Coffee heat rising

job-hunting

Another day, another dollar…

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…and maybe an extra day lopped off the life expectancies of moi and my staff.

When I left for my minivacation last week, the asbestos abatement contractor was busy decontaminating several suites on our floor, by way of moving in some new tenants. A week ago Monday, I walked into the building through a cloud of what smelled like chlorine fumes. The stench inside the office was so toxic it made my nose and throat hurt. I left after a short time; it took three hours for the smell to dissipate from the nose and throat. Yuch!

So now, nine days later, I stroll into the atrium and smell…a smell. It also smells kinda toxic, but it doesn’t resemble chlorine. It gets stronger inside the building, and LOTS stronger inside our office suite. One of the RAs comes in and asks what is that pervasive solvent smell. Solvent, yes.

I call Facilities Management and suggest enough is enough. The FacMan rep says no one has complained of any odors and we should have called the first time we smelled it. I say well, I’m calling now. She says she’ll get back to me.

Several hours later, phone jangles: an all-business woman’s voice on the line. She, it develops, is the owner of the asbestos abatement company, calling to get to the bottom of this. I complain; she says her crew has been told to use a different product, but now it’s FacMan’s job to get the lingering fumes out of the building. Then she says—hang onto your hat, now—that her crew had incorrectly used “a solvent that’s banned on the GDU campus.”

Say what?

“Why on earth,” quoth I, “did you use a banned solvent in a building with classrooms full of kids and offices whose windows can’t be opened?”

“I mean, I just banned it. So after this it’s banned at GDU.”

Fast thinking, Lowest-Bidder Lady!

Shee-ut. What a place.

I sent out two more job applications today, for a total of six.

How low can I go?

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Tomorrow’s job interview is with a nonprofit organization. So neat is this outfit that I had earmarked it as the first place I would do volunteer work after retiring. The job sounds like more fun than life, and frankly, if I could I would pay them to let me work there. However, I can’t afford that: for the next three or four years, I still hafta make a living.

Because it’s a nonprofit and the ad is for someone with a bachelor’s degree and three years’ experience, I’m assuming they’re budgeted for a low salary. Of course, GDU is a nonprofit, of a sort; and what I earn is pretty middling. Others whose jobs are related to my kind of work earn more. Nevertheless, my salary is exactly at the total income for an average four-person family in Arizona—meaning, I imagine, that I earn about twice the average Arizonan’s wage, since most families have two earners.

That notwithstanding, my expenses have expanded to fill all my income’s available space. So, if this proposed new employer offers me half of what I’m earning, I can’t accept it, because I wouldn’t have a chance of living on it. However, because I’m over 59 1/2 and can draw down my IRAs, I could get by on a significant pay cut. Drawing down the amount my advisor and I had planned when I retire would make this possible. And since I could in theory retire right now, there’s a certain demented sense to the idea of taking a small draw-down to supplement a reduced salary.

A reasonable amount to expect from this source is about $10,000 a year, since I’m already using part of said planned drawdown to cover my share of the Investment House mortgage.

I figured out how much gross salary I would need to get by in several scenarios. The amount I’d need ranges from $47,000 to $50,720, depending on a variety of circumstances. Then I estimated net pay on those amounts, given that my current net pay is 63% of gross. From these estimates, I calculated how much I would get monthly, and what a single paycheck would be if paid bimonthly and if paid biweekly.

Charmingly Excel crashed when I tried to get rid of the page break lines in one worksheet (does anyone know how to un-show those things?). This lost all the data I’d worked on today…though I’d have sworn I saved at some point along the line. Must not have.

At any rate, if M’hijito pays $100/month more toward the Investment House mortgage (he says he could cover more than that, actually) and I pay off the Renovation Loan, I still would have enough in savings to make it possible to live on the net income from a $47,000 salary, and to do so without serious pain.

Although the Renovation Loan’s monthly payment is fairly modest—only $170 a month—during the winter months it’s my largest monthly bill, and during the summer, the second largest. In addition, I’m setting aside $204 a month to pay toward principal. I haven’t been paying it directly to the principal each month, because I foresaw something like the present chain of events and figured I’d better save all the paydown money in cash accounts to double as emergency funds. The monthly set-aside figure—the maximum I can pay after all my other bills are covered—brings the ding on my monthly income to $374, which for me is significant. It’s twice my largest winter bill and $150 more than my largest summer bill. Get rid of that, and I can live on a smaller salary.

Well, we may find out tomorrow what the proposed new employer can pay. Let’s hope it’s enough!

The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5.Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1

Beating the layoff stress

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For the first six or eight days after I learned about the rumored layoffs, I felt so stressed that my chest hurt. One day at the office I had to lie down on the floor for a few minutes when an anxiety attack started to come on. Determined not to end up in the ER again, I managed to get the feeling that I was about to pass out under control with some breathing and relaxation exercises. But that didn’t stop the scary ache in the chest.

Today, though, I’m feeling a lot better: no pounding heart, no chest pain, no sense of oxygen starvation, no distractibility, and no sleeplessness. For sure, yesterday’s call from one of the employers I applied to helped. Even if I don’t get the job, at least now I have some hope that my age won’t disqualify me from every job I ask for. That was a big worry.

Also, with amazing speed I’m getting more and more comfortable with the idea of not working for GDU—even if it means taking a lower-paying job. Matter of fact, that prospect not only looks less scary, it’s starting to look downright welcome. Although I personally have had relatively little to complain about (other than the months-long PeopleSoft fiasco, the [probably illegal] reneging on an approved job offer I made to a prospective employee, and the overall toxic atmosphere on the campus where I taught), I certainly have seen the administration treat many of my coworkers abominably.

The prospect of being somewhere else begins to look more attractive. So does the idea of a new job with new things to learn and do.

I’m glad I started the job search before any university-wide announcement came down and before I knew whether this next round of lay-offs will apply to me. Just doing something to help yourself, rather than hunkering paralyzed in the headlight while the train bears down on you, goes a long way to make you feel better. It gives you a little sense of accomplishment, and it jump-starts the process you’re going to have to put into gear soon, anyway.

The first cover letter and résumé took a good five or six hours to put together! I thought I was gunna die. If every job application took that much time, how was I going to manage the work for the day job? To say nothing of all the freelance work The Copyeditor’s Desk has taken on?

However, the next application only took 30 or 40 minutes, and neither of the other two took any longer. Because the jobs I’m seeking (with exception of driving the zoo train…) are in the same general family of work and they’re all at nonprofits or colleges, tweaking the cover letter and resuméis pretty easy. It’s just a matter of writing new first and last paragraphs for the cover letter, adjusting the “what I can bring to your job” paragraphs—deleting some of them, moving others closer to the top—and shifting the resumé’s “list of accomplishments” to highlight the items most relevant to a given job. After I realized this, I began to feel a lot more confident that applying for a series of jobs isn’t going to kill me.

And really: if I get an offer from next week’s interview and then learn I’m not included in the next set of layoffs, I may take the job anyway—even if it pays less than I’m earning. The recurring workplace flaps, which seem to come more and more often, are ridiculous. I don’t need to put up with this kind of grief. And besides, the prospect of starting something new is beginning to sound pretty good. Darned good!

The Continuing Saga…

1. Unemployment for Christmas?
2. Does any of this have meaning for individuals?
3. Rumors start to fly
4. On the trail of the elusive job
5. Beating the layoff stress
6. How low can I go?
7. Interview No. 1