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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.

Networking

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I am sooo bad at it. Networking, that is. I just don’t do well with schmoozing. Any day, I’d rather sit in front of my computer and type. Not that I don’t enjoy other people—I do, as a matter of fact. It’s just that I’m not very comfortable around strangers: don’t know what to say, don’t want to say anything, want to get back to…gardening, cleaning house, editing copy, cooking, eating, shopping, playing with the dog, writing blog posts, reading a book, hiking a mountain, just about anything.

{sigh} It’s four in the morning. In two hours I have to get up and get ready to fly out the door so as to spend the entire darned day—SATURDAY!—at a book publisher’s convention. There are so many things I need to do and so many things I want to do and so many ways I don’t want to spend seven or eight hours sitting around listening to people palaver about how to market your book online. Augh! If we don’t pick up some business today, I am going to croak my peonie!!!

Okay, let’s think positive here. There must be some advice on the Web about how to network effectively.

Hmmm… Here’s a guy who suggests you need to make yourself memorable:
-dress distinctively or at least sharp (heaven help me: my clothes are memorable, all right, for looking dowdy and out of style because I can’t afford the latest new duds and I refuse to wear shoes that hurt my feet!);
-“be fully present,” by which our author seems to mean you should sincerely pay attention to people (or at least pretend to);
-ask questions that cause your interlocutors to tell a story about themselves, an old reporter’s trick;
-find ways to repeat certain key words and phrases—videlicet, your name, your company’s name, your business or industry, your product, and your location; and
-contribute to the conversation, don’t just mumble semiconscious small talk.

Ah ha! I think that last is the stumbling block for me. I don’t have much to contribute to conversation and so tend to turn a lot of pet phrases like “is that so?” and “isn’t that interesting?” (not!).

Another scribbler tells us you should “be genuine and authentic”; I guess that’s the same as my mother’s advice to “just be yourself.” Trouble is, most people don’t seem very impressed with “myself.” She (the writer, not my mother) advises setting some goals for what you want to accomplish at a networking event (that’s easy: get a second client who will feed us at least one new thousand-dollar assignment a month); visiting lots of groups (eeek! one isn’t enough?); holding volunteer positions in organizations (uh huh: soldiers have got something when they say “never volunteer”); and becoming known as a resource for others (comes naturally for us fonts of all wisdom). Seriously: been there, done that…have yet to get business from one of these events.

Here’s another obvious piece of advice: follow up on business cards you collect with e-mails, phone calls, and personal contacts. And it’s another of those networking tricks I never seem to manage to make myself do. I’ve already got a stack of cards from ABPA meetings gathering dust around the house. Interestingly, none of the people who traded cards with me have tried to contact me, either, so I guess I’m not the only one who…well, would rather be dusting than doing this.

Is there ANYONE out there in the whole gigantic Internet who has anything intelligent to say about this?

…dear god… There’s an entire organization devoted to business networking. Of sorts. There’s a newspaper on the subject!

But in answer to the basic question: No. Evidently not.

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

Today’s PF Post at The Copyeditor’s Desk: Freelance fees

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I just spent a couple of hours writing on how freelancers should set their fees, based on posts by Mrs. Micah and by veteran editor Katharine O’More Klopf. The subject seemed especially germane to The Copyeditor’s Desk, and besides…neither Tina nor I have posted there for a while. So if you will, please drop by CED to view Setting Your Freelance Fees, a subject that seems to be growing nearer and dearer to PF bloggers’ hearts as more of us struggle to cope in the faltering economy.

Jobs we’re glad we don’t have

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The neighborhood awoke to the sight of the Little Colorado flowing down the gutter on my side of the street. During the night the water main broke where it connects with Other Daughter and the Son-in-Law’s plumbing system, turning their nicely desert-landscaped yard into a swamp. As we scribble, the City is digging up the kids’ yard with a backhoe. The water is off for all the houses up and down the street and will be for another couple hours.

Fortunately, I happened to notice this an hour or so before the City showed up, allowing time to draw out and filter a few gallons of water. The tap water is full of dirt, but the Brita seems to have screened out the visible particulates. I boiled a couple of gallons so as to refill the dog’s water dish and have a little drinking water. Now I’ll have to replace the filters on the Brita and the refrigerator and run the Brita jug through the dishwasher. {sigh} Ain’t life ruff.

The City’s guys showed up pretty quickly. Other Daughter said they’d noticed the mess when they got up around 8:00 a.m., and the workers were here within 90 minutes or so. And if you think your life is ruff, just consider what it would be like to spend the day after Christmas shoveling water-laden gravel aside and excavating an unhappy resident’s yard. Several times…. The guy who came to my door to report that they were turning off the water said they’d just come from another burst main and would go to a third one directly after this.

It rained so hard last night, a couple of times I thought it was hailing. It was still pouring when I went to sleep around 10:00 or 10:30. So the rock and soil those guys are shoveling is waterlogged to the tenth power. Augh! what a way to make a buck.

One of the things I can’t grasp is the niggling resentment of the union wages autoworkers and other laborers have managed, over decades, to put in place, and the insistence that these folks’ wages should be pushed DOWN rather than that workers competing with them in other countries and in right-to-work (for peanuts) states here should be paid a fair rate. Tradesmen and skilled laborers keep this country running,IMHOone heck of a lot better than the billionaire financiers who put us in our present pickle, than the pretty faces on television and movie screens, than the chemically enhanced athletes that amuse us by chasing a ball around a field, and than Congressional representatives who just voted themselves a raise in their six-figure salaries.

Give the auto workers—and your city’s workers and your kids’ teachers—a raise, and make upper-level management and Congress take a pay cut. Now that would stimulate the economy!

And if you’re not in a job where the public begrudges what you’re paid for the privilege of shoveling mud, be glad of it.

Wah! I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up

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So I’m plodding across the freeway and thinking how much I hate wasting 90 minutes to two hours driving back and forth to the campus when it occurs to me that what I really hate is my job.

Oops! Say what? I hate my job? Come ON! Sure, the pay’s not equitable (my new opposite number is coming in at six figures on a 9-month contract, very annoying), but it’s still a decent living and it ain’t cleaning terlets or flipping burgers. The problem is, I am soooo flicking bored!

Writing the index for the current issue of the renaissance and medieval history annual meant having to read all that stuff AGAIN. Once was quite enough. Twice was more than enough. Three times is decidedly not a charm.While a couple of the essays are pretty interesting (relatively speaking), the archival study where the author notes every single sale of every tiny plot of land in the ninth-century Spanish March, with the name of each buyer and seller, was almost as mind-numbing as the excruciatingly detailed analytical comparison of Bromyard’s Tractatus iuris ciuilis et canonici ad moralem materiam applicati with his Summa praedicantium, a lively work when set next to the endless dissection of Milton’s educational theory and practice.

The index took all day Friday, all day Saturday, half of Sunday, and all of Monday and Tuesday to complete. By the time I sent it off to one of the RAs to be edited, at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, I thought I was gunna die.