Frugal Scholar has been holding forth (again) about the sometimes execrable customer service at Chico’s. Really. One wonders where retailers get the people the hire, or if they deliberately train them to turn off the customers. Is it possible that there are some among us they just don’t want to do business with?
Some retailers and retail staff trainers could do with some pointers. If you’ve ever stayed at a Ritz-Carlton hotel, you know what customer service is supposed to be like. Back in the day, when I was married to the corporate lawyer, he and I in fact did linger at Ritz-Carlton hotels on occasion…the one at Laguna Niguel, as I recall, was particularly amazing.
Here’s my plan: We all buy a copy of this thing and send it to the president or CEO of Chico’s. If Chico’s Facebook CSR responded to their neglected customer because she noticed Frugal Scholar’s criticism (entirely possible: companies do set their Web browsers to gather online mentions, turning the Internet into a gigantic online clipping service), then maybe if all of Frugal’s and FaM’s readers sent a little hint upper management, we’d see some changes made.
If time is money, it explains why I don’t have enough of it. Money, that is: I never seem to have enough time!
Friday (was that only yesterday?) I was reduced to spending the entire day cleaning house, having let the pigpen slide way, way too long. Dedicating a six or eight hours to dusting, vacuuming, scrubbing, and scouring gives you some time to think, and what I thought is that too much of my time has been wasted on the playground that is the Web and too little of it is used in any actively constructive way.
Not that I don’t spend plenty of time working…commenters will occasionally remark that I seem to work like an animal, and indeed, 14+ hours a day spent in front of a computer, haranguing students, driving from pillar to post, and thrashing around the Funny Farm does make for a tiring schedule. But, as I’ve observed before, I don’t think I’m working very smart. My work pattern is gestalt. Instead of focusing on specific, financially productive activities for specific periods, I’m all over the place: cruising the Web and writing and grading papers or doing course prep and editing copy and checking facts, all the while jumping in and out of the e-mail. Every day about 100 messages a day pour into just one of the four mailboxes that serve me, Funny about Money, and The Copyeditor’s Desk; I don’t have time to check all of them, but I do get pinged by my Mac.com mailbox frequently, all day and into the night. E-mail is one of the biggest time-killers known to Personkind, second only the the Internet playground itself!
One strategy I’ve used to organize time has been listing. This works pretty well: having a to-do list does seem to prod you to get those things done, if only because you get a tiny jolt of satisfaction each time you check one off. Lately, though, the lists seem to get longer and longer. They begin to look like this one from a day last week:
¨1. Move rose, plant bulbs ¨2. Write & print donor forms ¨3. Send ads to Nanette ¨4. Remind Marshall, Jim about SBA ad ¨5. Pick up house ¨6. Build a Mac.com “mailbox” for messages to deal with ASAP ¨7. Clean floors, counters, stove ¨8. Get in touch with Evan, others ¨9. Update student grades 10. Do laundry 11. Check CE Desk mail; cope 12. Order new business cards 13. Compose Time & Charges for PPP 14. Iron clothes 15. Figure out how to copy current 101 course to new BB site 16. Copy current 101 course to new BB site 17. Change at least half of 101 exercises & quizzes to noncredit assignments; figure out adjustment in grading scheme 18. Figure out new due dates for 2nd session 101 course; mesh with 235 assignment due dates 19. Rewrite syllabus accordingly 20. Post new syllabus, due dates, and learning modules 21. Finish editing current PPP novel; compose & print statement and report 22. Water plants 23. Finish planting garden 24. Buy food 25. Fix and eat food 26. Feed dog 27. Walk dog 28. Check rat traps 29. Fertilize citrus & palm 30. Clean, shock-treat pool
Crushing! The effect of a gawdawful list like this is to shut you down. It’s so huge and so discouraging, you don’t even want to start. You just want to avert your eyes and your mind from it.
Still…none of this stuff is disposable. It all has to be done. Maybe not today. But soon. What to do?
Another strategy is to build a daily schedule that will accommodate chores in focused periods. Rather than trying to accomplish a long and scattered list of tasks, such a scheme would bunch activities under various rubrics, scheduling similar chores during specific blocks of time. Here’s what I came up with:
The plan here is to build two new habits:
1. Limit e-mail to first thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon, leaving the program turned off the rest of the day; and
2. Pick up the litter around the house every day, instead of putting it off until whenever I think I have time and feel like it.
😀 Of course, developing new good habits isn’t so easy as developing new bad habits (is the sun over the yardarm somewhere in the world, yet?).
The beauty of this schedule, if it can be made to work, is that it specifies blocks of time to market The Copyeditor’s Desk. Right now, the bulk of my income comes from teaching and Social Security: two tiny pittances combine to make one larger pittance. It’s enough to get by on—just—but not enough to live on comfortably. I’d like to build the business into a revenue generator, and the only way that’s going to happen is for me to get off my duff and network among business owners and executives who have budgets to pay for communication services and products.
The ugly of this schedule, however, is that it still prescribes 14 to 16 hours of work: we’re looking at something that starts around 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. and ends between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. However, that’s ameliorated a bit by the loafing time shown on the weekends. Not much, but better than nothing.
{sigh} If I’m going to work this hard, I’ve gotta have more to show for it than a $29,000 gross income!
Speaking of the which, it’s almost noon and I haven’t even started to read the papers that I was supposed to have done on Thursday. ’Bye!
Our friend Cary Lockwood, the automotive guru and local radio show personality, was chatting over the phone the other day when I happened to mention that I might soon be in the market for a new (or less old) car. He made a startling—and IMHO startlingly brilliant—suggestion: once you’ve narrowed choices down to two or three cars that you could be serious about buying, don’t test-drive them. Instead, rent them.
He pointed out that, in the first place, a ten-minute spin around the block and up the freeway is no way to determine whether the car fits your needs or to become familiar with its handling characteristics. And second, it’s hard to evaluate a vehicle with a salesman hanging over your shoulder pitching the thing. The test drive is one of several tools car sellers use to pressure you into buying. Even when you know this, most people easily succumb to the emotional appeal of a shiny new vehicle.
Cary observes that today’s vehicles are built to run, relatively trouble-free, for ten years or more, if you take care of them. The smart frugalist figures that the longer you can drive a car, the less it costs over the long run. I, for one, plan to drive a car for ten years or until it falls apart, whichever comes last. Because it’s a big investment and you’ll have to live with it for a long time, doesn’t it make sense to invest a few extra dollars and some time to be sure you’re making the right decision?
Rental costs for a Prius run around $40 a day—maybe less with a coupon or corporate account. The New York Times calls hybrid rental prices “excessive,” but it’s hard to assess the truth of this. Car rental companies play coy about pricing; I haven’t found one that will quote a price unless you sign up to reserve a vehicle. A survey of various sites suggests rental rates in general run from around $38 to $150 a day. Forty or fifty bucks for an entire day of test-driving time looks reasonable when you intend to hang onto a vehicle for upwards of a decade.
Cary suggests that you take plenty of time to test the air-conditioning, the seating capacity and comfort, the gasoline mileage, and the car’s handling characteristics. You might even consider renting it for a three-day weekend, giving time to drive it under different conditions and maybe take it on the open road for a day trip. Here are a few things to check out:
• How quickly and effectively does the air-conditioning cool the car? • If you have kids, does the interior accommodate your car seats? Don’t guess: install the car seats and observe how they fit and how difficult it is to get the car seat and the child in and out of the vehicle. • Does the trunk or storage area hold a week’s worth of groceries? How about your golf clubs or skis? • Can all the drivers in your family see the speedometer and other dials clearly when the driver’s seat is adjusted to fit them? • Get in and out of the drivers’ and the passengers’ seats several times. How easy (or difficult) is it to get in and out of the vehicle? • How responsive is the steering? • How well does the vehicle take curves? • Does the car accelerate fast enough to enter a freeway safely? • With the car moving at the legal speed limit, brake hard. Observe the time it takes to bring the car to a halt and the car’s performance during braking. • Make a U-turn. How large is the vehicle’s turning radius? • Find a bumpy stretch of road. How’s the comfort factor on a rough surface? • If you decide to drive the car out of town, how does the comfort in the driver’s and the passengers’ seats hold up over the long haul? • What, really, is the gasoline mileage?
While many of these tests can be done during a standard car dealer’s test drive, several require time and the absence of a pesky salesman. Renting the model you’d like to buy is a smart way to go.
It’s not really the money. It’s the principle of the thing.
Yesterday I drove down to the dentist’s office to get a cleaning and also to discuss building a new night guard, mine having been rendered questionably useful by a couple of recent crowns. Dr. D’s practice is housed on the sixth floor of a midtown high-rise. His office is nice, but what’s really nice is Dr. D, whose taste in procedures is minimalist and who is personally a very charming man.
Driving down there is a bit of a pain, because you have to cross over the train tracks, which involves an endless wait at the left-turn light to get onto the side street where the parking garage is located. The lightrail pretty much destroyed Central Avenue as a viable road, something one finds peculiarly annoying when one contemplates the millions and millions of taxpayer dollars’ worth of beautiful, exquisitely tended landscaping and public art torn up and replaced with ugly railroad tracks and overhead electric lines.
To get to Dr. D’s office, you have three choices: drive down Seventh Avenue to Indian School, then over to Central and down to Catalina—a process that entails not one but two tedious left turns across the train tracks, where the light stays red for half your lifetime; drive down Central Avenue to Catalina, which puts you into a lot of slow traffic but requires only one time-consuming left turn; or drive across one of the main drags north of the train tracks on Camelback all the way to Seventh Street, then across Indian School or McDowell to Third Street, then over Third to Catalina, then across Catalina to the parking garage on Central, a round-about route that takes you more than two miles out of your way and adds four extra miles to your round trip. Not one of these strategies is ideal, but except for the latter, it takes about 15 minutes to get there.
Okay, so I get parked, ride the elevator up to Dr. D’s office, and bound into the reception area brandishing my parking ticket to be validated…and what do I see but a sign on the receptionist’s desk:
Due to a change in the building management’s policy, we can no longer validate parking. Parking fees are $1.00 per half hour.
Well, hell and damn. I don’t carry money with me! So, I didn’t have a dollar to get my car out of the parking garage! Or more like two or three bucks, because a cleaning takes about an hour by the time you sit around waiting to be seen. Maybe three or four bucks if he decided to fit me for a new bite guard, because that process takes for-freaking-ever!
I said, “It would have helped if you’d told me about this.”
She said, “I’m on the phone!”
I said, “I know,” and turned around and walked out.
When I got downstairs to the garage, the attendant would not let me out, even though my car hadn’t been in the garage longer than about eight minutes.. He proposed to write me a bill, for which their collection agency would come after me. I had to scrounge up a dollar out of quarters, dimes, and pennies, some of which fell on the ground as I was handing them to the clown (honest—I didn’t do that on purpose. But on reflection now wish I’d dumped the whole mess of them on the ground and driven off, since he certainly could have let me out of the garage under the circumstances).
I refuse to pay for parking in Phoenix. Here’s why: There’s no viable public transport. Much-vaunted lightrail notwithstanding, there really is no practical way to get around this city other than by car. My feeling is, if you want to do business with me, you provide a place to park. If your place of business makes me pay to park, I don’t patronize your place of business.
Consider: To get to Dr. D’s office on the public transit, I would have to walk from my house to an intersection with a signal where I could cross 19th Avenue, a dangerous main drag and a conduit of blight. Then I would have to stand outside a run-down tenement, famed for its incidence of crime. Within a day of the last time I picked up the 19th Avenue bus, a young woman was abducted from that bus stop and raped.
Okay, so realistically no one is going to abduct and rape an ugly old bat. What they’ll do with me is mug me. Robberies are not uncommon—thugs will stop their cars at intersections, get out, grab someone standing on the sidewalk, belt him one, and steal his wallet. No joke: this happened outside the Albertson’s just down the street.
The temperature outdoors was 105 degrees yesterday. Nineteenth is under construction, so to get across the road you have to navigate holes in the road and heavy equipment, all the while enjoying the serenade of jackhammers and diesel engines. A typical wait at a bus stop here is around 20 minutes; however, the city in its penury has cut back bus service, so chances are the wait is even longer.
Once on the bus, I would have to ride down to Spectral Mall, stopping at every corner allll the wayyyy down to 19th and Montebello. Once there, I get off the bus on the wrong side of the street and again have to cross a six-lane road through murderous traffic. The ambiance there is even more grungy than it is in my neighborhood, which at least has the vestiges of a middle-class neighborhood on one side of the road (even though the city is busy tearing out our homes.
Now I buy another ticket and wait for the train. This will entail another 15-minute stand in 105-degree heat, likely fending off the odd panhandler. The train will drop me off within several blocks of Dr. D’s office building, after another unbelievably time-consuming milk-run, first backtracking up 19th Avenue to Camelback, then across Camelback to Central, then allllll the wayyyy down to Catalina. The round trip will cost me $3.50…about what it costs to pay to park long enough for a dental appointment.
And—here’s the corker—the trip will take about an hour, one way! Yes: for $3.50, you, too, can kill a full hour making a trip that should take you 15 minutes.
So I spend two hours in 105-degree heat, round trip, standing around on the street in sketchy areas and riding elbow-to-elbow with strangers (some of whom are strange!) and pay as much as it would have cost to make a 15-minute drive and pay to park. Nothing about this system—either the vaunted and costly lightrail or the obnoxious parking fee, which the city parents think will encourage people to ride—makes me anxious to use the public transport. It’s expensive and it’s excruciatingly time-consuming. It is, in short, totally impractical, another of America’s steps along the way of its progress into Third-World living conditions.
If I lived in a city that had real public transit, the way San Francisco did when I lived there many years ago, then I would use it, or I would pay to park without hesitation. We used the buses and trolleys all the time; on the rare occasions that my mother and I drove to shopping, we expected to pay to park, and we paid to put up her car in the apartment community’s parking garage. That was part of the natural order of things.
But here we don’t have such a city. Here we have a city that, like Los Angeles, was quite deliberately designed for the automobile and that, with its city parents in the pockets of developers who have a vested interest in sprawl, continues to be designed that way. For this reason, demanding that people pay to park is unreasonable.
So, I’m in the market for a new dentist. Alas. I like Dr. D and I hate changing dentists. It’s hard to find a good dentist who won’t rip you off by trying to scare you into unnecessary procedures. It’s hard to find a skilled dental technician who doesn’t hurt you when she cleans your teeth. And getting a new dentist is going to be a pricey proposition, now that I’m no longer on Delta Dental. I could barely afford Dr. D, who proposed to give me a 10 percent discount. How I’m going to pay for some new doc, I have no idea. Probably I’m not.
But there is no way I’m going to pay to park as I go about my normal, unavoidable day-to-day errands.
Hurrah! At last I managed to break free enough time to dig some compost and manure into the soil and plant the winter garden next to the pool. Nothing much to photograph…besides, iPhoto has decided it won’t read my pictures or download from my camera, so that’s moot anyway. Right now the garden is mostly dirt, with a couple of bell peppers and a cuke that La Bethulia gave me, plus a few pots hosting an Italian parsley plant, a basil plant, a thyme plant, and a sage plant.
Soon, though…soon we’ll have Swiss chard, bok choy, leeks, fennel, lettuce, cilantro, red onions, and enough parsley to garnish Brennan‘s dinner plates for a week.
It should be interesting: I’ve never grown bok choy or leeks, but from what I can tell they’ll do all right here in the cool weather. It may be too early to start leeks from seed here; temps will be in the low 100s for at least another week, and I expect we’ll have 90-degree weather for another three to six weeks. Oh well. If they don’t germinate now, plenty of seeds are left over…some more can go into the ground a little later in the season.
It’s been years since I grew fennel. Make that decades. But the last time the stuff was invited into my yard, it thrived, producing feathery sweet anise-flavored leaves for months. In those days—I was just a dumb kid—I had no idea it made a tasty bulb. But now I do. 😉
Haven’t tried to grow cilantro here, but from what I understand, it’s a weed. People who do grow it say to keep an eye on it, or it’ll try to take over your patch of the world. Consequently, the seeds went into a big pot, where they’ve already germinated.
I’ve given up on imagining that gardening is an especially frugal activity. Really, I think it costs more to pay for manure and compost, fertilizer, gardening tools, hoses, plants and seeds, and water than it does to just buy the food in the grocery store. KJG recently joined the Bountiful Baskets co-op. For $15, she brought home more produce than she and Mr. KJG could eat. Last time I was at her place, she shared a gigantic head of romaine lettuce that was just gorgeous, along with several other high-quality veggies.
So, given that we have here a hobby and not a pursuit of frugality, this year the garden will be heavy on herbs, which are expensive at the store and grow happily for months on end. I love cilantro, but it doesn’t keep well in the fridge. Every time I buy a bunch of it, the stuff spoils before I can use it up. Parsley lasts longer and I should buy it, but I’ve become so accustomed to stocking up at Costco, which doesn’t carry fresh herbs, that I now hardly ever buy parsley, or cilantro either.
Bok choy! Yum! I love bok choy. Hope it will grow this winter. That is something that I will eat. Ditto Swiss chard, which has occupied a fair amount of the little poolside flowerbed for the past three winters. That stuff is the Southwestern veggie, as far as I’m concerned. It grows here all winter and well into the spring. It’s resistant to frost, and it tolerates weeks of warm weather before bolting to seed. Even after it throws out seed stalks, the leaves are still edible—unlike lettuce, which gets bitter as soon as it goes to seed.
Eagerness to bolt notwithstanding, some red lettuce also will occupy a little of the garden’s real estate. Costco does sell lettuce, but in much larger packages than I can consume, and so—again, because I rarely go into grocery stores anymore—I don’t buy much of it. And I love lettuce! It’s a great convenience and joy to be able to step outside the back door and pick a few leaves for a meal.
Last winter’s red onions were somewhat mixed, in the success department. A few sets didn’t grow at all. But some did, and the result was pleasing. When M’hijito grows them, they come out juicy, sweet, and truly superior to the grocery-store version. Mine were just OK…but again, there they were, and I didn’t have to drive to a supermarket to get them.
The carrot seeds didn’t get planted—ran out of room. I may put them in a pot, but that will have to wait until next weekend.
I wish there were more space in the yard for a garden. Because of the fruit trees, most of the backyard is too shady for veggies, and besides, to break loose more gardening space, I’d have to dig up the (expensive) desert landscaping. It has occurred to me to build a raised garden in a low area where a bunch of leftover flagstones form an unused and unusable “patio,” but that would be a lot of work, a lot of expense, and it’s in an area where dragging a hose would be a pain. Knowing me, I expect that if I had to lift a finger very far, a garden in that spot just wouldn’t get watered, and so everything would die.
Better to have a small garden full of favorites and unusual newcomers than a big one that’s so much trouble it never produces much, eh?
Images:
Red Bell Pepper. Fir0002. GNU Free Documentation License. Please note that this image is not in the public domain.
Parlsey. Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler Medizinal-Pflanzen. Public domain. Fennel in blossom. Carsten Niehaus. GNU Free Documentation License
Bok Choy. Public domain.
Red Onions. Agricultural Research Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Public dopmain.
Having closed academic programs and laid off several thousand employees, shucked off almost all graduate student support, and inflicted six months’ of furloughing on faculty and staff, the powers that be in Arizona higher education have decided it’s time to “improve” the universities.
Their idea of improvement? Privatize entire colleges. Bloat enrollments still further. Eliminate small and politically unpopular programs. Expand online course offerings by a factor of nine. Graduate still more students who can barely spell their own names.
No joke.
Noting that, at 25.3 percent, Arizona’s ratio of college graduates among adults 25 and older compares dismally with the nationwide figure of 27.5 percent, the Board of Regents proposes to tie university funding to each institution’s number of bachelor’s degree graduates. The more ignoramuses you turn out, the greater your share of state funding!
Remember, we’re already graduating seniors who don’t know what a preposition is, who think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, and who believe that World War I happened in the 19th century. Not that these minor shortcomings should affect your ability to flip burgers and stock the shelves at Walmart…
Arizona State University, with almost 70,500 students, is a hectic, overcrowded zoo. Some young Arizonans choose to attend the community colleges as long as they can specifically because they perceive such an environment is counterproductive to real learning. ASU proposes to increase its brick-and-mortar enrollment by 15,000, create a three-year “college lite” program with a limited choice of majors and lower tuition, and to add 27,000 students to its online programs.
Think of that. We’re talking about 112,000 students plus an unknown number in the college lite program, all riding the conveyer belt through a single learning factory’s assembly line.
You know, there’s a reason Arizona’s graduation rate is so low. Actually, one can readily find two reasons.
First, the poverty rate in this state is sky-high. Overall, 24.2 percent of Arizona children lack access to enough safe and nutritious food to ensure an active, healthy life. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21.2 percent of Arizonans live in poverty, compared to 14.3 percent nationwide. Poverty levels are even more extreme on the reservations: in Apache County, 29.8 percent of the population lives in “critical” poverty; in Graham County, the rate is 22.3 percent; in Navajo County, 23.7 percent. When you’re wondering where your next meal is coming from, matters like literacy and education don’t rate very high among your concerns.
And second, thanks to a long history of neglect, legislative short-sightedness, and underfunding, Arizona’s educational system ranks at the bottom in terms of quality, nationwide. Depending on how you look at it, our K-12 system is either 46th in the nation or 50th.
Now the Board of Regents proposes that our colleges and universities be funded according the number of ill-prepared kids they can push through four years of education lite: i.e., by the number of bogus bachelor’s degrees they can hand out.
They propose to privatize the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, one of the very few facets of our higher education system that has managed to achieve a decent reputation, 38th among the nation’s law schools. Its tuition is already $19,225 a year for in-state students and $32,619 a year for out-of state students, exclusive of an estimated $10,660 for room and board. This will cut off professional training in the law to even more of our impoverished citizens, as tuition will rise into the stratosphere. Phoenix already has a proprietary law school, proudly ensconced in its artificially gentrified downtown, and so the new owners will have to compete with an outfit that provides night-school and online law degrees. We’ve already seen the quality of education in proprietary schools; this strategy will bring that level of excellence to the Sandra Day O’Connor school.
Thirty thousand students will float through online programs (the university already has 3,000 people in online programs). I’ve been teaching courses online for a long time; after several years of online teaching at ASU, last summer the community college district certified me as an instructor of its online courses. Lemme tell you something: a good online course can’t hold a candle to a good face-to-face course.
Good learning requires good mentoring. It is based in discourse. That would mean conversation, observation, discussion, understanding. These things exist only in altered form in the online environment.
An online course is to learning as Facebook is to friendship.
Online courses are correspondence courses, barely adequate to the task of reading a textbook and taking a test on it. They do not suffice for studies that require lab experiences or field research, for learning that requires people to develop the ability to reason and argue on their feet, for thoughtful give-and-take.
Certain academic disciplines are, not surprisingly given the atavistic climate, politically toxic. Ethnic studies and women’s studies rank high among these. State Superintendent of Education Tom Horne, a crass pol of the demagogic kind, wrote a legislative bill that his fellow fruitcakes passed, banning ethnic studies classes in Arizona high schools because, said he, they promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.
I just know you think I’m kidding. Who would believe such a story if they were sober?
At any rate, the result of this performance—designed to pander to the widespread bigotry in the mob mentality here—ethnic and women’s studies faculty in the universities watched their programs run right down the drain. The sociology department at ASU, which had already been all but shut down (full of socialists, you understand…you can tell by the “socio” part, and because it’s housed in the school of “liberal” arts), has no place for these idled tenure-track and tenured faculty. So…quite a few junior and even senior faculty are wondering how much longer they’ll have jobs in the New American University.
You think I’m kidding about that socialist business, don’t you?
