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So there I was, a creature from the Cretaceous, hanging out with a much newer model in the Sprint store. And what a scene it was for these prehistoric eyes: mobile doo-dads from here to the horizon!

Friend wanted a Blackberry. She had inquired across the street at Best Buy, where she was advised that because of the contract she had with Sprint the coveted gadget would not cost her a couple hundred bucks but something over $700. So it was away to the Sprint store, therein to ask if anything could be done about the expensive mobile phone that worthy corporation had sold her a few months before, which was already showing signs of decrepitude.

While we waited for her to be told what a joke that idea was, we overheard two conversations.

One woman stood at the counter and argued, ad INFINITELY nauseam, about some problem she had encountered with Sprint’s service. Unclear exactly what it was, but whatever: Sprint was having nothing of any schemes to accommodate her. She argued forever, always assuring them that paying the exorbitant charge they were trying to rip from her was no problem, but the point was that they could do better. She was agreeable and polite and endlessly persistent.

All the time she was dickering with the sales staff, another woman talked into the store’s land line, trying to explain the injustice of some rip she had been unfairly charged, or so she said. The Sprintoid on the other end of the line wasn’t budging. She, like her counterpart at the front desk, had been talking at the time we entered, and both women argued their cases for a good half-hour while we stood there waiting for service. No cooperation to speak of was forthcoming.

The cost of the gadgets on display was astonishing. And they do some astonishing things: not only do they let you make an idiot of yourself by yakking while driving or while walking around in public, they connect to the Internet and function like tiny PCs. My friend wanted the Blackberry for a single reason: she wanted a mobile computer that would connect to Outlook, so she could carry her electronically inscribed calendar with her at all times. Ultimately she ended up paying around $260 for this privilege, purchased off the Web since Sprint was no more helpful than Best Buy had been. Add to that the cost of connecting to Sprint, and on and on.

Think of that. Two hunnert and sixty bucks for a calendar. Electronic tethers that guarantee you will never be alone, no matter where you go…

We might say “that will never let you be alone.”

Now that we’re admitting the economy is sinking into “recession” (possibly misspelled with an r instead of a d), at least some of us will need to take stock and consider what costs we can cut. The whole array of mobile gadgets, IMHO, offer rich pickings for those who would like to enrich themselves by spending less on unnecessary stuff.

Where is it written that we have to be “connected” at all times? Hey. We do not live in the Borg! Resistance is NOT futile!

Nothing bad will happen if our friends, business colleagues, and family members have to wait to yak with us until we get to a phone at our office or home.

Little that we do in our daily lives will be changed if we read our e-mails in an hour instead of right this minute, or if we tweet when we reach our desktop instead of off our cell phones.

And who knows? Maybe we could keep track of our appointments in a pocket-sized spiral-bound notebook, overpriced at Target if it sells for a buck and a quarter.

How much electronic junk do any of us really need? And why should we feel we have to carry this stuff around with us everywhere we go? And…more to the point: how much is it costing you?

Fellow frugalists! Cheapskates of the world! Arise and throw off your leashes! Ask yourself how much you really need mobile phones, mobile Outlook calendars, mobile games, mobile computers. Live free! And save a few bucks on principle.

😀

Had a little kitchen fire earlier this evening…well, we could call it “last night,” the hour now coming onto 1:00 a.m. I managed to carbonize an entire potful of buttered popcorn by failing to notice that I’d turned on the burner. This is why old ladies shouldn’t be allowed around stoves.

At any rate, the ruined pan—my cool Ikea stockpot!—now resides in the backyard, awaiting the light of day to be carried out to the alley garbage can. The smoke saturated the cabinetry around the stovetop, not helped by my stupidly turning on the microwave exhaust fan without thinking that such a fan “exhausts” by recirculating the air (read “smoke”) right back into the room. Ugh!

It’s possible the microwave is ruined—nice timing, a couple weeks after I changed the insurance deductible from $250 to $2500 by way of saving all of nine bucks a month. I took apart the metal exhaust fan filters and put them in the dishwasher, but I couldn’t discombobulate the whole arrangement, so some very stinky parts are still in place and couldn’t be cleaned. Nor, of course, can the microwave’s innards.

Then I was faced with a mighty stink from the cabinetry itself. In just the few moments before I noticed the burning food, smoke soaked into the woodwork. I tried cleaning the cabinets with Murphy’s Oil Soap. Didn’t work. Tried rubbing them down with lemon oil. Nothing.

Then I remembered that some time back I discovered that the grease and dirt accumulated along the ledge created by the cabinet’s trim came off quickly and neatly with a Q-tip soaked in baby oil. Could it be?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained: the cabinets already appeared to be ruined. Couldn’t ruin them any worse. The stuff is really nothing more than mineral oil with some sort of stinkum added.

So I rubbed the smelly areas with a paper towel soaked in baby oil and then wiped them dry with a clean microfiber rag.

Well! It made quite a difference. Don’t know that it worked 100%…baby oil is pretty heavily perfumed, and it may be that Johnson’s industrial perfume just covered up the smoke stench. I don’t much care for the scent of baby oil, but I’d sure rather have the parfum de l’huile pour les derrières des enfants around me than l’aire du popcorn brulé.

[dambola! the dog just caught the grasshopper that invited itself into the house while I was trying to air the joint out and carried the critter into the bedroom. argh! can life get any more amusing?]

Anyway, a little acrid smoke odor lingers in the kitchen, but I think it’s mostly coming out of the microwave. The whole house stank for three hours after the fact, but after throwing open every window and door and running the house fan, all the overhead fans, and all the table fans, most of the rooms are cleared out.

Baby oil. Kitchen cabinetry. Good combination. It really cleans varnished woodwork and is neither poisonous nor carcinogenic.

Oh, heaven only knows: maybe they’ve been flying for awhile and I just haven’t noticed, what with my nose tightly attached to the grindstone.

Over lunch with a friend, I happened to mention the rumor to the effect that Our Beloved Leader will shortly announce that everyone in my job category will be laid off. She said, “Well, that must have to do with the plan to convert all academic professionals to classified staff.”

Uhm… “Say what?”

Supposedly that’s the plan afoot. Academic professionals (the likes of moi) are exempt employees. Classified staff are nonexempt. “Exempt” means you’re exempt from a variety of state and federal rules that govern the degree of fairness with which you must be treated. So…why would you agree to take a job whose terms allow your employer to fire you with no reason, to shaft you with élan, to set you up like a 14-point stag in open season?

Why else? Money, of course. Exempt employees get paid more than nonexempt types in similar positions.

If they convert our positions to nonexempt classified jobs, then what they’ll have to do is can most of us and then make us reapply for our positions. This is because the university offers nonclassified slaves two retirement options: the state pension plan and a 403(b) plan. Classified (nonexempt) flunkies are eligible only for the state pension plan. The hook is that once you’ve selected one or the other, you can’t change! Ever. No, not ever, no matter what your beloved Dean says. So, the only way the administration can move an exempt employee who has selected a 403(b) as his or her pension plan to a nonexempt position is to have the person quit or be fired and then rehire him or her into a different job.

Cute, eh?

My job was originally advertised as a classified position at significantly less pay than my starting salary. When the hiring committee asked me what I would like in the new job, I said I’d like to keep my pension plan (little knowing, at the time, the significance of that seemingly innocent request). You could see the “uh-oh” in the collective mind: “And, uhm, ahem, which plan would that be?” When I told them I was enrolled in one of the 403(b) plans, they knew they were going to be forced to pay me a fair wage. Hence I started at about $8,000 more (in a 12-month job) than I was earning as a senior lecturer (in a 9-month job), rather than about $8,000 less.

🙂 

The state pension plan’s cost to the employee is significantly more than the cost of the 403(b): 9.6 percent of your gross pay, as opposed to 7 percent for the 403(b). Not only that, but it takes ten years to become fully vested! If you quit before you die in the traces, you can opt to roll over your contributions into an IRA; but you can’t roll over any part of the state’s contributions until you’ve been in the plan for at least three years, and even then you can have only a small part of them. You can’t get all of the state’s and your contributions until you’ve been in the plan for ten years. Understand: I’ve worked for the Great Desert University almost 15 years, but I would have to start anew in the pension plan. That would mean I would have to stay on the job until I’m 73 years old to retrieve all the money poured into the plan in my name. I would not reach even the lowest level of investiture until the year I’m eligible for full Social Security.

While the pension plan costs employees more, it obviously costs the state lots less. And you can be sure these “new” jobs will pay lots less, too. Chances of being hired back at your current salary are nil.

My job, slash-named “editor/publisher,” is ranked M51. The salary range for an M51 is $37,308-$59,948. The highest figure in that range is $2,550 less than I’m earning!

The nonprofit job I just applied for ranges in pay from $45,000 to $55,000. Interestingly, however, the proposed nonprofit employer pays the entire tab for the employee’s health insurance and dental insurance, and rather than gouging 9.6 percent out of your salary, it matches a modest 3 percent contribution to an IRA and leaves it up to you to decide where the rest of your retirement savings, if any, should go. Thus I could put 3 percent into the workplace IRA and deposit the remaining 4 percent to my Roth IRA.

A little arithmetic reveals that if I stay at ASU and continue to earn my present salary (highly unlikely), my net biweekly pay will drop $61 per paycheck, from $1,522 to $1,461 (as if the $220/month pay cut that happened with the switch from bimonthly to biweekly weren’t enough!). But if I go to the nonprofit and start at $55,000, my biweekly pay would be $1,459: a three-dollar difference.

Think of that. And what if the nonprofit organization is generous enough to pay bimonthly instead of biweekly? Well, then my paycheck would be $1,580, $58 per pay period more than I’m taking home from a salary that’s $7,500 more, the salary that GDU is paying me today!

Argh! Why does anyone keep working for this place?

Well, I’ll tell you why: I hardly work at all. Creative malingering—my own systematic scheme to avoid working at all costs—not only has failed to raise any eyebrows, it actually has resulted in higher annual review scores. Last spring I got a 4.5 rating on a scale of 4!!!!!

If I go to the proposed nonprofit, I suppose I’ll be expected to actually work. That could be depressing. I don’t know if I remember how.

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

Yesterday my Realtor friend invited me to lunch. I was happy for a break, since I’d spent the morning after a sleepless night drafting a job application. God, but applying for a job has become a complicated mess! Useta be you just sent in your resume and had an interview. Maybe you took some sort of skills test. No more! Today you jump through a dozen flaming hoops, explain your innermost self, provide a detailed excuse for every parking ticket you’ve ever had, and write a minidissertation. That’s before they’ll look at your résumé, which had better be machine-readable.

Anyway, my friend came armed with a stack of printouts for houses he wanted me to look at. Argh. I wasn’t planning on spending the entire afternoon driving around the central city, but that’s what we did.

He believes that with all the foreclosures and short sales on the market, we have a chance of finding a place that won’t cost as much to maintain for what I can get for my house. Problem is…what I can get for my house is now very little, indeed. The $325,000 estimate of a few months ago is now down around $270,000 to $280,000…before all the various commissions, fees, and rips are taken off. And while prices in other North Central neighborhoods have dropped, mine has dropped in exact ratio, so that if your house costs less, mine still sells for even less than yours, so I can’t afford yours.

This means that no matter how far property values in my part of town drop, I still can’t afford to move to a smaller, easier (read cheaper)-to-maintain house in a neighborhood with fewer run-down properties and less crime.

The repos we saw were dumps. The one place we visited that was not a foreclosure was in a little 1950s working-class enclave smack in the middle of the midtown high-rise district. The owners, who had lived there a good 30 years, had lovingly patched the sprawling, bizarrely laid-out house together with a series of add-ons, clearly projects they came up with as they had the money. Each room had different flooring, and strange passageways led to hidden bedrooms behind odd doors and long halls. It was, in a word, not to code.

There was a great deal of charm in all the work the couple had done over the years. The charm, alas, will go when the residents go. The house reflected them and was infused by them. Once they leave, it will be naught but a ramshackle pile.

Houses in the little enclave of patio homes I covet, as it develops, have most recently sold in the high 400s, so we won’t be moving there anytime soon.

So it looks to me like the project to find a place in town whose operating costs are relatively low is pretty forlorn. I just don’t think I’m going to find any such palace that I can afford. The only place I can get a single-family home with low maintenance costs and low taxes is…oh yes. Sun City.

I felt like I’d wasted the entire afternoon, when I should have been editing copy and working on applying for the Sonoran Institute job. The effort to cut costs by finding a cheaper place to live not only did not work toward cutting anything that looks like a cost, it wasted time.

If I lose my job—or when I retire—there’s no way I can maintain the house I’m in. This month the regular bills (utilities, etc.) overran the $840 set aside to cover them, and I also overspent the $1,500 “all other costs” budget by $27—even though my only extravagance was about $125 for some inexpensive dishes. Fortunately I have enough in savings to make up the difference. But once my income drops below its present level, I won’t be able to put money in savings. And I probably won’t have enough income to cover the summer bills and also eat.

Guess I need to resign myself to the fact that I’ll be spending my golden years in a ghetto for the elderly.

Next week Funny about Money will host the Carnival of Money Stories again. The deadline is this Sunday for the carnival that goes live on the 30th. So…be sure to send in your money stories!

Oops! Asleep at the switch, I neglected to mention that 15th Finance Fiestawent up on September 11 at On a Quest to Be Debt-Free, where Funny’s “Best Jobs, Worst Jobs” squib was included. With an appropriately patriotic theme, given the date, Quest’s round-up includes some great posts from around the PF blogosphere. I was tickled to see Money Blue Book’s interesting and entertaining explanation of how credit card numbers are generated, a post I’d noticed, with amazement, some time back. Cash Money Life and readers discuss ways to get your “check engine” light diagnosed for free (or for not-so-free!). And Money Grubbing Lawyer confirms my suspicions about pet health insurance.