Coffee heat rising

w00t! Murphy’s Law frenzy is over!

by

…I hope!

Just talked to one honey-voiced Roselyn at Social Security. About what happens when you commit the crime of earning more than $14,160, she told me an entirely different story from the one I’ve heard from three prior CSRs.

Three people at Social Security—one face-to-face and two over the phone—said that if you earn even a dollar over the prescribed limit, SS stops payment on an entire benefits check. What you owe for your overweening ambition—one dollar for every two dollars you earn—is then subtracted from your benefit that month. But you don’t get the remainder of the benefit check back until the following January. If you over-earn by more than the amount of a single benefit check, then they take two checks away from you. The one I spoke to a month or two ago explained that because your Medicare Part B premium is paid out of your gross benefit, you have to pay that out of pocket, since obviously if you’re not getting your premium check your Medicare B would go unpaid. In other words, not only do you lose the net income from your Social Security check, you also have to beg, borrow, or steal another $111 to pay the Medicare bill!

Well, Roselyn calls bullshit.

She says that is not true at all. When I told her I thought I would earn about $14,900, she said that they would not withhold a month’s benefit check. She said that because of the two for one deal, whatever I would owe would be “not very much.” Furthermore, the fact that I did not work for anyone for two full months this summer counts in my favor. She thinks it’s even possible I will owe nothing.

In any event, says she, you’re not billed for the amount you owe until the following year’s tax returns come in, because the government cannot be certain of what you earned until all your W-2s come in. Once they figure that out, they let you know. You can pay your fine in any of several ways: by simply forking over a check or by having an amount withheld from your benefits check until it’s paid off.

If that’s true…thank you, God!

Of course, there’s no way to be certain that what she says is true. It’s odd that her version would be so radically at odds with what not one, not two, but three other Social Security reps said. And what those three said is different from the variant that you get online: Ehow tells us that if you earn more than $14,160, your benefits will be reduced accordingly throughout the following year. Go to this government site and you get a head-spinning patter of gobbledygook that, to me at least, is utterly incomprehensible: you can work but you can’t and if you do you’ll get more money later and maybe you’ll get some money now and there’s a special rule for if you’re working but also retired and…and…huh? Move on to a government page that tries to explain how they engineer paying off your debt, and you get the explanation that they take half of your overage (i.e., I earn $14,900 in 2010 so have earned $740 over the income limit, so the operative figure is $370) and subtract that from your total year’s Social Security benefit, arriving at a reduced SS benefit. They then divide that by 12 to decide your gross monthly pay.

If that’s accurate, then it would drop my net benefit by $36 a month. More than that, really, because the cost of Medicare will inevitably rise, and with a depression on, you can be sure there won’t be a cost of living increase next year, any more than there was this year.

But as I was speaking with each of the three previous CSRs, I repeatedly asked if even one dollar over the allowed amount meant an entire benefit check would be estopped, and each one assured me that was the case. Each time, I remarked that it didn’t seem fair that a person should lose an entire month’s benefit for earning what I thought at the time would be about $200 over the limit. Each time, the person said, in effect, “Them’s the rules, lady!”

Roselyn told me something else that is directly at odds with what I’ve been told by others and at odds with the language on an official Social Security form. I mentioned that because of PeopleSoft’s lagging pay scheme, GDU paid me in January for work that was done in 2009; that even though my last day was December 31 and I’m on record as having retired on December 31, this payment came in 2010. She said if it was paid in 2010, it would be counted against SS as 2010 income, no matter that my last day on the job was December 31, 2009. Other CSRs have said that money earned in 2009 is counted as 2009 income, and that this also applied to the RASL (unused sick leave pay doled out to state retirees over a three-year period). Thus the $6,800 of RASL paid to me this year would be seen as 2009 income and not counted against my Social Security.

I just downloaded form SSA-131, which contains this language:

Employees are sometimes paid wages in a year subsequent to the year that the wages were earned. The most common types of payments are accumulated vacation pay or sick pay paid after retirement…. Wages which are earned in a year prior to the year the are paid usually do not affect benefits payable under the Social Security annual earnings test.

So, obviously, Roselyn misunderstood this issue. And that makes me doubt everything she says.

Hmmmm….. I’d better jump through another 20 minutes of phone nuisance hoops and call those people back…

• • • • • • • • • •

Hallelujah!

A really knowledgeable-sounding, professional-sounding rep got on the phone this time. She put me on hold while she personally looked up the question to get a definitive answer. And the answer is….

Yes! Roselyn is right!

UNbelievable!

by

Well, I probably won’t be writing much here for the next week or so.

You’ll recall that I spent half the g.d. summer creating an elaborate online course in magazine writing for the college. Since I was paid to do so, I worked pretty hard at it; the job occupied end-to-end seven-day weeks of 14- to 16-hour days.

Yesterday I learned that Blackboard blocks student access to almost all of the presentations I built during all those hours of mind-numbing work. I’m going to have to take down most of the course, rebuild the presentations at a website students can access, only without voice (so everything has to be written out!), and rewrite the entire flicking course! This has to be done in six weeks, while I’m reading 75,000 words of brain-banging freshman babble, first in draft, then in progress, then in final form.

How the hell this is going to happen escapes me. There’s no way I can redo the entire course while I’m trying to handle an intense eight-week section of composition, one that’s filled with new freshmen, some of whom need a great deal of help with their writing.

I’m so angry I can barely speak. Certainly can’t sleep. Was up until 2:00 a.m. and then reawoke and started working again at 5:00.

As appealing as the idea of teaching online is, of not having to trudge out to campus and entertain a roomful of people who doze through 80 percent of what you say, you can be sure that I will never do this again.

What a flicking disaster Blackboard is! In its new Version 9, developers replaced functions that did work—such as the Digital Drop Box—with complicated systems such as “Assignments” whose benefits are outweighed by the confusion they inflict on students and the hassle they present to instructors. It has added a vast selection of features that look like they should bring real substance and versatility to the online environment. Indeed, they would…if they operated as advertised. But they don’t. We’re presented with podcast functions that offer twenty minutes of space but won’t operate if you speak longer than three minutes, carrying capacity that won’t hold video files or more than a few still images, and nonintuitive functions that require students as well as faculty to climb a learning curve the height of Mt. Everest. The result of these upgrades, such as they are, appears to be a system that is so unstable it crashes in flames the instant classes begin and students start using it.

Blackboard is largely bloatware. If the school is to offer online courses at all, it needs a software infrastructure that can support online instruction. It can’t be a system that appears to offer this resource and that resource, only to yank the rug out from under the instructor, who belatedly discovers that none of those resources can handle so much as a 20-minute lecture or the briefest of PowerPoint presentations. If you’re a college instructor and your institution is trying to woo you to put part or all of your course online through Blackboard, RUN AWAY!

Run away as fast as you can! Do not convert your courses to this system in its current incarnation. It is a huge, bloated tick on the corpus of higher education.

{sigh} If anyone would like to contribute another guest post, it would be nice to keep this site going while I’m working on something else 18 or 20 hours a day…

Moment of Fame

by

This week Funny didn’t enter any carnivals, the proprietor having been somewhat overwhelmed with quotidian concerns. However, a new carnival with a somewhat slower-than-usual calendar picked up a post I sent in two or three weeks ago:

The Bellringers
Education Buzz
Student Performance: Is There Any Question?

This is an interesting carnival. If you’d like to know what teachers are thinking (and if you have kids, you should…), pay a visit!

The Summer of Murphy’s Law

by

Going into this summer, the longest period I’ve ever faced without enough income to make ends meet, a thought entered my little pea brain:

If anything can go wrong, this is the time it will go wrong. Expensively wrong.

It’s Funny’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will always go wrong at the worst possible moment.

Now it can be reported: Murphy’s Law is a true law of Nature, and Funny’s Corollary is dead right. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a long series of expensive fiascos and missteps, all of them happening when there’s not enough cash flowing in to cover my ordinary expenses, much less unplanned-for costs.

Check it out:

Holy mackerel! Over $2000 in little surprises and extravagances! Income for a whole month was only $1,475. Unplanned expenses occurring over the three months of Penury Summer amounted to more than a month’s worth of summer income.

Granted, a few of these things—the clothing, the gas grill, the vacuum cleaner—were covered by savings. The palm tree trimming misery came out of cash flow. But all the rest of it: one nasty little surprise after another.

Entertainingly enough, the $1,475 monthly summer income in the absence of teaching is $565 less than normal, ordinary budgeted expenses.

Well, it’s a good thing I had a substantial emergency fund. Two funds, actually: $2,000± of ordinary diddle-it-away savings, plus the original $14,500 that I’d accrued by the time unemployment struck. The diddle-it-away savings accrue with a monthly contribution from cash flow, and it usually will cover modest wants and needs. The grill is not what I would describe as “modest,” but it did turn out to be a good buy.

So far I haven’t had to dip into the savings set aside for a real catastrophe. It’s close, though: At the moment I have $225 in the credit-card budget to last me until September 20 and $664 in cash to last till September 30. I don’t get paid until September 15, and I have no idea how much that paycheck will be. Those morons at Fidelity screwed up the August drawdown, so that’s $385 disappeared into the ether. If or when that will rematerialize, I don’t know.

To put the frosting on the cake, Wellcare, the privatized provider of Medicare Part B, has screwed up its billing and is demanding that I pay twice for this month’s premium, which I’ve already paid. Call to inquire and you get somebody with a Bangladeshi accent telling you their computer system is down so she has no idea what to say about it, and asking you to call back at 10:00 at night. Why the righties want to hand over all of Medicare to those sleazy insurance corporations beats me!

More huge bills are pending. The power bill this month is going to be astonishing: August’s heat and humidity had the AC unit pounding away almost nonstop, in spite of my setting the thermostat at 85 degrees during the daytime. Water bills are always high in the summer, although the unusually wet summer meant I didn’t have to add a lot of extra water to the regular drip watering schedule.

The college has not paid me the second part of the stipend owed for developing the online magazine writing course. This appears to have happened because no one has reported to the dean that I completed jumping through all the required hoops. Paradoxically, it’s a good thing.

Yes. Getting shorted on money earned is good. Why? Because Social Security is poised to shaft me big time. That stipend, if it’s ever paid in full, will put me $240 over the 2010 Social Security earnings limit of $14,160. As a result, Social Security will confiscate an entire month’s benefit check: $1,275. And make me come up with $111 out of pocket to pay for Medicare Part B. So the punishment for earning $240 “too much” is a fine of $1,275.

The fact is, if the school forgets to pay the rest of the stipend, I’ll be better off, even though I will have to take money out of the S-corporation to survive. If Social Security shorts me $1,275 this fall, then I’ll be forced to dip into my catastrophic emergency fund, just to buy groceries.

Things will be extremely tight this fall. Because I’m only teaching one class per eight-week session, total monthly income will be just $100 more than budgeted expenses…assuming I’m estimating my projected paychecks correctly, which is not a safe assumption. Expenses will start to go down in October when the weather cools a bit, but September’s utility bills will max out my $2,040 budget, and October’s will come close.

Sure do hope I can get a fistful of teaching assignments next spring, when at last I’ll be free of Social Security’s enforced poverty. I’ll need to teach three-and-three in both semesters and try to pick up at least one summer course. Or another stipend for developing an online course…

And I now have a plan for surviving next summer. This fall, with teaching income piddling in, I’ve had the state’s Fidelity plan cut my distribution to the minimum required to keep my RASL payments: that’s one buck, or 77 cents after tax. Down from $500. That will save $6,000 of the $11,000 I left in that account to cover me until the last RASL payment is disbursed in 2011. If I were to take $3,000 of that money out next summer, it would still preserve some capital but it would provide the equivalent of a monthly net from teaching three sections! And that would be plenty for me to live on.

If I can get one course next summer, it even would provide enough to take a vacation!!!!!

Wow. I haven’t been on a vacation in eight or ten years. That would be cool. Literally…you can be sure it’d be far away from this place!

She’s Back!

by

Delightfully, the engaging and lovely author of Simple Life in France has resurfaced. She’s been a bit out of commission, between surviving the first few months of gravitude and uncertainty about where DH will be assigned, now that he’s fully recovered from injuries sustained in a car wreck.

O me of little faith! I thought she had abandoned the blogging life (to get back to real life, perhaps?) and so had deleted her link from the blogroll. But now she’s back, it’s back. Go there. Enjoy!

Auughhh, Part II: Gaaaaaaaaahhh!

by

This morning after I got home from class, I called Mr. L., the Plumber par Excellence, and he met me casa M’hijito, where of late a geyser was said to have erupted in the laundry room.

He decided pretty quick that the problem was a clog in the drain line. However, he had a time figuring out exactly how the lines were configured because of where the leak seemed to be coming from. He called his sidekick, who appeared in due course, parking a second large plumber’s truck in front of the house.

Studying the situation, they think the drain drops straight down from where you can see the fixtures into the ground, where it courses under the foundation, under the patio slab, and eventually connects with the line to the sewer. The reason the water is pouring out from under the workroom’s west wall is that the workroom floor is designed so water will drain down toward the door, should a washer overflow. So the water bubbling up from the clog is simply seeping toward the west wall, building up there, and then surging out from under the plaster.

The reason it’s doing that, they believe, is that there’s a small crack along a pipe seam. When there’s no clog, the water flows so fast through the pipe that little or no water leaks from it, and what does drip out simply soaks down into the soil beneath the slab.

“Uhmmmm…. Won’t this eventually lift the slab?”

“No,” says Mr. L. “It’s OK for a little water to seep under a slab.” In fact, he says, the way the house’s shower is built, with dirt directly under the pan, is ideal, because if the shower pan leaks it will do no harm. The problem was, the clog was pretty solid and so water was backing up and actually coming UP in an exuberant way. A washerful of water has a lot of force as it’s backwashing upward. And so on.

So the men get up onto the roof and run a rotorooter line through the standpipe, planning to ream out the pipe all the way to the connection with the sewer line. They’ve determined that the water from the kitchen and  bathrooms is getting through to the drainout line just fine.

They run this thing and run it and run it and run it and run it and run it and it is hotter than goddamned HELL and after about a half-hour or forty minutes of this torment both men are drenched and literally dripping with sweat. They persist, continuing to run the thing until finally they break through and then they haul many, many yards of metal cable back up out of the plumbing.

That’s when the sidekick appears in the house with a report on what they found. Hang onto your hat:  Mr. L. hauled a dead rat up out of the drainpipe!

Summbiche.

He said that was a first for him. He looked a little green around the gills, because apparently the vic’ had been there for a few days. He said the little guy was not only disintegrating, he had created enough of a plug that with the grease and lint that flowed in after him, the mess had completely plugged the drainpipe.

Oookayyyy… So, how do we think Ratty got into the drain?

He said the standpipe on the roof has another pipe that connects to it at a right angle, high enough that a good-sized critter, which this one was, could reach up and wiggle its way into the top of the pipe. Probably the rat was searching for water, the scent of which it could smell around the standpipe. By way of seeking water, the little fellow probably lost his footing and fell down in there.

But Mr. L said he was very concerned about the possibility of rats getting into the attic. He asked if M’hijito has heard any scuttling around in the attic or walls at night. He says they’ll wreak real havoc if they get inside the attic, and they must be kept out of there at all costs. Once they get into an attic, they chew up the electric wiring, and that’s a very expensive fix.

They can’t get into the attic through the standpipe and vents, because those don’t open inside the attic. But all openings around the attic larger than the size of a nickel have gotta be closed tight. Also, he urged that we get the trees trimmed a good long way from the house, because this particular variety of Rattus is pretty acrobatic and can jump several feet.

After all that work and a very unpleasant development to deal with, Mr. L. only charged $120. He was there more than two hours—closer to three, come to think of it.

Gerardo, who promised to come remove the sheared-off paloverde tree, was in mañana mode today, a not unusual development with him. As his excuse, he trotted out the grand old classic, “My Truck Broke Down.” With that truck, it’s possible. Since it behooves us for one of us (i.e., the one who’s not working 9 to 6) to keep an eye on Gerardo’s ministrations, that will eat up all of tomorrow afternoon!

Meanwhile, we have three practical pieces of plumbing-maintenance advice from the redoubtable Mr. L:

1. Continue trying to keep washer lint out of the drain. At both houses, the washer hose drains into a utility sink. We each attach those nylon mesh bags that lemons and other veggies are sold in, using wire bag ties to secure them tightly to the end of the hose. Mr. L. thought that was a great idea, as long as they’re changed out frequently. Don’t, however, try this if you hook your washer hose directly into the drain standpipe.

2. Do everything you possibly can to keep grease of any kind out of the kitchen drain. He says it was a combination of lint and grease that built up against the Deceased to create an almost impenetrable clog. He says NOTHING should go down that drain that has any grease in it, and he remarked that even spaghetti sauce is toxic to drains. Take a few paper towels and wipe out a pan before washing it in the sink.

3. Once a week, fill both sinks with water. Cold water is as good as hot. Fill them to the top and then open both drains at once. This will push water down through the pipes with a fair amount of force, and that will help to clear whatever has collected in the drain over the week.

To the latter, I will add a bit of huswifery that I learned during my youth in the Cretaceous: Before you fill the sinks, run hot water down the drains. Then pour a cup of ammonia in there, and plug the drain tight. This strategy melts and loosens the grease down in there, without doing the kind of damage that a chemical like Drano commits. Let the ammonia sit in there for at least a half hour or an hour—or, preferably, overnight. THEN fill both sinks with water and blast the drains with that.

When last seen, the plumbers were discussing what they would have to drink at Happy Hour…