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Idle essays

Bankbooks and Financial Records: Things people say about themselves

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Officer Canciverra of the Phoenix PD just came by to pick up a checkbook La Maya and I found on the ground during our morning stroll. The owner’s address is in Tempe, so pretty clearly it didn’t just happen to fall out of her purse in the oleanders, 20 miles from home.

Interesting, the things your checkbook says about you. People reveal a great deal about their lives in ordinary, insignificant-looking daily records. Lawrence Stone, a controversial and entertaining historian of Britain’s early modern period, applied this fact with great flair when he produced The Crisis of the Aristocracy, in which he concluded that the British nobility went through a period of hard times near the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. As a toddling researcher in England, I studied Prof. Stone’s work and then, in a graduate-studenty way, tried to go forth and do likewise.

Her handwriting suggests our Chase Bank customer is an elderly woman. She pays $800 a month for what she enters as “cash rent.” You can’t rent much in Tempe for that price. It’s a debit, not a credit, so presumably it’s what she pays for a roof over her head—probably a room or backyard studio behind someone’s house. And that someone likely isn’t reporting the rent to any taxing authorities.

She has a number of relatives who share her last name. She paid airfare for several of them to come to Arizona last Christmas, and one of them received $100 as a Christmas present from her.

Another of her relatives, Donna, evidently was sick and disabled for a long time. Every month our checkbook writer paid $900 for Donna’s healthcare. In February, though, she voided the $900 check. A couple days later, she paid almost $2,500 to a mortuary.

After that, a series of checks are voided and several transactions are corrected, as though she went through a period of confusion and, probably, grief. Donna apparently mattered a great deal to her.

Her last check was written on March 30, leaving a balance of around $32,500 in her account. Ominously, one check is missing between that check number and the top check in her check pad.

I hope she wasn’t ripped off, or if she was, that Chase made good on the forged check.

So it goes. Our little lives are full of quiet drama, aren’t they?

Should I bother with trying to save my job?

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So I’ve cooked up a proposal that has an outside chance of rescuing our office and saving my job. The idea is that my sidekick and I will go on nine-month contracts, which would save the university a bundle of money, and that we would have only one research assistant, who would be hired 10 hours instead of the more usual 20 hours a week, cutting the tuition reimbursement (the real cost of running our operation) by 50 percent.

I haven’t submitted this to Her Deanship yet. At the moment, I’m wondering whether I want to.

Why? I’m afraid the deans will like it. They might actually buy it. And that would mean I’d have to keep trudging to work at the Great Desert University for the next three to seven years.

Not that such a fate would be worse than death. No doubt it would be better to hang on to a regular income, complete with health insurance and accruing sick leave (for which I get paid at retirement), instead of cobbling together a living with Social Security, investment drawdowns, and part-time teaching gigs. On a nine-month salary, too, if I quietly taught freshman comp at the community college my total earnings would be significantly more than I’m making now.

But I’m beginning to feel pretty confident that I can survive quite nicely in Bumhood. Why on earth would I want to keep working at a place that houses my office in a condemned building that still (months later!) stinks of the solvent used in the most recent asbestos abatement effort? Whose air conditioning has not been turned on despite 97-degree heat? Where we have no drinkable water (vile stuff comes out of the taps) and no place to get it but the public bathroom? Where parking costs almost $900, and where raises (few and far between) are immediately taken away through various creative increases in “benefits” and ancillary gouges?

On the other hand, it’s a nice sinecure: I come and go when I please, and I sure don’t work very hard. But…without those RAs, my sidekick and I most certainly would be reduced to actually working. Heaven forfend.

It would be kind of irresponsible not to at least try to save our operation. It’s the only such office anywhere in the world, as far as we know. No other university has anything like it. And getting it established took years of politicking and lobbying on the part of faculty and some powerful deans and chairs. If there’s even a chance of rescuing it from the trashbin, I suppose it really would be lâche of me not to try.

On the one hand, I think the heck with them. On the other: Michael Crow is not the only person who works for the Great Desert University…neither is Categories Idle essays, Workplace issues 6 Comments

Connectivity: Is Twitter a sign of poverty?

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Have you read Virginia Heffernan’s article, “Let Them Eat Tweets“? In a flight of metaphoric ecstasy, she suggests that a craving for virtual connections reflects an individual’s real-life social poverty (citing Bruce Sterling’s remarks at a South by Southwest technology conference). People who have real wealth, whether of soul or of lucre, feel no great need to be linked in. “We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of [cyber-]overcrowding because—it suddenly seems so obvious—we can’t afford privacy.”

Be still, my swelling ego! This explains it all: I don’t do Twitter and I don’t do cell phones and I don’t do text-messaging because of my status as a member of the richly endowed elite!

I knew it, I just knew it.

LOL! Actually, what I know is that Twitter forgot my password, I couldn’t get in, and it’s taken the proprietors a month to answer my appeal to their “help” line. And I can’t afford a cell phone. And if I could, I can’t imagine where I would find time for texting. I haven’t even had time to open the message from Twitter responding to my call for help.

It’s an interesting rumination, though, one that poses über-questions like “what is wealth,” “what is poverty,” and “WTF”?

The real reason I don’t have a cell (when people who live on welfare certainly do) is that I resist having everyone and anyone calling me wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. An ordinary land line is intrusive enough. Why would I want people jangling me up while I’m driving the car, sitting on the train, walking around, dining at a restaurant, working at the office?

Far from a sign of “a strong soul or a fat wallet,” that turn of mind strikes me as a kind of psychic self-impoverishment: surely if I were nicer, more generous, a better person I would be open at all times to the tendrils of everyone around me. I don’t have a cell because I don’t want one, and I don’t want one because of a certain social miserliness. That’s a long hike from spiritual strength.

And while the whole idea of Twitter intrigues me, it strikes me (more strongly than it intrigues me) that Twitter represents a gigantic hole into which to throw time. A space-time warp, so to speak. As I would not fling myself into a black hole to see what’s on the other side, so I feel a bit dubious about Twitter.

My guess is, though, that the poverty metaphor doesn’t apply. If you can find the time and energy to build virtual relationships, you probably have more social wealth than those of us who would rather not, thank you, tweet.

Check out Twistori, BTW. Interesting, in a hypnotic way.

Train: Less than awesome. Blue Funk: Amazing

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Some scientist recently opined that the function of weeping, apparently a behavior unique to humans (or almost so), is to recruit sympathy. So what does it mean when you’re walking down an empty street with no one around but a dog, crying aloud? Who, really, do you imagine will empathize with you?

Well, no one. No news there, eh?

I hate frustration.In my weird little psyche, frustration seems to go hand-in-hand with depression. Today it took just one tiny jab of frustration to tip me into the Slough of Despond, where I’ve spent the entire damn day trying to swim out of the quicksand. It also triggers hot flashes. Note that, young things: when you reach about 52, every idle whim that’s countermanded brings on the sweats and chills.

So this morning I’m really looking forward to another trip on the train to My Beloved Employer’s shabby-looking campus. I figure I’ll read another 50 pages of detective-novel proofs, and my teeth will not be set on edge by the time I reach my destination.

Two or three miles of driving brings me to the park-n-ride. I hike from there to the “station” (I’d call it a “stop”) and order up a day pass. This takes several steps. Come to the step to pay, and up pops a message that says “bank cards not accepted.” By that, they mean no debit cards, no credit cards. Well of course I expected to pay with Visa, which workedjust fineyesterday. I don’t have $2.50 in cash with me, because, strangely enough, I don’t carry cash, having had my purse stolen once too often. After trying several machines, all of which flash the same f***-you message, I give up, trudge back to my car, and make the miserable drive to Tempe, enhanced greatly by having to drive across the city’s single most congested surface street to get to the hideous freeway.

I was mildly annoyed by this all day, while plodding through scholarship on 14th-century Spanish warlords (well, that’s what we’d call them today, if they resided in, say, Afghanistan). Nasty specimens of humanity, those.

A woman looking to hire one of my RAs calls and gives me the third degree about the guy.
—Are you really sure he’s not a rabid nut case who will make everyone in the office crazy?
—Yeah, I’m really sure. {Argh.O lucky man, having the privilege of working for the likes of you.}

Back on the freeway, homeward bound: traffic comes to a dead stop about halfway there. So I have to get off at 24th Street, dodging a sonuvabitch who cuts me off and keeps cutting me off all the way up to Thomas Road. Good thing for him I don’t carry a revolver in the car.

Long, miserable drive across the city.

During this drive I ruminate on a remark that emanated, yesterday, from my ex-husband, a man whom I occasionally (in moments of sentimentality) regret having left. I’d called him—the guy is a corporate lawyer—to find out if I could shelter income from my freelance escapades by forming a corporation that would hold income and pay my sidekick, leaving my share of the money untouched as corporate capitalization until I reach 66. Would this keep Social Security from confiscating my SS benefits in proportion to the amount I earn that exceeds a piddling $14,000 a year between ages 64 and 66?

He thinks so.

Then I needed to have him explain one of the niceties of my astonishingly complex 2008 income tax statement, so I could fill out Paradise Valley Community College’s W-4 form correctly.

Do you ever feel that you’re speaking with someone who thinks he’s talking to someone like you who is not actually you? Sometimes I think the man is talking to a ghostly sister of mine, a woman who really isn’t me at all. After 25 years of marriage, he never seemed to get to know me. He got to know a ghost-sister, maybe, but whoever he thinks I am, she’s not me.

The instant he hears I’m signing up to teach freshman comp, he goes (pompous as Hell), “Ho ho ho! Well, you’ll find that sometimes you’re better off in a job that’s not so prestigious.”

You understand: I am so slow on the uptake that it takes a full day for me to register an insult. Not until I’m plodding through the miserable homeward-bound surface-street traffic do I start to think…
W…
T…
F…????

“Prestigious”? He thinks I think the jobs I’ve held all these endless underpaid overworked years have been “prestigious”? Does he think I taught four-and-four in an untenurable position, working 60, 70, 80 hours a week for freaking prestige?

Could he possibly think—really, seriously?—that I imagined hacking away as a freelance journalist was somehow prestigious? Does he imagine that I saw myself as magically endowed with some elevated status working as an assistant editor on a crass city magazine, best titled The Chamber of Commerce J, where I was expected to work six and seven days every week, with at least one overnighter a month, for $12,000 a year at a time when $24,000 was on the low side of middling pay?

Is it possible—really, seriously?—that he doesn’t remember I took that shitty job because he was canned from a senior partnership at one of the “most prestigious” law firms in the American Southwest just a few weeks after we moved into a house that tripled our mortgage payments? That while he sat stunned in the living room I had to go out and find a job to keep food on our table? Did he really think that I left my six-year-old son in daycare for fu*king prestige? That I had a taxicab pick my child up at school and drive him to the care place because I wasn’t allowed to leave the office long enough to pick him up from school, because I so loved the fu*king prestige?????

Could it be—really, seriously?—that he never noticed why I came to develop such a strong distaste for teaching freshman comp that I said I’d rather go on welfare than ever do that again? Does he not recall the trips to Mexico when I had to haul along a suitcase full of student papers, the days and nights of our “vacations” when all I could do was grade papers? Papers in Guaymas. Papers in Hermosillo. Papers in Tucson. Papers in San Francisco. Papers in Colorado. Papers in Washington, D.C. Papers in Atlanta. Papers in New York City. He thinks I don’t relish doing that again because it’s beneath my patrician little standards?

Possibly I fly too far off the handle, to suspect he understands what he’s saying and contrives to be insulting on purpose. It’s as though he makes a set of assumptions about you, but those assumptions are so far off base that in fact he thinks he’s talking to someone who is not the person he is talking to.

On the other hand, he’s alarmingly smart and capable of great subtlety. He certainly could be doing it on purpose.

Who is this man? And why did I waste 25 years of my life with him?

Sometimes I feel like about 90 percent of my life has been an utter waste.

Laughingstock postscript

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Our Beloved Leader has circulated a memo about the Obama snubbing. It contains this wording:

Since my appointment [as president of the Great Desert University] we have not awarded honorary degrees to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment. We have not offered degrees to our sitting Senators or our sitting Governors as many universities do. We have not invited them as university commencement speakers either.

In this case, the historic election of Barack Obama, we invited him as our university commencement speaker, the first in recent memory. We did that out of recognition of his unique achievements and his deep connection to our mission as a university committed to excellence and access.

If that’s the reasoning, why didn’t we say so instead of emanating the PR double-talk that went out to the Associated Press Friday?

Heee! It gets better and better.

GDU Defends Status as Champion Laughingstock of North America

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LOL! You have to be here to appreciate how ludicrously typical this is. Colleagues are still hooting with ecstatic hilarity (heaven knows we have little enough to laugh at around that place) over columnist Gail Collins’s choice words:

Obama’s round of spring events will culminate in appearances at graduation ceremonies in Notre Dame (where the local bishop is ticked off about the abortion thing) and Arizona State University, where he is not going to receive an honorary degree. A spokeswoman for the university explained that it was withholding that honor from the president because “his body of work is yet to come.”

Tough standards, A.S.U.!

Snark! Gasp…catch your breath, pick yourself up off the floor, and tool on over to CNN, where Our Beloved Employer’s p.r. staff can be seen digging us in even deeper:

The university says that the president’s achievements have yet to rate the honor, and is directing reporters to use a statement given to the Associated Press. “His body of work is yet to come. That’s why we’re not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency,” Media Relations Director Sharon Keller told the AP Thursday.

The university’s guidelines say the degree is merited by “significant contributions to education and society over the course of a person’s career,” though Sandra Day O’Connor and Barry Goldwater — both Arizonans — received the honor after the latter had served just over one term in the Senate, and the former was roughly three years into her Supreme Court tenure. Also honored: activist Cesar Chavez, legendary Arizona senator and former presidential candidate Mo Udall, and broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

Here in the blogosphere, one wit notes that the Great Desert University adjudges Erma Bombeck’s opus sufficient to merit an honorary degree, to say nothing of Jerry Colangelo’s and Steve Allen’s. Backs against the wall, administrators personfully stick with their decision to withhold an honorary degree from the President of the United States but instead will name a scholarship after him.

Mighty white of ’em, eh?

Meanwhile, the highly educated products of our elite institution, patriotic young entrepreneurs steeped in the significance of their nation’s history and place in the world, have made themselves busy peddling their tickets to the graduation ceremony. Entrée to hear the first African American President of the United States in person comes cheap at the Great Desert University: $60 to $100 a seat.

God, what an embarrassment to be associated with that outfit! How can I count the ways I love the prospect of exiting, pursued by…whatever?
MORE!

Laughingstock Postscript
Funnier and funnier!