Coffee heat rising

Thank goodness! And . . . gasp!

by

Two scary envelopes arrived in the mail today: one from the county tax assessor and one from my financial manager. I figured both would bring bad news.

And yea verily: even though the sale value of my house has dropped $50,000 over the past couple of years, the assessor’s biannual estimate of its value has gone up by $33,000, raising my taxes from the $1,500 I paid when I moved in about four years ago to almost $2,100.

However, this moment of gloom was relieved by a report from the redoubtable Stern and Reimer, who, despite the drumbeat of unnerving economic news, contrived to make my investments earn $2,265 in August.

LOL! Just about enough to pay the taxes!

In fact, I have the tax money in hand, accumulated by dint of a $300-a-month setaside from my paycheck. So I can pay the assessor this year. But next year: ????

The $3,600 annual impound into a savings account is to cover property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. It used to cover annual car registration, too, but because my car is now eight years old, I can pay that out of cash flow. If my car were newer, I couldn’t do that.

Now the problem is . . . the combined cost of 2008’s property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance will come to $3,700.

And three hundred bucks a month is pushing the envelope of what I can afford to set aside. State employees received no merit or COLA increases this year, and will not as long as the economy is in the toilet. In the past, we’ve gone several years at a time with no raises whatsoever. So: they raise our taxes, but they don’t raise our pay.I haven’t retired yet, and already the basic cost of keeping the government from confiscating my home or my car and providing enough coverage to rebuild if the aluminum wiring sets fire to the joint is passing my ability to pay it.

What this demonstrates is what I’ve already begun to suspect: I will not be able to stay in my home in retirement.

If there was any question about that, this tax bill answers it, plain and clear.

Unbundled! Qwest strikes again

by

So, I’m reading my Qwest bill and notice some long-distance calls to Austin, where I know exactly no one. I also want to find out what they want me to do with the useless modem the Filipinos sent and to cancel the $3.99/month roadside assistance plan that recently proved to be ludicrously useless. After dialing the customer service number printed on the bill, I again make the acquaintance of Qwest’s damnable robot, which eventually puts me through to one “Josh.”

Amazingly, this “Josh” speaks English. Yea, verily: he’s a native speaker. In the course of probably 40 minutes spent gabbing and wasting time on hold, I learn he grew up in Las Vegas and presently is living in Logan, Utah, where he works in Qworst’s call center to support his lifestyle as a ski bum.

The Josh brushes me off about the unidentifiable long-distance calls but agrees to discontinue the laughable roadside assistance disservice. Along the way, he remarks that he can save me money on the phone bill. Figuring he wants to sell me something (he does, but not till later), I rise to this bait. How, I ask, does he propose to do this?

“Well,” says he, “I see you have DSL, cell phone, and a land line. I can bundle them together, and it will save you $10 a month.”

“They are bundled,” say I.

“No, they’re not,” says he.

“The only reason I got the DSL was because Qwest sent an ad touting its cut-rate bundling. I called your company and specifically ordered the bundled service, and I was told that was what I got.”

“Look at your bill,” says the Josh. “If it doesn’t say ‘bundled service’ on the front page, then you don’t have bundled service.”

“The bill is unintelligible,” I observe. “None of it makes any sense at all. It is a document designed to confuse the customer.”

The Josh does not deny this. He proceeds to do the bundling thing, and now magically my bill drops by ten bucks a month. Not wanting this lucre to burn a hole in my pocket, he suggests I upgrade my cell phone service. I say I never use the cell phone and the only reason I got it is that pay phones have pretty much disappeared and I have to drive an aging car across a freeway to get to work; the cell is only for emergencies and I don’t need an upgrade. He then proposes I get their TV service. I say I don’t watch TV.

He is incredulous.

“You don’t watch television?” he squawks.

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.” This is a slight exaggeration, but the Josh need not know it.

Discouraged, he now suggests I replace the old, perfectly functional modem with the new one, which I haven’t yet shipped back to Qworst. I say I’m not looking forward to fiddling with a CD and the connection, which invariably gets screwed up, and I can’t afford to be offline over the weekend because I have to do a blog carnival.

“What’s a blog?” the Josh inquires.

Beginning to suspect the man smokes something that doesn’t have nicotine in it, I ask him if he’s serious. He insists he doesn’t know what a blog is. I try to define blogging in one sentence.

He says for nine bucks, they’ll send a service guy over to install the modem. I say “sold!”

Now—get this!—he tells me I must immediately ship the free modem the Filipino staffer has ordered back to Qworst, so that the service dude can replace it with another modem, which will cost me $100. But lucky me! Qworst will be sending me a $50 rebate coupon!

Oh, thank you, honored phone company!

Not until I get off the phone do I realize that the Josh has figured out, during the course of conversation, that the modem in the box is the same kind of modem the service person will install, that at one point he subtly backpedaled to maneuver me into letting him replace it with one I have to pay for, and that the Josh probably gets paid by the amount of junk he can sell to the customer.

So here’s what we have:

In August 2006 I ordered what was presented to me as a bundled set of services. This “bundling” never happened. The result was that for the past two full years I have been overcharged $10 a month for a service that was misrepresented to me. That adds up to a $240 overcharge. More recently, I was made to jump through an hour’s worth of hoops while two marginally English-speaking technicians tried to figure out, over the telephone from their stations half-a-globe away, what was wrong with my DSL connection. Their assessment was wrong. Incorrectly thinking my modem was on the fritz (in fact, Qworst’s serviceapparentlywas down, something the company had not bothered to share with its men and women in Manila), they sent me a new modem, telling me it would be free of charge providing I shipped the old one back. This device is a newer model. A stateside Qworst customer service person smoothly switches out this free modem for an identical one, to the tune of $100, promising a $50 rebate. So, all told I’m out $290 in fraudulent and questionable charges.

Charming, eh?

If there was any question whether the robot voice expresses the disdain with which this corporation’s leadership views the Great Unwashed, interaction with Qworst’s live voices quickly dispels that.

What’s an intellectual worker’s real overhead?

by

Over at The Copyeditor’s Desk, TM opines that a freelance editor working from home does business with a very low overhead: a computer, an Internet connection, appropriate software, some inexpensive paper, a few pens or pencils, maybe babysitting or day-care costs.

On a superficial level, I’d agree with that. But I’d like to argue that there’s a lot more cost behind editing, writing, graphic design, programming, and similar pursuits than just hardware, software, and some office supplies. The truth is, none of us can do our jobs without one very expensive piece of overhead: education. By and large, the more education the intellectual worker has, the more his or her skills are worth . . . but the higher the person’s overhead.

Consider what a good education costs. An undergraduate degree at an in-state public school can easily run you $15,000 to $20,000 a year. We paid $40,000 a year for M’hijito’s four-year degree at a private liberal arts college.

Two years of graduate school will take you to the M.A. (assuming you’re trotting right along): add another $30,000 to $80,000. A professional degree will set you back even more: the Great Desert University, which bills its law school as “among the lowest of all American Bar Association accredited law schools,” presents in-state students with a tab of $35,041 and bills out-of-state students $47,606. At GDU, a Ph.D. in a less marketable subject, such as English, runs from $7,052 a year for in-state students to $19,606 a year for out-of-state students (not counting books, housing, food, transportation, and personal costs); attaining a doctorate can take six to eight years.

So… A bright mind, a bachelor’s degree, and a few years of on-the-job experience probably will put you in a position to freelance as an editor, a writer, a graphic artist, or a computer programmer. Let’s figure the start-up costs:

Computer: $1,000
Printer/FAX/Scanner: $300
Internet connection: $360/year
Software:$300 (e.g., indexing program, etc.; assumes MS Office comes with computer)
Student loan: $8,724/year (approx: $60,000 repaid over 10 years at 8% interest)
Office supplies: $200
Desk: $300 (Ikea or other knock-down furniture)
Chair: $100 (Ikea or other cheap furniture)
Total: $11,984

Assuming you could bill 30 hours a week (a generous estimate, indeed!) and you needed a pre-tax income of $40,000 to live on, you would have to gross $51,984 a year to get by. Giving yourself two weeks of vacation time, you would have 1,560 hours in which to earn that amount, meaning you would have to gross $33.32 an hour: consistently and steadily.

This doesn’t count items that would be in your house anyway, such as a telephone connection, air conditioning and heating, water, and access to a bathroom and kitchen. And the biggie: it doesn’t include health insurance!

If you had a low-end master’s degree that you managed to complete in only two years, you’d add $30,000 to the cost of your training (assuming you count books, living expenses, & the like). What the heck: let’s pay that back in 20 years instead of a mere 10; at 8% that would run you $426 a month, or $5,112 a year. This actually brings your annual overhead down to a mere $7,672; to get that 40 grand of pre-tax income, you’d need to earn $47,672, or $30.59 an hour over fifty thirty-hour weeks.

Hm. What if you had a Ph.D.? Let’s say eight years of graduate school at $14,000 a year, since research assistantships and fellowships usually cover most of your living expenses. Again, you pay it back at 8% over 20 years: $936.81 a month, or $11,244 a year! This puts your annual overhead at $13,804. Now you need to pull in $53,804 to end up with a pre-tax, pre-health insurance take of 40 grand: $34.49 an hour.

In any of these scenarios, you’re having to earn $30 to $35 an hour and bill 30 hours a week consistently for 50 weeks a year. That’s to bring in an amount that’s just enough to call a living wage. Sort of.

In the Night Kitchen

by

Insomnia! How I hate it. The night closes in like a black, sticky, toxic cloud, bringing with it all manner of prickly little horrors.

Five things I regret having done

  • Leaving a perfectly fine husband
  • Leaving my son behind
  • Not being with my mother when she was dying
  • Having agreed to go to the University of Arizona, not insisting on Cal Berkeley
  • Majoring in French

Five things I wish other people hadn’t done

  • My mother: smoking herself into the grave
  • My father: bringing us to Arizona
  • My son: taking up smoking
  • My father: disinheriting me
  • My fellow Americans: voting for George Bush and his cronies

Five things I could have done better

  • Focused on a real career
  • Been a better mother
  • Been a better daughter
  • Been a better wife
  • Taken control of my life sooner

Five characteristics I would be better without

  • Preference for solitude
  • Habit of taking the path of least resistance
  • Laziness
  • Self-indulgence
  • Insecurity

Five characteristics that redound to my benefit (there must be somethinggood here)

  • Self-discipline
  • Writing skills
  • Literacy
  • Some degree of intelligence
  • Ability to be self-starting

Five small things that make life better

  • The company of dogs
  • The company of friends
  • My son in a positive mood
  • A lovely morning
  • Flowers

Five things that scare the sh*t out of me

  • Old age
  • The U.S. economy and the decline of America
  • The state of health care in America
  • The ascendancy of the right wing and the injection of religion into secular politics
  • Climate change

Five things we could have more of

  • Swimming in the pool
  • Walking in the desert
  • Friends
  • Wine
  • Good food

Five things I could do without

  • Greed
  • Morons
  • Ambient noise
  • Work
  • Insomnia!

Sploggers get rich quick off your work

by

Several sploggers have been harvesting posts from Funny about Money. Most recently, a site called “The Retired Millionaire” has been reproducing passages from Funny and monetizing them. I have contacted Adsense to let them know that if they don’t bring a stop to the use of their service to steal money from me by using my work as an advertising base, they soon will be hearing from my lawyer and from the U.S. Attorney General, and to instruct them to remit all revenues generated from my content to me.

You’ll notice a new addition to the blogroll atFunnyand atThe Copyeditor’s Desk:Exposing Sploggersis a group of WordPress bloggers who are banding together to fight back. They propose to track down the owners of offending groups and to develop various ways to force them to remove members’ copyrighted material from their sites and to stop the wholesale theft. Exposing Sploggers also lists several other sites with information and resources, which you should know about.

It is against the law to use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, and profiting off that material is actionable. I am not above filing lawsuits against anyone I can catch in the act. No © symbol or copyright notice is required to establish your rights in your work, nor is it necessary to register your work with the Library of Congress to establish rights. Copyright applies to all reproducible hard-copy, film, and electronic material, and the law protects such material from the instant it is created. If you would like to know more about this, my chapters on copyright and on libel in The Essential Feature were vetted by an internationally prominent publishing lawyer, who pronounced them the best summaries in layman’s language that she had seen.

If you’re a blogger, I urge you to join Exposing Sploggers and work actively to bring a stop to theft of your work. In some cases, copy pirates have ripped off entire blogs, so that Google searches go to the thief’s site instead of to the real blog. Obviously, if you are trying to monetize your site, these crooks are stealing from your pocketbook. Even if all the slimeball steals is your ideas and your creativity, you should care. You should care very much.

Lose some pounds, keep some bucks

by

Cassie the Corgi is getting a bit on the chunky side.Bad. The corgi is built like a dachshund: short legs under a long spine. This mutation puts a lot of stress on the spinal column, making the dog susceptible to back injuries and debilitating arthritis. Apparently overweight is the most common cause of crippling back pain in these dogs, and the most common cause of premature death.

So it’s time to put the pooch on a diet.

I’ve been feeding her about 8 ounces per twice-daily feeding: 2 ounces of starch, 2 ounces of veggies, and 4 ounces of meat with each meal. Pretty clearly that’s too much: she’s gained three pounds since she moved in with me. That’s a lot, when you’re supposed to weigh about 21 to 23 pounds: 13 percent of her desired body weight!

The rule of thumb for feeding DIY doggie cuisine is 2 percent of of the ideal body weight. Assuming Cassie should weigh 23 pounds, that would be 7.46 ounces a day, or 3.68 ounces a meal. That is not much food! In fact, it seemed way too little to sustain such a lively little dog, and so I just started feeding her by guesswork.

Evidently I guessed wrong. I’ve been feeding her 8 ounces per meal.

Interestingly, not only was she beginning to look like a tiny barrel with legs sticking out, she also had lost her enthusiasm for the beloved doggy dish. She had to be coaxed to eat. No wonder: the poor little thing must have felt like she had a cannonball in her belly.

Yesterday I cut her ration to 5 ounces. This morning she was dee-lighted to scarf breakfast, and she greeted the day by rocketing around the house like a Roman candle run amok. Clearly she feels better on a lighter diet.

This is going to save some cash: half as much frozen vegetables, rice, and chicken represents a significant savings on dog food. I think I’ll ease her down to 4 ounces per feeding and see how she does.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

It occurs to me that what’s sauce for the pooch could be sauce for the human: What if I restricted my feed to 2% of my desired body weight?

That would come to 2.6 pounds of fine cuisine per day.

Seems like a lot. A typical meat portion for me is about 4 ounces. Because there’s nothing to eat on the campus that isn’t junk food, I don’t eat lunch. Somehow I doubt that 2 pieces of bacon, a piece of toast, orange juice, and strawberries in the morning plus 4 ounces of grilled meat and a salad at night come to something over 2 1/2 pounds of food. However, this morning I ate enough oatmeal to create the lead-ball-in-the-belly sensation. And I do eat a fair amount of watermelon and fruit during the day.

The difference is that Cassie eats better than I do. My diet is not a carefully calibrated fusion of mixed vegetables, starch, and meat. I eat whatever comes to hand, which tends to be high on cheese, meat and fish, crackers, and fruits and low on vegetables.

What if I weighed my food and tried to keep the daily volume to 2 percent of the body weight I’d like to have? Or less? What if I made an effort to balance veggies and starches 50-50 with animal proteins? This could be an interesting experiment.

Might save some money at the grocery store, too!