Coffee heat rising

Freaking God’s miracle!

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OMG. So my wonderful, talented, and incredibly competent associate editor and I drag over to the Executioner’s office this afternoon. I’m thinking maybe I should’ve gotten a wooden cart to haul her to the guillotine. We could have crowds of right-wing crazies hollering their approbation, and maybe a legislator knitting, knitting, knitting…

We’re sitting there in the waiting area waiting (what else?) for the hatchetwoman to see us. One employee walks past, recognizes us, and barely stops herself from weeping (surely her cat has died?). Another strolls by and looks grim. The word is out, no freaking doubt of it.

We’re called in, and we both think here. it. comes.

The Kid has said that if she gets laid off in June, just as she comes out of a divorce that has led to her ex- losing his job (and her and her child’s health insurance) because of a conviction for harassing and stalking her, she is screwed, screwed, ge-screwed. Her Deanship has told me The Kid is to exit on June 30. I’ve bitten my tongue so hard my ears hurt.

The Executioner starts by handing over The Kid’s notice to her.

And then says “Keep reading past the first paragraph. Don’t panic before you read the rest of it.”

Un. Freaking. Believable. They’re extending her to the end of the year. They’re pretending she’s an exempt service professional (something The Kid is fully, totally, grandly uninformed about) and saying they will renew her nonexistent “contract” to December 31.

The Kid, who has a lot more moxie than I do, eyes the Executioner and says, “Well, are you hiring me back at my current salary?”

This is a question I have been afraid to ask.

“Why, yes,” says E. “You both will continue at your current pay, benefits, and retirement.”

I express my wish to E. that she express our endless gratitude to Her Deanship for this little coup, which must have taken some major machination. She darts out of the office and forthwith returns with Deanship herself, attired in an outfit that looks like it probably cost more than my net worth.

Emboldened, I ask what about our lead research assistant, the one who handles the single most difficult academic journal on the planet and shepherds the darned thing through from beginining to end?

The Kid and I brace, microsecondwise, for the worst.

“Oh, yes. Weren’t you told?”

“Uhmmm…no…”

She’s smiling, so I figure there’s a fifty-fifty chance good news is on its way.

“We’re keeping her on through the fall semester, too.”

Then I say, This Kid needs to get health insurance. She just divorced and her husband just lost his job.

E. says, No problem. Go on over to HR and tell them you’ve had a change of life circumstances, and you can sign up for any of the health insurance programs.

Thank you, Goddess! And trust me, nonbelievers: goddesses have nothing in common with deans.

The Kid and I staggered out of the Executioner’s chamber and headed for the fanciest restaurant in lovely downtown Tempe, where we raised a glass of expensive white wine to the event that we will be canned, but not until New Year’s Eve.

Damnatiõ! Has anyone else out there actually celebrated the sheer unmitigated joy of a layoff?

Our story to date:
Ax Falls, but…uhm…Bounces
Résumés on the Wind
Staying Solvent in Penury
Perfect Retirement Day
How IT Puts Apps into Job Applications
Is This Worse than We Think, Even?
Income Stream Sighted

Microbudgeting: Keep costs under control with a baby-steps budget

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I’ve come up with a name for the week-to-week budgeting plan that I invented to keep discretionary costs (if you call food “discretionary”) under control: microbudgeting.

As readers who follow Funny know, I set aside $840 a month to cover recurring, nonoptional bills: utilities, once-a-month yard care, insurance. These represent the highest possible figures for the utility bills, which occur in three summer months here.

Then I set aside $1,200 a month to pay all other living expenses,including food, household goods, yard goods, gasoline, clothing, repair and maintenance on the house and car, vet bills, insurance copays, and on and on and on. This amount represents the microbudget: I divide the $1200 into four $300 “chunks” roughly corresponding to weeks, and coordinate those with the American Express budget cycle. All of these costs are charged on AMEX, and the bill is paid in full at the end of each cycle.

Some weeks, I’ll run in the red. But if I manage to stay in the black in one or two weeks, it usually evens out.

Here’s how this looked last month:

Week by week
Week by week
Whole month
Whole month

As you can see, even though even though I ran in the red three weeks out of four, over the course of the month I just broke even. Costs were high last month because of the new stockpiling scheme: I’d just bought a freezer and was stuffing it with one to three months’ worth of food. I’d planned to take money out of savings to do this, but as you can see, that wasn’t necessary.

Because I can spot, week-to-week, when I’m running in the red, I know when to cut back. Didn’t do the greatest job of that in February, but things are looking better in March. So far.

Microbudgeting turns out to be an effective tool for helping yourself to stay on budget. Except for extraordinary expenses that needed to be paid out of emergency savings anyway, the week-to-week strategy for staying on budget has worked to keep spending under control pretty well. It breaks a longer period, during which you might be tempted to overspend on this or that activity or impulse buy, into smaller pieces that give you an opportunity to climb out of the red without feeling like you have to pinch pennies the entire. grinding. month. It’s a lot easier to economize for one week than for two, three, or (if you’ve overspent early in the budget cycle) four weeks. Once you’ve got yourself back in the black, you feel a lot more confident that you’re coping.

Notice that I carry forward the red ink into the following week. This prevents “cheating” by pretending to start over with the full amount budgeted for that week, despite having spent more than desired the previous week. I ended up $11.13 to the good at the end of the month, because even though I overspent in three weeks out of four, I managed to stay enough in the black in week 2 to cover the excess spending.

Normally I try to stay in the black at least three weeks out of four (ideally, four weeks out of four!). February was stressed because of the food stockpiling, and because I chose to pay for it out of cash flow instead out out of savings. Had I taken some money out of savings to cover the hoarding scheme, I would have ended deeper in the black, and probably would have stayed in the black at least one extra week.

This scheme requires some OCD tendencies: it demands that you hang onto every receipt and enter it in a spreadsheet or hard-copy account book. But I don’t find this onerous. I stick the receipts in my wallet and then sit down and enter them about once a week. It takes maybe 10 minutes a week to accomplish.

To build habits that keep you in the black without leaving you feeling blue, it’s well worth the time!

Income stream sighted

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Thar she blows!

Landed an interview with the chair of a nearby community college’s English department. I’m begging for part-time work, and it looks more than moderately hopeful.

A friend from a previous life is teaching there full-time. She got me in the chairman’s door, and he expressed interest. Those two say that though the community colleges have had some budget hits, too, the situation is nowhere near as dire as the university’s. My friend said the colleges are overrun with students, meaning they’ll need adjunct faculty to handle the endless stacked sections of freshman composition.

Horrible, but better than starving, eh?

The community colleges here are part of the county and are supported by property taxes still hugely inflated by the real estate bubble. Taxes are based for two or more years in a row on a single evaluation. This year we will pay artificially inflated taxes on property valuations that now grossly overstate the real value of most houses in the county.

Because community college tuition costs a fraction of the universities’ (which have been soaring the past few years), many university-bound students take their lower-division courses at the community colleges, saving a bundle on college costs. And of course, if you’re a out-of-work cabinetmaker or drywall hanger hoping to learn accountancy, it would behoove you to get the best price you can on your general-studies courses. So it’s not surprising that laid-off workers are flooding into those schools. Their tuition helps to keep the smaller colleges afloat as the Great Desert University and its two sister institutions sink like a fleet of Titanics.

If I’m extraordinarily lucky and can pick up two courses in the fall, before GDU cans me, I can bank the net, which will help ease the way into poverty. It should more than cover COBRA, leaving me all of Social Security and a little more than half of investment income to live on. And, unless I’m mistaken, it’s not gross but net income that’s counted against your Social Security benefits, so I should be able to take on a few editing projects, too. All told, I could end up netting about $700 less than I earn now. I think I can live on that.

I hope.

Is this worse than we think, even?

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What a day!

Before I even parked my purse in the office, I made a run on HR. There I learned a) they don’t know how much COBRA will be; b) the state just posted a page showing the new COBRA costs, but they’re telling staff not to tell anyone about it (says a lot, doesn’t it?); c) yes, they have to pony up the so-called “extra” pay that will have accrued by the end of December, which is supposed to be paid in the January “extra” paycheck (snark!); d) they don’t know if I get dibs on any internal hires that may be happening, given my status as an exempt year-to-year contract worker; e) the maximum number of vacation hours GDU will pay me for is 176; and f) I probably will be eligible for unemployment benefits.

ohhhkayyyy…. Moving on…

Back at the office, I get on the phone to my passing acquaintance at the General Accounting Office, the one who informed me that HR’s reps were full of beans when they told both me and La Maya that we lose our RASL (more about which, onward) if we’re laid off instead of announcing unilaterally that we’re retiring. Clear it was that this woman was no friend of GDU’s Human Resources bots, and so I felt fairly confident that she would not rat on me for inquiring about exactly what Our Beloved Employer was trying to accomplish by secretly changing my associate editor’s job status from a nonexempt classified to an exempt contract worker…and trying to faze past me the idea that her offer letter for a classified position amounted to a “contract” for a “we can squash you anytime we please” job.

My Spy’s first instinct was that nonexempt workers are hired to be present for X number of hours, and exempt workers are hired to accomplish a job, no matter how long it takes. Thus, if they dump all our graduate student assistants and leave us with six (!) journals to take from manuscript to the compositor, they will not have to pay her overtime for the obscene number of hours she will have to work beyond the number for which she is paid.

Hmmm…good thought, said I.

And, said she, it’s a lot easier to get rid of exempt workers.

Yeah. Don’t I know it.

Moving on, Spy advised that I should be very careful to figure out exactly what is the hourly rate for the new contract OBE proposes to emit, come June 30. She pointed out that RASL—a kind of severance package based on the number of unused sick leave hours a state employee has accrued—is based on your hourly pay at the time you leave state service, not on the amount you made when you were being sort of fairly paid. Quite a few retiring workers, she reported, have been rudely surprised to learn that by accepting a pay cut instead of furlough days, they cut this retirement benefit significantly.

RASL is a feature that pays you for accrued sick leave, based on your years of service. You accrue sick leave separately from vacation time, and it builds rather slowly. After you’ve racked up 500 hours, you’re entitled to be paid about 30 percent of your hourly pay for each hour of accrued sick leave, at the time you leave your job. When you hit 1,000 hours, glory be! As your parting gift, the state forks over 50 percent of your hourly rate for each hour of accrued sick leave. This money drifts up because it is contributed to a state fund from your salary.

Well, I have almost 1,200 hundred hours, presently worth something over $17,000.

Spy pointed out that if they reduce my hourly pay with this new contract, it could drastically affect my RASL. So drastically, she advised, that it may be worth turning the contract down and walking if what they offer in June is a pay cut. She advised carefully figuring how much my RASL is worth at my present rate of pay and being prepared to calculate, quickly, how much I would lose if I accepted a pay cut.

So: add that task to the mix. And add to it another layer: figure out how to get by if I have to quit at the end of June instead of hanging around until the end of December. Gaaaaahhhhh!

Now Spy waxed garrulous. This is one of those government employees who knows how to function within and to operate a bureaucracy because of long, long service. Just listening to her made it clear that she’d been around forever. She remarked that she had several friends with over 30 years of service to the state, and that among them all, no one could remember anything remotely like what they’re seeing now. She said people are demonstrating in front of their office buildings and having sh*t-fits in the lobby, but all anyone could say to them is that there just. isn’t. any. money. left. to. pay. out. Staff can’t help, because they have nothing—literally nothing—to help with.

More spookily still, she observed that some people are beginning to talk seriously about the possibility that the state government could completely shut down. Not just close the prisons and the universities. No. Shut down everything. Go out of business.

After that conversation it took some hours to get a grip, and I will say, at this moment it’s still a pretty tenuous grip.

Back at the office, Her Deanship commanded another audience. Tomorrow I have to go in prepared to discuss which RAs will get the ax first, and which of our client journals will go away in what order. Took half the afternoon to compose a memo responding to that and to argue in favor of retaining our lead RA through the fall semester.

Just as I was wrapping up that little gem, said lead RA showed up and asked, “Am I going to be here in the fall?”

Oh shit.

So, I had to close the door and explain to her what is happening. By the time that discussion was over, I’d been clenching my jaw so violently I’d brought on a muscle tremor.

Her department has lost most of its graduate student support lines. There were nine lines to support 26 graduate students. They are now all distributed. OBE delayed so long in dropping the ax on our department that this exceptionally worthy mother of two has now lost her chance at any other assistantship. It’s not like they didn’t know. I mean, please! How many times has Her Deanship put me off since last freaking August when I have told her we need new client journals? Five? At least. I’ve sensed for weeks that the reason for the stonewalling is that she knew we weren’t expected to survive and she didn’t want to commit our services to faculty members, only to have to yank the rug out from under them.

Just another manifestation of the basic fact of academic life: a university’s administration does not give one thin damn about the welfare of its students.

In an attempt to get a good word in for my associate editor, I spent two or three hours laboring over the STUPID annual evaluation form, an enormous time-waster. Anyway, assuming Her Deanship accepts it and passes it along to HR, if the sidekick applies for a new job at GDU anytime in the more or less near future, a rave review will be sitting in her permanent files.

My jaw hurts. I’m going to go put a heating pad on my face.

Yours in eternal awe of Our Beloved Employer,

—Funny

How IT put “apps” into job applications

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LOL! Just went over to the Maricopa County Community Colleges job applications site (where, BTW, precious few openings are to be found). If I’m to teach part-time, I’ll have to get into their HR system.

They’ve updated their electronic job application system. In some ways, it will be convenient, because you used to have to fill out a pages-long application over and over and over and over, one for each opening you addressed, and you had to send your transcripts with every job application. The community college district would advertise 87 gerjillion openings, and you had to jump through all these hoops for each one. Now once through will do you.

But…wow! Instead of sending a transcript, you now have to fill in a form that asks you to list every. college. course. you. have. ever. taken. No lie: check out the form.

For the love of God. Do you know how many courses it takes to get a Ph.D.? This is going to take hours!

And to make things perfect, the online part of the system doesn’t work with a Mac. When you get to the form to enter your Social Security number, it won’t let a Mac enter anything, nor will it save your data UNTIL you’ve entered the Social Security number.

My laptop (ASU’s, actually: another thing I’m going to have to buy sometime in the next nine months) has lost its connection with the modem’s router and will not reconnect. So that means I will have to do this from the campus.

To give you an idea how long this is going to take, they have an online tutorial to show you the obvious: instructions on following the instructions to fill out the forms. They estimate it will take you 15 minutes just to plow through this tutorial.

That’s for the privilege of earning $2,400 a course.

You can teach a maximum of three courses a semester, which would come to just about what I need to survive in the post-layoff world.

However…there are no ads for P/T faculty advertised.

Well, at any rate, I need to get this form filled out, which I’ll have to do this week.

I think GDU is paying $3,000 a course. That would make it possible for me to hit the $14,000 mark by teaching 3 and 2, instead of 3 and 3 with the community colleges. And GDU hires (uhmm…maybe: in better times) adjunct faculty to teach the upper-division Writing for the Professions course, which is slightly less onerous than freshman comp. On the other hand, GDU’s classes are much larger than the community college’s, and the attrition rate is lower. In a community college course, by the time everyone has dropped who’s going to drop you can end up with just 12 or 15 students, which is manageable. The last time I taught Writing for the Professions as a side job, GDU doubled the enrollment of two courses and I ended up with 80 online students! In a writing course!!!

I keep telling myself there’s nine months to find some sort of work. But it’s damned scary: there is nothing! You can’t get a job when no one’s hiring.

La Maya, who still subscribes to the local paper, said yesterday’s edition reported that to make up its enormous budget deficit, among other things the state would have to close all three universities. On the one hand it’s hard to believe anyone actually said that; on the other, this is Arizona.

Augh! There oughta be a law against three o’clock in the morning!

Funny is on Twitter

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apatosaurus33
Halcyon days

…sort of… Just signed up this morning, and now see the learning curve for this thing will be a bit steep for a survivor of the Cretaceous.

At any rate, I’m finally on Twitter, no doubt moments before another comet comes along to end the Twitter Age. Those comets: what a nuisance!

The username is FunnyAboutMoney. I have yet to figure out what the “@” function is about, but if it has significance, will let you know. Please sign up to “follow” FaM, and let me know how to find you on Twitter so I can sign up to follow you!
🙂

Image: Public domain; found at Wikipedia Commons