Thank God for bad cowboy music to fill up the empty air in the car when NPR’s local talkathon shows are dull as old chewing gum and NPR’s local pretend-classical station is playing Strauss waltzes and Souza marches.
Lenten thanks, Day 26
On the rare occasions that You decide to allow a full seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, your Godship, that’s very nice. It would be even nicer if You could manage a few more events like that…
Neither time nor energy for much blogging today. This damn virus is still hanging on—unless I’m mistaken, we’re into the fourth week with that now. Tiresome. I swear, every bug takes me twice as long to throw off as normal people seem to need.
One of my students said the disease tends to come back on you, and that when it does it brings on gastrointestinal symptoms. Well, dunno if that’s true, but yesterday I had a bitch of a bellyache and projectile diarrhea. Could’ve been from the cheap hamburger I picked up at Safeway for the dog, though. Night before last I barbecued some of it for me as well as to feed the pooch, and my chunk of it came off the grill on the high side of rare. So it could have been contaminated meat, something that seems to get more common as the days pass.
Speaking of students, I’ve fallen way behind in grading stoont papers, what with being too sick to think, dealing with the eternally ongoing Blackboard fiascos, having the Carnival of Personal Finance take up two full days of my time, trying to cope with not one but two clients on ridiculous deadlines, and then getting distracted with the Macy’s flap. So, I’m going to have to spend the entire day reading papers.
Meanwhile, for your eclectic delectation, here are a few things to read.
While I was trying to figure out if the current viral complaint actually does a) relapse and b) entail gut symptoms, I came across this interesting site from a Columbia professor of virology. Check out the guy’s podcasts!
Here’s a handy thumbnail guide for car buyers. Great pointers for how to hold your own with those dratted salesmen.
First crack out of the box this morning, I presented myself at the business office in the nearest Macy’s, which happens to inhabit the snooty Biltmore Fashion Square. I will say, I was primed for battle. But through a great effort of will, I determined that I would be…well, at least polite. After a brief search, I found a tall, silver-haired fellow secreted away in a windowless, crowded office way in the back of the third floor.
I explained the circumstances: Charge forgotten after no statements had arrived; bill sent to a collection agency with a Better Business Bureau grade of “F” because of its disastrous complaint record.
To my surprise, this gentleman turned out to be a mellow sort of a guy, the type who probably never gets visibly frustrated or annoyed, even when confronted by an eccentric old bat the first thing Monday morning. Better, as it developed, he was a man with a Rolodex full of direct lines to human beings. And, best of all, he was an area supervisor.
As he’s punching buttons to make his way through a phone-tree maze, he says, “You know, they’ll want a photo ID.” No problem: I produce my driver’s license, which gets added to the mound of paper now littering his desk—including the correspondence from the collection bureau. He gets someone on the phone; then proceeds to call someone else.
“What’s your address?” he asks.
“Nine ninety-nine Erewhon Road,” I say.
“Hm,” he says.
He gets off the phone from another factotum. Then he says, “Here’s what’s happened. They’ve been sending your statements to the wrong address.”
“What?”
“Yes. Look: the address this credit bureau has, which is the same address our credit department has, is on Erewhon Street, not Erewhon Road. Your driver’s license says you live on Erewhon Road.”
Oh. Em. Gee. My strange neighbor Manny lives at 999 Erewhon Street, two houses away from me. He’s been peeved at me ever since the roofers parked a load of asphalt shingles meant for my house on top of his roof.
It turns out that Manny and his wife have been marking misdelivered correspondence “refused” and returning it to the senders. Cute, huh? Considering that they walk their two dogs past my house to let them shit all over the yard about every third day, you’d think they could bestir themselves to carry a piece of first-class mail over and drop it in the mailbox.
Mr. Supervisor speculates that the reason the physical plastic credit card got delivered is that the post office will not return credit cards, so they probably took the time to look up my real address. As for the dunning letter from the collection bureau: that was raw luck. He thinks probably it fell into the hands of a postal carrier who happened to know the customers on his route, and who also could tell the difference between a road and a street.
Marshaling his vast collection of direct lines to actual human beings, Mr. Supervisor made a couple of calls and within five or ten minutes he had erased the black blot on my records and arranged for me to pay the bill right then and there, in person. Not only that, but he came up with a charge of $23, not $28.
Impressive, eh?
The take-away message here isto resolve issues in the corporate bureaucracy, avoid the punch-a-button maze whenever possible and seek a face-to-face meeting with a live human being.
What a relief! It felt a lot like the way you feel when you finally manage to dig a mean splinter out of your foot.
Much cheered, I decided to take a tour of the Biltmore shopping center, where I used to hang out pretty regularly, back in the palmy days when I could afford to shop in places like Ralph Lauren. Coveted a few iPhones and iPads and drooled on an iMac with a gigantic screen (actually, it’s almost affordable).
The new accountant says the S-corporation can and should be spending a few bucks on business-related items for its proprietor. No question it can afford a new iMac. She even thinks it should be paying for a cell phone (!!). I wonder if it could afford an iPhone.
Over to Williams-Sonoma, purveyor of so many of the now aging accouterments of my nifty little gourmet kitchen. Did I mention that during the past Week in Hell, I destroyed my favorite 8-inch sautée pan? Yesh. It’s pretty much wrecked.
Williams-Sonoma has one just like it, only in All-Clad instead of Cuisinart, the maker of the deceased gem of a fry-pan. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it…that one plus another All-Clad the size of the nonstick 10-inch Calphalon number that’s about worn out would come to around $225. Plus 9.3% tax. For a mere $90 (not counting almost ten bucks in tax), I could get two non-stick Calphalons in exactly the sizes I want. But they have that annoying brushed slate-colored stuff on the outside, which over time collects a patina of grease that will not come off. Oh, covet those shiny All-Clad things!
Frugal Scholar also covets All-Clad and, like me, picks them up at thrift stores and estate sales. And, she notes, at interesting cut-rate sites like this one. Yea, verily: there’s the beloved little pan! As an irregular, forty-two dollah! This outfit has more 10-inch pans than you can shake a stick at, but Williams-Sonoma’s, at $120, comes with a lid, which none of the online models do.
Moving on, I visited a few more of my old haunts and realized the place has changed hugely since the last time I idled away an hour or two there. I have got to get out of my garrett. The world is starting to pass me by.
That notwithstanding, I believe I’m going to permit a little passing by this afternoon. I’ve lost count of the number of evenings in a row when I’ve sat down to dinner at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., after having parked myself in front of the computer somewhere between four and six in the morning. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well last night, with thoughts of some shady collection bureau haunting the night. The day is too beautiful to kill in the office.
The journalism students’ papers (both sets of them) are read, and a start has been made on the freshmen’s papers. The little McBoingers don’t have a major paper due for another two or three weeks, and so they can wait a few days to get their present magnum opus. So, I am knocking off the work for the rest of the day.
That decision having been taken on the way home, the minute I walked in the house the phone rang, and lo! There was a prospective client calling from Virginia, seeking a project manager. A project manager for big projects. Technical projects. That would be the sort done by professionals, not self-published tracts by some wretch who thinks the hoodoos in Sedona were put there by space aliens. Did I add paying projects to that?
So between now and tomorrow Tina (who when last heard from was talking about waiting table again) and I will need to organize something persuasive about ourselves and line up some live references. This is the sort of client that, if we can manage to do a decent job, could keep us in beer and skittles for quite a while.
Well. At least it’s nice and quiet at four in the morning. Except for Sheriff Joe’s ubiquitous helicopters, which use the skies over our neighborhood as an aerial freeway.
Update: This all turned out for the best. A Macy’s supervisor took charge, figured out why their statements had never reached my house, untangled the mess, and accepted payment for the original bill. It remains to be seen whether the collection bureau, which has an unsavory reputation, will actually be called off. But for the nonce, things look brighter.
§§§
Yesterday I pick up the mail and open what looks like some official correspondence or possibly a long-awaited check from Google Adsense, which sends payment in envelopes like the one in hand, with no clear return address. And what should I find but a threat from a collection agency!
Say what?
They claim I owe Macy’s $91.
I have no clue what this is about, since I don’t ordinarily shop in Macy’s, because it’s too far away, it’s an unpleasant store to navigate, and it’s generally overpriced. I call Macy’s and spend a good hour wending my way through punch-a-button mazes. Finally one factotum claims I made a purchase last September for $28. I point out that’s a far cry from $91, and if I made any such purchase, why does the account number on the bill collector’s statement not jibe with the account number on the credit card they sent me, which was never activated? She has no clue, either.
Finally, while I’m listening to obnoxious sounds and waiting for yet another clueless soul with a Bangladeshi accent to come on the phone, I sift through several months’ worth of Excel entries and discover that indeed, in September I bought a bargain purse for $28. Now I remember! It was one of those girls-on-the-town shopping adventures. Among several strategies that La Maya and I used to drive the price down from about $90 was to agree to open a Macy’s charge account for 10 percent off—hence the presence, in my file drawer, of the unactivated card.
Macy’s never sent a statement. I recall noticing that the bill hadn’t cleared after the first month, but then as my Excel spreadsheet turned into an endless roll of toilet paper, the uncleared line fell out of sight and it simply slipped my mind.
Not one statement is in the file, and I am quite certain no statement ever landed in my mailbox.
M’hijito suggested that I probably didn’t recognize their bills and tossed them in the recycling bin with the flood of unwelcome junkmail that the USPS dumps into my mailbox. That certainly is a possibility. But I doubt it: I’ve been around for more than a day or two, and I do know what first-class mail looks like. Unless Macy’s sends its bills at bulk-mail rates, it’s highly unlikely I would have missed six statements.
No. The only explanation is that they didn’t send a statement and so, since my bill-paying is triggered by the arrival of statements, I failed to notice the outstanding charge.
Hmmm…. Interestingly, I don’t seem to have been the only one to experience what appears to be a Macy’s scam to extract interest and late fees from unsuspecting customers. We have this endless Facebook exchange, in which a woman describes exactly the same experience and one commenter remarks,
For anyone claiming that this is not a scam, they’re out of their mind. This is absolutely a scam to create late payment fees on behalf of Macy’s. Yes, as an employee you can explain it well and yes, as a credit card user, you can eliminate the problem by being aware of what the account is and how it works, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a scam. Macy’s purposely makes it very easy to lose track of a small balance that is due in order to tack on a large fee. It’s a classic shady business technique/scam. Just like when a company asks you to sign up for a “FREE” rewards service or some other set-up that is free for a month, but then requires you to cancel the $9.99 or $19.99 that starts billing every month. Sure, you can cancel it, but most companies who operate this type of shady practice make it difficult to find a phone number to cancel, or they bill it under a name that doesn’t look familiar to you and if you’re not paying close attention to your credit card bills each month, you can end up getting billed several months for something you never intended to sign up for in the first place.
Other people have described similar behavior and said it damaged their credit rating. Macy’s also has another scam, whereby when they issue you a credit card through one of their 10% off schemes, they’re actually issuing you two credit cards, one of which you don’t know about. One is a regular store account and one is an AMEX account. Since they no more bother to tell you this than they bother to send you statements, if you go to your online site to check your balance, you will think it’s zero, because the real balance appears in an account about which you are kept in the dark.
Well, I guess I’m going to have to pay the bastards. But you can be sure I’ll never buy another piece of junk at a Macy’s store again.
Two nice little checks for The Copyeditor’s Desk just came in: a payment from Google and a handsomer remittance from an editorial client. This brings the corporation’s bottom line to almost six grand, plenty to buy a new computer, which I’m going to have to do one of these days. When I tried the credit union’s new electronic deposit tool, it worked with no problem. So today I can deposit the cash that fell off those money trees without having to burn gas or time.
Time. Yes. We could all do with an infusion of that. One fiasco after another here: I’m working 18- to 20-hour days again, trying to cope with the avalanche of little disasters.
The misbegotten Blackboard has done it again. OMG, how I hate Blackboard; hate to the nth power! After half the world has upgraded to IE9 or Firefox 4, now IT sends out a notice that neither of these is compatible with Blackboard.
Actually, we might more accurately put it the other way around: Blackboard is incompatible with IE9 and Firefox 4.
Either way you look at it, it means a bunch of my students can’t get into my course sites unless they download Chrome or Safari. And one of those is a 100% online course!
I recently upgraded Firefox myself, but for reasons unknown, it only updated to 3.9, and so at least I can still get into the courses. If the upgrade prompt had installed 4.0, I would be screwed. The only way I could access the online course at all and manage the incoming papers from the face-to-face students would be to sit in the campus library, in a miasma of rhinoviruses floating on the air, for hour after hour after hour.
Well, no. Actually, I could get in with Safari, but it’s much less convenient. Compared to Firefox, Safari is a pain in the butt to use.
Yesterday I worked from three in the morning to after midnight, with a hiatus to stand in front of two f2f sections, creating new a website on WordPress.com to accommodate the online course. As some of you may recall, building the course in Blackboard took several months—indeed, the school paid me the equivalent of an entire course’s stipend to do that large amount of work. So, trying to move the course (and the two freshman comp sections) to a new platform in a matter of days is no joke.
I think, however, that it’s going to work.
The “Journalist” template will accommodate a lot of pages in the right sidebar. That’s good, because moving all the course materials over here involves posting 26 pages. That’s right. Twenty-six.
Below those, there are 15 sets of external links to sites ranging from examples of different article types to trade groups and job boards. The sidebar, in short, is toilet paper.
However, two students have said the material is more accessible than it is in Blackboard. That tells you something about Blackboard! 😉
The “subscribe” function will allow students to receive e-mail pings when new announcements go online, which BB doesn’t provide…well, actually, it does have an RSS function, but the District disabled it. Students have to proactively go TO their Blackboard site and physically scan up and down the front page looking for new posts. The straight, conventional blog format in WordPress allows new announcements to appear at the top of the page; if you post a “permanent” announcement in BB, it sticks to the top of the page and the weekly learning module updates get pushed below the fold, giving students the impression that no new announcements have come up.
Of course, WP lacks the assignment submission function and the grade sheet function. However, those are easily replaced. My plan is to set up a separate Gmail account dedicated exclusively to the online course, which will segregate student papers from the flood of spam that pours in from the community colleges. It will be easy to return graded student papers as “replies” to incoming Gmail. And as for their grades: a one-line spreadsheet with the functions built in will tell students what their current score is and show their percentage of total points. I’ll e-mail a blank spreadsheet to them and let them enter their own scores in their own little spreadsheets.
Meanwhile, two clients imagine I’m working on their stuff. One has an arcane problem with Word, which I may not be able to fix from my Mac.
Three sets of student papers are pouring in as we speak.
The Book Publisher’s Association thinks I’m going to mount their March newsletter, which is now three weeks late, in the arcane web publishing platform they use.
So late last week I schlepped to Tempe, there to meet with my friend Tina for lunch and then to get my hair done by a reasonably trustworthy stylist. What I hadn’t counted on: The Mill Avenue Crafts Fair.
Augh! This annual event has bloated into a huge affair that calls vendors from all over the country and shoppers from all over the state, to say nothing of every tourist who’s in town during the high season. Driving around it and getting a place to park is a freaking nightmare.
However…it is kinda fun to stroll around. I like to buy my jewelry (when I buy it, rather than making it myself) from crafters who show up at these fairs, and yea verily! Who should I stumble across but a couple of Polish jewelry-makers who specialize in amber and silver. Aren’t these pretty?
Photo’s not too great—my camera was running out of juice and I got in a hurry. Oh well. Anyway, I needed a new li’l cross for choir, since I gave my good silver and topaz cross to my best friend on the choir at the time I walked away after a visiting cleric remarked that if we didn’t support George Bush’s war in the Middle East and the Israeli agenda, we weren’t good Christians.
Love the design of the earrings, and the cross is kind of unusual but not strange.
These little fellows set me back about $120, which was not a problem because I have plenty in diddle-it-away savings to cover that. Indulgences like this are exactly what the diddle-it-away sinking fund is for. So, no, the baubles are not the issue.
The issue is these…
Yes. I’m afraid so. As long as I was wandering around Mill Avenue, I could hardly not pay a visit to my favorite purveyor of pain-free shoes, the cutesily named Shoe Mill, especially since I happened to have a $20 off coupon. Lo! They were having a 50% off sale!
Nothing that anyone would like to wear in public was part of this sale, and the Naots pictured above were decidedly not on sale. Nooo…. With the $20 off, the tab came to around $160.
Good God! So now I’ve spent something in excess of $300, by the time you figure in the bottle of leather lotion I picked up to treat the outrageously expensive purse I bought there shortly after Canning Day.
Still. I can afford it. Despite last month’s excesses and unexpected expenses, it looks like I’ll end this month about $350 in the black, an amazing feat made possible by a state income tax refund. That money would normally go into the diddle-it-away fund, easily making up for these two little extravagances.
However… My son’s birthday happens in a few days. I would like either to buy him an expensive electronic doodad or to give him the amount it would cost and let him buy whatever doodads he pleases. Or just cash the check as ones, scatter them across the living room floor, and roll in them.
If I keep the shoes, forking over several hundred bucks for a birthday present is going to be a stretch. The Shoe Mill has a generous return policy, and so I could burn a quarter-tank of gas to trek back out to Tempe and get my money back. On the other hand, I need a pair of summer shoes. My favorite summery shoes are an old pair of Naots whose cork soles are crumbling and shedding little pieces. And the new Naots would look awesome with this dress from J. Jill:
I want that dress. I don’t have any light-colored shoes to go with it. So of course I need the silver Naot sandals. Don’t I?
I could take the shoes back, refrain from buying the linen summer dress, and save about $280, which could then be expended upon my son. Or not.
It should be borne in mind that the feds owe me $3004 for the 2010 tax refund, which should be dropping out of the ether into my checking account pretty quick now. So really, I could pay for all of this out of savings and the refund without draining diddle-away savings to naught. On the other hand, that would leave significantly less than $3000 to put into the short-term survival fund, which is supposed to carry me through until the end of 2012 without taxable drawdowns from investments.
Realistically, between now and then I probably could scrounge $280 from various frugalities to replace the money in the survival fund. Assuming I remember to do so, and assuming I work that hard at pinching pennies. Or maybe not so realistically: pretty soon the Dog Chariot will need a new timing belt: $340.
So the Republicans are getting ready to go after Social Security and Medicare. Some of their followers don’t even seem to be rational. Here’s one who remarks that if Social Security goes, “no one is going to be hurt by it.”
Yeah. No one but the kids.
You know, if it were not for Social Security, I could not stay in my home. I wouldn’t be able to pay the property taxes, and pretty soon the County would come and evict me. I would be living on the streets right now, today. The house my son is living in would have been foreclosed by now, since without my salary and Social Security, we wouldn’t have a hope of making payments on the upside-down mortgage. And that is with a retirement nest egg that’s 3.3 times larger than the average 50- to 60-year-old’s.
In a culture where families fly apart as the kids reach adulthood, where the elderly are objects of disdain and discrimination, where you’ll have a tough time getting a job if you’re laid off at 45 and no chance at all if you’re in your 60s, where a man is considered not a man if his mother lives with him, where the elderly are expected to live on their own until they’re sent off to a nursing home, who exactly is going to take care of the old folks when they can no longer work?
Without Social Security and Medicare, my choices would be to depend on my son to house me, feed me, and cover my healthcare costs or to live on the street until I die, which would happen in short order. Ours is not a culture like Revanche’s, where young people expect to care for their parents no matter how much strain it puts on their own lives. Most Americans would expect their parents and troublesome siblings to fend for themselves.
This is true for a large portion of the elderly in our country. Get rid of the so-called “entitlement” programs—into which we have paid all our lives—and you’ll end up consigning huge numbers of older Americans to dire poverty. Responsibility for supporting them will fall to their adult children, who don’t have the resources to care for elderly, unemployable parents.
Will you be willing to take your parents in after they can no longer work? Oh, you say you don’t want Mom and Dad living in your spare bedroom? You don’t want them in your face all day, every day, telling you how to raise your kids and how to live your life. Well, then, are you prepared to pay their rent? Can you cover the property taxes on their paid-off home?
And when you discover the cat food in the pantry (they don’t have a cat, interestingly enough), will you shell out a couple hundred a month to buy groceries for them? When you find out that they’re too frail to get groceries for themselves, will you run to the grocery store once or twice a week and stock up on microwavable food for them?
Are you willing to pay for your parents’ healthcare? Sure you are. But can you? Can you afford to buy insurance for an elderly person who already has chronic health problems? And if they can’t get insurance at all (which they can’t, because of the chronic health issues), are you in a position to pay for their health care out of pocket? You do know, no doubt, how much treatment for a heart condition costs?
How many of you who are younger and midlife adults see yourselves, seriously, as willing and able to care for your parents when they get too old work? Take a look at these excellent young people who are coming up behind you…see any of them planning to support Mom and Dad in old age?
In the post linked above, Revanche asks readers if they have a plan for taking care of their parents when the old folks can no longer care for themselves. Do you? If you’re under about 35 or 40, you’d better get one.
And by the way, who’s going to support you when you get too old or sick to work, and the stock market crashes right at the moment when you can no longer hold down a job?
