Coffee heat rising

Reprojecting next year’s income

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Obsessive again, I spent another day and a half rehashing, in a desultory way, next year’s income and outgo. And worrying. Worrying worrying worrying: can I make it?

It appeared very much as though I could not. In 2010, projected discretionary and monthly unavoidable expenses, all told, will run about $30,075. Net income from Social Security, teaching, and GDU’s one-time payout for unused vacation time would come to about $26,200. The problem is, the $14,160 that Social Security will allow me to earn in 2010 before a 50% penalty kicks in is just too little for me to live on.

Cutting costs every which way from Sunday (my expenses have already been cut significantly, preparatory to unemployment) brings the estimated outgo down to $27,675, still more than projected income.

The goal, BTW, is to avoid taking a drawdown from savings next year, so as to allow the investments in my major savings instruments to recover from the crash of the Bush economy. With that constraint, there was no way income was gunna exceed or equal outgo, no matter how many numbers I crunched.

Dang!

Well, this morning a dim light dawned. The community college district issued my first full paycheck, which for the first time showed state and federal tax withholding. A little English-major math revealed that the total gouge, for everything, is only about 14 percent. I’d been estimating a 20 percent tax bill.

That 6 percent difference will make it possible for me to live on Social Security, my net vacation time payout, and teaching income next year! My share of the Investment House mortgage will be paid from a separate little windfall, and without that $800 a month hit, I should be able to live in something slightly more luxurious than full-out anchorite style.

Without cutting my current $1,200 a month budget for discretionary expenses (some of which are only nominally “discretionary”), I still run in the red, as you can see from the first four columns on the left. However, as a practical matter discretionary expenditures have averaged about $1,000 for the first nine months of 2009, despite several months with large budget overruns. Assuming straitened circumstances will lead me to keep those costs at or below $1,000 a month, I end up just within my 2010 net income—as shown on the right.

Add a $2,500 drawdown from the S-corporation, which I plan to take this December and stash in next year’s survival fund, and the picture looks even better:

In this scenario, if I manage to keep discretionary expenses around $1,000 a month (on average), I should have about $2,740 of play over the course of the year.

So, if no really huge unexpected expenses strike next year, I should survive the tight times of 2010 without undue suffering. It won’t be luxurious, but neither will I have to set up a campsite under the Seventh Avenue Overpass.

Whether 14 percent withholding for taxes will suffice remains to be seen. But that problem will have to take care of itself in April 2011.

By 2011, my investments should have recovered enough to justify a 4 percent drawdown. And the onerous restriction on the amount of earned income Social Security imposes will expire (for me) in 2011, so I can put all of my contract and blog income into the pot. As a practical matter, the combination of teaching, Social Security, and S-corporation income may be enough that I won’t have to draw down anything like 4 percent. I’ll need $800 to cover my share of the Investment House, and that’s only 2 percent of the present investment total. If, as my financial managers think, investments will have recovered substantially by 2011, it may be even less than that.

Hallelujah!

Teaching without tools

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So the li’l community college students have handed in their first batch of final, final, FINAL most-brilliant-thing-they-ever wrote essays. A few are surprisingly good. Most are unsurprisingly adequate, and a few evince some real challenges with language. Mercifully, so far none of them is flunking (exactly), and I’ve only got about four or five more papers to read.

Teaching students about writing has its challenging moments in an institutional world controlled by educators who are convinced that learning how language actually works does nothing to help students develop strong writing skills. Having made a living as a writer and, later, as an editor, I can testify from personal experience to the wrong-headedness of that idea. Most of my writing style has evolved specifically because I learned a lot about grammar and language in grade school, middle school, and high school. Over the years, I consciously applied knowledge of grammar and sentence structure to my own writing by way of developing a specific style, one designed to be moderately complex but not ornate. Though in my old age I often drop a letter or a word as my fingers fly over the keyboard, I rarely make a grammatical or structural error that is not a typo.

I believe that students are well served by a strong grasp of their native language’s grammar and style. But that’s something few of them learn.

After the chair of my old department at the West campus proposed and got approval for a course titled “Grammar and Style for Writers and Teachers,” the dean of the College of Education paid her a visit and said to her, “I wish you would not teach grammar to education majors.”

No joke.

So what you have, all you taxpayers out there, are teachers of English who do not know how to describe the workings of the English language. They do not know its conventions, they do not know where its conventions came from, and they have no idea how to teach your children how to form a sentence at once technically correct and graceful.

Inside the classroom, it means that you (the instructor) have no vocabulary to use in speaking with the students about issues they need to understand. There’s no way to speak easily and meaningfully with them about language and grammar (of any sort: traditional, structural, transformational, whatEVER)…because they don’t know the words to describe these things. Neither, we might add, did their previous teachers, being graduates of colleges that quite deliberately keep budding K-12 teachers in the dark.

So. Let us say I want to ask a class of bright young students to refrain from writing sentence fragments. I give them, as an example, this typical utterance:

Which is the main drawback to teenage drinking.

How do I explain that this is not a complete sentence? I’m speaking to people who may not know what a subject and a verb are, but more to the point in this case, I can’t easily explain to them that this is a fragment because it is a subordinate clause, and that we know it’s a subordinate clause because it begins with a relative pronoun.

When I asked my students why this utterance is a sentence fragment, one of them said, “Because it starts with a preposition.”

Understand: quite a few of them have been told they must never start a sentence with a preposition, but none of them seem to know what a preposition is. One reported that she had been told never to start a sentence with because, because it’s a preposition.

Because it starts with a preposition.
Because it starts with a preposition, my teacher said it is an incorrect sentence.

How do I tell them which of these is a sentence fragment and why? How do I tell them what patterns to look for when they don’t know what a preposition is, they don’t know what a subordinating conjunction is, they don’t know what a relative pronoun (or any kind of pronoun) is, they don’t know what an independent clause is, and they don’t know what a dependent clause is?

And, without using the terms “relative pronoun,” “interrogative pronoun,” and “adjective,” how do I explain which of these is a sentence fragment, and why?

Which is what I was trying to say.
Which of the puppies has the nicest personality?
Which way do we go to find the train station?

The current theory has it that somehow humans are born hard-wired with the grammatical structure of their native language, and so you don’t need to instruct them in it. That accepted as a given, obviously neither you nor your students need a vocabulary with which to discuss these matters. Instead, we’re told that the way to teach students to write is to make them write. And write. And write. The more they write, the accepted wisdom goes, the better they write.

Well, no.

The more you write badly, the more bad copy you churn out. When you don’t understand what you’re doing, all you can do is grope around in the dark. You have no way to improve your skill because you have no tools, no knowledge with which to improve. And no, grammar is not hard-wired into the human brain. It is learned in infancy by listening to the people around you. When the people around you speak a dialect—as, believe it or not, many Southwesterners do (oh, yes, Virginia: there is a cowboy dialect!)—you learn the grammar of that dialect. If you grew up in darkest Arizona, for example, something like I never saw them two mountain lions until they were right on top of me rings true. That is your hard-wired grammar.

And if no one ever teaches you how to speak about language, you’re unlikely to learn how to express that statement in lingo appropriate to the college or the white-collar office job.

What it means for a college writing instructor is that we’re left empty-handed of any tools with which to teach our subject matter. We are effectively hamstrung. There’s no way you can help students develop their writing skills without some common language you can use to discuss those skills!

To coin a Southwesternism: it’s the stupidest damnfool thing I ever heard.

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