Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Decluttering Hell: File Cabinets

by

Lookit this…

P1020418

And this…

P1020419

And this!!!

P1020420

This weekend I spent seven hours shoveling out file cabinets!

The accountant, who’s also doing my bookkeeping, would like to get file folders that contain only a few months’ worth of statements and receipts, rather than a pile that requires me to rent a llama to get the junk to her office. These are records that need to be saved for seven years, and so to accommodate her wish, I had to break free some space in the file cabinets in the office and the garage. The current bank account and charge card records reside in my desk file drawers, which have just enough room to hold them. Having to create duplicate files and add them to yet more hanging file folders ain’t gonna work.

The four-drawer garage file cabinet was jammed, and the two-drawer model in the office was also about maxed.

Problem is, I never know what to keep and what is safe to throw out. The ex- (the corporate lawyer, who presumably should know) kept every scrap of paper having to do with finances, jobs, etc. all the way back to before the beginning of our 25-year-long marriage. He kept every check he ever wrote — and in those days that was quite a few. I expect to this day he has some set of bureau drawers packed full of that kind of stuff.

That sort of imprinted me with the importance of keeping anything for which, by the remotest chance, you might be called to account.

All right…so, it was off to the Accountant from Nirvana to get the facts on record storage. Via e-mail, the Q&A:

•  What about statements and paperwork for homeowner’s and auto insurance, dating back to the mid-1990s? Can that stuff go? I have a new insurance company. Is there any reason I might be asked to prove that I had a car or house covered in the past? If I have to keep some of it, how much to I need to keep?

Keep for 3 years.

• Statements from old, long-closed investment management accounts? Statements from the 403(b) at GDU, which has now been rolled into my big IRA? Statements for mutual funds that I no longer own? These go back 15 or 20 years. At one point Reimer (investment manager) asked me to come up with evidence for the “cost basis” of some Vanguard account. I don’t even know what a cost basis is, much less how to find it in that mountain of paper. Apparently he wanted to know how much I had originally invested, back in the 1980s. I managed to unearth what I thought was the first statement from Vanguard, but he said that wasn’t it. Do I have to keep all these stacks of old statements? 

Keep the December statement only (or whatever month shows a good summary for the entire year).

• Bank and credit union statements for accounts that have been closed? Some date back to the 1990s. Some are more recent. 

Save for 7 years.

• How about pay stubs dating back to my first pay period on the job at GDU? At one point my first paycheck came in handy…at retirement, GDU tried to claim I’d started a year later than I really had, thereby trying to screw me out of a year’s worth of RASL credit, to the tune of several thousand dollah (yeah, i know it’s a huge faceless mindless institution, but in my paranoia i do not believe for a minute that there’s no agency behind that kind of thing). Should all those job records be kept? Some of them? Which ones, if only a portion?

Toss them all once you receive your W-2 for that year.

• How about records of annual reviews, student evaluations, CYA notes on formal proceedings with a particularly nasty colleague that could have led to a lawsuit? Don’t know if anything could still come out of it — the student involved has since moved on, and there surely must be some kind of statute of limitations. What on earth to do with THAT pile of paper???? 

I don’t know about those types of professional issues.

•  Evidence of malfeasance on the part of a former chair, notoriously incompetent but now retired? Is there a statute of limitations that might apply to colleagues and former ASU employees who might have a grievance against this woman?  

Again, I don’t know about how  long you would save these items as they relate to standards that are part of the education profession.

Well, this was all very informative. Also very work-making. It meant I had to go through yards of hanging files, sifting out the December statements for many more investment accounts than I can add on my fingers. The ex- and I divorced in 1992. Over twenty years of obsessive document-filing resided in those cabinets! Two of the banks that issued scores of monthly statements no longer exist. Neither do two or three of the investment firms that managed my money before Stellar came on the scene.

I threw out 18 or 19 years’ worth of home and auto insurance paper, 11/12ths of 21 years’ worth of old investment statements, 14 years’ worth of old bank and credit-card statements, five credit cards from long-defunct accounts, and any number of miscellaneous archaeological finds.

An Internet search brought up the specifics of Arizona’s statutes of limitations. For most civil cases, it’s one year. The litigious student who got into the fight with my scoundrelish former colleague is now a successful real estate agent, so she’s unlikely to file a lawsuit even if she could. Other former colleagues who still have gripes against GDU have missed their chance to include the noxious chair in their complaints. My former secretary, La Morona, whom I managed to force out by riding her to do the job right until she finally gave up and quit, also has missed the boat, which sailed four years ago.

So I threw out everything that had to do with GDU.

Then it was into the house to clear out the office file cabinet.

This thing has fast become overwhelmed by the constant flood of dead trees from Medicare’s ancillary insurance companies. Medigap carriers AND Part D drug plan carriers, it develops, send you a three-page (minimum) document called an “Explanation of Benefits.” These things list Every. Single. Doctor’s appointment; Every. Single. Test you take; Every. Single. Procedure that is done on you; Every. Single. Prescription you fill… every goddamn thing any medico or para-medico can think of to charge you for, world without end, amen.

These documents are well-nigh incomprehensible. Without training in the intricacies of the medical bureaucracy, the only way you could figure out what the things mean is to spend several hours poring over each one, studying every entry, looking up the mysteries on the Internet, and trying to relate the mess to reality. Such as it is.

Look up a question like “how long to save EOBs” and you discover nothing is said about when to dispose with this tsunami of paper. Indeed, at least one federal site implies that you should keep the litter forever by remarking that you can use past EOBs to reconstruct your health history, in the event of some question or catastrophic illness.

Another site states that insurance companies are required to store EOBs electronically and can disgorge copies on demand. Uh huh. So, in theory, you should be able to discard them as soon as you’re sure your medical provider has actually been reimbursed.

But yet another source (sorry, didn’t have time to save URLs while heaving paper) tells you that you should match each EOB with the medical provider’s corresponding bill, checking to be sure that the correct procedures were charged (it’s your job, as it develops, to ride herd on Medicare fraud) and searching for reasons to challenge any denials of coverage. Then you are to clip each EOB to each statement and save them until tax time. If you’ve been sick enough that you might be able to claim a medical deduction, then you have to haul all this stuff out, revisit it, and use it to document your deduction. If not, then you should save it for at least a year.

Why not? Who has anything else to do with their time, eh?

By the way, each EOB conveniently includes your name, address, birth date, and Social Security number. 🙂 Ain’t that grand? So all of those things have to be shredded or burned.

They’re not the only offenders. Bank One and Chase Bank print your credit-card number (!) on their statements along with your name and address; American Express does not.

Shoveling all this crap out resulted in a mountain of paper  that completely filled the 18-cubic-foot recycling barrel.

P1020422

And that was just the stuff that didn’t need to be obliterated.  The pile of paper spread all over the floor around a trash can and the dining-room chairs, pictured in the third image above, is all stuff that has to be shredded or burned. Then there’s this stack of paper from a prior, half-baked file-drawer purge, which I just haven’t had time or energy to figure out what to do with:

P1020421

I was going to burn those five (!) folders full of defunct documents over the winter, but we had no-burn regimes every night when it was cold enough to use the fireplace. And besides, burning paper in the fireplace results in a godawful mess to clean up. And it stinks.

My shredder is already on its last legs. So the options are

a) to pay someone to shred the stuff, which I’m just too ornery to do;
b) to go buy a new shredder (which I probably ought to do, since mine has to be coaxed); or
c) burn the whole pile in the backyard charcoal barbecue.

Undoubtedly, c) is the cheapest option. However, as we scribble it is 105 degrees in the shade. The barbecue is  parked in the full sun. Outdoor stuff around the neighborhood is, as you can imagine, quite dry, and that raises a concern about hot ashes floating around.

So, I suppose I’m going to have to get up off my duff and drive to OfficeMax or Costco to get a goddamn shredder.

Lord, how I hate this kind of thing! No wonder my blood pressure is through the freaking roof. Whose isn’t?

How Is It Possible? Another Day from Hell!

by

The past four or five days, I’ve been enjoying yet another goddamn health quirk: sudden stabs of agonizing pain in the eye, as though someone were pushing a needle through the backside of my left eyeball.

This has happened before, but in the past it’s only occurred once and then it’s gone away. This time, it’s not going away. And, as usual, a visit to the Hypochodriac’s Treasure Chest that is the Internet induces raw panic. Raw panic does nothing for one’s sense of well-being.

Awake at 1 in the morning, after a pre-bedtime jolt that felt like my eyeball was about to rupture. Whiled away the wee hours editing some pretty damned awful copy. Went back to bed around 4:00 forgetting to set the alarm clock so I could get out the door by 6:45. Slept until well after dawn.

And so missed my 7:30 meeting. And, interestingly, for a change there was a reason I was supposed to show up.

Got Young Dr. Kildare’s front office staff on the phone at 25 after 8:00. They suggested I should present myself to YDK at 9:00 a.m. sharp.

He observed that there wasn’t a thing  he could do about it. I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist. I said I’d tried, but the earliest I could get in is a week from tomorrow. He said that would never do. I needed to be seen right now. He ordered his front office staff to find a practitioner and run interference with his or her front office staff.

They got me in to a doctor located in one of the city’s darkest slums, at 1:00 p.m.

My class runs from noon to 1:15. Said slum is a 40-minute drive from Heavenly Gardens Community College. I fly into campus, planning to dismiss class with a list of things to study for the Phaque Phinal.

I don’t bargain on Ms. Grandmère showing up with a gallon of milk and two packages of cooked-up mix brownies.

Nor do I bargain on today’s batshit craziness.

I appoint Ms. Grandmère as my unofficial substitute teacher and say “If anyone comes in here, tell them you’re the instructor.”

She says, “But I was a college dropout!”

I say, “That’s OK. I was a high-school dropout.”

The party is under way as I shoot out the door.

Run to my car, rocket across the freeway, navigate one of the scariest parts of the inner city, find said doc’s office. I’ve brought my laptop with me, because I have a rush editorial job to do, one that will pay decently, and I just know this last minute cram-me-into-the-schedule business is going to mean I get to cool my heels in the waiting room forever and aye.

When I get there, I turn on my computer and…wait. And wait. And wait. It won’t boot up. Mentally, I try to guess how much this apparent crash is going to cost me, right at the moment at which I decide to quit my job.

(As it develops, the thing was trying to download some new “critical” goddamn Microsoft updates — WHAT IS IT WITH THESE GUYS THAT THEY CAN’T GET THEIR SOFTWARE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME AROUND? — and because it couldn’t access a wireless connection, it hung. So I guess one thing, count it, (1), didn’t go totally wrong today.)

Finally I get in to see the doc. He’s an old guy, gringo but to my delight fluent in Spanish and not the least bit afraid of bureaucratic rules forbidding discussion of health-care issues in the native language of “illegals.” I like him, though I question his skills as an up-to-date diagnostician.

He decides I suffer from episcleritis and keratitis and recommends, in addition to four daily doses of prednisone drops, a hefty round of Motrin. I point out that in the ton of paperwork they made me fill out is mention of my allergy to the active ingredient in Motrin. He is dismayed to learn I am allergic to NSAIDs in general, since that is the mainstay of what he regards as the treatment for whatever I have.

By the time I escape his office, it’s two p.m. and I’ve had nothing to eat all day. I’m hungry. I take the Rx for prednisone and head for the pharmacy at my favorite Safeway, figuring I can pick up some food and a couple of foamydelicious canned beers to ease my general angst.

At the Safeway pharmacy, I encounter not a pharmacist but an assistant whose backwoods English is so illiterate as to draw notice, even here in lovely inland Arizona. After making me stand in line and then making me stand around some more while she figures out who I am and how to serve me, she announces that the pharmacist is on break and I should come back later this afternoon for the eye drops. I say I am tired, hungry, and in pain, that I have no intention of waiting half the day to get some prednisone eyedrops that no doubt are sitting on their shelves, that I can’t see to drive anyway, and that I want the prescription back so I can take it to the Walgreen’s across the street.

I practically have to throw her down on the floor and wrest the prescription from her fat, sweaty fist to get it back from  her.

Having achieved this, I proceed across the street, where the pharmacist forks over the eyedrops in about 30 seconds.

Starved, I stick some frozen sweet-potato fries in the oven and defrost a tiny piece of steak to throw on the grill. The steak is freezer-burned. Defrost another tiny piece from a newer package; cook both so as to feed the substandard piece to the dog. Phone rings. SDXB. Can’t make him understand that as soon as I’m finished eating and drinking myself into a well deserved stupor, I’m going to bed.  He keeps saying he’ll call me back after I have time to eat.

Administer prednisone, which requires lying down with eyes closed, while listening to SDXB talk. Get off the phone. Fix breakfast/lunch/dinner; overcook steak. Pained eye is so dilated it looks like the eye of an excited cat at midnight. Can barely see through it.

Decide to STET the appointment with the other eye quack on the 14th, since I suspect the old guy gave me a cursory look and had no clue what he was talking about but instead made a quick guess — particularly since I have exactly zero symptoms of keratitis and because he speculated the thing was some sort of allergic reaction, a theory that makes little or no sense. If there’s an improvement over the next day or two, bueno, I’ll cancel. But if not, at least I’ve got a foot in another door.

Never did get to take a nap. It’s almost 6:00 p.m. If I go to sleep now, which I desperately want to do, I’ll be awake at 10 p.m. and that will be that. Dog  hasn’t had her evening feast, anyway. Eyes hurt.

Entire day has shattered into tiny shards like a wine glass dropped on the kitchen floor. I have gotten NOT ONE THING done.

More Days from Hell

by

Ugh, ugh, ugh! Will this never stop?

Yesterday:

• Up at 4 am.
• Blood test bright & early: H. pylori or not?
• Noon class, the one that takes a gigantic chunk out of my work day
• Take the disruptive kid by the hand, sit her down in a conference room with my chairman, and tell her how the cow ate the cabbage
• Race to the creative writing class for which I’m substituting: another 2½  hours

The day is done by the time I get home. Between 4 and 6:45 a.m., wrote two blog posts, answered e-mail, responded to blog commenters, put issues on paper for unruly student, hustled a graphic artist friend to do our brochure, watered plants, fed the dog, bolted down a chicken sandwich, and flew out the door. After class: too exhausted to move. Ate dinner, fell into bed.

On the docket today:

• Feed dog; forget watering plants, forget making bed, forget any and all other routine tasks
• 7:30 a.m. class
• Another confrontation: student who hasn’t shown up for 5 of the 10 class meetings turned in a failing paper; expects to be allowed to turn in a paper she didn’t do several weeks ago, asks to be forgiven for all the absences, and thinks she’s going to pass the course.
• Race from that to meeting with client.
• Race from client to Chamber of Commerce meeting
• Race home, try to work
• Choir practice: 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

I won’t get any work done, of course, because I’ll be too tired. I got up at 1:15 a.m.  Worked, spending part of the time trying to decipher nervy bird-brained student’s incomprehensible paper, 3 pages with no paragraph breaks. Went back to bed at 4. I’m now about to be late for class and haven’t even had time to brew a cup of coffee.

Bathtub’s full. Gotta run!

Report from the Ramparts of Hell

by

{moan} I think I’m gunna die but that’s not possible because I’ve already died and gone to Hell, which is where I spent the entire accursed day.

Actually, the day started out OK, but it swiftly went downhill. It was a stressful day whose prospect has been causing frissons of NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO IT all week long. Is it possible that stress could influence the bellyache?

Awake at 3 a.m., unable to go back to sleep. Hungry & headachey; ate a piece of cheese & three figs; had coffee. Didn’t want to have an actual breakfast because I had to go to a breakfast meeting as dawn cracked and didn’t want to be rude by refraining from eating.

6:45 a.m.: raced to said meeting. Knew there’d be no chance for lunch and so ordered a blueberry pancake, bacon, & tea. Stomach was already upset when I got there; this didn’t help. Converted burpy to urpy.

The minute the meeting broke up, flew across the city to the new gastroenterologist’s office; made it on time. Conferred with her. Liked her a lot. She agreed with Young Dr. Kildare that I probably don’t have cancer, probably have developed gastric reflux disease, that it’s unlikely to go away soon, and that for the rest of my life I will be taking a drug that saps calcium out of my already osteopenic bones and is known to cause clinical depression. She also agreed that it made reasonable sense to do a noninvasive test for H. pylori, given my history of living in a Third-World country, before moving forward with an endoscopy. In fact, she felt an endoscopy is unnecessary.

She wants to do a blood test. I said the Mayo doc had opined that a positive result for H. pylori proved only that one was once exposed to the pathogen, not that one was presently infected. She begged to differ: if you test positive, she said, it means the microorganism is still resident in your gut. If you have not been treated with several rounds of antibiotics combined with proton pump inhibitors, then you are still infected. Therefore, in the absence of previous treatment for Helicobacter, a positive result means you are infected. She said she would treat me for H. pylori if she could prove I have it. So…that was reassuring.

Out the door. Not enough time to go home between the doctor’s appointment and class.

Trudged up to campus, a 45-minute drive. Stood (on the sore goddamned foot!) in front of a computer terminal passing another 35 minutes until class started. Steered students to computer commons, for librarian’s presentation.

Had to deal with unruly student (again!). Kid is out of control. She is just completely batshit. DAMN it, twelve more goddamn weeks of this??????

Computers went down. Librarian was unable to do her presentation. She filled time talking about life in China, whence she came. Some students interested, some bored stiff. Afterward she wanted to set another date, so now I’ll have to drag them over there again next week. This screws up my carefully orchestrated schedule, but I think I can do it by killing a busywork assignment.

Tina, trying to cope with her usual overload, sends worried e-mail. I finally escape and get home.

 Stomach royally upset and actually hurting by the time I get back to the house. Significant heartburn. Annoying after ten days of feeling pretty good. Very, very annoying.

Gulp down some disgusting generic Gaviscon. Has no discernible effect.

A plagiarized paper surfaces. I give it a 0 and copy the chair; now will have to deal with THAT next week, god effing DAMN it.

Not hungry but decide to try some yogurt with honey, which sometimes is soothing. Feel marginally better, but not much.

 Exhausted. Field some e-mails, stare glassy-eyed at news sites for some indefinite period. After a while, recover enough to continue working on website, hugely updating it, writing new pages. It now looks pretty good.

It’s after 7 p.m. The dog is whining and nagging at me, I’m sort of hungry but afraid to fix much food because I’m afraid it’ll make me sicker. The dog hasn’t been fed and is running out of food. I have no more meat to cook for her and don’t feel even faintly like grinding up veggies for her, either. Have canned dog food but that stuff always gives her the runs. May have to feed it to her, though.

Tomorrow, another doctor’s appointment, lunch with friends, all of which will put me behind even further on the various to-do’s I’ve set up for myself.

Of this week’s to-do’s, I’ve done ten of the twenty projects & tasks I listed. Some of them didn’t get done because the website needed to be updated and improved before moving on to things that would entail posting links at various networking groups’ sites.

Done:

• Joined Local First Arizona.
• Fixed Tina’s CE Desk e-mail.
• Reorganized and rewrote entire website for client.
• Downloaded Google Contacts into Excel; used that to start a database and start preparing a hard-copy address/contacts book for CE Desk.
• Revamped the CE Desk website.
• Started building files for new contract workers.
• Cleaned out space to hold files for the same.
• Compared costs of Business Networking International (BNI), National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO),  & Trustegrity vs. probable marketing value; decided NAWBO is the best bet.
• Got in touch with two previous employees, schmoozed.
• Sent receipt to client.

NOT done:

• Look into Scottsdale Airpark business publication, for ads & possible PR opportunities.
• Come up with articles ideas for the same, for Phoenix Business Journal, for Scottsdale Chamber’s publication.
• Call Chamber’s director to discuss publicity; try to volunteer as ambassador.
• Set up a calendar on the iPad and try to get into the habit of using the damn thing (but realized that’s not going to happen…I’m unlikely to fiddle with that).
• Join NAWBO.
• Track down the third former employee who, I think, would be good to keep in touch with.
• Finish the database.
• Write this month’s newsletter.
• Bill website client for 5 hours of work. And, come to think of it, three earlier hours of work.
• Scan and e-deposit two other clients’ checks.

 Pending:

• Volunteered for Habitat for Humanity; have to meet them at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.
• Choir director thinks we’re going to show up at 8:00 on Sunday morning.

I don’t want to. I hate racing around at dawn and hate this stupid schedule with two 7:30 a.m. classes a week and a 7:30 meeting in Scottsdale and do not want to fly out the door at 7:30 Sunday morning and I. need. a. BREAK!

No wonder my stomach hurts.

Live-Blogging from Hell

by

Mwa ha ha!  You’ll recall I thought it was a lovely day this morning? Even vacation-like? Well, when you think about it, nano- means very, very, excessively extremely small. That does describe the extent of today’s minivacation.

Before long I get around to loading the sheets in the washer. Check one item off the list.

Next quickie project is to water the potted plants outside, which fortunately are fairly close to the side door to the garage, where the washer & dryer reside. I reach over to turn off the spigot and hear this husky “drip-drip-drip” and by golly it’s coming from inside the garage.

The garage sink, into which the washer drains, is COMPLETELY PLOGGED UP and water is now pouring onto the floor.

Shut off the spin cycle. Get the plunger. Plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge to no avail.

Call the plumber. He’ll come over sometime this afternoon.

Try to mop the water up off the floor. Lost cause. Open the garage door, move the car outside, get the wide broom, sweep puddles of water out onto the driveway.

The washer is now full of soapy sheets and white underwear. Pour cold water into the bathtub. Haul out the undies, wring as much soapy water out as my ancient hands will permit. Rinse them out in the tubful of water, wring, hang on plastic hangers to dry. Decide I’d just as soon not leave the sheets sitting the the washer all day. Remember how  my mother and I used to have to rinse all the clothes and linens, including my father’s enormously heavy khakis, in the big utility sink in the service porch, then drag them out to the backyard and hang them up on the clotheslines. If a shamal (a sandstorm) came rolling in from the desert or a rain squall washed ashore from the Persian Gulf, we would have to run to grab the clothes off the line before the flying dirt or water hit.

Those were the good old days. Not.

Funny. The plumbing never seemed to back up in those halcyon times.

Haul the sheets into the bathroom, rinse them in the tub, wring them as best as I can, drop them back in the bucket, haul them to the backyard and hang them on the makeshift clotheslines out there.

Hm. Walking through the kitchen, I notice that the kitchen sink is backed up, too. Call the plumber to report this, so he’ll know what he’s contending with. He says that means the kitchen line we thought we’d unplugged a few days didn’t really get unplugged. He’s armed with all his machinery.

It’ll be a while. The really BIG thing I needed to do today was to file The Copyeditor’s Desk’s annual report with the Corporation Commission. I’m late, and probably accruing late fees as the days pass. But it’s easy: get online, enter the corporation’s registration number, update a form, fork over about a hundred bucks, and click “done.”

Sounds easy, anyway.

But….

I get up to retrieve my wallet, wherein resides the corporate credit card.

It’s not in my purse.

It’s not in my class junk bag.

It’s not in the car.

IT. IS. FUCKIN’. GONE!!!!!!!

I can’t find my wallet anywhere. Nowhere. Anyplace. Noplace!!!!!!!

Maybe I left it at the window & door guy’s shop when I took out a credit card to pay him. Of course, they’re “family oriented” and close over the weekend. No one there.

Okay. So…can I find the credit card number and just enter the damn thing at the Corporation Commission’s site? It means taking a chance that someone is madly charging up truck tires and boom boxes on that card, but hey. All I have to do is say I didn’t realize it was gone when I was submitting forms online.

Well. No. I can’t find the credit card number. My file folder full of statements is over at the accountant’s. Fortunately she lives across the street. She comes over with the statements, and with advice:

CALL. AMERICAN. EXPRESS. NOW. NOT. LATER!

And while you’re at it, call the Mastercard vendor, too. Do not even THINK of waiting until Monday when you can get the window dude on the phone!

Oshitodamnohell…

BUSINESS OWNER: Okay, but how’s about I post the annual report first?

ACCOUNTANT: You could probably get away with that.

Welp, we find the full account number in a piece of correspondence AMEX sent at the time I opened the account (otherwise, they show only the last four digits on their statements).

So I sit down to do the annual report and…that’s when I realize I don’t know when the card expires.

Rifle through all the papers and receipts in the files: no clue.

Damn.

So, get on the phone to AMEX and Mastercard to report missing-or-stolen card. They cancel the accounts and say they will reissue new cards. While chatting with the AMEX CSR, realize that holy god! My flicking Medicare card was in that wallet, and Medicare kindly stamps your goddam SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER on the card and then demands that you carry it everywhere with you! Have a near melt-down on the phone.

Moving on… Transfer the amount of down payment for the windows from savings over to checking and use that to pay the balance on the Mastercard, with which I paid the window guy.

After all these tergiversations, I remember—a day late and a dollar short—that at one point along the line I photocopied the contents of that wallet. Dig this out, and yes, it shows the Medicare card, a Mastercard, two AMEX cards, a driver’s license… Hmmm….Apparently I also had a J.Jill card in there.

Can’t get a human being at J.Jill, only the MOST infuriating robo-answerer in creation. Only option there is to cancel the card altogether. Good. Less opportunity to charge stuff up.

Now I am without a charge card. And I charge everything. I do not carry cash. I buy gas at Costco, and you have to use your AMEX card to buy gas there, unless you go inside and buy a cash card (which I’ll have to do tomorrow, with a check, since I have to drive from proverbial pillar to annoying post next week).

The plumber shows up. “This looks bad,” says he.

He breaks out his rotorooter tool and climbs on the roof. As I write this, it is 109 degrees in the shade of the back porch. You don’t even want to think about what the temperature is like in the full glare of the sun atop a dark roof.

In the presence of another human being, my hysteria abates from its high pitch. A vague memory arises: didn’t I read some PF blogger’s advice somewhere that a person should take her Medicare card out of her wallet and stash it someplace in the house? And didn’t I…did I?…act on that?

Dredge through a file drawer to find the hanging folder for Medicare, and therein find a file labeled À la carte. And hot dang! There’s the damnfool Medicare card!

Somewhere along the line, for one brief shining moment, I experienced a flicker of common sense. A miracle!!!! Whoever has my wallet does not have my Social Security number.

What. a. freaking. nightmare.

…..oh, but it gets better….

[PLUMBER walks into kitchen and runs water in the sink]

HOMEOWNER: Hm. Looks like it’s running.

PLUMBER: Actually not. It’s plugged up solid.

HOMEOWNER: Get the jackhammer.

PLUMBER: That’s what I’m doin’!

I think he’s joking. I hope.

PLUMBER goes back on the roof, having asked me to stand next to the sink and watch what happens. Spends another ten minutes laboring with the drain snake.

He comes down and opines that the drain is now clear.

I remark that I can’t recall blocked pipes when I was a little kid.

“Well, people didn’t rely on the plumbing as much then. We didn’t have dishwashers, and a lot of people didn’t even have washers in their homes.”

Right. And when water came out of a faucet, enough came out to matter…

Moving on, he notices a gallon of vinegar sitting on the garage table—I use it in the dishwasher. He says, “If we could pour a gallon of that down the drain, it would be good.”

I say, “How about ammonia?”

Says he, “That would be even better.”

I haul out a half-gallon bottle of ammonia. “Pour it all down the kitchen sink,” he says. “And use some of it to clean the sink!”

I put on a pair of rubber gloves and proceed as directed. We let the ammonia sit there for ten or twenty minutes. Then fill the sinks—what with the hateful low-flow kitchen faucet, it takes another ten or twenty minutes to fill the kitchen sinks. I ask if it would be possible to get one of those plastic faucets, like the one on the utility sink, that actually works and put it on the kitchen sink. He thinks (erroneously) that I’m kidding.

It’s 3:03 p.m. I have not done the annual report (nor will I, now, until Tuesday or Wednesday), I have not picked up the piles of paper off my desk, I have not read the rest of the client’s MS, I have not read any part of the ARC awaiting attention, I have not printed out the stuff about the windows and filed them, I have not gone to Costco (nor can I, until new credit cards come in), I have not graded student papers, I have not cleaned the floors or dusted, I have not washed the windows. I have not scanned and deposited the most recent check from Google Adsense. My hands are burning from scrubbing sinks and sink grids with Barkeeper’s Friend. It is hotter than Hell in here. I am going to bed, perhaps never to arise.

With any luck.

 

 

Entertaining for Fun and Profit

by

There! Everything is mise en place, the sausages are on the grill, the water’s heating for the coffee, and I have seven minutes to spare. As soon as my friends get here for this morning’s little brunch and tête a tête, all that will remain is to flip the meat a couple of times, toss some milk and flour in the blender, whirl the stuff around, pour it into a hot pan with melted butter, and stick the thing in the oven. Fifteen or twenty minutes later: voilà! A brunch that can’t be beat.

Well. It could be beat if I were serving something like champagne, tequila sunrises, or bloody Mary’s. But they get coffee and grapefruit juice. This is Monday morning, for hevvinsake.

La Maya and I have invited our realtor friend, whom we’ll call JS here, for a nice brunch and some prospecting conversation. He’s interested in laying the groundwork for future client relationships (La Maya and La Bethulia have expressed some disenchantment with their long-term realtor), and she and I are both interested in learning whether the real estate business is worth pursuing for retired academics.

La Maya has another eight or ten years before she can retire, though she’s expressed an interest in retiring at the earliest possible moment (like, oh…maybe tomorrow?). I’m already on the street, having been laid off two years ago and found that no one will hire an old bat to do anything, at least not anything that pays as much as minimum wage.

I need to earn more than adjunct teaching pays—not much more, actually—and it needs to come in year-round. La Maya thinks she’ll need something after retirement to keep herself active and to help her and La Bethulia continue to live in the style to which they intend to remain accustomed.

She would be a great sales person, because she has a warm and engaging personality. Me…not so much. I’m a writer because sitting in my garret suits me, and in fact it may be the only thing I can do. But still…I do stand up in front of 25 or 30 adult students on a regular basis, so maybe I can pass for something less hermitic.

* * *

Several hours later

That came off nicely. The food was good. The dog was a pest. The human company was convenable. And we learned a lot about starting in the real estate biz.

First, what we know is that JS and his wife are both MBAs from good schools. They each had respectable corporate careers, which after a number of transfers took them to Minneapolis, where they resided for some time. During that time, they each were laid off three jobs—apiece! Finding themselves unemployed for the third time, they concluded that enough was enough and decided to buy a Mrs. Field’s Cookies franchise here in Phoenix. Shortly after arriving here (he said within two weeks), they realized that would never do. But they stuck with it for about three years until they managed to sell the business. At that time they had plenty in savings and figured they would just be retired people.

About that time they had a late-life kid, by choice. “Best decision I’ve ever made in my life,” says he.

Then the stock market crashed, so one of them needed to go back to work. He was more or less enticed into real estate by a friend; took the classes planning to go into commercial property sales and then, influenced by a particularly articulate instructor, decided to try residential sales instead.

He says he loves it (and he indeed seems to): says he’s never worked so hard in his life and never enjoyed a job so much.

The trick, we’re told, is to treat the enterprise as a business, not as some sort of part-time gig. He says you have to work at it full-time (or more), always be developing leads and prospects, always keep abreast of the changing market, and have a coherent, first-rate marketing strategy. He’s very good at marketing: that’s what he did for the huge corporations where he worked in management.

Now, here’s the kicker:

I asked, as subtly as I could, how much a person could expect to earn at real estate; then La Maya put the question more frankly.

He said that in your first year, if you’re working at it full-time, you can expect to gross $30,000 to $40,000, before expenses. After ten years, he’s making about 200 grand.

After sixteen years, La Maya is earning 33% of that, in a tenured position. Prorate that nine-month salary over twelve months, and you still end up with significantly less than half of JS’s take. Me? After ten years in academe, I was earning 33% of it over a twelve-month contract. Now I’m making $14,400 a year.

WTF!?!

As you can imagine, this got our attention.

La Maya now thinks she will take a year to enroll in the required courses on the side, get a license, and, if she can get away with it, begin slowly to build a following. This would put her in a good position to take off when she quits her GDU job in about five or six years.

I’m thinking it would be worth trying to get the license fairly quickly (possibly even paying a proprietary school for the courses, since the junior colleges don’t offer them in a timely manner). Then start building the business forthwith. Thirty grand doesn’t sound like much. But even if you had to fork over 40% of it in taxes and overhead, you’d still be left with a net $18,000.

The net on what I earn now ranges from $11, 520 to $13,440.

So…if JS is correct, even on the low end, first-year income would still net significantly more than I’m making now. An extra $4,560 would make a huge difference for me, to say nothing of an extra $6,480. It would mean the difference between scrabbling along, pinching every penny and not even being able to go to a movie or a concert, and living a fairly normal middle-class life.

Before this afternoon, I was wavering about the real estate class. It takes place on the evenings of the two days I teach, which means I get two Days from Hell each week, and I double my commute cost because I have to drive out to campus twice on each of my teaching days. I’ve wondered if the results would be worth it.

However, I now think it’s a good idea. I’m just gonna do it. It’s only five weeks. Then I’ve got to find the second course somewhere and take the ½-credit contracts seminar. Once I have those things in place, I’ll try to get a job as a flunky somewhere, carrying an experienced agent’s luggage. I’m not going to quit teaching until I see if I can succeed at this enterprise—I now have the classes down to such an art they don’t take much time to manage. But if 30 grand comes in the door during the first year, you can be sure I’ll never set foot in a classroom again.

Good-bye to the schoolhouse!