Uncategorized

Yay! Funny is back on MSN Smart Spending with the piece on the charms of older houses. Thanks, Karen!

If you haven’t come upon Smart Spending yet, you should check it out. It’s a rich compendium of tips, leads, articles, and opinion about personal finance and frugality. Some of the articles are guest posts by PF bloggers and some are written by the blog’s administrators, both experienced journalists. It’s very high in quality, with interesting posts appearing daily.

Out at the Great Desert University, our business manager says our July 2 paychecks have already been processed, and so they should be issued on Thursday, come what may. So that shoos the wolf away from the door for another two weeks.

What will happen over the next fortnight remains to be seen. BizMan says she hasn’t heard anything about the university shutting down. Second summer session begins on July 6 and runs five weeks, so presumably they will at least try to keep the classrooms open. By far the majority of the university’s employees, however, are not in the classrooms. So I suppose we can expect to see bathrooms go uncleaned, landscaping go unwatered, trash go uncollected, computers and computer network go untended, perps and derelicts go unmolested by the campus cops, funding go untended, journals go unedited, paperwork go unpushed. Perhaps, we might say, business go unmanaged.

Given the legislators’ vendetta against education and in specific against higher education, if state departments are, in their words, “ratcheted down,” I’m sure GDU will bear the brunt of the ratcheting. And since our office serves the institution’s teaching mission only undirectly (through vocational training and mentoring of graduate students), we’ll likely be among the first to shut down.

So, even though I’m mighty happy to get this week’s paycheck (assuming it really does materialize), my expectations for the future remain low.

Earlier today I was reminded that I neglected to follow up on the remark, made several days ago, that the Dean had her amanuensis summon me into The Presence.

To my astonishment, what She wanted to do was carry out one…last…annual review. Why, I could not imagine: it’s pretty obvious that at my age I’m not going to get another job, and since the state government, universities included, is crumbling like a chunk of limestone dropped into a bucket of vinegar, it’s especially unlikely that I’ll be finding any appropriate openings at the Great Desert University, the Tucson variant thereof, or the Flagstaff variant therof, any of whose supervisors are allowed to see employee evaluations. It seems like a vast waste of Her time and mine…but whatEVER. She’s the boss.

Hang onto your hats, folks: Her Deanship delivered the single highest performance rating I have ever received in the entire 16 years of my tenure at This Great Institution. She raved about my genius and then generously offered to recommend me for any damnfool thing I imagine I want to apply for.

The performance score she dealt out comes under the heading of Not Possible. Truly: it is amazing.

What, oh what does it mean?

Let’s bear in mind that Deans do not speak plain English. They speak in tongues. This happens because there are a lot of things (as in “most things”) They can’t safely say directly, for more political reasons than any of us (the Deans Themselves included) can count. Like the Delphic Oracle, university Deans speak to you obliquely. They imply. They suggest (subtly). They emphasize. They de-emphasize. Whatever it is that They wish you to understand, They rarely (perhaps never) say it directly. It is not in Their nature to do so.

So, two Sherlockian questions present themselves:

a) Why on earth would Her Deanship spend Her valuable time on what appears to be an utterly futile and pointless exercise?

b) Whence this rave review (after we’ve been becalmed for a full year!), and why?

As for question (a): It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Her Deanship is just being kind. Possibly she wants to send off the underling with good feelings; possibly she truly does feel bad about the demolition of a project that took untold hours and effort by staff, faculty, and administrators to launch and has proven to be utterly unique on the planet.

Could be. Anything’s possible. Nooooo…..

There’s a reason for this. Could be that She knows something’s up. Experience shows She always knows when something’s up. She hinted around that opportunities may arise near the end of our tenure at GDU. Inscribing an ecstatic performance review into the record could put Her in a position to do a targeted hire (oh, no: make it “will” put Her in that position), much simplifying Her life and everyone else’s. It also would help Her to argue effectively for…whatever She expects to have to argue for. And She knows that if I don’t hate Her, I’ll write any proposal She asks me to write. I’m very good at writing proposals. The more entrepreneurial, the better. University presidents love entrepreneurship. For that reason, university vice-presidents, the immediate bosses of Deans, love entrepreneurship.

So, there’s that entertaining possibility. One can always daydream.

It also could be a good review of me (i.e., our office) makes Her look good.

Okay, this brings us to question (b), most succinctly expressed as “HUH?”

I just can’t imagine!

Last summer Her Deanship agreed to let us hire a third RA, giving us a total staff of five. At about the same time, She apparently became aware that our days were numbered. Consequently, She kept putting me off every time I lobbied for more client editors, more work, oh god anything to keep this horde of eager young geniuses occupied. It became painfully clear that She knew something, and that what She knew meant that She dared not commit our services to faculty editors, because She either knew or expected that those services were about to go away. The result of it was that we didn’t have enough work to keep all our staff busy, and the result of that has been that I have foisted every scrap of work my associate editor and I might have done ourselves onto the graduate students. Otherwise, they would have had nothing to do, and they’re here to gain experience and learn from it. As a matter of fact, one of them ended up with precious little to do, much to my chagrin. This has been the worst year our office has ever experienced.

One expects She knows it. And that, with singular circularity, brings us right back to question (a).

Mysterious, isn’t it?

Image: Sherlock Holmes, by Sidney Paget. Public Domain
Wikipedia Commons

Tomorrow morning begins the first in what I hope will be a long-running, fairly regular series. I’m calling it Entrepreneurs.

Every now and then I meet or hear of someone who has an unusual or even unique enterprise. Many of these small businesses are interesting in their own right. Some are especially interesting to PF readers because they suggest creative ways to start a business that could support you or to build a side income large enough to get you out of debt or build a credible savings plan. So it occurred to me that Funny about Money regulars and visitors might enjoy learning about these highly original ideas now and again.

The first post in the Entrepreneurs series should go up in the wee hours of the 25th. I hope to run about one such story a month.

And I especially hope you enjoy these stories. If you know someone who’s bringing a creative business idea to life, please give me a lead: she or he could be featured on Funny about Money.

Image: Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikipedia Commons

So…you thought that documentary about food production I put you on to a while back was over the top, eh?

Evidently not. Take a look at this, will you please? Maybe I’m being altogether too credulous about this stuff…but given a bent for skepticism that fades toward the cynical, I doubt it.

Buy local.

Buy organic.

It does make a difference.

Image:
Fastily, Wikipedia Creative Commons