigate universities in other countries, such as Canada, where costs are far more reasonable than out-of-state fees in the U.S.

• Try to get your employer to foot part or all of the bill. Many companies and government employers will underwrite graduate training relevant to the job. Even if you have to agree to stay with the company for a number of years after you finish the degree, that’s more than a fair trade to avoid being saddled with student loan debt for years.

• Look for research assistantships that waive tuition. Tell the program director or whoever is trying to recruit you that you can’t attend unless you get an assistantship or other support that will waive tuition. Remember: graduate students are the bread and butter of most university departments. They want you.

• Failing that, try to get a 50 percent FTE job on the campus. Most universities waive tuition for employees, and often this applies to half-time as well as full-time workers. GDU, for example, considers a 50 percent time job to be “full time,” complete with health insurance and tuition waiver. The waiver is taxed as income, but since you will earn so little, your tax will be minimal…certainly compared to a lifetime of student loan payments. Often this applies only to in-state tuition; bear that in mind if you’re looking at out-of-state schools.

• Some universities will waive tuition for an employee’s spouse. If your husband or wife has a job that’s fungible and is willing to work at the desired college or university, this is a strategy that might make sense.

• If you’re interested in a university in another state, get a job in that state, register your car there, register to vote, and wait a year to enroll. This will establish residency and avoid the outrageous tuition often charged to  out-of-state students.

Do everything you can to avoid having to take on student loans, even if it means maintaining your dreary day job and taking coursework online and at night. If you possibly can get by on a part-time income, tighten your belt for the two to four years it will take to complete a program while you work. That’s a hard row to hoe, but well worth the goal: completing the degree free of debt.

Finally, I’d add one more bit of advice:

Caveat emptor!

Investigate and think carefully about any degree program before enrolling—no matter which institution offers it. Some otherwise respectable universities have gone into the diploma mill business—under pressure from legislators and alumni to compete with outfits like the University of Phoenix, university administrators and boards of regents crave to operate their institutions on a business model, even though education is not and should never be a business.

Any degree program that does not require the GRE, the GMAT, the LSE, or a similar entry exam is suspect. My university, for example, offers a very respectable Master of Business Administration, for which applicants must submit GMAT scores. It also offers several knockoff low-residency and online versions of the MBA, none of which requires an entrance exam of any kind. Savvy employers know the difference.

Any fully online degree program should be regarded with deepest suspicion. Any low-residency program should be approached with caution. Any interdisciplinary program that leaves you with a strangely titled degree (“Master of Liberal Studies,” for example) should be avoided. These degrees may get you a perfectly fine job. Maybe not, too.

If higher education is a business, then students are consumers, and they should use as much care in buying the “product” as they do in buying a refrigerator or a dishwasher.

Postscript, June 6, 2009: One other strategy for underwriting a master’s degree without going into permanent hock is to join the military. I didn’t think about this as I wrote the post, first because it’s such a huge commitment and second because IMHO, you should join the military because you want to serve your country, not because you want to extract a lagniappe. If your main motive for signing up is to have the taxpayer cover the cost of your graduate tuition, you really ought to ask yourself whether a master’s degree is worth risking your life. There are higher reasons for serving America.

Images:

Oxford University, Andrew Yong at Wikipedia Commons
U.C. Berkeley, Tristan Harward, at Wikipedia Commons, ShareAlike License

109 in the shade!

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painterM’hijito remarked that Bila the Painter will earn more in two days, painting the exterior woodwork on the downtown house, than either M’hijito or I bring home in a week. And one thing you have to say about painting: you can’t offshore it to India!

On the other hand: what does it really mean to earn more in two days as a skilled tradesman than a white-collar worker earns in a week?

Well… Today we broke another heat record for May 18. By midafternoon, thermometers on M’hijito’s patio, my patio, and SDXB’s patio all registered 109 degrees. That’s in the shade. A hundred-and-nine-degree day is, in a word, HOT. Bila earns his living climbing up and down ladders, hauling paint around, and slathering or spraying the stuff everyplace he can get it. And “everyplace he can get it” is as likely to be in the full sun as in the shade. 

M’hijito took a paid day off today to dance the Workman Waltz. If Bila takes a day off, being self-employed, he doesn’t get paid. At all.

The incredibly complex antique Baldwin lock did not remove readily from the door that Bila planned to sand and refinish. So we had to call the locksmith who specializes in museum pieces, and wait an hour on him. M’hijito and I went to breakfast in the interim. When we got back, Bila was sitting in the front yard gazing into space: the locksmith had yet to show up. If M’hijito and I unavoidably kill a little time on the job, we generally get paid. If Bila wastes time on the job, it’s time that will likely make him late to the next job: again, time he doesn’t get paid for.

Bila pays for the paint out of his fee. I’d guess he’ll buy about $200 worth of Dunn-Edwards’s best.

That brings his pay down to about what I bring home for two weeks—after a furlough day is taken out.

But he still hasn’t bought health insurance, paid self-employed FICA, ponied up other state and federal taxes, paid for the gas to run his truck, put money aside in an IRA…. A fair estimate is that all those costs would consume about 40% of his after-paint gross. 

$950 fee – $200 for paint = $750
$750 – 40% = $450, approximate net pay for about two days’ work

Supposing Bila actually got five days of work a week (a big supposition, especially in the present economy): $225/day x 5 = $1125/week, net

My take-home pay for a week without a furlough day is about $760. So, if Bila works very, very hard, he earns significantly more than I do. But very, very hard is the operative term:

• He’s doing a back-breaking, mind-numbing job outside in 109-degree heat.
• To earn enough to support his family, he has to do it five to seven days a week.
• If he can’t get a job on a given day, he earns nothing.
• If he’s sick or hurt, he earns nothing. 
• Any vacation time he chooses to take is unpaid. 

There’s a lot of paint splattered on Bila’s side of the fence, so it’s hard to tell what color the grass is over there. But I’ll bet it’s not any greener than mine!

Nothing like a 109-degree day to make us wage slaves appreciate what we have.

Images
Housepainter: Lukeroberts at Wikipedia Commons
Paint cans: Sherwin-Williams 

One door closes; another opens

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pvccDrove up to Paradise Valley Community College this afternoon, by way of turning in a mountain of paperwork to HR.

What a pretty campus! Even though the weather is daunting—40 mph winds, blowing dust, threatening clouds—the place is architecturally coherent and pulled together, clean and well maintained…every building is full of light and pretty much absent tenants who look miserable. Over at the department, the head secretary was up on a ladder installing strands of party lights.

—What’s the occasion? say I.
—Graduation, say the assembled staff.

Graduation?

Takes a minute for this to soak in: for heaven’s sake! They’re fêting students who are graduating this spring!

This would require them to treat their students like human beings. How quaint!

You know what? I think I’m going to like working at a college that treats students like human beings. One of our research assistants has been given a weeks-long runaround as she has tried to get an answer to one simple question: can she file her graduation papers in the second summer session, or do they have to be filed in the first session? Whether she keeps her nicely paid assistantship through the first half of the summer depends on the answer. And no. one. will. tell. her! When I asked Her Deanship if she would please cut the red tape and find out on her end, she referred us right back to the same merry-go-round. How can I count the ways I’d rather work where they don’t deal with students that way?

Door-to-door, the drive from the college to my house took exactly 15 minutes this afternoon. Instead of passing through a concrete canyon built of 30-foot-high concrete walls, the freeway goes through scenic hills with a view of the mountains to the north. No train…but no dreary hour-long commute, either. Parking is free and close to offices and classrooms.

So, as it develops, leaving what looks like a plum job (but is only so because no one in the Dean’s office is paying the slightest bit of attention to us, leaving us unmolested to do our work) will not be the end of the world, after all. It will be an opening to a whole new world.

I can’t wait!

A Close Brush with Financial Disaster

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Some years ago, I came very close to jumping off the financial cliff: I seriously considered buying a 100-year-old bed-and-breakfast in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was reminded of this episode by a post at Manely Montana, a blog whose proprietor runs an inn that appears to be very beautiful. All so idyllic.

innat410The Inn at 410 occupied a fine old building, an elegant Victorian house in the middle of Flagstaff’s gentrifying downtown. It was owned by a couple who had moved to Flag several years earlier, having long dreamed of living in a small town. He was a successful businessman—had an MBA and ran the family business in Chicago for many years. At one point, the house had been a Northern Arizona University frat house, and as you can imagine it was quite a mess when the students were done with it. It was, however, a historic house in the center of what was once the town’s ritziest district, formerly inhabited by movers and shakers, some of whom went on to do some moving & shaking on a national level.

They renovated the house to the nines. At the time I stumbled upon it in connection with a story I was writing for Arizona Highways, it was just lovely. Because of the article, they comped me a couple of weekends. I was enchanted.

For a number of years I’d been teaching in a nontenurable position at the Great Desert University’s unhappy west campus. The job was underpaid and the workload was obscene—often I put in 70- and 80-hour weeks, with no overtime pay, and I spent my unpaid summers preparing the following year’s courses. When I started, it was an upper-division and graduate-level campus serving older students, and so the teaching wasn’t intolerable. But now the university was converting the campus to a four-year institution, and suddenly I was being expected to teach freshman English, a task that in the academic world ranks slightly below cleaning the toilets. I had not signed on to teach freshmen, and many years before, after TAing my way through graduate school, I had pledged that I would go on welfare before I taught freshman comp again.

If that weren’t enough, the atmosphere on the campus was toxic. Morale had taken up permanent residence in the sub-basement: everyone was miserable, from the provost’s office on down. At one point two of my colleagues came close to a fist-fight. We kept driving young faculty insane, quite literally. One of my students, a cop, blurted out that she had arrested one of my wacko fellow professors for beating up a young boy—and that guy was not the only one who took a swan-dive off the deep end. We were all swimming in the deep end, truth be told, and I wanted to get out of the water in the worst way.

So I was on the job market. For a time, I’d been applying to anything and everything I thought I might conceivably, by any stretch of the imagination, persuade an employer I could do. But there were never many jobs for the likes of moi, and as I grew older, fewer presented themselves.

A year or so before I made the acquaintance of the Inn at 410’s proprietors, I had fallen in love with Santa Fe. I would have killed to live there. In fact, I applied for a job at a private college there and was told that I was decidedly not their type. I considered applying for an opening at the city newspaper, but the pay was far too low to support anyone in that expensive venue. While I was wandering around the town, I came across a busy, successful bed-and-breakfast near the downtown area. Its owner took time to chat for a few minutes and said that she and her husband had always dreamed of living in Santa Fe—owning an inn was the only way they could afford it, since the place provided them a place to live as well as a living. They were, she claimed, very happy.

So, when the owner of the Flagstaff inn told me that he and his wife wanted to sell the place, he got my attention in a big way.

I started to think seriously about buying the business. Although I had no spouse to help and was not about to get one, Northern Arizona University had a world-class hospitality program. The inn had hired one of its senior-level students as its full-time maitre-d’ and general factotum. The guy was good, and it was clear that he was doing much of the heavy lifting. The proprietors spent a great deal of time hiking, volunteering for The Nature Conservancy, and hob-nobbing with the town’s business class. They would show up to supervise the cooking of breakfast and socialize with guests, and then they were outta there. The grass on their side of the fence looked mighty green.

In the course of considering this scheme, I became friendly with the young man, who clued me to a number of issues, not the least of which was the amount of work and expense entailed in maintaining a century-old building. Not long before, he revealed, they had had to jack up the structure (!) and rebuild its foundation to keep it from collapsing. The place had over a dozen rooms, each of which had to be cleaned and restocked every day—assuming you could keep them occupied. The kitchen was actually a licensed restaurant, with all the regulatory and tax issues that entailed. There was lots more, too.

On the other hand, because it was a business, the Inn made life virtually tax-free for its owners. They lived on the property, meaning the business paid the cost of their quarters. The business owned their vehicle. The business paid their salary. The business paid for their groceries. The business bought their health insurance. Clearly, setting up your entire life as a business had its advantages.

But on the other other hand… After a while I noticed that the proprietors didn’t spend a lot of time together. When the breakfast rush ended, he went off to spend most of the day hiking and bicycling. She disappeared in some other direction. Why, I wondered, did they want out of this arrangement if it was as idyllic as he claimed? I began to suspect that all was not beer and skittles in Paradise. Could it be that their marriage was strained as a result of the stress and demands of running a very public, very work-intensive operation from which they evidently had no easy escape?

When I sat down with the guy to discuss a deal, he offered to sell the inn for something over a million dollars. My house was paid for, and it was worth about a fifth of that—enough to make a down payment. The economy was good at the time, and I would have had no trouble getting a business loan to cover the rest of the sale price. He offered to hang around for a year on a consultant basis, to assist me in learning the business and to help keep it going until I could develop the experience and expertise to operate the inn on my own.

It wasn’t a bad offer. But a million and a half bucks? Wow! It did give one pause.

It gave one a long enough pause to look at other inns that were on the market…and to discover that most of them had been for sale for years. Even in some of the most spectacular and desirable areas of the country, bed and breakfasts do not sell quickly. In other words, if this scheme didn’t work, there was no easy escape plan.

Further investigation showed that one of the reasons the couple wanted to sell—besides the one I suspected to be their real motive—was that a long drought was devastating the tourist business in Flagstaff. The town’s main draw as a tourist venue is not the Grand Canyon, which is a long way off, but a small ski area on the nearby dormant volcano. Although tourists pass through Flag on the way to the Canyon, relatively few of them stay there. They stay at the lodges around the Canyon itself, of course. No snow meant no tourists.

Global warming was already being talked up, and some people (such as the Nature Conservancy types the proprietor hung out with) were predicting that the drought would be a permanent fixture. If that was so, Flagstaff—and the Inn at 410—was withering on the vine.

Looked like Bankruptcy City to me. I declined the offer.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had bought the inn. Other times…well, I can just imagine! I think I made the right decision. It’s never a good idea to get into something without a credible escape plan, and “no credible escape plan” described that scheme to a T.

NAU announced it would its hospitality program, shutting the spigot on quality low-cost hired help. The drought continued for several more years, spurring a massive die-off of the ponderosa forest that covers northern Arizona. Each summer brings huge and dangerous wildfires, some of which encroach on Flagstaff itself. And of course, now that we’re in a deprecession, the hospitality industry in general is suffering.

I managed to escape teaching and land in a decently paid editorial job. It’s boring as hell, but it is a job. Though I’m sure life as an innkeeper would have been interesting, it might have been a bit too interesting. I’m glad I looked before I leaped.