Coffee heat rising

109 in the shade!

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painterM’hijito remarked that Bila the Painter will earn more in two days, painting the exterior woodwork on the downtown house, than either M’hijito or I bring home in a week. And one thing you have to say about painting: you can’t offshore it to India!

On the other hand: what does it really mean to earn more in two days as a skilled tradesman than a white-collar worker earns in a week?

Well… Today we broke another heat record for May 18. By midafternoon, thermometers on M’hijito’s patio, my patio, and SDXB’s patio all registered 109 degrees. That’s in the shade. A hundred-and-nine-degree day is, in a word, HOT. Bila earns his living climbing up and down ladders, hauling paint around, and slathering or spraying the stuff everyplace he can get it. And “everyplace he can get it” is as likely to be in the full sun as in the shade. 

M’hijito took a paid day off today to dance the Workman Waltz. If Bila takes a day off, being self-employed, he doesn’t get paid. At all.

The incredibly complex antique Baldwin lock did not remove readily from the door that Bila planned to sand and refinish. So we had to call the locksmith who specializes in museum pieces, and wait an hour on him. M’hijito and I went to breakfast in the interim. When we got back, Bila was sitting in the front yard gazing into space: the locksmith had yet to show up. If M’hijito and I unavoidably kill a little time on the job, we generally get paid. If Bila wastes time on the job, it’s time that will likely make him late to the next job: again, time he doesn’t get paid for.

Bila pays for the paint out of his fee. I’d guess he’ll buy about $200 worth of Dunn-Edwards’s best.

That brings his pay down to about what I bring home for two weeks—after a furlough day is taken out.

But he still hasn’t bought health insurance, paid self-employed FICA, ponied up other state and federal taxes, paid for the gas to run his truck, put money aside in an IRA…. A fair estimate is that all those costs would consume about 40% of his after-paint gross. 

$950 fee – $200 for paint = $750
$750 – 40% = $450, approximate net pay for about two days’ work

Supposing Bila actually got five days of work a week (a big supposition, especially in the present economy): $225/day x 5 = $1125/week, net

My take-home pay for a week without a furlough day is about $760. So, if Bila works very, very hard, he earns significantly more than I do. But very, very hard is the operative term:

• He’s doing a back-breaking, mind-numbing job outside in 109-degree heat.
• To earn enough to support his family, he has to do it five to seven days a week.
• If he can’t get a job on a given day, he earns nothing.
• If he’s sick or hurt, he earns nothing. 
• Any vacation time he chooses to take is unpaid. 

There’s a lot of paint splattered on Bila’s side of the fence, so it’s hard to tell what color the grass is over there. But I’ll bet it’s not any greener than mine!

Nothing like a 109-degree day to make us wage slaves appreciate what we have.

Images
Housepainter: Lukeroberts at Wikipedia Commons
Paint cans: Sherwin-Williams 

w00t! Times has PF frenzy!

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OMG. This morning’s New York Times, ever in touch with the whims of the moment, has gone overboard in its coverage of personal finance and frugality. And as usual, they’re a day late and a dollar short (sorry, Times editors: but what can you do when you have to steer a 1,500-ton flagship?). 

To start with, over at Get Rich Slowly, Mrs. JD published a highly entertaining piece on the virtues (and drawbacks) of DIY. Hoot! She scooped the FRONT PAGE (no less) of the Times by a full day! Appearing in print a good 24 hours later, Times reporter Susan Saulny comes forward with some of the funniest DIY disasters on record…okay, okay! They’re not funny if they happen to you. But if they don’t…heeeeee!

The entire freaking Times Sunday Magazine is devoted to PF issues, right down to Randy Cohen’s column, “The Ethicist.” We were given a heads-up on this by Frugal Scholar, who, before the magazine hit the newsstands, got a conversation going, with a follow-up, on financial writer Edmund Andrews’s so-scary-I’m-hiding-under-the-bed article about his journey toward desperate indebtedness. The mag, which features a mildly annoying photo of Suze Orman on the cover and an eye-glazing profile inside, is quite the tour de force. A really creepy piece on credit card companies’ interest in the psychology of tu et moi (by Charles DuHigg) struck me as easier to read than David Leonhardt’s no doubt much more significant article on the economic relationship between China and the U.S. Overall, it’s good, very good.

But oh, my friends, and ah, my foes: bloggers got there first!

😀

Sumer is y-cumin’ in

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Spring has done all the sproinging it’s going to do around here, and now temperatures are in the low 100s every day. The pool is decidedly warm enough to swim in, though most of the yard’s flowers are fried. I need to pull out the remains of the winter garden, which has gone to seed, and decide what to put in there for the summer.

A few hardy characters are thriving, though. I was delighted to find the emerald green paloverde has burst into bloom, weeks behind all its coreligionists. Paloverde trees drape themselves in vibrant yellow flowers in late spring. Most have already come and gone, and, because in past years the one in my yard hasn’t blossomed much, I figured that because the thing is a hybrid it likely will never flower. Wrong!

The ground beneath this amazing shade-maker is carpeted with golden flowers, and the canopy hums with small solitary bees and big, bumbling black carpenter bees. The Sonoran desert is the richest habitat for bees in the world, they being nourished by insane trees like this.

Creatures alien to the desert are coming out in the early summer heat, too. A pot in back has sheltered three bulbs donated to my cause by SDXB. They’ve sat there for years, soaking up water and giving nothing but long strappy leaves in return. A couple of weeks ago, though, suddenly one of them sprouted a huge, club-like stalk:

Yesterday the stalk produced this:

c

It’s VAST, a good six inches across. Not only that, but there are two more of them on the same stalk! It looks like a strangely colored amaryllis. 

The usual suspects are around, especially the roses. In the summer heat, freshly blossomed roses blow in minutes. Nevertheless, I managed to capture this one before it fricasseed :

Gourds love the desert heat, and so do many melons. The butternut squash seeds I took out of a grocery-store purchase have produced three husky plants in their giant pot, and they’re already blossoming. Last time I counted, there were six or eight flowers in there.

butternuts

The plant wilts in the heat but springs back every evening after the blasting sun goes down. I guess wilting is a survival technique. The cantaloupe, which grows much slower and has yet to produce a flower, doesn’t do that, at least not yet:

Don’t know how well it will do in that pot, which in the first place is probably not large enough for a chunky vine and in the second was cracked at the outset—tying it together with a length of clothesline rope had dubious results.

Then of course we have the usual suspects, bougainvillea that never seem to know when to quit flowering—they’re been at it since February, since the risk of frost disappeared, and all of them will continue to blossom until it gets cold again. I love bougs…

The Easter lily cacti bloomed a little early this year. They’ll be back soon, though: they normally blossom on and off throughout the summer.

Outrageous-looking thing, isn’t it?

Four-thirty in the morning… {sigh} Is it early or is it late? Nothing like sitting in front of a computer to pass the wee hours. I’ve been here since 3:30. Woke up after a weird dream—I was working, under the same annoying soon-to-be-canned conditions, at a much nicer and more professional venue than GDU, someplace that looked a little like Central Arizona Project’s sylvan offices. In this dream I walk out after dark in a rainstorm to go home, only to discover my car has been stolen. So I go back inside the building, followed by a small, very wet chihuahua-like dog that has decided to allow itself to be rescued.

Returning to consciousness, it struck me that my sidekick, who does a large slab of the work our office performs, can’t possibly be letting any grass grow under her feet. 

She’d be a fool to wait to look for work until December, when the office is being shut down. Unlike me, she’s highly employable. If she gets a job anytime in the near future, we are screwed, screwed, ge-screwed. The minute that woman goes out the door, we’ll have to shut down a third to half of our operation.

If we do that, will the deans just close us down altogether? Can they? I do have a contract, and my only surviving RA has a far more convincing contract to the effect that GDU will provide her graduate-student support for the duration of her tenure in the Ph.D. program. It won’t, of course: the history department ended up with nine support lines for twenty-six graduate students. Several people who were in the middle of their programs found themselves suddenly without assistantships.

It remains to be seen whether they’ll dump my RA out in the snow come the end of December. By then there should be some stimulus money, but given the callousness we’ve seen from the deans’ office, if I were her I wouldn’t be expecting to see any of that money.  She’ll be ABD in the fall, her comps coming up in August. If she has to go out and get a fulltime job somewhere, probably answering phones or greeting WalMart shoppers, I can’t imagine how she will finish her dissertation.

Well, thank God for the natural riches of this world, for we certainly have little enough of the manmade variety to go around.

Your megacorporation “values” your business

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Why do faceless corporations work so hard at being faceless? And why do they veil their facelessness behind messages that claim to “value” their customers’ business? The fact is, if they valued your business they wouldn’t treat you the way they do.

For the second time in three months, Cox has failed to send a printed statement. When you call, the customer service rep gives you a scripted story: “We printed it on the 26th of last month. If you didn’t get it, you need to talk to the post office.” Understand: they’ve already wasted a significant slab of your time and tortured you by forcing you to listen to the most hideous Muzak turned to high volume, and now they want you to waste even more of your time trying to get through to an even larger and even more understaffed bureaucracy, the U.S. Postal Service, whose fault this clearly is not!

I will say, they’re better than Qworst. At least you can get through to a human being, and at least the human being has a sense of humor!

Customer: “You know, your bosses need to know that real musicians actually make real music, and they record it. You can get real music to put on the phone.”

CSR: [laughs] “Well, if it’s any comfort, sometimes we have to listen to it, too!”

Customer: [laughs] “You poor kid! What an awful job!”

[CSR and Customer laugh at Cox’s unholy treatment of its customers and employees.]

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it’s possible to get your hands on the names of living, breathing executives of faceless corporations, and on the addresses of their corporate headquarters. Ergo:

Jimmy W. Hayes
Chief Executive Officer 
Cox Enterprises
6205 Peachtree Dunwoody Road
Atlanta, Georgia 30328

 

RE: (666) 123-4567 
Acct. No. 098-765-432101234 

 

Dear Mr. Hayes:

 

Once again, no statement from Cox has arrived this month. This is the second time in three months that a Cox statement has supposedly been sent and “lost.” I mailed your company a check for $71.65, the amount your spokesperson says is due, but of course in the absence of a statement I have no precise understanding of what I’m paying for or whether the bill is accurate.

 

I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy your customer service rep’s canned line that it’s all the Post Office’s fault and that because you guys didn’t send the statement I have to go waste still more of my time (it took over 10 minutes of listening to truly painful Muzak to get through to a human today!) by hassling the postal service. All my other bills appear on time. None of them ever goes missing. It seems highly unlikely that the U.S. Postal Service has something against Cox Communications and so is failing to deliver Cox’s statements and only Cox’s statements.

 

What seems more likely is that the statements aren’t being sent as a way to trap customers into missing a payment and being gouged unfairly with a late fee.

 

Please ensure that your staff sends statements in a timely way. The reason I asked Cox to send paper statements rather than dorking around online is that I’m getting on in years and do not remember things well. And I can’t afford extra dings on my bills for late payments.

 

Thanks for your consideration.

 

                                                                        Sincerely,  (etc.)

The “go talk to the Post Office” line is an obvious runaround. Even though these companies have monopolies or near-monopolies, you’d think sooner or later their customers would either find other ways to get what they need or simply abandon that service or product. Really. Will I die if I don’t have high-speed Internet? (Hmmm… Probably.) Can I get high-speed Internet somewhere else? (Evidently: a Google search brings up seven competitors on the first page!) Do I really need a land line? (Nope.) Can I get cell service with some other provider? (Indubitably!)

What is the matter with these companies that they can’t spare a little common courtesy for their customers?

Incorporating for fun and profit

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Finally finished with all the paperwork (I hope!) needed to establish The Copyeditor’s Desk as an S-corporation. Incorporating my multifarious freelance enterprises as a single entity will make it possible for me to earn enough to live on despite the government’s strictures on earned income for those who take so-called “early” Social Security—a limit guaranteed to keep all but the wealthiest investors in poverty.

It wasn’t as complicated as I feared. But of course, having an ex- who’s a corporate lawyer works to decomplicate these projects. 

Here are the steps you take to form an S-corporation in Arizona (it could be different in other states, so don’t take my word for it):

1. Check with the government for availability of your proposed corporate name.

2. Fill out a form called “Articles of Incorporation” and another form called a “Certificate of Disclosure.”

3. Send these with a cover sheet and a check for $85 to the Arizona Corporation Commission. 

4. Apply for an EIN through the federal Internal Revenue Service. 

5. Fill out and mail IRS form 2553 to tell the feds you’re electing to be an S-corporation.

Once you’ve jumped through these hoops, you have the paperwork necessary to open a business account with your bank or credit union. Eventually you should receive confirmation and still more paper from the various bureaucracies, at which point you can start behaving like a corporation. In Arizona, you have to publish the articles of incorporation for three days running in a local newspaper, a pricey proposition, and you’re supposed to submit an annual report. The latter is something you discuss with your tax professional. 

It’s a little more involved than that, of course, but the basic steps are less difficult than they appear. Funny about Money, which will be part of this corporation, is already making a little cash, so I’m looking forward to having a bank account into which to deposit it. Let’s hope that by next year it will earn enough to spring me free of one or two sections of freshman comp! 

😀

Reno loan GONE!

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Well, after two days, almost two hours of dorking around at the credit union, and a quiet stress attack, finally I managed to get someone to take my $21,000. 

At one point I thought maybe I should take it all out of the bank in dollar bills and sprinkle it around the floor of the credit union’s lobby. Let the janitor find a way to use it.

Lenders do not want you to pay off a loan. No. Bad. D-o-o-o-o-n’t take our interest payments away!

Just before the flu struck, Shibu (doughty manager of the credit union branch on the Tempe campus) obtained the precise amount that would be owing as of last Tuesday and e-mailed clear, understandable, easy(-sounding…) instructions for how to pay off the Renovation Loan, which is actually a second mortgage on my house. He said any teller should be able to perform the transaction. 

Then I got sick, in the middle of a vacation. So instead of schlepping to the main campus amid (chaotic!) commencement preparations, I decided to run over to the West campus, which also hosts one of the credit union’s branches. Since I had several other errands to run on the West side, this would work out OK.

So it seemed. 

Teller took one look at Shibu’s instructions and said, “This is something our  manager will have to do. I don’t know how to do it.”

Manager was in with someone else. She would, the teller thought, surely be free soon.

A half-hour later, I was still cooling my heels. The work I needed to do for a client was still waiting for me. The syllabi I’d promised to send to the chair of the department who proposes to hire me to teach three sections next fall were still waiting, yet to materialize even in draft form. The groceries remained to be purchased. The signature form for the locksmith was still to be delivered. My stomach was achingly empty. So, annoyed, I left.

The main campus’s branch is dead empty, the whole place having lapsed into a state of exhausted vacancy after last night’s 70,000-guest Presidential commencement bash. This, I imagine, should be easy.

I hand over Shibu’s written instructions to the teller. Fortunately, he’s in the offing.

She takes about 20 seconds to reach full flummoxhood. He has to come over and take her through the process, step by step. But even then, they make a couple of errors and have to back out and start over. Then they get mysterious error messages and have to figure a way around those. 

This procedure took almost 45 minutes! Then it took another ten or fifteen minutes to make Shibu understand that I wanted the monthly automatic payment that had been going from checking to the loan now to go from checking to money-market savings. Think that finally got settled. I hope.

Now, you know, being an inveterate cheapskate I experience the act of forking over $21,422 as stressful, even when it’s 21 grand that I saved up precisely so I could fork it over. Just hate letting go of pretty little dollars…you have to prize my fingers loose from them. So 45 minutes of repeated efforts to hand over a chunk of dough felt like 45 minutes of waterboarding. At one point as I’m standing there watching them and trying to remind myself that it’s their problem, not mine, my little heart started to pound, the metallic flavor of adrenalin to flood the tongue, the ears to ring, the room to spin. Damn!

From there I had the pleasure of visiting the gynecologist, whose nurse noted that my blood pressure was a shade high. 

No kidding? 

At any rate, the loan is finally paid off. And good riddance. Shibu said it was accruing interest at about $3.50 a day. If one paid it down at a stately rate over its thirty-year term, one would end up paying out exactly twice the original loan amount. What with the extra $200 a month added to routine savings, plus the net teaching salary, plus what I expect to earn freelancing, by the time I exit GDU’s ivied halls the credit union will be holding about $24,000 in savings, more than replacing the amount I earned last year for the express purpose of the pay-off.

Whew!