Coffee heat rising

Shopping for the Pleistocene Set

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LOL! Frugal Scholar has a great story today about finding a pair of Not Your Daughter’s Jeans at a thrift store, discovering they fit pretty well, getting a compliment from DH (!!), and so going in search of similar togs. None of which fit at-tall.

Was going to add my most recent shopping tale in a comment to hers, but Blogger won’t let you post a comment unless you have a specific gmail account open, and since I’m busy with the Festival of Frugality, I’m not logging out of that account, into the FaM account, out of the FaM account, and then back into the FoF account just to scribble a few words.

But this is funny enough to share, anyway. Hence:

Yesterday I wandered into a boutique in the thriving strip mall where Leslie’s swimming pool store resides. This shop always has THE cutest clothes in the window. Highly covetable.

Within those air-conditioned climes I found a cute top, gauzy with nifty crewelwork trim. Dig out the tag: $135.

Moving on…

The sales clerk came bouncing up and offered to sell me anything she could. I asked how to tell the sizes, since the sizing wasn’t obvious. She also had to dig around for a tag and finally came up with one on a chic-looking pair of low-slung pants: Large.

“Uhm… Large? That wouldn’t begin to fit around my rear end,” said I. “How do your sizes run?”

“Oh,” quoth she, “they go up to about a size 10.”

“A size 10 is ‘large’?”

“Yes.”

“How are you able to sell many clothes? The average woman in this country wears a size 14. That is not ‘large.’ That’s average.”

“Actually,” she started in—hang onto your hat: this is where it gets good. “Actually, the reason fashion sizes run small these days is that the Japanese are buying so many clothes, and they’re kind of small.”

“I don’t see any Japanese customers around here,” I observed.

“Well, because of the demand in Asia, manufacturers are all making clothes for Chinese and Japanese women.”

“That explains a lot,” I said. “I hardly ever buy clothes any more, because nothing fits. And you know, at size 12 I don’t think I’m fat.” (Objectively true: I’m well within the normal BMI range for a woman my age and height.)

“Oh, no, nooooo, you’re not fat!”

You don’t think so? “Well, the only place I’m buying clothes these days is Costco, because that’s the only place where I can find things that fit. Maybe American women would like to wear cute clothes, too?”

Exit, pursued by a globalized bear.

Isn’t that the most hilarious thing? Literally, there is no Asian community anywhere near that store. The demographics are mostly white followed closely by Latino and a fast-growing African-American community. Last I saw, few of us looked especially underfed. How do retailers that have absolutely no concern for their customers stay in business?

So, the next time you try on umpteen berjillion outfits and can’t fit into one of them, you’ll know:

It’s because the Chinese have the sewing machine!

Image: Singer Sewing Machine. Vincent de Groot. GNU Free Documentation License.

Update: How’s the Retread Working?

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Some of you will recall my recent enthusiasm, now a few months old, to renovate the aging face, which was beginning to show the signs one might expect in a survivor of the Pleistocene.

After a fiasco with a product called RoC, I ordered up some Alpha Hydrox AHA Enhanced Lotion from the Internet. This old favorite has about the same concentration of alpha-hydroxy acid as the expensive stuff my dermatologist used to dispense, at a tiny fraction of the cost. The plan was to try to plump out some of the wrinkles and fade the age spots a bit, and then to disguise what remained with liberal application of new-fangled powder mineral makeup.

So, did any of these shenanigans do any good? Well, judge for yourself. Here’s a before:

BeforeRightNoMakeup

A bit blurry, but probably just as well. Some things are best not studied with excessive acuity.

Now here’s the after:

Doctored and painted!

Definitely not going to win any beauty contests. But I think it’s better. The hide looks healthier, and the splotches and uneven coloring are smoothed out.

AlphaHydrox

The keys were twice-daily application of Alpha Hydrox (which I could only find at Amazon.com) and various ordinary drugstore face creams or hand lotions; daily application of a sunscreen; weekly exfoliation with plain old baking soda, and artful painting with Kirkland Borghese mineral makeup.

Naturally, sensing that I liked the stuff Costco immediately took the makeup off the shelf. It appears to be out of production altogether—you can’t get it online, either, nor, apparently, can you buy it from Borghese. After traipsing to three Costco outlets, I finally found a few in one store, where I bought two sets for the cost of one small jar of powder from The Body Shop. When it runs out, I guess I’ll try L’Oréal, which is the drugstore version of Lancôme.

Vanicream-sunscreen
Benign sunscreen

Considering that it’s been barely four months since I started this regimen (not to say “experiment,”), the results are not bad. No doubt if I keep it up, by the time I’m 70 I’ll look like I’m 18.

😉

Festival of Frugality Comin’ Our Way!

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w00t!!! Funny is hosting the Festival of Frugality next Tuesday.

I’m just sitting down to start reading submissions. It’s not too late to send yours!

Looking forward to seeing what everyone has been up to this week. Here’s a link to the Festival itself (note the proprietor’s superb taste in blog templates 😉 ), and here’s where you go to enter your latest and greatest post.

Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
See your golden words in glowing lights! Win a chance at Editor’s Choice!

Carnival-image

Hotter Than a Two-Dollar Cookstove!

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Thank heaven the air conditioning guy showed up today—and by midmorning. By midafternoon the thermometer in the shade of the back porch read 115 degrees.

The unit has been laboring almost nonstop, all day long, just to keep the house at 85 degrees.

When I consider how my cash is spent…

The guy charged me $275 to replace a part that may or may not have been shot. I have no way of knowing, of course, what was wrong. He could have sold me a new air-conditioner if he’d felt so inclined…I wouldn’t have known any better.

Matter of fact, he did try to sell me a new air conditioner.

The owner of my longtime air-conditioning company, which over the past couple of years has been stumbling badly through the depression, finally sold out to someone else. He’s still around; whether as a part-owner or as an employee is unclear. But the new outfit? Not good.

First thing that happened was just a day or so ago I got a phone solicitation from someone who pretended to be “with” the company (i.e., “they hired me here in the boiler room and gave me this script”). He tried to high-pressure me into renewing the annual service contract, which I had long ago decided not to renew, because it’s such a waste of money. All it does is pay for two service calls up front, one in the spring and one in the fall, to inspect the equipment. It gives you no leg up on service when your unit craps out and no discount on products or service during the effective period.

Because he presented himself as someone who worked for Jim and Carol (owners), I wasn’t scorchingly rude to him as I would be to someone I perceived to be a phone solicitor. But I should’ve been. It took three repetitions of the fact that I’m unemployed and can’t afford to pay for a service contract before I got him off the phone!

Now today comes this new service guy—not the usual guy. Very slick sort of a fellow, not the amiably disheveled type that is our usual AC repairman.

I’d run out to Ace to pick up a nonprogrammable thermostat before he showed up. When I told him I’d learned the Braeburn unit that had been installed wasn’t meant to operate a heat pump, he demanded to know who told me that! A bit taken aback, I said I’m a big girl and can use the Internet. I looked up the unit and the model number and learned that it’s incompatible with heat pumps, which probably explains why my power bill went through the roof the instant it was installed.

He then tried to convince me that the immediate jump in the power bill had nothing to do with the incompatible thermostat but that my unit is out of date and needs to be replaced.

I said I’m unemployed and can barely afford to have him come in and fix the thing, much less pony up $5,000 for a new one!

He then tried to persuade me two more times that I should buy a new air conditioner. When I told him rather strenuously that i. don’t. have. the. money to buy a new HVAC unit, he suggested that I should take out a loan.

Then he pitched me for a service contract. He gave me the usual slippery hustle: if I had a service contract I could get the expensive new part for a discount. The contract would only be $150….

“Look,” said I, “How much will it be to buy a contract and install the part?”

“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” said he.

“Good. And how much would it cost just to install the part, without the service contract?”

“Two hundred and seventy-five dollars.”

“There you have it! Just install the part, please.”

So he won’t be coming back.

I should’ve called Sally’s guy a month or more ago, but just haven’t gotten around to it. He services both parts of the heating/cooling unit in one $65 trip in the spring (the way these guys justify $150 is by claiming they have to come inspect the AC in the springtime before you start it up and then heater in the fall before you start using that, which is clear and present ridiculousness).

Anyway, the nonprogrammable thermostat is a little easier to use than the programmable model. At least I don’t have to dig out the encyclopedic instructions and study them for 15 minutes every time I want to change the settings. It has one of those “save” buttons that causes it to reset the temp 5 degrees higher (in summer; 5 degrees lower in winter) until you tap it again to turn it off. This means that if the temp is set at a sleepable 79 degrees (about as warm as I can stand a cooped-up house and still sleep at night), when I get up in the morning I can press one button to move the temperature up to 84 degrees. That’s a degree off my normal setting, but one degree, I expect, will not make enough difference to bankrupt me.

Any more than I’m already going to be bankrupted. Literally, the unit has run all day long, barely stopping more than five or ten minutes at any time. It’s almost 9:00 p.m. and the thing is roaring away. It’s still 99 degrees outdoors.

And a good thing it is that I just went out there to look at the thermometer. For some reason the timer on the hose didn’t kick off, and the tap was still gushing into the pool!

Luckily, the water level was pretty far down, so after two hours of the hose running full-bore, it’s still an inch or two below the coping.

It needs to be backwashed, because of all the gunk the damn palm trees dropped in there. Tomorrow morning. Really. That will pull the water level back down to where it was and I’ll have to refill it again tomorrow.

Cripes. I’ll be lucky if the water bill is only $225. And the power bill a mere $300.

Funny’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law

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Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will.

Funny’s Corollary: …At the worst possible time!

Candles Melted inside the Linen Closet. Charming!

Have you noticed that? Not only will things always go wrong, they conspire to do so at impossible times.

It is Friday before the Fourth of July weekend. At 5:15 in the morning, I awake in a stupor to the sound of the air-conditioning pounding away.

Grope for my $720 glasses. Can’t find them.

Lift the dog off the bed, let her out, shut off the AC, stumble to the bathroom. Sitting there I think…huh? The seat here sure is warm. Thass odd. I turn the thermostat down at night so I can sleep, then turn it up to 85 in the day. But just now it’s only barely day. By the gray light of early dawn, the thermometer on the back porch reads 98 degrees.

Stumble back into the bedroom. Search for my glasses. Can’t find them.

Bloody hot in here. Stumble into the hall. Thermostat says 82, but it’s set for 78. Shit. That means the AC’s on  the fritz.

$ $ $ $ $

Speaking of $$, I still haven’t found the glasses. Search all over the house. Can’t find them.

Finally take the bed apart. Find them under the covers. Miraculously I was so tired I didn’t move last night and so never rolled over on top of them.

Check e-mail. Message from Apple: that worthy corporation’s mail & server account has come due. That’ll be $100 for service I can get free from Apple’s competition. But everyone I know has that address. Do I really want to deep-six it?

Probably not.

My radically reduced budget is already about shot. I really need an air-conditioning bill and an exorbitant bill for Cadillac e-mail service to come up in the same month.

That’s not all. I’m sitting here and realize the traffic ticket that came to me after my son was snapped by the traffic cam in the speed trap on State Route 51 said the registration on the car comes due this month. In Arizona, the cost of registering your car is exorbitant. Although it drops as the car ages, it’s still gunna be a $100 bill, plus another $30 for the emissions testing rip-off: a $130 whap upside the head.

Three expensive, unavoidable hits in freaking JULY, including an air-conditioning service call on a holiday weekend (!), at a time when power bills are through the roof, water bills are through the roof, gasoline prices are through the roof, and I have no income.

Funny’s Corollary!

Motivating People around Us: Six Ways to Better Customer Service

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A week or so ago, Financial Samurai posted a thoughtful article on the importance of recognition in motivating workers, especially as they move upward through the organizational hierarchy to take on greater and greater responsibility.

He touches on an issue that was presented to me some years ago. While I was an editor at Arizona Highways, I was sent off to take a seminar in motivating creative workers. To boil a daylong talkfest down to a sentence or three, the gist was that creative people are motivated less by money than by recognition of their skill and talents. It was claimed that graphic artists, writers, and editors feel a great deal less validation from promotions, nice offices, and raises than from awards (whether from inside the organization or from trade and creative groups) and verbal commendations from management.

Well. I recall thinking that sounded like a good excuse to pay creative workers less than accountants, circulation managers, and ad salespeople—as though those folks never engaged any kind of creativity in their jobs. What I took away from the seminar was that all workers thrive on generous recognition of excellence: that positive feedback on good work is more effective than negative feedback on efforts that leave something to be desired.

Weirdly, that idea was recently reinforced by, of all people, a dog trainer.

Motivated creative worker

Cassie the Corgi and I were attending an agility training class. The trainer was trying persuade everyone that the key to convincing a dog to do what you ask is effusive praise. In the middle of his harangue, he stopped and said, “How do you feel when the boss says to you, ‘Great job, Joe! You really did exactly what was needed!'” He mimed a handshake and a pat on the back.

“That makes you feel like doing the same thing again, right? Maybe even better the next time.

“But what if he just grunts ‘Nice work there’?” He made like a guy walking past the cube, waving a coffee cup in the air. “How does that make you feel? Not so enthusiastic about the job.”

You don’t have to be a boss (or a dog trainer) to profit from this advice. One obvious application is to customer service reps and sales clerks. Ever think about how you behave affects the way they feel about their jobs? Imagine having to put up with some chucklehead who can’t even make eye contact while she yammers on the cell phone as you’re toting up her grocery bill. What must it feel like to be on the receiving end of a call from a customer who has just spent ten, fifteen, or more minutes listening to infuriating Muzak, advertising, and “we value your patronage” pseudomessages while trying to get a simple answer to a simple question?

We can “motivate” all sorts of employees around us. Even though they’re not strictly “our” employees, they’re our employees in that they’re trying (in theory) to please us with various products and services. It’s in our interest to motivate them, because happy employees provide better services and may even go above and beyond the call for us, in one way or another.

Here are some ways to build better morale and promote better service among the employees we run into every day:

• Refrain from yakking on your cell phone while the checkout clerk is charging up your purchases (that is so rude!).

• To keep the edge out of your voice after navigating an endless phone tree, turn on your speaker phone so that annoying ads and muzak aren’t pumped straight into your ear. Try not to take out your frustration at having to fight to reach a human on the human being who finally does answer the phone.

• Thank people for their efforts, even if they’re just doing their job.

• When people do something you like, compliment them on their professionalism, helpfulness, or special effort.

• Even if the person is doing just an adequate job, compliment him or her on something or make some empathetic remark. Recently a tired-looking bank teller perked right up when I observed that her manicure looked lovely.

• When a talking machine asks you to comment on a telephone representative, say “yes” and leave a positive comment—most people only comment when they’re complaining, so these devices serve mainly to add stress to an already stressful job.

What strategies do you use for getting the best out of the people around you?

Image: Pembroke Welsh Corgi on an agility teeter-totter. Elf. GNU Free Documentation License.