Coffee heat rising

Love in the time of influenza

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Feed me, Seymour! Influenza A viruses
Feed me, Seymour!

People are dropping to the left of us and dropping to the right of us. We seem to have a serious flu epidemic going on in our parts. Last night on the Evening Play-Nooz we heard thousands of cases have been diagnosed in Arizona, and a number of people have died. Given that most people can’t afford to go to the doctor with a case of the flu, the figures are undoubtedly just a fraction of the real number of victims.

For the first time in recorded memory, our choir director didn’t show up for midweek practice. He fell ill immediately the morning after the wedding for which we sang and ended up flat on his back. His doctor told him to stay in bed for seven days, and absolutely not to leave the house.

A vigorous and healthy man, this guy hasn’t missed work as long as I’ve known him, which has been a while. If he’s laid low, we frail old bats haven’t got a chance. The fancy private school attached to the old-money church is awash in flu (attendance down more than a third, one mother claimed), and since he also leads the children’s choir, that’s likely where he picked up the bug. At least one public school, I heard in passing, is threatened with closing because so many kids are sick.

Speaking of sick old bats, as I walked up to the checkout stand at the Safeway I noticed the clerk, one of the regulars who clings to the job despite reduced pay and slashed hours, looked like she’d been banging on Death’s door but they wouldn’t let her in. When I asked, by way of greeting, how she was doing, she said she wasn’t feeling so good.

“You have the same look I get when I have a terrible headache,” I said.

“Yeah, except the headache started a week ago. This has been building up all week. First the headache. Then my back and legs started to ache, and now every muscle in my whole body hurts!” And not only that, but half the rest of the store’s employees are already out sick.

Naturally, because I had a bandaid on my thumb I hadn’t been able to squitch open the damn plastic bags in the produce department, so I’d just picked up a few things, unbagged, and carried them to the cash register. While she’s telling me this story, she’s handling the parsley, the green onions, the tomatoes, my Safeway card, a pen for me to sign the credit-card receipt… Urk!

I suggested she should go home, if she was that sick.

She said she was trying to go home: that she’d been calling a manager for the past hour to tell him she needed to leave, but he wasn’t answering. She said quite a few of the store’s clerks were out sick, and she hated to leave him even more short-handed.

More likely, she hated to forego the pay: in a right-to-work state like Arizona, grocery store clerks are grossly underpaid and often have little or no sick leave. If she stays home with the flu, she may go without her pay. And since many low-income workers live from paycheck to paycheck, she has to weigh the benefit of not exposing customers to the flu against her next meal.

If the way our good cashier appeared to feel, if the way our choir director evidently felt is what authorities are calling “mild” in describing swine flu, we don’t even want to know what “severe” may be. Steer clear of this little guy, folks:

  • Wash your hands frequently.
  • Wash all fresh produce and anything else that doesn’t get thoroughly cooked before consuming it.
  • Get your flu shots!
  • Get your kids immunized!
  • Stay out of public places as much as possible.

Take care of yourselves!

Image: Dr. Erskine Palmer, Influenza A virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Image Library

Update: COBRA, RASL

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So yesterday I reported on the flap that arose over the COBRA discount, in which one of GDU’s sterling HR representatives told me that staying on the payroll until December 31 would make me ineligible for the discount on COBRA mandated under ARRAS, the federal stimulus plan. This would mean my health insurance premiums would jump from $26 to over six hundred bucks a month. Even with the discount, the cost will rise to $186, but since I’ll be paying more than that for Medicare, it almost looks affordable.

Not, of course, with almost zero income, but I’ll just have to forego food and other necessities, since at my age I can’t risk going without health insurance.

Well, the story gets better.

I managed to find an e-mail address for an actual human being at the downtown state employee benefits office, taking me outside GDU’s purview. Off went a query:

If my employment with the Great Desert University ends on December 31, will I be eligible for the discounted COBRA?

Here is the reason that I am asking this question:

The federal rule on COBRA premium assistance, posted at www.irs.gov/pup/irs-drop/n-09-27.pdf, says a person is eligible…

(1) who is a qualified beneficiary as the result of an involuntary termination during the period from September 1, 2008, through December 31, 2009, (2) who is eligible for COBRA continuation coverage at any time during that period, and (3) who elects the coverage.

However, at GDU’s “frequently asked questions about COBRA premium assistance” page, this wording appears:

Who is eligible for premium assistance?

A person is eligible for premium assistance if and only if:

He/she is eligible for COBRA coverage between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009

AND

The qualifying event that makes him/her eligible for COBRA coverage is a covered employee’s employment being involuntarily terminated between September 1 2008 and December 31, 2009.

The HR rep with whom I spoke yesterday told me that the first bulleted  point, saying you must be “eligible for COBRA coverage between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009” means that if I am on the payroll on December 31, that will disqualify me from eligibility for the COBRA premium assistance BECAUSE my health care plan will remain in effect on that day, and so, because I will still be covered by my plan on December 31, I will not be “eligible” for COBRA until the next day, January 1, and therefore will miss the deadline. She believes that as long as your plan is in force, by definition you’re not eligible for COBRA—you have to have been thrown off your plan to be eligible. That is, she is saying that as long as your health care plan still covers you, you are not eligible for COBRA and therefore if you are still on the payroll on December 31, you are not eligible for the COBRA discount.

Is that true?

The way I read the federal rule published on the IRS site, it looks like “eligible for COBRA continuation coverage” means only that you are enrolled in an employer’s health plan and that you are involuntarily terminated between 9/1/08 and 12/31/09. Is simply being covered by your health care plan on the day you are involuntarily terminated enough to disqualify you from the discount, if your termination date is December 31?

Thus I need answers to two questions:

1. Is it true that if I am terminated involuntarily on December 31, 2009, I will not be eligible for the COBRA premium assistance? and

2. If it is true that termination on December 31 will make me ineligible for the COBRA discount, will a termination date of December 30 leave me eligible for the premium assistance?

Thank you for any clarification you can offer. I would like confirmation of the answer in writing, since no one at GDU seems to be certain of these policies.

Shortly, along came this startlingly literate response:

Hello,

Anybody terminated involuntarily between 9/30/08 and 12/31/09 are  all included in the Stimulas.

Thank you,

[the correspondent’s name & position]

{Sigh} I don’t know whether to take the word of a person who thinks that “anybody…are” and who can’t spell or punctuate stimulus. But at least now I have something in writing to support my interpretation of the law.

Ah, but it didn’t end there. Yesterday, the story got even better!

To be eligible for the state’s payout for accumulated sick leave (RASL), you have to be officially considered “retired.” Since I’ve worked at GDU since the early Pleistocene, this benefit amounts to about $20,000 for me, to be paid out in three annual installments.

The way I understand it, this means you make an official statement that you are retiring (and you have to do this within two weeks of your termination day) and you start drawing down from the state retirement system or from your 403(b), whichever you’re in.

As usual making an exception of myself, I want to roll over the $130,000 or so that has accumulated in this plan into my large IRA, which is professionally managed. I’d like to do this a) for the sake of simplicity (fewer statements to handle, fewer bureaucrats to deal with) and b) so that all my money is managed by the same financial management firm.

In connection with this strategy, I’ve been told that to be considered a GDU retiree, you have to leave a small amount in your 403(b) fund. Although you can roll over most of the money, there’s some minimum amount you have to leave in the state’s custody. What that minimum is remains a mystery.

So while I was at the HR office receiving incorrect information about the timing of the ARRAS eligibility, I asked the same font of wisdom if she could tell me what is the minimum that has to stay in the 403(b) to maintain one’s status as a “retiree.”

Well, of course she hadn’t the faintest. She’d never heard of such a thing.

She advised me to call the RASL director at the General Accounting Office to ask about this. I’ve been in touch with this woman before, and in the past she’s been very helpful—she was the one who advised me that the story La Maya and I each heard from HR office on two separate GDU campuses, to the effect that if you’re laid off you’re not eligible for RASL, was wrong.

By the time I reached her the following day, I’d about figured out that everything the HR rep had said about COBRA was just so much B.S., and so I’ll admit there probably was an edge in my voice.

When I asked her what was this “minimum amount” I’d been told had to stay in my 403(b) account, she completely went off on me.

She said that if I rolled my money out of my 403(b) into my own IRA, that would “obviously” mean I was not retired and therefore I could not have the $20,000 the state owes me for back sick leave pay.

I asked her to please define what is meant by “retire,” since I didn’t understand how rolling money out of a 403(b) into another tax-deferred plan would cause you to not be retired. She could not or would not respond to that question, but instead informed me flatly that if I rolled anything out of my 403(b), she would send me a letter rejecting my application for RASL. She started yelling at me (!) that “you can’t have everything you want.” I was so nonplussed it didn’t occur to me to say I’m not asking for everything; all I’m asking for is what I’ve earned over the past 15 years of working 14-hour days, 7 days a week with no overtime.

She then demanded that I call Fidelity and TIAA-CREF, where my 403(b) funds reside, with any further questions. She said they had “hundreds” of representatives who have had experience with this issue and could confirm what she said.

It took an hour and a half to get through the punch-a-button mazes to reach humans at those two worthy organizations. TIAA-CREF has disconnected the line that used to reach a person, so that now all of its published telephone numbers take you to a barricade between its employees and the Great Unwashed. Finally I got a call from a guy I reached through an e-mail form on their website.

At Fidelity, the CSR and his manager had never heard of any such rule. They both said they couldn’t imagine how rolling your money from one tax-deferred fund into another tax-deferred fund would magically make you “not retired.” The manager suggested that the way to get around this crazy woman would be simply to make a small drawdown, as though I were going to take out payments to live on, until such time as she approved the RASL and the first payment hit my account. Then, he suggested, just go ahead and do the rollover. Once she’d approved the RASL, there would be nothing she could do.

He also suggested simply rolling over the first distribution into my IRA. He said there’s no rule prohibiting you from making a roll-over, and although Fidelity has to confirm with GDU that the person requesting a distribution actually is “retired,” there’s no way the GAO woman was going to know where the distribution goes.

At TIAA-CREF, the CSR was amazed and said he also had never heard of any such thing. He said, however, that when the request for confirmation of retirement status goes through to GDU, the form used to make that request does say where the distribution is going. So, he concluded, this woman would be able to see whether I was having the money put into my checking account or whether it was being rolled into another tax-deferred instrument. He recommended taking a minimum distribution, paying the taxes on it, and depositing the remainder into my Roth IRA.

This will mean I can’t consolidate my money from three tax-deferred instruments to one for at least three months after I leave GDU. It takes that long after the demented woman at GAO approves your status as a retiree and gives the go-ahead for the RASL payment for the first of the three annual installments to be disbursed. Since I probably am going to have to make drawdowns from savings to survive, this is going to add to the hassle factor immeasurably.

What a flicking nightmare.

Another fun day at Human Resources

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It’s probably my mistake. Most things are. Whatever, when I showed up yesterday morning at Human Resources for the required meeting for exiting retirees, I was told that the meeting wasn’t yesterday; it was Wednesday.

Now, I would swear the woman who made the appointment for me was on the phone when I had the calendar in hand, and that I said, as I always do, “Let me confirm that…” But maybe not. Maybe I wrote it down on Thursday and just imagined I entered it on Wednesday.

This created a double inconvenience: The pointless 44-mile round-trip trudge out there (where I have nothing to do other than pack up some more of my junk and haul it out to the car), and then, because they sent a packet of information through the campus mail, another pointless round trip in the next day or two to pick that up.

Swallowing my fury, I remarked to the woman at the reception desk that I had some questions that I haven’t been able to get answered. In the conversation that ensued, it developed that she was the very person who had made this pointless appointment for me—and, we may add, so far the only one who seems to have made some sense over the telephone. She was sitting at the front desk because, thanks to the layoffs, they’re so short-handed they don’t have enough staff to run the office properly. At any rate, she offered to answer said questions.

You understand: in dealing with HR what you get is a passel of information that you already know. Whatever they tell you is a) boilerplate and b) already on their website. But when you have a real question, one that isn’t answered on their website, they don’t know the answer. Consequently, they either tell you they don’t know and they don’t really know where you can find out, or they give you an answer that’s wrong.

For example, the last time I was out there (and I do mean out: HR’s offices are way to the south of the huge campus. It’s too far away to walk, and the parking lot is permit-only, so that employees have to pay to park there or take a chance on getting a whopping ticket)…the last time I was out there, I was told that the proposed December 31 canning day would get me in under the wire for the discounted COBRA.

Without the discount on COBRA, my health insurance premium will jump from $26 a month to something over $600. With it, the premium will be somewhat less than Medicare, around $185. Not really affordable, but at least attainable, more or less.

Yesterday the HR lady read the rules for the discounted COBRA closely (isn’t that a quaint idea?) and concluded that what I’d been told was wrong. My benefits actually have to have stopped before the 31st. So, she proposed, I need to ask the Dean’s office to can me significantly sooner. She suggested the 11th—arbitrarily, because some other disgruntled retiree had chosen that day at yesterday’s meeting.

I informed her that Social Security will not deliver a benefit check before the middle of February, even though it “starts” (snark!!) in January, and that they refused to “start” it in December so that I can get some money in my bank account in January, because I’m earning a salary in December that would trigger the 50 percent penalty for working while drawing SS. I pointed out that I will have a difficult enough time living for a month and a half with no income, and that there’s no way I can manage that for something like two months.

Then she decided I probably could get away with it by having them can me on the 27th, the date of the last paycheck of the month. But, she said, I’ll have to get the Dean’s office a) to do that (meaning I have to get that bureaucracy off the dime) and b) I have to get those people to state that I’m being terminated involuntarily (even though in fact what’s happening is they’ve arranged to have my contract stop then, and it’s entirely possible the government will argue that not renewing a contract is different from firing a regular worker).

Then I asked how I get my money out of the 403(b) plans to roll it into my IRA. She didn’t know. She said I had to call Fidelity and TIAA-Cref, and she did not know how to reach a human being at either outfit.

So I asked what is the minimum amount I’m required to leave in the plan in order to be regarded as “retired” over the next three years so that I can get my accrued sick leave payments, which are doled out over a three-year period. She didn’t know. She said I needed to call the state’s general accounting office.

I asked if benefits are taken out of our vacation pay, and if so, did that mean my health care insurance would be extended over the month or so of time for which GDU owes me. She said she believed that the health insurance stopped on the termination day, but she wasn’t sure. She called a payroll clerk up to the front, to discuss this question.

That woman said that the only thing that was taken out of back vacation pay was state and federal taxes, but that the federal tax bite would be 25 percent, and that your benefits stop on the day you are terminated. I asked why the tax rate was so high. She said that was just the rules. Then she said the state tax deduction would be over 30 percent, because that’s what I put on my A-4 form. (I did? Well, that explains why I keep getting such large state tax refunds). I said that would mean they would be grabbing over half my pay!

She said no, by “30 percent” she meant the state takes 30 percent of the federal tax. Then she said it was possible to elect a slightly smaller bite. I said I would like to do that. So she produced a new A-4, which is the same as a W-4 only for the state of Arizona. The lowest amount I could select was 21.1 percent.

By the time I walked out of there, steam was shooting out of my ears.

These developments—assuming they’re true—represent substantial more hassle, substantial more uncertainty, and four fewer days of pay: $960 less than I thought I would get!!!!!

The bright spot is that I’ll net a little more in vacation pay than the $3186 I expected: $3670. Not much—$486 less than the $960 I’ll lose by moving my termination day forward—but better than yet another hit on the head.

Moving on, I tried to contact the college’s business office manager, cc-ing my dean, and was told that she’s out until next Monday. So now all this complicated mess has to hang fire until then, and then hang fire still longer until she gets around to answering me. By then I will have forgotten some of the details and also will be engaged in dealing with other messes.

Today, whenever it gets to be business hours, I’ve got to track down the woman I found at GAO and find out just how little cash I’m allowed to leave in the 403(b) without losing my RASL payment.

Then, somewhere, somehow (I have no idea where or how) I’ve got to find someone who understands enough about COBRA to confirm or deconfirm whether I really have to sacrifice $960 of pay in order to keep my health insurance premiums in a range that I can even remotely afford to pay.

What I don’t understand is that, assuming the HR lady is right in thinking I have to be off the payroll before December 31 because my benefits would extend to that day, why can’t I be canned on December 30, thereby losing only $240 worth of pay? The rule says “eligible for COBRA” and the last day on which you may have been canned is the 31st.

She interprets “eligible for COBRA” as meaning not only that you were canned involuntarily but that your benefits have stopped. In her view, because my benefits would still be in force on the 31st, and because GDU will have to not pay me for the extra four days after the December 27 payday until the first payday in January 2010, those two things together will make me ineligible for the discount. I don’t think so: I think the rule says you may have been canned as late as the 31st. If she’s right that hanging onto my job until the 31st makes me ineligible for the discount but letting them can me on the 27th makes me eligible, then by that reasoning (if “reasoning” it can be called), I should still be eligible on the 30th. IMHO, I should be eligible on the 31st, but I’m willing to forego $240 (less tax, less benefits, less every other gouge GDU can think of) to keep my insurance premiums “down” to a mere $186 a month.

So far, I’ve been unable to find anyone, anywhere who can explain this rule. Most of the HR people barely know it exists at all, and they certainly don’t understand its fine points.

Jayzus Aitch Keerist on a crutch! Is it any wonder I’m grinding my teeth until they break?

Best phone solicitor story of all time

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LOL! Over at The Buck List, Buck Weber holds forth on his two favorite ways to deal with telephone solicitors. His post reminded me of the time one of my graduate school professors occupied a fair amount of class time telling us about his latest encounter with a call center employee.

At the time—this was long before the Do Not Call law, when most people could expect two to six nuisance sales calls a day, and long before caller ID—we were in the middle of a particularly obnoxious spate of harassment from people trying to sell carpets. So one day Jack picked up the phone and yea, verily, a young-sounding woman asked him if he wouldn’t just love to take advantage of today’s special on gorgeous new carpeting, “only in your neighborhood.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you called,” he exlaimed. “I was hoping to hear from you!”

“You were?”

“Yes. I’ve decided I do want to carpet the house and am very interested in your offer.”

Well, of course the young woman was beside herself with joy. After some happy small talk during which they discussed the types of carpet and the possible color scheme, she asked him how many rooms he had.

He described a typical suburban house, as most housing in Tempe is: three or four bedrooms, a living room, a family room. Lots of carpetable space.

She asked for the approximate dimensions. He gave her figures for all these rooms.

They set up a day for a salesman to come over and measure each room and show him carpet samples. He gave her an address and made an appointment.

As the conversation wound down, she thanked him profusely for his business (probably the first sale the kid had ever made). He said she was welcome, happy to talk with you, etc., and then, just as she was about to hang up, he said…

“Oh, by the way, I have one question…”

“Yes?”

“These carpets can be installed over dirt floors, can’t they?”

A moment’s pause ensued. “You have dirt floors?”

“Why, yes,” he said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

The line went dead. For some reason, he didn’t get any more calls from carpet sellers.

phonegoldplated

A$k and Re¢eive, Revisited

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If you ever need a reminder to get bids for every…single…project of any kind, here’s a tale with that a moral to it:

Richard the Landscaper proposed to remove the dying ash in front for for $1,000, down from the original $1,500 he thought the market would bear. When I asked if he would please also remove the moribund plantings around the tree’s base, cover the stump with a mound of dirt, spread some more gravel there and arrange the existing rocks decoratively, and then plant one of the baby vitex trees I’ve cultivated in pots, he added $200 to his bid. So, as I’m facing unemployment I’m looking at a total of $1,200 to take down the tree and repair the landscaping.

Welll….

I called the Desert Botanical Garden, which has a master gardener training program, and asked if they could refer any of their graduates. Forthwith came in the e-mail a list of a dozen certified arborists. So I called one—let’s call him Mike the Arborist. He just came by to view the jungle that is my yard and give me some estimates on the large amounts of pruning that need doing.

He said he would take out the dead ash tree for $500!!!!!

More ordinary tree trimming comes in the vicinity of $40 to $100, depending on the complexity and size of the job.

Covered with sharp thorns the size of tiger claws
Sharp thorns the size of tiger claws...trimmed back from the sidewalk less than a month ago!

For $225, he’ll also remove the ferocious palo brea on the south side, which has become a dangerous menace—passersby risk facial scratches and eye-gouges if they have the temerity to use the sidewalk in front of my house. For about $40 apiece, he’ll trim up the two trees the palo brea is crushing to help them fill out properly. For a few dollars more, he’ll trim the olive inside the front courtyard, restoring it to its former graceful splendor. With the job in the front yard, he’ll clean up the desert willow and restore the passageway between it and the Texas ebony free of charge.

In the back yard, he proposed some judicious trimming of the exuberant emerald paloverde—not enough to infringe on its shade-giving properties but a little pruning to keep it off the roof and discourage crossed limbs. And though he disapproved of  Satan‘s westside weeping acacia (yes—he and Proserpine actually planted two devil-pod trees in back, one where it would drop plaster-staining junk into the pool and the other where its limbs could snap off and fall on the house—or on the neighbor’s house), he recommended against removing it and suggested simply cleaning up the lower limbs, which are dying off  because they’re not getting enough light.

So, instantly the guy drove away, Richard got a call canceling the job he had yet to do. I think he’d forgotten about it, to tell the truth. Thank goodness! It looks to me like I can get ALL the pruning and tree removal—take out the dead ash and the nuisance palo brea, prune the palo verde, the olive, the vitex, the desert willow, and one of the hideous willow acacias in back, plus build the mound and move the stones onto it—for not a helluva lot more than Richard proposed for the ash and the mound (all told, R. wanted $1,200 for those jobs).

Wow! I was braced for an $800 to $1,000 bid just to do the basic trimming, to say nothing of removing the palo brea. Can you imagine?

Asked him what his background is and how he came to start a business. He said he and his wife had moved back to the US from Germany, where they’d started their family (she’s German), because they wanted more space and Arizona was where they could afford it. He started working for a large landscaping firm that was doing all the maintenance for the huge new developments out on the west and east sides. There he learned how to climb and prune trees, ended up as a manager, and started studying landscaping seriously. He became a certified arborist, and then after the economic collapse he and a partner bought an existing landscaping company that had about 35 accounts. He said their plan is to target small to medium-sized developments that are too small for the huge landscape maintenance firms to bother with. So…it sounds like he knows what he’s doing and he has some experience. He’s very clean-cut, well-spoken, and even though he’s a gringo he doesn’t look like an escaped convict.

My yard is desperately overgrown. It not only needs to have a huge, mature (dead!) ash tree removed, it needs serious work that verges on relandscaping. Some of that work really should be done by an expert. Unless I miss my guess, this single call to just one other contractor is going to save about $1,000 on the total job.

Hamburger: 12 ways to keep your family safe

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Because chuck and rump roasts often go on sale for 10 to 50 cents a pound less than the grocery store’s hamburger, I look for bargain roasts and ask the butcher to grind it for me. Not only is the resulting hamburger cheaper, I find it invariably tastes much better than preground burger. Well… did you see the Sunday Times‘s exposé about the gross ways hamburger is prepared in slaughterhouses and the unholy results on public health? Add another good reason for asking the butcher to grind a single roast: ground beef from a source you can see is safer and you know what’s in it!

I’m not going to dwell on the horrific facts reporter Michael Moss uncovered, except to point out that the single burger that poisoned a 22-year-old woman and left her in a wheelchair for life likely consisted of “products” from four different meat packers, some of which define meat in ways you and I would define “garbage.” One of them contributed “lean finely textured beef,” which consists of “trimmings” put through a centrifuge and then treated with ammonia to kill microbes. Yummie!

This explains why the custom-ground hamburger from a butcher’s counter tastes better than even the best of preground burger. It may explain, too, why neither the dog nor I have croaked over from food poisoning. Yet.

Other than abstaining from hamburger, what can you do to keep your family safe? Nothing is 100 percent, but a few habitual strategies will help:

• Buy preground meat at Costco, one of the few retailers that tests meats for bacterial contamination before marketing them.

• Buy beef roasts at a butcher shop or at a grocery store with a staffed butcher counter. Select lean cuts and ask the butcher to grind them for you.

• Never buy preshaped, prepared hamburger patties. Ever.

• Before preparing burger for cooking, place a bottle of dish detergent next to the sink, so it will be handy.

• Use a plate or a synthetic, dishwasher-proof cutting board as a surface for shaping hamburger patties. Use a dishwasher-proof bowl for mixing meat loaf or meatball ingredients. Never use the counter as a surface on which to prepare raw hamburger.

• Never, EVER leave frozen hamburger out on the counter to defrost!!!!! At normal kitchen temperatures, it takes just 45 minutes for E. coli bacteria to double in number. And since just a few cells can make a diner very sick, indeed, the longer meat is out of the freezer or fridge, the greater the likelihood of food-borne illness.

• Each time you handle raw hamburger, go to the sink and use the dish detergent to wash your hands thoroughly before touching any other surface in the kitchen. This is extremely important!

Do not touch the kitchen cabinets, dishes, glassware, silverware, doorknobs, or anything else without washing your hands first.

• After the burger is in a pan or on a grill, place the plate, bowl, or cutting board on which you prepared the meat directly into the dishwasher. If you don’t have a functioning dishwasher, fill the kitchen sink with hot water, strong dish detergent, and about a quarter cup of Clorox. Immerse all tools used in hamburger preparation in this solution and allow them to soak for 10 or 15 minutes before scrubbing, rinsing, and draining.

• Cook hamburger well done. If, like me, you can’t stomach well-done barbecued hamburger, find something better to eat.

• Never reuse the same plate that carried the meat out to the barbecue grill to bring cooked meat back inside! Put that plate directly into the washer, or scrub it well with strong detergent and hot water before reusing.

• Use detergent to thoroughly clean the countertop on which you did the meat prep. Then scrub down the faucet and sink, and also wash doorknobs and cabinet knobs that might have been touched with contaminated fingers. Don’t forget to wash the outside of the dish detergent container.

• Clorox is an effective disinfectant. If your counter will tolerate Clorox, use it. If not, use a strong solution of concentrated Windex, or make your own by mixing rubbing alcohol and water in equal proportions with an added dose of ammonia. Wipe down all countertops, sinks, faucets, doorknobs, and cabinet knobs with this product.

It’s a shame that regulation of the meat industry has grown so lax that we have to take extreme measures to protect ourselves. But of course, when you kill the beast, you take the chance that you’ll kill the consumers the beast was created to protect. That seems to be the case today. If we American carnivores want to live and we want to see our children spend their lives mobile and in good health, we need to take steps to keep our kitchens safe. Let’s bear in mind: we don’t live in Europe!

Image: American Beef Cuts. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.