Our brand-new light rail system is already raising its price per ride. Hasn’t been running two months, and the price is going up a buck, from $1.25 (one way!) to $2.25. I’m sure that won’t be the first increase.
The other evening one of my RAs, who doesn’t own a car, rode the train up to M’hijito’s house to meet me so I could chauffeur him to an Arizona Book Publishing Association shindig. He said it took an hour to get from lovely downtown Tempe to the corner of Seventh Avenue and Camelback. That’s a 20-minute drive in your car.
At the current rate, would it be cost-effective for me to ride the train, once the city has torn down an entire row of homes and trashed the property values in my neighborhood so they can run the train tracks up the road that demarcates this neighborhood from the bland slums just to the west? Assuming the rate stays the same, at $5 per round trip?
Let us calculate:
My house is 18 miles from the campus. Coincidentally, my car gets about 18 miles a gallon if I’m not hypermiling. (If I drive very carefully, I can push it up to around 25 mpg, but let’s assume I’m keeping up with traffic and not driving my fellow homicidal drivers crazier than they already are.)
Assume gas prices stay at $1.70 a gallon. Assume the train ride stays at $2.25 one-way, $5.00 round trip. Because I have a disabled parking sticker, I can park in any metered space in Tempe for free, so I do not pay GDU’s $780/year parking fee. Let’s also assume I go out to campus 5 days a week and I take 3 weeks of vacation time.
Thus: The cost of gas for a round trip is $3.40 a day. I commute 5 days a week for 49 weeks, or 245 days a year.
$3.40 x 245 = $833 a year: Cost of driving for a person with a disabled sticker.
$833 + $780 = $1,613 a year: Cost of driving for a person who has not discovered you can park for free with a disabled sticker, or who buys a parking space within a mile of the office
Okay. If the train costs $5.00 per round trip:
$5 x 245 = $1,225 a year: Cost of riding the train
Not too bad: only $392 a year more than I’m presently paying. That doesn’t take into account the wear and tear on my car. However, my car, being a Toyota, does not cost anywhere near $392 a year for upkeep and repairs.
It also doesn’t take into account the two hours you would spend in transit: 80 minutes more time wasted in transit than you would kill sitting in an automobile each day. That’s 19,600 minutes a year, 326.67 more hours of your life wasted in a train than in a car!
Does anyone seriously think people are going to ride this train for real commutes from the outer reaches of the Valley? If I bought a house in one of the now-bankrupt new suburbs out by the White Tanks or halfway to Prescott, the number of miles I would have to commute would triple. So would the time spent in transit.
In the unlikely event that the train fare stays constant, clearly the longer your commute the more you would save on gas. However, the end of the line will be about six blocks from my house. If you lived out at the White Tanks or up in Anthem, you’d have to drive all the way into the middle of town, anyway. By the time you get this far, you only have another 20 minutes to drive. Your air-conditioning has made the car nice and cool, and the Park-&-Ride will sit smack in the middle of a high-crime area where your car is likely to be broken into or stolen.
What would you do: park your car in a dangerous lot in 115-degree heat and add another hour to your commute, or keep on truckin’?
Having laid off the two women who landed a cleaning job here at the Funny Farm by leaving their Kwik-Kopied business card on the door, I decided to run the vacuum cleaner and clean the 1,860 square feet of tile that is the floors.
Ah, cleaning ladies. How quickly one forgets (after only 15 years or so) why it’s sometimes (usually) better to do it yourself.
In a pinch, a wire tie substitutes for a bolt.
So I grab the vacuum cleaner…and the handle falls off.
Ah hah! That’s where that bolt on the floor came from…a month and a half ago. After searching around for a couple of weeks, I couldn’t figure out what it fell out of. Eventually I either put it away where I could never find it again or threw it out.
Wired the handle to the vacuum cleaner. Swept all the tile. Then dust-mopped, preparatory to steam-cleaning. Last time the ladies were here, they announced that they didn’t like the steam-cleaner and instead wanted to use a good old-fashioned string mop. That was when they applied something like a gallon of Simple Green to my floors.
No wonder they didn’t want to use a steamer. One of the cleaners, the old one that worked the best, was clogged to nonfunctionality: looked like they’d left water sitting in its tank, where it evaporated and filled all the vents with calcium deposits. Poured some vinegar in there to soak and used the other unit, which I’d purchased as a back-up.
A microfiber cloth jury-rigged to the steamer works better than the steamer's wimpy pad.
Normally a steamer floats over a ceramic tile floor like a planchette on a ouija board. But with a gallon of detergent smeared on the floor, it was like pushing the thing over a rubber mat: tacky and gummy. The microfiber rag I’d wrapped around the cleaner came up black and gooey after running it over just one room—normally, one rag will do for the entire house. A second go-over saturated another rag with black, gooey gunk.
Six blackened rags later… Now I figure swabbing the floor with vinegar may cut some of the dried-on detergent. Pour some white vinegar into a bucket and dilute, 50-50, with water. Wrap another microfiber rag around the Swiffer gadget and apply the stuff to the tiles. Steam.
Eight blackened rags later… Well, I doubt if the floors are free of gunk. Gray stuff was still coming up on the fourth steam-scrubbing. But at least the streaks are gone. My guess is that over the next few weeks, if I clean the floors once or twice a week, eventually the stuff will come up.
After all that floor scrubbing, tomorrow it’s supposed to rain.
The wages of stupidity! This adventure is the result of having forgotten one of Funny’s Ten Money Principles: Do It Yourself!
Funny to functionary in business office, re: furloughs:
SK [Sidekick] and I would like to ensure that each of us takes our furlough days on different days of the week, to be sure someone who is not a grad student is in place at [Our Spectacular Office] at all times. To accomplish that, here’s the plan I would like to suggest:
I take each payday between now & the end of the current FY as the furlough day. This is 11 days. I will need to see how much one of these things actually reduces my take-home pay before deciding when to take the 12th day, as I will have to figure out where the survival money will come from. This will probably happen while the weather is still cool enough that we don’t have huge air-conditioning bills.
SK may then take the Thursday of payday week off, if she would like, or any other day in each pay period. Similarly, SK will need to figure out how she will make ends meet before deciding on a 12th day.
The only question we have about this is the effect the lagging pay policy would have on using the payday itself as the furlough day. As far as I can figure, there are 11 paydays between now and June 30, because the July 2 payday actually covers a period that ends in June. Is that correct?
I hope this strategy is acceptable to the Dean’s Office. If there’s any problem with it, please alert me so we can adjust accordingly.
Functionary to Funny, re: furloughs:
There are actually 12 pay periods in the furlough time. It began this week. You will be able to figure out approximately how much it will reduce your take home pay if you take 10% of your pay and subtract it from the total pay. (one day of each pay period is 1 out of 10 days or 10%) If you and SK, start this week, then you have 12 pay periods and you will not have to have any check with 2 days missing. Does that make sense?
Thank you for being conscious of the fact that it is important we have coverage in your office at all times. The College appreciates that.
Heh heh heh heh heh heh…you betcha!
You understand: We get paid on July 2, a day earlier than normal because July 3, a holiday, falls on our usual payday. We have what is known as “lagging pay,” meaning our paychecks cover periods of varying distance in the past. No one who is human has been able to figure out a rationale for this system, which makes exactly zero sense.
M’hijito once explained lagging pay to me, pointing out that, among other benefits for the employer, it amounts to a way to short you for paid vacation time at the time you leave a company’s employ. It was all over my head, so I didn’t understand a word of what he said. But I’m quite certain that whatever its effects, they’re not in the worker’s interest.
Last year our mid-July paycheck was issued on July 18 and covered June 30. That would suggest this year’s scheduled July 17 check will also claim to cover days in the prior fiscal year.
What this means is that even though the furloughing is supposed to stop at the end of the fiscal year (June 30), we still get our pay docked in not one but TWO paychecks in the following month.
Meanwhile, we still have only eleven pay periods of days (22 weeks) that we will work in the current fiscal year. If we take a day off between July 1 and July 17, we’re taking it off in the next fiscal year. The only way we can squeeze 12 furlough days into eleven pay periods is to take two days in one pay period.
Actually, you’re allowed to take part days. So you could, in theory, divide one day in four and take 1.25 days off in four pay periods.
Isn’t that cute?
Illustration from Alice in Wonderland by John Tenniel
Trying to work up the courage to call the new cleaning ladies and tell them they won’t be coming back. The “furlough” (read “pay cut”) will excise almost twice what they charge from my paycheck. And paying what they charge was a stretch in the first place.
So, I feel bad about that, because I’m sure they wouldn’t be doing the work if they didn’t need the pay.
On the other hand… The last time they were here, Norma announced she didn’t like the steam cleaner I use on the 1860 square feet of tile that covers my floors…could she use the mop and Simple Green? Sure, said I, thinking each to her own.
I then went on about my business. When I came back in, I thought the house smelled mighty strongly of Simple Green. It didn’t smell of Simple Green: it reeked. And it continued to stink of perfumed detergent for the next three days.
Odd, thought I, since that never happens on the rare occasions that I clean the floors with a mop. Ohhh well.
Well, a couple of days ago I went to grab the big bottle of vinegar out of the the garage cabinets and found the lifetime-supply bottles of Simple Green in front of it. Pick one up to move it out of the way and whoa! It’s almost empty!
Those women used almost an entire gallon of Simple Green on the floor! What the heck did they do? Dump the stuff into the bucket and use it undiluted? For hevvinsake, no wonder the place stank.
A gallon of Simple Green will last me for a good six months, or more. It’s not like the stuff is cheap or easy to find—Costco quit carrying it, and Home Depot only recently picked it up. So now I’ll have to pony up money out of my reduced paycheck to buy some more of that stuff. And come next cleaning day, I’ll have the fun of scrubbing the residue up off the tiles. Wheeee!
Just goes to show, if you want something done right, do it yourself.
Yesterday, for the first time in many a moon, I took a much-needed hike up North Mountain, not far from my house. Besides having reached a peak state of out-of-shapeness, I’m getting fat, and the stress from the crescendoing din about the job situation is giving me a chronic bellyache.
As I was walking up the mountain (and starting to feel better), it occurred to me that I may be better off living on lots less income and living with lots less stress.
And the stress level, of late, has been measurable in astronomical units. In August we were told to expect an announcement around September 15 to the effect that almost everyone in my job classification would be laid off. Then the story was that the university’s president could not make such a decision without approval from the Board of Regents, which meets in the first week of December—hence last winter’s round of Christmastime layoffs. That date came and went. But now, in January, our rabid legislators, unleashed as our governor leaves to join President Obama’s cabinet, have decided to gut all three universities by way of taking out their loathing for Communists and Darwinists (which is what they think resides in a College of “Liberal” Arts and “Sciences”: not a joke!). Everyone’s salary is cut by 12%, and that’s just for starters. The president himself—no mere rumor-monger—has announced that 1,000 people will be laid off before the end of the fiscal year. Nontenure-track lecturers have already been told they will not be renewed after this semester; much more bloodletting is to come.
No wonder I feel like I’m going to throw up every time I eat! It’s not cancer: it’s GDU.
Reflecting on my career, such as it is, it struck me that if you count the years I was in graduate school, when I taught two sections a semester as a “teaching assistant” (read “slave laborer”), I have been working for the Great Desert University for about 25 years. There was an SAHM interlude where I freelanced, wrote three books, and worked on the editorial staffs of two large magazines. But otherwise, almost all of my work life has been spent at That Place.
And lemme tell you, working in any department of That Place is by definition stressful. When I was in graduate school, a “teaching assistantship” meant you were handed a set of books and two sections of 25 freshman composition students and told to build a course—unsupervised. There was a one-semester T.A. seminar, which carried no credit and which was a grand waste of time. By the time you prorated the salary over the number of hours this job entailed, pay was significantly less than minimum wage. But you got a tuition waiver. Since the Arizona constitution mandates that public education will be provided for citizens at a cost as close to free as possible, at the time a tuition waiver did not amount to much.
Teaching freshmen…OMG. In the first place, freshmen are not quite a step removed from high-school kids. If I had wanted to teach adolescents, I would have gotten a teaching certificate, not a Ph.D. in English. Freshmen face all the difficult developmental issues that high-school kids deal with—sex, friends, lovers, parents (complicated by the kids’ first solo flight into the world), teachers, drugs, alcohol, cars, race, class, gender, and all that—to which are added the vicissitudes of life as we grow older: deaths of friends or family members, abuse by love partners, money, failure, frustration. Poor little things. Well, freshmen tend to confuse the English teacher with Mommy, often because inexperienced composition instructors tend to give assignments that invite students to write about personal matters and hence, in the students’ not-quite-adult minds, to invite the instructor into their lives. Some of their issues are heart-rending.
Add to that the general illiteracy of the standard American high-school graduate, and you have one helluva job in teaching composition. Any day I’d rather clean house for a living!
Editing a research newsletter for the graduate college, which I did for a couple of years, was infinitely easier and pretty fun, except for our photographer, who was an evangelical Christian fundamentalist. He used to try to proselytize everyone we went out to photograph, often to embarrassing effect. While a friend and I were poking fun at his aggressive ridiculousness, we got word that the man’s only son, a winning young teacher with a doctorate in physical education who was roundly loved by everyone who knew him, was waiting at the stoplight at 44th Street and Osborn when a cement truck came along, rolled over on top of his car, and smushed him like a bug. Needless to say, our photog went even further off the deep end (he became convinced that God had arranged the extinction of his son to spare the son great suffering that had been scheduled for later in life), creating a situation that was not only sad but quite difficult to deal with.
Teaching upper-division students was a huge improvement over freshman comp, even though the course I taught most often was known off the record as “freshman composition for juniors and seniors.” When I returned to GDU after a 15-year hiatus, it was to a satellite campus populated mostly by returning adults, a very choice sort of student indeed. This would have been idyllic were it not for the course load and the chronic overenrollment of the writing sections: four and four, capped at 30. I taught four sections of writing courses—120 writing students at a time!—every semester, and usually picked up two more sections during the summer. To give you a picture, if 120 students each turn in a three-page paper, you are faced with THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY PAGES of gawdawful drivel to plow through. Not only do you have to read it, you have to try to comment intelligently on it; quite a trick, given the quality of the material produced by people who think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain State and World War I happened during the 19th century. Consider that you should assign at least six such papers, and you get the idea.
Soon I learned never to accept overrides, no matter how pathetically supplicants begged to be let into my overstuffed courses (National Council of Teachers of English guidelines specify no more than 20 students in a writing class). But occasionally the admins or the dean would quietly admit people behind my back. One semester I showed up and found FORTY-TWO students enrolled in a technical writing course! And in addition to that section, I had three others filled to their cap of 30 students. That’s 132 writing students. Again, by the time you prorated my salary over the 14-hour-a-day seven-day weeks, it came to right about minimum wage.
Now that I’m on the main campus editing copy for scholarly journals and supervising a small pack of graduate students, life is much better. Except for the swirl of layoff rumors. However, though things are relatively quiet now, this job has not been without its stressful moments.
Certainly, coping with GDU’s answer to Bartleby the Scrivener was one of the major causes leading up to the stress attack that put me in the emergency room and kept me lashed upfor a good twelve hoursto every cardiovascular monitor known to humanity. The Bartleby situation went on for four. long. years. By the time she quit, shortly after the 2007 Christmas break, I was becoming obsessive about the woman. Recognizing that she was quite literally driving me nuts, I had made up my mind that if I couldn’t force her out at the time of the spring 2008 annual review, I was going to quit myself.
Well, stress is a function of life. That’s so. But GDU is so far down the Rabbit Hole, so incorrigibly through the Looking Glass, that we come out thinking life is a function of stress.
Because the Red Queen said so. Off with their heads! Off with all our heads.
If I’m canned, I will not weep long. It will be a relief to get back to the real world, where the mountains to climb are made of granite and tackling them is good for your health.
Illustrations by John Tenniel
The Cheshire Cat over the Croquet Match: Alice in Wonderland
The Mad Hatter and the Dormouse: Alice in Wonderland
Alice Meets the Red Queen:Through the Looking Glass
This is the first time I’ve entered the C of Personal Development—it only recently came to my attention. It gets an eclectic collection of entries. Happiness has organized them by topic: Personal Development and Personal Finance. Each category includes quite a few interesting articles. My attention was caught by Andy of Personal Hacks, who submitted the first installment of his autobiography, starting with the time he arrived, as a youngster, in the U.S. from Egypt. Debt Kid got into the Personal Development section with The #1 Reason You Can’t Get Out of Debt. Ms. Smarty Pants shares an insight into a time management system she says works for her. And Money TLD talks about how to survive without a car, an idea that occurred to me as I was driving to work this morning and realizing that after the probable layoff I won’t be able to afford $1,100-plus a year for car insurance.
Our brand-new light rail system is already raising its price per ride. Hasn’t been running two months, and the price is going up a buck, from $1.25 (one way!) to $2.25. I’m sure that won’t be the first increase.
Trying to work up the courage to call the new cleaning ladies and tell them they won’t be coming back. The “furlough” (read “pay cut”) will excise almost twice what they charge from my paycheck. And paying what they charge was a stretch in the first place.
