Coffee heat rising

Breaking up is hard to do…

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Uh-huh...

Getting disentangled from the Great Desert University and onto Social Security is a nightmare hassle! Right now I have an inch-thick folder of information, instructions, and policies about retirement, and it’s growing. There’s another folder full of paperwork specific to Social Security and Medicare.

Today I learned that when the state of Arizona pays me the first of three payments for my accrued sick leave (known appropriately as “RASL,” as in “you get to rassle around trying to collect this”), I will owe FICA and Medicare taxes on it. And, even though it represents money earned in 2009, it will not be paid until 30 to 90 days after my job is terminated.

Canning Day is December 31. That means the RASL will come in 2010, after I’ve started collecting Social Security. And that means the $6,355 payment will count as part of the maximum $14,100 I will be allowed to earn in 2010.

This will mean that in order not to have my Social Security benefits docked, I will have to refrain from teaching three of the six community-college classes planned for 2010. And that will mean I will have to use the RASL to live on, rather than putting it into retirement savings, as planned.

Item: I can’t afford to stand down from teaching next year. When you do that, you drop off the departmental chair’s radar, and you may find yourself never being hired again. I know: this has happened to me before. Next year I will need to teach as many sections as I can get, so as to build a track record that will get me hired in the future for as long as I can dodder into a classroom.

Item: I need to put that RASL money in savings!!!!! My investments are down more than $120,000 from where they were a year or so ago, and they certainly aren’t going to regain that in the six months I have left to work at GDU. I just can’t afford to substitute RASL for teaching income.

The university will owe me a little over $19,000 in RASL. This amount will be paid in three annual $6,355 installments: in 2010, in 2011, and in 2012. I will reach age 66 in May of 2011; after that, the dock-your-Social-Security trick stops.

Plowing through the stack of policy statements on RASL, I see that a) you can delay applying for RASL as long as 180 days after you’re terminated, and b) you can defer the first year’s payment (and only the first year’s payment) by rolling it into a deferred compensation plan. And c) the second and third annual payments are disbursed on the anniversaries of your first year’s payment, which comes 30 to 90 days after the state receives your application.

So, to avoid having my Social Security benefits dinged by the RASL and to avoid being forced to use the RASL for living expenses, I’ll have to put two maneuvers into play.

First, I’ll need to delay applying for RASL until the middle of April, so that the soonest possible time it would be paid is mid-May, after my 66th birthday. If I fail to do that, then the second RASL payment will also arrive before I reach the “full” retirement age of 66, and I’ll be dinged for that one, too. If I time my application so that the first RASL payment arrives after May 7, 2010, then the second RASL payment will not arrive until I’m 66, at which time I can earn as much as I want (or can) without affecting Social Security income.

Second, I’ll need to establish a deferred compensation plan before my job ends. This is required. That may mean that even though the damned furloughs just ended, I’ll have to continue having my pay docked. That I will get the money back sometime in the remote future is irrelevant to the fact that I need all my paycheck to stash savings to live on after I’m fired.

The deferred compensation plan is managed by a private provider. That means, of course, that there’ll be fees involved. So I’m going to have to pay someone for the privilege of letting them take my money away from me. Isn’t that sweet?

That’s just the start of it. Then there’s the realization that because I’m being canned in December I have to apply for Social Security in October in order to get the payments started in January. But I will not get my last paycheck until after January 1, because of PeopleSoft’s obnoxious lagging pay scheme. Furthermore, because of the furloughs, the gross amount on an October paycheck will not reflect accurately what GDU will pay me over 2009’s twenty-six pay periods. Nor will I have statements from my freelance clients, nor will I have any clue how much my S-corporation will pay me between September and December 31.

So, how will the Social Security Administration calculate my benefits, when no accurate statement of my 2009 pay will be available until after those benefits are supposed to start?

Then there’s the business of all the vacation pay the SOBs owe me: $5,287 worth. This payment also will come forth in January, 2009.

Will that be held against my Social Security earnings, even though it represents pre-2010 income? Can that amount be rolled over into this deferred compensation plan?

And if I have to roll it over…my GOD! I intended to use that money to cover COBRA. If I have to roll it over into deferred compensation, I won’t have anything budgeted to pay for health insurance between January 1 and May 7, 2010. I’ll have to dig into my retirement savings to cover that.

The more I look into this stuff, the more questions come up and the more unfair the whole mess looks. No wonder I grind my teeth all the time!

Kiddie nudes: Where was the editor?

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This is totally off-topic, but have you seen the photo that appears on the front page of the Home section in today’s New York Times? Look at it closely, and then consider that it runs over a story asking the slightly titillating question of whether letting kids run around nude is OK. It made me wonder where the heck their editor was, and what on earth he was smoking!

Personally, I don’t think letting your kids trot around the house or the fully fenced backyard in the altogether is some sort of moral issue. Nudity isn’t especially objectionable in my book, and nudity among small children is benign enough. But… I think we have to consider the context of the society in which we live.

First, many Americans do consider a state of undress to be some sort of moral issue, and they are abhorred at the very thought of nude three-year-olds running rampant across the landscape. We may consider that to be their problem. But really: civil people don’t go around offending other people’s sensibilities on purpose. It’s common courtesy to teach your children to dress modestly in public and before guests.

Second, and more to the point: we live in a culture that is inundated with sexual imagery, much of it quite violent. We know that a surprising number of adults—women as well as men—develop unhealthy cravings for small children, and that quite a few will act on these cravings. Teaching the kiddies some modesty is, alas, the better part of valor.

To my eye, the Times‘s photo is pretty sexualized. Am I crazy? Note the position of the little boy’s hand vis-à-vis the thigh of the man standing near him, and the handsomely exposed legs of the woman in the foreground. Maybe I’m nuts…but IMHO the Times‘s Home editor should have exercised a little discretion.

Whaddaya think? Nuts or prissy?

The dance of the adjunct faculty

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This morning after visiting the Social Security Administration to apply for a replacement SS card, I dropped by the Paradise Valley Community College campus to find out a few of the things I need to know: how to schedule time for the li’l students to visit the library and how to get set up in BlackBoard, the online learning tool where faculty can post course docs and students can turn in papers electronically.

Truth to tell, I was dreading it: expected a day fraught with hassles. The prospect of enduring a series of runarounds in the 110-degree heat, when what I most wanted to do was find an air-conditioning vent and stand under it, did not fill me with joy.

But nay! Hang onto your hats, folks: people were nice to me there!

Lordie. I hardly know what to make of it. The librarian (who at the moment had little to do) got up and gave me the grand tour, sat down at a computer with me and got me into the system, showed me how to sign up for library time. Then he personally accompanied me to one of the IT gurus, to whom he introduced me. From her I learned about a whole week of faculty learning seminars in August, some of them for really neat stuff. They were both very generous with their time and behaved as though they actually  liked their jobs.

Weird.

At GDU, a newbie can’t get people to explain things for love nor money. When you ask how to get something done or where to go to find out, the answer invariably is “I dunno. It’s not my job.”

When GDU hired me to establish our office, they expected me to buy furniture, computers, printers, scanners, software, office supplies, reference works, and even the phones and ethernet connections. One woman in the dean’s office was assigned to find us office space, which she eventually did—in the engineering building—but she wasn’t very gracious about it. She acted like it was quite an imposition, even though that was her job…which has since been eliminated. Getting the phones installed was a memorable headache: it took a week or two just to find out where I was supposed to call to apply to have them installed. It then was another couple of weeks before they got around to doing it. Ethernet entailed a similar runaround. And the furniture…oh god! Don’t ask.

Think I’m making this up, don’t you? Well, I thought it was “just me” for the longest time: must be my curdled personality turning people off. Then my friend who had founded and developed a nationally prominent graduate editing program retired—this program functioned more or less as our sister program, because we hire(d) our research assistants from its students, providing rare, nicely paying twelve-month support for three graduate students. The new guy showed up, and we became soon became cordial. Pretty quick he’s asking me how to get this, that, and the other thing done. He voiced exactly the same complaint. No one would tell him where to go or how to find out how to do the most basic things!

So I felt weirdly gratified when the new director, who was an affable, gregarious fellow hired to run a prestigious program with national visibility, ran into the same brick walls. At least it wasn’t something I was doing.

At any rate, it felt very strange to have people who never saw me in their lives act as though they cared whether I lived or died. The pay’s not very good, but it’s beginning to look like the trade-off is huge: working someplace where people aren’t miserable in their jobs.

A post with no title: What can one say?

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It’s 9:30 at night and the temperature on the back porch, which has been in the shade all day, is 100 degrees.

Brain’s temperature is somewhere in that vicinity, too. Today reminded me of why I love teaching so bitterly.

Several weeks ago, I spent about eight hours writing an Eng. 102 syllabus and another six to eight hours on an Eng. 101 syllabus. By the time you add all the college’s required boilerplate, one of these things is about 16 single-spaced pages long. Some of said pages are very complex, indeed: braids of the textbook author’s ideas of what the students should learn and what they should already know entertwined with your ideas of what they should learn and what you know your students most certainly will not already know and the college’s idea of what some lawyer on the District board thinks they ought to know and what some veteran of the trenches knows they don’t know and may never figure out.

So I felt pretty good about creating a creditable product, all those weeks ago.

In the interim, the college jettisoned its Eng. 101 text and took on an entirely new text from an entirely different publisher. No problem: there’s only so many ways you can express what an Eng. 101 student needs to learn (if learn she will). It’s all pretty fungible. Recreating the revised 101 syllabus took only about two or three additional unpaid hours.

Then came the announcement that lo! We have a new edition of the Eng. 102 text.

New edition. Why do textbook publishers keep churning out new editions? Because of the lucrative market in textbook resales. At the end of any given semester, college bookstores buy back used textbooks from students who would just as soon never be reminded that they took any of the courses they paid for that semester (about 90 percent of all students, I’d guess). Bookstores buy the books back for ludicrously low prices. Then they resell them for a profit to used-book dealers, who shuffle them around and reconsign them to the college bookstores, who re-resell them to the next batch of students at yet another profit.

Result? Neither the author nor the publisher makes anything on the resale and the re-resale of used textbooks. To continue to make their marginal profit, publishers a) have to jack up the prices of textbooks through the stratosphere (Amazon.com, which regularly underprices college bookstores, is selling the new edition of the 102 text for $78.10), and b) have to grind out new “editions” every two or three years. Each semester a new edition comes out, every single student has to pay the full freight, because no used copies are available. Which is the point.

Secondary result? Instructors get to die with overwork trying to keep up with the shit.

Our textbook author reshuffled her contents so that, although the underlying pedagogical message remained the same, readings were partly deleted, partly reshuffled, and partly changed. To salvage the course plan I’d created…oh, my god. I started around 9:00 this morning and finished at quarter to nine in the evening. During that time I got up twice to pee, and I was interrupted once by SDXB, who killed the better part of an hour talking about himself, and by a volunteer for the Mayo Clinic, who wasted about 10 minutes with a stupid customer service survey. I spent almost ELEVEN HOURS trying to untangle the mess made by the fake “new edition” whose purpose was to pluck the feathers of yet another incoming class of freshmen.

Sumbitch. Not one minute of this time was paid for. My pay for teaching these courses starts when I walk in the classroom door…not during the untold hours I spend preparing the classes.

Academia. What a scam!

Other people’s pets

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How much do you figure your neighbor’s dog (cat, parrot, boa constrictor, tame alligator) costs you? LOL! I have to say, I expect my own pets to be destructive and figure the repair bills to be part of the cost of doing business. But one thing we tend not to budget for is the depredations of other people’s critters.

While M’hijito’s roommate was in Singapore visiting his relatives and hustling for a job, he left his brand-new Infiniti parked in the driveway (Roommate is the scion of a ridiculously wealthy family).

Quick backstory: Some time back, Roommate became enamored of a cat belonging to the old guy who lives in the house behind M’hijito’s place. He took to feeding and watering the beast, much to M’hijito’s disgust (it uses the vegetable garden as its litterbox), and he has thought of it as “his” cat. In his absence, the cat has taken up residence on top of the Infiniti, where it sleeps at night, out of reach of hunting coyotes and stray pit bulls.

So the other day as M’hijito was headed out to work, he noticed a couple of brown mounds on top of the Infiniti. On closer inspection…oops! Cat mounds!

The cat had deposited two large piles of cat poop on the brand-new silver Infiniti’s roof. Unknown how long they’d been there, but in 115-degree heat, it doesn’t take long for such a substance to bake to perfection. With Roommate due to surface yesterday, M’hijito drove the car to a commercial car wash. This removed the mound, but…well, the paint beneath it was etched and permanently stained.

So, that brand-new car is going to need a paint job. Hope Roommate’s insurance will cover it. Meow!

As I write this, Inez and Carlos the Knife‘s demented dog is running loose in their front yard, once again threatening to eviscerate all comers. I see their new next-door neighbors, the present and blessed occupants of the former Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, managed to dodge inside the house before the dog could catch them between their car and their front door.

Carlos, who is coming onto 90, has a little senility problem. Whenever Inez, who still has all her marbles, turns her back, Carlos sneaks over to the front door and lets the dog out. Once free, it lurks around their front yard but refuses to be caught—reasonably so, since Carlos is given to whacking it with his belt. From the front yard, it chases young children, bicyclists, and postal carriers up and down the street. Fortunately, the mail came before this afternoon’s fugue.

This antic, too, has its expenses. In addition to the potential for medical bills and lawsuits, the last time the hound got out, the post office declared our entire block terra incognita. They refused to deliver the mail to anyone until the dog was locked up or hauled off to the pound (whence it came). And they challenged us all to call the county animal control officers. It took about a week to get our mail delivery restarted, by which time my AMEX bill was running late. I had to pay American Express for the privilege of paying my bill electronically, something that made me stabby, very stabby.

But maybe I have no sense of humor.

One of my students suffered permanent injuries when an idiot’s dog, allowed to run free by the idiot, attacked her as she was jogging down the street in front of her house. She managed to fight it off with several hard, well-aimed kicks (she was a tall, athletic young woman), but it ripped a tendon in her leg and damaged a nerve, which never healed properly.  And neighbor Al carries a shillelagh around with him when he walks his little dog, after the moron 125-pound lady who owns three pit bulls and a retrieveroid had one of her “pets” dig out from under her fence and attack him and his little pooch. She paid the vet bill occasioned by sewing the small dog’s throat back together. Generous of her, eh? Same cur gives Cassie the evil eye every time we encounter the woman and her Iditarod team dragging her down the road.

Sometimes I wonder what possesses people who think their animals are their kiddies, and who imagine the rest of us don’t mind dodging their free-roaming dogs and having their cats defecate and urinate all over our homes (and cars!).

How much has your neighbor’s pet cost you? Can you beat a new automotive paint job?

Images:
Annoyed cat, Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, Wikipedia Commons
Trained attack dog in action, US Air Force, public domain, Wikipedia Commons

Money happens…

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SDXB, a fellow who found his way clear to jump off the hamster wheel in his late 40s and never went back to the workplace, is fond of saying that “money happens.” By that he means that he never seems to lack for money (and it’s true he lives well, despite having little or no visible means of support) and that occasionally unexpected little windfalls happen.

Truth to tell, he has always made money happen. Until he reached retirement age, he supported his bumhood habit by occasionally volunteering to go TDY with the active-duty Air Force Reserve, in which he was the highest-ranking non-com in his job classification. The military pays certain people who are effectively temp workers pretty well, and reservists who stick with it get a nice pension and health care, plus access to commissaries and base exchanges around the world. He also did a fair amount of freelance journalism, especially travel writing, which underwrote trips you and I would regard as vacations and provided some nice tax write-offs.

He insists that a person who is willing to live frugally, who has even minimal resources, and who makes bumhood (read “permanent unemployment”) a priority can live comfortably without having to labor in the salt mines. And for him it’s worked: he’s almost 70, and he hasn’t held a steady job since the day he got up from the editor’s chair at a Scripps-Howard newspaper and walked out the door. He climbed on a plane, flew to Hawai’i, and camped on the beach for a month, where no one could reach him by telephone. He’s bought two houses in cash and he buys his cars in cash; he travels, he never wants for entertainment…and he doesn’t go to work.

Well, I’ve always been too cowardly to pull that one off, even though he kept assuring me that I had more than enough to live on and that money happens.

Now that I’m about to be forced to get out of the editor’s chair myself, though, I’m discovering that the guy may be right. In the past couple of days, money has happened three times.

Two happenings occurred yesterday. First, a client from bygone days resurfaced to ask if I’d edit a new project he’s cooked up. It was short and easy—I got through it in just a few hours and will bill about two hundred bucks. While I was playing with that, the phone rang, and lo! There was the chair of the English and Humanities department of Phoenix College, an inner-city branch of the community college district, conveniently located about eight minutes from my house.

Asked she, would I take on, at the last minute, a 200-level course in journalism?

Happy to, said I, but I’m already signed up to teach the maximum number of credit hours the district will permit.

No problem, quoth she! Because it’s an emergency hire, she can get an override.

You’re on! said I.

She said she’d have to be sure the course actually makes before forking over a contract, but it only needs 18 students. It’s a hybrid course that meets once a week, and when I looked over the district’s requirements, I realized it’s much the same course I’ve taught several times at Scottsdale!

So. This fall, in the four months running up to Canning Day, I will gross ninety-six hundred extra dollars with this side job as a community college teacher. Since our office is winding down, I doubt if this will cause much strain; after all, the “two” GDU courses I signed on to teach in the spring of 2008 morphed into four, and I survived.

Meanwhile, an hour ago I finished reading another detective novel for pay. A pretty darned good one, too: well written and clean. Another $250 in the busker’s hat.

Money happens, but money unhappens, too. A few mutual fund, IRA, and 403(b) statements materialized toward the end of the week, showing that my devastated investments are reviving a little. Since reaching their April 2009 nadir, they’ve climbed about $9,000—and that’s after I took out about $15,000 to pay off the Renovation Loan. Still, the total of retirement savings is down $126,792 from the high balance in May of 2008: thanks so much to the greedy bastards and misguided dogmatists who’ve run the country and the economy this past decade or so.

Think of that: a hundred and twenty-seven grand lost in the collapse of the Bush economy. If that money hadn’t unhappened, I’d have plenty to retire on without a worry in the world. On the other hand…if the economy hadn’t crashed, I’d stick with a boring job for the next three years and not be about to embark on the grand adventure of bumhood.

Win some, lose some. Maybe being pushed to quit working, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, is worth a little money unhappening.

Images:
Hamster and hamster wheel, Dimitar Popovsky, Wikipedia Commons
U.S. Dollar Bill, public domain