Careers | Funny about Money

Discombobulated

October 22, 2008 by funny

Ugh! Spent the entire darned day yesterday building a package to sell The Copyeditor’s Desk to university presses. I hate writing stuff like that.

It’s exactly the same as writing a résumé and cover letter to apply for a job, and just as stressful: not only what do I say and how do I say it, but what is the most effective way to structure a pitch, what do they need and how do I talk about that instead of talking about me, when do I say X and how far do I push Y and how do I get something that should be in the emphatic last position in a graf out of the freaking MIDDLE of the graf without coming up with something that sounds incoherent and….augh! And then I had to targetrésumés for both me and Tina and tweak our track record so the reader will easily spot the work we do that’s relevant to his or her needs…gasp!

After all that, I have one, count it, ONE package ready to mail. Meanwhile, I didn’t get a lick of work done for GDU. I expect this will go easier for the other three presses whose ramparts we need to assault this week: I set up the draft material in boilerplate sections, so that really the only segment that will need to be rewritten to customize for each press is the first paragraph or two. The routine is very much like applying for jobs. The first cover letter is torture, but once you’ve got it on paper, you can reuse a lot of it with relatively light revisions. Ditto therésumé: when you start with the “list of accomplishments” or “relevant skills,” you can adjust those to move the job description’s desiderata higher on the list.

Speaking of job applications, I need to do a bunch more of those, too, in light of Our Beloved President’s recent online fireside chat.

Unfortunately, though, I’m going to be forced to actually work today, as extreme as that sounds. Two new math articles have been sitting on my flashdrive since Friday.

And it’s already 6:37 in the morning. Dang! Gotta run! 😯

Layoffs? Market crash? Great Depression II?

October 13, 2008 by funny

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

May 6, 2009October 8, 2008 by funny

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

How low can I go?

May 6, 2009October 7, 2008 by funny

Tomorrow’s job interview is with a nonprofit organization. So neat is this outfit that I had earmarked it as the first place I would do volunteer work after retiring. The job sounds like more fun than life, and frankly, if I could I would pay them to let me work there. However, I can’t afford that: for the next three or four years, I still hafta make a living.

Because it’s a nonprofit and the ad is for someone with a bachelor’s degree and three years’ experience, I’m assuming they’re budgeted for a low salary. Of course, GDU is a nonprofit, of a sort; and what I earn is pretty middling. Others whose jobs are related to my kind of work earn more. Nevertheless, my salary is exactly at the total income for an average four-person family in Arizona—meaning, I imagine, that I earn about twice the average Arizonan’s wage, since most families have two earners.

That notwithstanding, my expenses have expanded to fill all my income’s available space. So, if this proposed new employer offers me half of what I’m earning, I can’t accept it, because I wouldn’t have a chance of living on it. However, because I’m over 59 1/2 and can draw down my IRAs, I could get by on a significant pay cut. Drawing down the amount my advisor and I had planned when I retire would make this possible. And since I could in theory retire right now, there’s a certain demented sense to the idea of taking a small draw-down to supplement a reduced salary.

A reasonable amount to expect from this source is about $10,000 a year, since I’m already using part of said planned drawdown to cover my share of the Investment House mortgage.

I figured out how much gross salary I would need to get by in several scenarios. The amount I’d need ranges from $47,000 to $50,720, depending on a variety of circumstances. Then I estimated net pay on those amounts, given that my current net pay is 63% of gross. From these estimates, I calculated how much I would get monthly, and what a single paycheck would be if paid bimonthly and if paid biweekly.

Charmingly Excel crashed when I tried to get rid of the page break lines in one worksheet (does anyone know how to un-show those things?). This lost all the data I’d worked on today…though I’d have sworn I saved at some point along the line. Must not have.

At any rate, if M’hijito pays $100/month more toward the Investment House mortgage (he says he could cover more than that, actually) and I pay off the Renovation Loan, I still would have enough in savings to make it possible to live on the net income from a $47,000 salary, and to do so without serious pain.

Although the Renovation Loan’s monthly payment is fairly modest—only $170 a month—during the winter months it’s my largest monthly bill, and during the summer, the second largest. In addition, I’m setting aside $204 a month to pay toward principal. I haven’t been paying it directly to the principal each month, because I foresaw something like the present chain of events and figured I’d better save all the paydown money in cash accounts to double as emergency funds. The monthly set-aside figure—the maximum I can pay after all my other bills are covered—brings the ding on my monthly income to $374, which for me is significant. It’s twice my largest winter bill and $150 more than my largest summer bill. Get rid of that, and I can live on a smaller salary.

Well, we may find out tomorrow what the proposed new employer can pay. Let’s hope it’s enough!

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

May 6, 2009October 5, 2008 by funny

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…

On the trail of the elusive job…

May 6, 2009October 4, 2008 by funny

I’m not going to sit here and wait for the ax to fall. My source has had further confirmation of the rumor that everyone in my job classification is about to be laid off, and, although my own spy in midlevel administration hasn’t heard the story, he remarked that it was entirely believable and that his unit is so strapped there’s some talk of closing down entire academic programs.

A couple of days ago I applied for a job at a regional nonprofit—an organization whose mission and philosophy seem very laudable and that has a high reputation among nonprofits. Yesterday I applied for three more jobs.

Given that we’re supposed to be teetering on the brink of another Great Depression, it’s surprising how many job openings are out there, with pay in the general range of my present salary. Now it’s true, my salary is middling at best—but I’m not starving and I don’t really need to earn much more.

One of the community colleges is advertising for a marketing director. I used to know the woman who held that job about 15 years ago. She really loved it. And it pays $9,000 more than I’m earning.

The strategy right now is binary (oh! can you believe I know a word like that!?):

Possibility #1: Get another job comparable to the one I have. This will carry me over to full retirement age, whereinatupon my problems will be solved.

Possibility #2: Collect early Social Security and start a 5% drawdown of tax-deferred savings; get a part-time job paying around $14,000 (the max you can make before the government starts confiscating early Social Security payments) and limp along until I reach full Social Security age. Then turn back the $31,000 S.S. will have paid me, reapply and obtain full Social Security (about $400 a month more than I would get now) and collect the returned taxes.

Both of these are problematic.

Scenario 1 could require me to (gasp!) actually work. Horrors. I’ve honed Creative Malingering to such a high art, I’m not sure I remember how to work. Seriously: at my age it’s unlikely anyone will hire me for a full-time job. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, of course; but truth to tell, it’s probably a waste of time to apply.

Scenario 2 entails a significant drop in income. I may be forced to sell my house (if I can!) and move to Sun City, where costs are a lot lower. I suppose I could rent it and use the rental income to pay a mortgage out there, but the tax complications make my head spin. By the time I’ve paid the various tax gouges, I’d probably come out way behind.

At any rate, one of the jobs I applied for yesterday is a part-timer: driving the tourist train at the zoo! LOL! Can you imagine? Actually, I think it could be a TON of fun during the winter months, when the weather’s good. And it would keep the wolf from the door for nine or ten months, until the heat comes back up. I’m not going to drive around in an open vehicle in 110-degree heat. But if I keep looking for work something better should come along before next summer.

My strategy is to consider the broad categories of organizations where I’d like to work: nonprofits, colleges, and publishing houses. Then brainstorm all the employers I can think of in those categories. And then go to their websites and check their HR pages—once every week. I’m also checking job links at various trade groups I belong to: Arizona Book Publishing Association, Society for Technical Communication, and the like. To ensure that I check each possible employer every Monday, I’m building a table with date columns to check off.

????News Flash!???

This afternoon as I was racing out the door to meet a friend, one of the employers I applied to yesterday called and asked me to come in for an interview!

Good grief! Somebody wants to interview me! One day after they get my resumé & cover letter! That is astonishing.

The interview is set up for Tuesday afternoon. I was able to squeeze into the beauty salon Monday to get my hair cut—I’m looking pretty shaggy after a summer of neglect and pool water. And…gosh. I haven’t interviewed in so long I can’t even imagine how to prepare, other than to get the hair styled.
The place is situated in the center of a lovely desert park—absolutely gorgeous. I have no idea whether they have cubes inside those rustic adobe buildings or what the rate of compensation is. But the pay rate may not matter: not much is a heck of a lot better than nothing. It would be a wonderful place to work, and the job—an educational program manager—could be a lot of fun.

w00t!

The Continuing Saga…