Finally—finally, finally, finally—the state sent out a booklet showing the medical benefits offered during this fall’s annual enrollment period. We’re a week in to the normal open enrollment period and have had no information. GDU was supposed to have posted this stuff today, but at last look had not. The state, however, has known the facts long enough to print out and mail a 69-page document to every employee.
We still have an EPO, through the very iffy Cigna but at least an EPO, and my doc at the Mayo accepts it. Thank God! And according to the CSR I just spoke to, it will cover care at any emergency room, including the pricey Mayo. Premium is only $39 a month.
The total monthly premium is $523. According to this document, those of us who are to be canned between now and December 31 will be entitled to the COBRA discount and so will have to pay only 35 percent of the usual outrageous COBRA premium. For the EPO, then, my cost will be $183 a month—significantly less than I’ve budgeted for Medicare Part B + Medicare Part D + Medigap.
Hallelujah! Now…if I can just manage to not get sick between now and my 65th birthday, I’ll be golden.
None of this bodes well. Our Beloved Employer, the State of Arizona, is up to something, and it ain’t good. They are actually keeping the nature of the 2009-10 health care plans secret. Open enrollment starts on Monday, and HR on all levels—at the state and at the university—is refusing to tell anyone what choices we will have or what providers they will cover.
What this means is that (once again) the pooh-bahs expect people to be dangerously angry. The last time they pulled a serious number on us, when PeopleSoft was jacking us around to the extent that some people weren’t getting their paychecks at all, they had armed guards present at meetings in which they tried to justify the various ways they were screwing us.
Rumor has it that we will be offered only two health plans, one from Aetna and one from Cigna. Everyone here knows how likely it is that you will get in to see your accustomed doctors if you have Cigna as an insurer. From what I’m told by friends who are healthcare professionals, Aetna is even worse. When Cigna was our only choice (a state of affairs that devolved the last time our present governor was in power: coincidentally, her husband is a senior executive with that outfit), one of my doctors would not see me at all, even after I offered to pay him in cash! I had to go out and buy private insurance on the open market in order to have any choice at all in medical care—and around here, where medical care is about as good as the educational system, you do need to have some control, in the form of choice as to which doctors you will and will not see and which hospitals you will and will not end up in.
Since relatively few Arizonans are sensitive to this fact (in a right-to-work-for-nothing state, employees are just happy to get any health insurance), a limited choice of plans is probably not the issue. Some people will be annoyed, but not to the extent that the Mouthpieces will feel a need to have men toting guns present at public meetings.
No. The issue will be that the cost is going to go through the roof. And that will set people off.
The furloughs have done so much damage that a permanent pay cut in the form of a gigantic hike in health insurance premiums really will cause some serious outrage. We have had our salaries back to normal now for one, count it, one week. Over the past six months, I’ve been working at a $500/month cut in pay. My associate editor announced that she’s looking for another job, because the new little number they’re doing on her has cut her take-home pay to $200 a week.
If they raise insurance premiums to $200-plus for one person (which is what all the plans that are not HMOs other than the EPO presently cost), that will leave her working for…yes! nothing. Zero take-home pay. At that point, she’ll be better off to quit. Applebee’s, where she earns more in five hours than GDU was paying her in a week before its current shafting of her, offers a rudimentary form of health insurance that would carry her over until such time as she can find a decent job. My guess is, she’ll walk right out our door.
A-n-n-n-d… If that’s what comes down, I can’t do all her work plus all the work of the research associate they’re not replacing. Even if it’s only for four months, between September and Canning Day, I may be forced to quit, myself. Supposing Her Deanship agrees to let that much of our workload go and still keep our office open, an exorbitant health care premium will bring an end to my plan to save up enough cash to get by in the coming penury. It’s pointless to work yourself to death if the pay doesn’t do you any good. I’d probably be better off to quit, myself.
What a place!
We’re told the university system is getting $154 million in stimulus funding (quite a lot for educational institutions in this state, which tells you something right there: it’s a tiny, tiny drop compared to the amounts forked over to revive the automobile industry and to lay down more asphalt across our state). GDU is supposed to get the largest part of this.
When Her Deanship was canning me and again when she was raving on about how brilliant I am, several times she murmured that “there might be something” come December. Apparently they hope to find a way to salvage some part of our program if they get some money. But I’d have to think once, twice, three times about any such offer.
First, I really resent the prospect of another $300 to $500 cut in pay. Now, I realize that I’ll be paying something like that for Medicare out of a vastly smaller income. But it’s the principal of the thing: at least on Social Security I won’t have to work for my pittance. (I’ll have to work to scrape together two other pittances in order to survive…but we’ll overlook that for the time being. 🙂 ) Second, I’ve come to feel so angry about the way that outfit has treated my staff that I can barely stand to drive out there and walk onto the campus. And third, I’m tired of waking up at 4:00 in the morning and not being able to sleep for worrying about…well, about shit like this!
Helle’s Belles. I’m going back to bed. Too late to drug myself: I have to drive a car in a few hours. But damn it. There’s a limit to these three-hour nights.
Comes the following from my sidekick, in the e-mail:
After the furlough and the new deductions they’re taking…I’m netting about $200/week. I’m going to do the bare minimum. It’s just not worth it. I’m going to have to find another job soon. I can’t live on this.
Think of that. This talented young woman, who in working 50% FTE for our office has handled not one, not two, but three scholarly journals (one of whose content is partially in Spanish), has a master’s degree from the Great Desert University and a set of highly sophisticated editorial skills. Tells you a lot about how GDU values its master’s programs, doesn’t it? And about how it values its employees.
Some time back, she remarked that she earns more in a five-hour shift waiting tables at Applebee’s than she does in a week at GDU. Now, I expect, she earns more in about two hours.
A week or so ago, she got a notice from PeopleSoft, the faceless contractor to which GDU has outsourced its payroll functions, to the effect that they’d just discovered that for the past year they’ve failed to withhold her required contributions to the state retirement system, which in this right-to-work-for-nothing state amount to 9 percent of the employee’s salary. They tried to blame this on her, claiming she had not gone to a “new employee” meeting when she was switched from graduate research assistant to classified staff (thereby incurring a large cut in pay) and so had not “elected” the mandatory retirement.
Say what?
In the first place, she was not a new employee. Having worked in our office doing the same work for the prior two years, she had no reason to think she was regarded as a “new” employee.
In the second place, classified state employees here have no choice of retirement plans. They are eligible only for the Arizona State Retirement System, a defined benefit plan, and they are required to belong to it, willy-nilly. There was nothing to “elect”! GDU and PeopleSoft should have automatically withheld her retirement contributions, as a matter of course.
GDU has pulled some nasty stunts on employees over the years I’ve observed it in action. I can’t say this one takes the cake. But it comes close.
It comes close because she is paid so frigging little in the first place that it’s insulting. Then to confiscate practically her entire salary…it’s just inexcusable.
Is there any question why morale is in the sub-basement? Is there any question why the place is collapsing inward on itself? And is there any question why this city hosts therapists whose entire practices consist mostly of GDU employees?
No wonder I grind my teeth till they break.
If I could see my way clear to survive between now and Medicare eligibility, I would quit Monday morning. Let them find someone else to lead the sheep to the slaughter.
In fact, I probably could quit in September. Apparently you can claim COBRA if you can say the reason for your leaving is that the job changed enough to make it unacceptable. And as far as I’m concerned, this kind of treatment of my staff is unacceptable. At that time, the nine-month COBRA discount would carry me through to my 65th birthday. The combination of four sections in the community colleges plus the amount GDU would have to pay for my unused vacation time would amount to only about $1,495 less than my salary in the last quarter of 2009.
This morning after visiting the Social Security Administration to apply for a replacement SS card, I dropped by the Paradise Valley Community College campus to find out a few of the things I need to know: how to schedule time for the li’l students to visit the library and how to get set up in BlackBoard, the online learning tool where faculty can post course docs and students can turn in papers electronically.
Truth to tell, I was dreading it: expected a day fraught with hassles. The prospect of enduring a series of runarounds in the 110-degree heat, when what I most wanted to do was find an air-conditioning vent and stand under it, did not fill me with joy.
But nay! Hang onto your hats, folks: people were nice to me there!
Lordie. I hardly know what to make of it. The librarian (who at the moment had little to do) got up and gave me the grand tour, sat down at a computer with me and got me into the system, showed me how to sign up for library time. Then he personally accompanied me to one of the IT gurus, to whom he introduced me. From her I learned about a whole week of faculty learning seminars in August, some of them for really neat stuff. They were both very generous with their time and behaved as though they actually liked their jobs.
Weird.
At GDU, a newbie can’t get people to explain things for love nor money. When you ask how to get something done or where to go to find out, the answer invariably is “I dunno. It’s not my job.”
When GDU hired me to establish our office, they expected me to buy furniture, computers, printers, scanners, software, office supplies, reference works, and even the phones and ethernet connections. One woman in the dean’s office was assigned to find us office space, which she eventually did—in the engineering building—but she wasn’t very gracious about it. She acted like it was quite an imposition, even though that was her job…which has since been eliminated. Getting the phones installed was a memorable headache: it took a week or two just to find out where I was supposed to call to apply to have them installed. It then was another couple of weeks before they got around to doing it. Ethernet entailed a similar runaround. And the furniture…oh god! Don’t ask.
Think I’m making this up, don’t you? Well, I thought it was “just me” for the longest time: must be my curdled personality turning people off. Then my friend who had founded and developed a nationally prominent graduate editing program retired—this program functioned more or less as our sister program, because we hire(d) our research assistants from its students, providing rare, nicely paying twelve-month support for three graduate students. The new guy showed up, and we became soon became cordial. Pretty quick he’s asking me how to get this, that, and the other thing done. He voiced exactly the same complaint. No one would tell him where to go or how to find out how to do the most basic things!
So I felt weirdly gratified when the new director, who was an affable, gregarious fellow hired to run a prestigious program with national visibility, ran into the same brick walls. At least it wasn’t something I was doing.
At any rate, it felt very strange to have people who never saw me in their lives act as though they cared whether I lived or died. The pay’s not very good, but it’s beginning to look like the trade-off is huge: working someplace where people aren’t miserable in their jobs.
An auto mechanic turned radio personality and Internet entrepreneur: Cary Lockwood is the first star of Funny’s new series interviewing men and women who find creative new ways to jump off the treadmill.
I came across Cary after finding his website, YourAutoNetwork.com. At first glance, it looks like an Angie’s List for car mechanics, except you don’t have to pay for it. On closer inspection, some differences arise: all of the businesses listed are local companies, and unlike Click & Clack’s reader-driven listing, the site offers few consumer reviews. Thinking what a great idea to bring in some side income, I gave him a call. Turns out the story is a lot more complicated.
FaM: Thanks for chatting with us, Cary. Would you tell us how you came to start YourAutoNetwork.com?
Lockwood: I spent 20 years working for General Motors, at the automobile proving grounds here in Arizona. When GM closed that facility, the company asked me to move to Michigan. Well, I grew up in the East, and my wife and I decided we didn’t want to move back in that direction. So I started a repair shop. It did well, because we emphasized customer service and did honest, high-quality work.
One day a friend and local talk show host, Charles Goyette, invited me to do a segment on his radio talk show. I said I’m not very political and might not fit in. He said they had a Saturday show that didn’t talk about much controversy. So I started doing it.
Pretty quick I realized we were getting a lot of calls from people wanting to know where to get their cars serviced and repaired. There’s a huge need, because—well, to tell the truth, people do run into dishonest shops, and that’s left them untrusting and wary.
That’s when I started the auto network.
The radio show, which evolved into Your Auto Network’s Calling All Cars, began to get bigger. It grew from a Q-and-A segment to a twice-weekly show that covers everything automotive, covering everything from fuel and batteries to windshields and tires, from gas-saving strategies to laws affecting car owners.
Meanwhile, the list kept growing, too.
After a while I had an offer to buy the shop. My wife and I decided to sell and go with making Your Auto Network our business.
FaM: How does an automotive shop get on your list?
Lockwood: I seek out the proven performers, but listeners and friends recommend them. I check them out personally, along with doing a lot of research. The shops can be doing any work related to automotive upkeep—repair, bodywork, painting, parts operations, window tinting, tires, and the like—but they have to be locally owned independent businesses, not chains or big-boxes.
I check out their experience, because that’s one of the things that makes a great shop: we have minimum requirements for the number of years they’ve been in business. They have to have an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. Often I’ll call without identifying myself, to see how they answer the phone or whether they shunt you off to an answering machine. Then I observe the shop itself and study the operation.
The standards are high, because my name is on it.
FaM: One of the problems with Angie’s List is there’s no way to tell whether an owner has had all his in-laws, cousins, nephews, and nieces send in glowing reports.
Lockwood: That’s right. And that’s why we don’t have a lot of customer reviews, although we do make it possible for people to comment.
Testimonials are great if they’re fair and honest, but they don’t give enough information about the business. We go there to meet them, and we work hard to make the listings accurate.
FaM: It’s hard for the average consumer to get a good picture of an automotive service outfit. Often it’s by guess and by God.
Lockwood: I’m on the Auto Repair Advisory Committee for the Better Business Bureau. We review and advise about consumer complaints to the BBB. One of the first things I do when we get a case is to check out the company’s BBB rating. It’s unbelievable! People will go to F-rated places!
It’s really important to check out service providers before you do business with them. If you find a good independent shop, you save a lot of money—and you have greater peace of mind.
FaM: Other than the obvious publicity, what benefit do the shop owners derive from making the YourAutoNetwork.com list?
Lockwood: We’re trying to offer benefits that come from the power of collective buying and pricing. For example, we’re now working to get collective pricing on parts and auto supplies. And we’re looking into ways to offer members group health insurance plans.
FaM: Do you charge shops for listing on YourAutoNetwork.com?
Lockwood: Typically, we charge a small fee. Most of the monetization is coming from ad revenues, especially from the radio show. We now own the show’s air time.
FaM: It’s quite a leap from auto engineer to radio talk show host!
Lockwood: Well, I didn’t expect to be on the radio. When I was a kid, I took acting lessons and actually got parts. Then I got picky about what I’d do—decided I only wanted to act in Shakespeare plays—and also, I was very interested in mechanical things.
The show started live, and it’s now recorded. My wife and I do the editing. That helps a lot–it makes me sound a lot better, and also our guests.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the show’s community activities. We started a partnership with the Salvation Army, and network members have joined in a clothing drive. Shops have collections boxes for customers to donate. We sell a car care rewards card to consumers, and for each purchase we donate $4.00 to the Salvation Army, about 13 percent of gross revenues from the card sales.
We first got interested in helping the Salvation Army because of the economic downturn, with so many people out of work and being turned out of their homes. We like the Army’s emphasis on building self-sufficiency. They do more, though, than helping people who are down on their luck financially. In addition to the Family Center, for families who are facing a crisis, they have a shelter for abuse victims, they do drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and they provide care for the elderly.
FaM: These two enterprises—the radio show and the network listings—must be an enormous amount of work.
Lockwood: It really was a lot of work at first. It’s tapering off now, partly because we’ve achieved one of our goals, which was to have coverage for the entire valley. And over time we’ve learned to work more efficiently.
The big challenge is trying to get the data perfect, before it’s published. My wife helps with getting the information accurate, and we both work at proofreading and checking.
FaM: What advice would you offer a Funny about Money reader who might be interested in doing a similar website in another city?
Lockwood: To do it at a level that offers real value to your readers, you need to be very expert in the business you’re reviewing. Not just anyone can do one of these sites on automotive service. You need many years of experience to understand how these businesses work and what makes them successful, from the owner’s and the customers’ points of view.
I’d suggest that if you want to create a really useful consumer service website, you should pick a business that you truly know something about. If you’re an expert, if you know customer service well, and you know how the businesses operate, you may be able to pull it off.
It’s a lot of work, and you have to be fully committed to accuracy, honesty, and fairness.
FaM: Were you at all nervous about selling the shop to become a full-time radio personality?
Lockwood: No, but you have to be confident and hard-working to insure success.
FaM: What steps did you take to ensure that you could make the transition financially?
Lockwood: We never lived over our heads, so that wasn’t an issue. We did things like building our own house—I helped to build it myself. We didn’t want to get tied down with a large mortgage and other debts. We look at things this way: Say we’d like to get new furniture for the living room. It’s going to cost $4,000. So we ask ourselves, “Do we need it today, or are they still going to be making couches in six months?” If the the answer is “yes, living room furniture will still be around,” we save up and pay for it in cash.
FaM: What’s your strategy for retirement?
Lockwood: Hasn’t entered my mind, because we still have more to achieve. We diversify our investments. And besides, enthusiasm keeps you young.
Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the university is keeping us on through December instead of closing our office, as expected, on June 30? Shouldn’t I be delighted that we all come and go at will, unmolested, and that we’re all being paid for many more hours than we really put in? What, I keep wondering, is the cause of the stress I feel about the job? Have I slipped my trolley? Is there any real reason to hate this job so much I don’t even want to think about it, much less go and do it?
The stress spinning off this resentment keeps me awake at night, causes me to grind my teeth, and drives me to drink. (Okay, not much drink…but for me, two glasses of wine or beer every single day is about 1.5 glasses too many.)
Last night I sat down with a pad of paper and started listing every reason I could think of, sane or not, that might explain my loathing for GDU in general and for my job in specific. Didn’t expect much to come of it: at the outset, I figured my problem is simply unhappiness at being laid off and worry about how I’m going to get by in retirement that will start about six years sooner than planned.
The result surprised me. At the outset, the list consisted of petty, stupid things that really don’t matter much: being rusticated to a decrepit building that was called out of condemnation for no discernible reason; the enduring stench of chemicals used to remove asbestos nine months ago, fumes that have never fully dissipated; some SOB from FacMan turning the thermostat as high as it would go (!) and then bolting the cover to the wall. I mean, really: get over it!
But as I was scribbling these things on paper, more serious issues arose:
• It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy to accept a full-time salary for doing practically nothing. Profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy.
• I’m bored stupid on the campus. Reading academic copy is not one whit more fascinating than reading freshman comp papers; it’s just a variant on boredom.
• I dislike the fraudulence of many degree programs offered not just by GDU but by universities in general. We’ll refrain from naming these, for obvious reasons, but let us observe that too many undergraduate and graduate programs take students’ money and give them precious little in return. Some courses of study turn out graduates with neither the learning and critical thinking skills a traditional liberal arts degree should cultivate nor a salable vocational skill. We have professional programs that turn out not professionals but dunderheads. Although GDU, like most large public universities, does have many highly worthwhile programs, it no longer is easy for a student to distinguish between a worthy program and an academic scam. I don’t like working for an institution that generates much of its income from questionable products.
• And speaking of fraudulence, I’m unhappy with the discovery, made in the course of doing my job, that about 95 percent of academic “research” and publication is unmitigated bullshit, and I resent being made an accomplice to that variety of institutional fraud.
Finally, as the hour grew later and I was nodding off to sleep over the notebook, the real cause of my nausée about the job surfaced. Several years ago an incident occurred whose details I can’t describe here. Suffice it to say that as a result of my doing something my dean had approved, I pissed off an über-dean, who, in a highly actionable way, shafted a woman I had hired. So actionable, in fact, that I gave her the name of a barracuda lawyer and advised her to sue the university. Had she done so, she would be corresponding with us from the Riviera, where she would be enjoying the life of Riley.
What this guy did was so crushing and so demoralizing that at the time I made a considered decision never again do anything even remotely entrepreneurial for the university. Bear in mind: I was hired because of my proven entrepreneurial track record and led to believe my job was not only to establish an office unique in the Western hemisphere but to grow it into a significant enterprise. I decided that I would allow the office to perform the work it had claimed for itself—nothing more—and that I would keep as low a profile as possible. Indeed, I would do as little work as possible, given the kind of appreciation my work had elicited.
There it was: I’ve hated my job ever since that happened. And there’s nothing even faintly irrational about it.
Over the past three or four years, I’ve pushed the incident out of my consciousness. But it hasn’t gone away. The guy pulled a nasty stunt on me and on an innocent bystander, and he should have been canned. In fact, a year or so later he was evicted from that particular über-deanship and shoved laterally into a less influential (but still highly paid) position. A day late, we might say, and a dollar short.
What can I do about this?
Probably nothing. I can’t undo what happened four years ago, and I can’t change the disaffection the incident created. There’s not a thing anyone can do to repair the damage that was done to me and to our operation, and even if there were, it’s too late now.
Still, when I awoke this morning I felt a lot better. Identifying the causes of distress and recognizing that at least one of them is in no way unreasonable helps to create perspective. At least I know I’m not crazy: I really do have good cause to feel some anger and resentment.
Should you put things like this behind you? Well, obviously. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll drive yourself nuts. But you can’t put an issue behind you until you know what it is. I knew what this one was a long time ago but deliberately neglected it. That probably was a mistake: given that there was no recourse within the institution, I should have left the job as soon as possible. “Putting it behind me” without taking action on it was like burying radioactive waste in a vegetable garden.
Putting a problem behind you probably needs to include doing something, no matter how minimal, to resolve the issue: physically getting away from it, confronting its cause, asking for redress, or finding a way to undo harm that has been done. It may be that you must do something about an issue before putting it to bed; otherwise, you risk chronic angst whose real cause grows more and more undefinable as the years pass.
What about you? Have you encountered an issue that came to affect your thinking, your attitude toward life, or your well-being? How have you dealt with it?
