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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.

Yesterday intrepid shopper VickyC led the wayon a half-day safari through Ikea. What an experience! The place, which occupies a large chunk of a large retail campus full of warehouse-size furniture stores perched on the banks of a gigantic freeway running through a vastsuburban plain of look-alike tract houses, was just jammed. So crowded was it that you couldn’t even stand still without having someone bump into you. At least a third of the patrons were youngish mothers with small, shrilly screaming children.

LOL! If I had been a child, I would have shrieked, too.

VickyC was continuing her search for a small desk, and she also hoped to pick up some shelves that hang niftily on the wall without visible braces. We did locate the shelves. But a difficulty promptly arose: she lives in a historic house, none of whose measurements are standard in 2008. So neither of the two sizes the shelves come in would fit either of the spaces where she wants to hang them. That she plans to put books on them and one sign announced their maximum load is 11 pounds didn’t help matters.

If she could find a desk small enough to leave room on the 60-inch wall that will house this proposed work space, she might manage to fit in a narrow cabinet of shelves. We looked at every cabinet, every bookshelf, and every desk in the entire 40 million square feet under Ikea’s roof. We searched at such length that by the time neither of us could stand up any longer, the crowds had gone home and we had most of the store to ourselves. During the hours-long expedition, we found one arrangement that mightwork. She decided to think about it.

We came away with three purchases: VickyC found a plastic drawer organizer and I grabbed a few unscented pillar candles and a glass mug to replace the yard-sale purchase I dropped some weeks ago.

I was struck by how chintzy the furniture items were. Much of this stuff is truly ugly: lots of plastic, ersatz veneer-over-cardboard, and fake chrome- or fake nickel-plated hardware.

On the other hand, beggars can’t be choosers: the stuff is amazingly cheap. And it must be said that the children’s furniture includes some adorable and snazzy designs. The “Mammut” series offers this cheerful table and chairs, which come in fire-engine red, brilliant blue, and lime green — to die for. The table is all of forty bucks, and each chair is fifteen.

We were impressed, too, by the large selection of Marimekko-knockoff fabrics, some of them in upholstery weights, others sheer, and all bright, striking, and fun. Next to the fabric department, Ikea sells hardware that will let you convert lengths of cloth into sliding shade-like “drapes” that move back and forth like shoji screensacross a window, an appealing device, indeed. Among the deskoids, we found an exceptionally stylish affair cobbled together with your choice of several etched-glass tops slung over legs fashioned to look like black-enameled sawhorses. With no drawers or other storage, it was useful mostly for decoration, but it did look cool.

Most of our fellow shoppers were twentyish-to-thirtyish adults who had the harried look of working parents. When I was that age, my husband and I had bought a house whose $350 mortgage payment stretched our income to the max. We had zero dollars with which to furnish the place. We had some pieces of Levitz furniture that we’d bought with the bribe my father gave my husband to elope with me, so that he (father) didn’t have to pay for a wedding and reception. And that was it. I ended up building bookshelves and tables with bricks and boards, which furnished our home for some years.

Probably today I’d buy Ikea products instead. The stuff is cheaper than bricks and boards, and at least it resembles furniture, more or less. Doesn’t look like you’d get years of wear out of it…but that may be just as well. You wouldn’t want to keep it around for years. There’s something to be said for stylish junk that can be thrown away when you can afford to buy something better. I’m not crazy about the concept of throwing out junk and replacing it with new junk every three or four years, but if you can’t afford anything better, that’s pretty much what you have to do. That, or live with lots of bricks and boards.

The estate sale has a lot to recommend it…