Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Costco scores in customer service

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If I weren’t already sold on Costco, its staff would have won me over yesterday.

Headed home at the end of a workday made interminable by the mind-fuzzing effects of a two-week-long spate of insomnia, I made a run on Costco. I needed several food and household items and, most urgently, gasoline. First I stopped at the Target, where I found some place mats that would do (sort of) as companions for the new dishes. After a nice long stand in line at Target’s check-out, my American Express card wouldn’t work. Swiping it brought up an error message. The cashier tried to swipe it on his machine and then looked stymied. Stunned with exhaustion, I decided I didn’t need those placemats (knew that…why’d I ever think otherwise?) and told the guy to forget it.

Now I stumble into Costco. I’m so tired I literally feel weak in the knees. The prospect of trudging through acres of merchandise to pick out the half-dozen things I need only to arrive at the check-out stand and have them reject my credit card: ugh! It’s more than I can contemplate. So I stop by the customer service desk, where I ask a gentleman named Glenn if it’s possible to tell if the card has a hold on it.

Well, yes, there is. He checks it and discovers no problem. Barely coherent, I explain what happened at Target. He suggests I call the number on the card, printed in submicroscopic characters, and ask. I say I can’t read that number. Now—amazingly!—Glenn directs me to a telephone at the far end of his counter and dials the number for me! After a relatively brief navigation through the robotic punch-a-button maze, I reach a fellow who tells me the is account is in good standing.

So I trudge through the acres, retrieve the goods I need, and show up at the check-out. There, my credit card won’t work. I explain, no doubt altogether incoherently by now, what’s been happening. The cashier calls for a supervisor, and one Ernesto shows up. He punches in the card’s number and some sort of code, and thereby he makes the card work. Hallelujah! He says the magnetic strip has given up the ghost and advises calling AMEX and asking for a replacement.

Imposing some more on Ernesto, I ask if this means I can’t get gas at Costco, adding that I’m almost out and can’t get to work without a refill. He instantly comes up with a solution: pay upfront by purchasing a Costco cash card.

“How much gas do you think you’ll need?” he asks.

“About $50 worth.”

Presto-changeo, he produces a $50 cash card and adds the cost to the food bill.

Wonder of wonders. It worked. Stick the card in the pump and it lets you buy $50 worth of gasoline.

What a relief. I really didn’t want to have to find another gas station on the way home—wasn’t even sure the car had enough gas to get home.

Glenn and Ernesto’s kindness went a long way toward making a trying day tolerable. Not only that, but the discovery about the cash card will make it possible for me to buy Costco’s gas again before the new card gets here. American Express informed me that it will be the 19th before a new card arrives—that’s ten days! If I insist on going to work every day, the tank will need a refill before then. So, another Costco cash card is in my future.

What’s an intellectual worker’s real overhead?

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Over at The Copyeditor’s Desk, TM opines that a freelance editor working from home does business with a very low overhead: a computer, an Internet connection, appropriate software, some inexpensive paper, a few pens or pencils, maybe babysitting or day-care costs.

On a superficial level, I’d agree with that. But I’d like to argue that there’s a lot more cost behind editing, writing, graphic design, programming, and similar pursuits than just hardware, software, and some office supplies. The truth is, none of us can do our jobs without one very expensive piece of overhead: education. By and large, the more education the intellectual worker has, the more his or her skills are worth . . . but the higher the person’s overhead.

Consider what a good education costs. An undergraduate degree at an in-state public school can easily run you $15,000 to $20,000 a year. We paid $40,000 a year for M’hijito’s four-year degree at a private liberal arts college.

Two years of graduate school will take you to the M.A. (assuming you’re trotting right along): add another $30,000 to $80,000. A professional degree will set you back even more: the Great Desert University, which bills its law school as “among the lowest of all American Bar Association accredited law schools,” presents in-state students with a tab of $35,041 and bills out-of-state students $47,606. At GDU, a Ph.D. in a less marketable subject, such as English, runs from $7,052 a year for in-state students to $19,606 a year for out-of-state students (not counting books, housing, food, transportation, and personal costs); attaining a doctorate can take six to eight years.

So… A bright mind, a bachelor’s degree, and a few years of on-the-job experience probably will put you in a position to freelance as an editor, a writer, a graphic artist, or a computer programmer. Let’s figure the start-up costs:

Computer: $1,000
Printer/FAX/Scanner: $300
Internet connection: $360/year
Software:$300 (e.g., indexing program, etc.; assumes MS Office comes with computer)
Student loan: $8,724/year (approx: $60,000 repaid over 10 years at 8% interest)
Office supplies: $200
Desk: $300 (Ikea or other knock-down furniture)
Chair: $100 (Ikea or other cheap furniture)
Total: $11,984

Assuming you could bill 30 hours a week (a generous estimate, indeed!) and you needed a pre-tax income of $40,000 to live on, you would have to gross $51,984 a year to get by. Giving yourself two weeks of vacation time, you would have 1,560 hours in which to earn that amount, meaning you would have to gross $33.32 an hour: consistently and steadily.

This doesn’t count items that would be in your house anyway, such as a telephone connection, air conditioning and heating, water, and access to a bathroom and kitchen. And the biggie: it doesn’t include health insurance!

If you had a low-end master’s degree that you managed to complete in only two years, you’d add $30,000 to the cost of your training (assuming you count books, living expenses, & the like). What the heck: let’s pay that back in 20 years instead of a mere 10; at 8% that would run you $426 a month, or $5,112 a year. This actually brings your annual overhead down to a mere $7,672; to get that 40 grand of pre-tax income, you’d need to earn $47,672, or $30.59 an hour over fifty thirty-hour weeks.

Hm. What if you had a Ph.D.? Let’s say eight years of graduate school at $14,000 a year, since research assistantships and fellowships usually cover most of your living expenses. Again, you pay it back at 8% over 20 years: $936.81 a month, or $11,244 a year! This puts your annual overhead at $13,804. Now you need to pull in $53,804 to end up with a pre-tax, pre-health insurance take of 40 grand: $34.49 an hour.

In any of these scenarios, you’re having to earn $30 to $35 an hour and bill 30 hours a week consistently for 50 weeks a year. That’s to bring in an amount that’s just enough to call a living wage. Sort of.

In the Night Kitchen

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Insomnia! How I hate it. The night closes in like a black, sticky, toxic cloud, bringing with it all manner of prickly little horrors.

Five things I regret having done

  • Leaving a perfectly fine husband
  • Leaving my son behind
  • Not being with my mother when she was dying
  • Having agreed to go to the University of Arizona, not insisting on Cal Berkeley
  • Majoring in French

Five things I wish other people hadn’t done

  • My mother: smoking herself into the grave
  • My father: bringing us to Arizona
  • My son: taking up smoking
  • My father: disinheriting me
  • My fellow Americans: voting for George Bush and his cronies

Five things I could have done better

  • Focused on a real career
  • Been a better mother
  • Been a better daughter
  • Been a better wife
  • Taken control of my life sooner

Five characteristics I would be better without

  • Preference for solitude
  • Habit of taking the path of least resistance
  • Laziness
  • Self-indulgence
  • Insecurity

Five characteristics that redound to my benefit (there must be somethinggood here)

  • Self-discipline
  • Writing skills
  • Literacy
  • Some degree of intelligence
  • Ability to be self-starting

Five small things that make life better

  • The company of dogs
  • The company of friends
  • My son in a positive mood
  • A lovely morning
  • Flowers

Five things that scare the sh*t out of me

  • Old age
  • The U.S. economy and the decline of America
  • The state of health care in America
  • The ascendancy of the right wing and the injection of religion into secular politics
  • Climate change

Five things we could have more of

  • Swimming in the pool
  • Walking in the desert
  • Friends
  • Wine
  • Good food

Five things I could do without

  • Greed
  • Morons
  • Ambient noise
  • Work
  • Insomnia!

* sigh *

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Wish I earned four times what a senior editor makes, as young Fabulously Broke is doing as an independent IT guru. If I did…well, then I would.

😉

Last night I learned that the person I hoped would take care of Cassie the Corgie in October, when I’d planned to go to a reunion of my dearest college friends, can’t do it. That leaves me with no babysitter for the dog, and so that means I can’t go. Darn it. I was really looking forward to getting together with these women, only one of whom I’ve seen at all since we graduated from the university forty-two years ago.

Besides the fact that I can’t afford to put the pooch up at a kennel or at the vet’s, I’ve developed a real flinch reflex about that strategy. During my adult life, I’ve had seven dogs and seven cats. For twenty years I was married to a man who loved to travel and who could afford to board the dog while we were in transit. Not once, EVER, have I boarded a pet (dog or cat) and brought it home healthy. Every single time, the animal has come back from the vet’s or the kennel with some ailment or parasite infestation: kennel cough, enteritis, ear mites, ticks, fleas…you name it. What this means is that after you’ve paid the vet to put the dog up for several days, you then get to pay the vet to treat the dog for whatever it picked up at the vet’s kennel! And I really can’t afford to pony up another $100 to get Cassie well on top of the boarding fee, the $100 my car will burn in driving to Sedona, the cost of eating out four days, and the cost of a gift for the hostess. If I earned IT guru money, I could afford to have a petsitter come to the house. Because Cassie won’t use a dog door and won’t go out and do her thing unless you go out and stand there with her, such a person would have to show up twice each day to feed her and then come back and let her out another four times. Or so. We won’t be doing that.

Oh well. I’ve lived forty-two years without seeing old friends. Guess I can manage to get through however many years remain without it.

Then there’s yesterday’s bêtise: I stupidly bought a beautiful little table on megasale at Pier One. It was already marked off a substantial amount. Then I got another 20% discount for taking the floor model.

And then I let the sales dude load it in my car. If I’d done it myself, I would have done it right. The thing fell over at the first turn I made, splitting the pretty painted top. This might have been OK, because the broken part is in a corner and doesn’t show much. Or it wouldn’t, if the table fit in the place I planned to put it. But it doesn’t. It’s two inches too wide! And because I took the extra discount, I can’t take it back.

So now I have a $170 Goodwill item. Bad stupidity!

Yesterday another of my little stupidities came home to roost: I’d agreed to accept a guest post on the uses and misuses of the one-em dash for The Copyeditor’s Desk. This magnum opus arrived yesterday morning. Duh! WordPress won’t do a one-em dash! So now I’ve got a very fine essay full of examples requiring a character that doesn’t exist, as far as I can tell, in the blog’s publishing software.

Then I realized, along about 11:30 last night, that I’d forgotten to go by La Maya’s house and pick up the newspaper, they being out of town. They’ve probably been burgled by now.

Well, I’d better get up, feed the dog, and see what new disasters I can commit.

Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine…

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Cassie the Corgi decided the crack of dawn was too late to start the day, and so began campaigning to spring to life at ten to five. Gronk! After wringing her out and finding myself still being importuned to get up, I put her on the bed, in hopes that would quiet her down. You don’t put a dog on the bed when you do that. You put a 23-pound puffball of fur on the bed — one that wriggles. So…we’ll be washing the bedding this morning, among other activities.

Precious few blossoms are clinging to vines here at the tail end of summer. When the power went out the other day, it shut down the irrigation timer, and so quite a few of the blossoming critters in my yard are parched. The weather has been surprisingly balmy this year: only a few 115-degree days. We’re supposed to have a heat wave this weekend, with temperatures predicted at around 110, although just now it’s quite lovely outside.

Thank goodness we get an “extra” paycheck this month! Last week’sfurniture-buying exploitoverspent my Diddle-It-Away savings by about $200. Truth is, the money could come out of ordinary cash flow, but that maneuver would engross this month’s payment into the Renovation Loan paydown fund. A couple hundred bucks out of the paycheck of the 29th will do no harm.

I vacillate between taking the $9,500 now accrued in the paydown fund and applying it to principal right now and keeping it in savings to double as emergency fund cash. One thing to be said for paying it toward principal right this minute is that it will keep me from spending it on anything else. Another thing, of course, is that it will cause a much larger chunk of the regular monthly payment to go toward principal, which would be good. On the other hand, with the economy as iffy as it is and the university busily laying off its employees, I hesitate to let those dollars out of my hands.

This is gunna be a hectic weekend. I’ve got to hand over an indexing project to my sidekick for proofreading no later than Tuesday noon; at the moment two chapters and an endless series of narrative endnotes remain to be marked up, and then I have to type, format, and organize the entries. That job alone will take at least an entire day. The author is paying us a premium to do a rush job, so in fact we each will earn more than enough to pay the extra $200 needed to cover the entire furniture adventure. But horrors! It requires me to (shudder!)work! Meanwhile, food needs to be purchased, laundry laundered, floors and furniture cleaned, pool tended to, yard plants rescued….where will the time come from?

TheHealth & Wealth rafflehas had its first two drawings. So far the organizers have not awarded me the million work-free dollars to which I feel I am entitled. One more drawing is slated for September 26. Surely at that time the money will be deposited to my checking account.

And so, to work.

Big Brother in action

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Have you seen the CriminalSearch site? It’s free. You can enter a person’s name and state of residence, click a button, and up will come what purports to be his or her rap sheet. w00t! You, too, can get the straight skinny on all your neighbors. And on that sketchy dude your daughter has been dating! And oh, heck…while you’re at it, why not check up on your daughter, too?

You also can enter an address and get a report showing which of your neighbors in the surrounding area have criminal records, with their names, addresses, and a map showing how to find their homes. And…uhm…yours, if you happen ever to have been caught in the act of turning right at a stop sign without coming to a full stop or failing to yield the right of way.

Problem is, the results seem to be less than significant and less than accurate. A neighborhood search, for example, shows my area rife with desperados: all of them flagrant violators of the traffic laws. Nary a violent criminal or a sex offender appears in the district that includes my neighborhood, the scary slum to the north, and the tenements to the west. Ditto the Investment House’s neighborhood and the bordering crime-ridden area to the west, which is infested with gangs. Well, not quite ditto: one person arrested for theft lives in the general vicinity. Some of the traffic arrests include such heinous crimes as not carrying one’s car registration in the vehicle and not wearing your seatbelt. Now, recently I read that to protect yourself from car theft you should not keep the registration in the car. And when I was pregnant, my gynecologist told me absolutely not to wear a seatbelt in the last trimester, because it would inflict more damage in a minor accident than the collision would.

From the looks of CriminalSearch’s maps, it looks like all is quiet around here.

However, the Sheriff’s office posts maps with the names, addresses, and specific rap sheet details of all registered sex offenders in the county. When you call that up, it’s a whole ‘nother story. The area to the north of me has a half-dozen offenders. The tenements to the west also house several sex offenders. The area to the west of the Investment House, which surrounds a middle school, is awash in sex offenders.

Then there’s what we personally know. Here in the mid- to high-rent district, a state legislator just had to resign after he was arrested for walloping his wife. He lives about six blocks up the road. Right across the street, there’s Carlos the Knife. I know Carlos was arrested the time he cut up his daughter with a kitchen knife when she got between him and her mother. I know he was arrested again more recently, when he went after his wife again. A block north and west, where I used to live, I know the delinquent who lived across the street from me was arrested when he got violent and his grandparents called the police. In Arizona, the police are required to make an arrest in every domestic violence case, even if the victim refuses to press charges. None of those incidents appears in CriminalSearch.

I know that one bright morning 18 months ago the gentleman who rented the house across the street from me was pursued by a small army of cops and brought to ground in his driveway, where it took the occupants of several cruisers and two motorcycle officers to subdue him and carry him off to jail. Okay, so that place is a rental and he’s gone; so maybe the records are up to date and don’t include him. But the current tenant gussies himself up like a Hell’s Angel and rides an unmuffled Harley; somehow I doubt the guy is the Angel Gabriel in disguise. Chances that he has a criminal record are very high.

This freebie, advertiser-supported service comes from PeopleSearch, an outfit used by employers and landlords to do background checks on job applicants. Could your credit rating, your shot at a job, or your ability to rent a home be harmed because you dared to flout some bureaucratic rule that makes no sense? Or because of a minor traffic violation? Meanwhile, the real perps, people who might be inclined to embezzle from the till or bring a street-sweeper to work, they don’t show up.

Invasion of privacy is real. It can get you in your pocketbook and it can get you in other ways, and you may never know why. Fairly or unfairly, it can keep you from getting a job, jack up your interest rates, and even bar you from renting a desirable place to live. Americans need to wake up to this. You should care.

Comments left on the iWeb site:

BeThisWay

You are very right.

Still, I admit to getting titillated by the discovery of an assault case on the record of someone I know very well.Someone who is quite holier than thou in general, and looks down his nose at someone else we both know who got arrested for something shockingly similar.

Heh.