Tag Archives: Money

A conference by any other name…

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Given the “constrained fiscal environment” and fuss made over the excesses at any number of government sponsored conferences over the last four years, the very word “Conference” has been formally stricken from official usage. No matter what you’re doing, no matter how much it smells, looks, and acts like a conference you can never, ever call it that for fear of bringing down the wrath of the anointed – and even worse, the attention of the Washington Post.

Despite the official prohibition against staging (and largely against even attending) conferences, there sure are a hell of a lot of people fully engaged in planning for and attending workshops, councils, boards, reviews, forums, and very large group meetings. Under other circumstances, they’d be called conferences and no one would bat an eyelash, but great pains are taken to make sure they’re called anything but what they are.

Now, I’m just a cog in this great machine, but when I see our most senior leaders sitting before Congress begging for permission to cut pay and benefits while they’re still allowing grip and grin sessions and a hundred other boondoggles to happen with a nod and a wink, well, you can rack up mine as a vote of no confidence. There’s plenty of waste in this vast bureaucracy… and most of those on the inside would be happy to point it out if anyone were going to take a serious swing at eliminating it. But while we’re still in the business of wasting time and money on conferences by any other name, citing payroll as a major cost driver just doesn’t pass the common sense test.

Thank God we apparently never grade that test.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Elections. So apparently the good people of Crimea can throw off their Ukrainian overlords, declare themselves sovereign, and promptly ask to be consumed by Russia all within ten business days. It makes one wonder why it takes us 20 months to gear up for a fairly straightforward presidential election in this country. Then again, I suppose it’s simpler when the whole thing is orchestrated in advance and the outcomes are always a foregone conclusion. Of course this whole discussion is pre-supposing that our own elections aren’t orchestrated in advance and the outcomes aren’t foregone conclusions. Food for thought.

2. Cash. Paper money still has it’s place. I think those who herald the death of the dollar bill are a bit premature in that regard. With that said, one of the places where no one has any business waving around paper money is at a toll booth during the peak rush of the afternoon commute. Pony up the couple of extra beans a year, get over your paranoia about tracking your car, and get with the ezpass program. No one needs to deal with your dumb ass dropping your $20 out the window and then being too close to the booth to open your door to retrieve it while they’re trying to get home. The only thing it says about you is that you are an unredeemable asshat.

3. Redaction. A moment ago this space was filled with a third point that was a scorcher. I was poured to overflowing with the kind of snark you’ve come to expect from jeffreytharp.com. Then, sadly, I highlighted every word and punched the delete key. Redacted. Because someone was probably going to get their little feelings hurt and end up being more of a enormous joy-suck then they are already. Some day I will have the chance to say everything that’s on my mind… and when that day comes, woe betide the poor feckless fool who tries to stand between me and saying my piece.

Bare minimum…

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The year was 1994, or approximately the end of the last ice age. I was 16 years old, worked 20 hours a week and McDonald’s, and minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. Flash forward to 1998. I was 20, worked about 16 hours a week as a student dispatcher, and made $5.15 an hour. Jump two years into the future. I was 22, worked 40 hours a week as a first year teacher and made $15.38 an hour. Climb into the Way Back Machine for one more ride to 2008. I was 30 years old, with an undergraduate degree and an MBA, working for Uncle Sam, and making a multiple of $15 an hour.

So what’s my point? Nothing much other than giving you a little background and assuring you that when I say working in fast food and making minimum wage sucks, that it’s a situation I know a little something about. It sucks a lot. As someone who cleaned grease traps, unloaded truckloads of frozen foods, and filtered the fryers, I’m uniquely postured to say that with a degree of authority. Although the job sucks, I can’t bring myself to see that it sucks badly enough to justify paying basically the same wage I made as a first year teacher. After all, that job sucks for a whole different list of reasons… and not just that, it requires a 4-year degree, testing, certification, and a relatively clean criminal background check. Yes, dare I say it, teaching is more important work than flipping burgers and the compensation should be commensurate with that.

There is nothing in my experience of working minimum wage jobs that tells me anyone should make $15 an hour based on the work’s level of difficulty. Of course level of difficulty really isn’t the argument. In all the cases I’ve heard, the reason is simply that they should make $15 an hour because they need more money. I hear ya, brothers and sisters. I need more money too. But you see, I never “just” worked my part time minimum wage job and expected it to be enough to get by. I cut grass in the summers and shoveled snow in the winters. I collected aluminum cans and cashed them in for pennies. That was all side work on top being a pretty successful full time student and on top of my part time job. Even now that I’m outside that $15 an hour range, I’m not above picking up cans from the side of the road, or taking on an occasional side job, or writing a damned book about my experiences and selling it online.

Let’s be brutally honest, there aren’t many of us who are working as hard as our grandparents did. I’ve never come out of deep mine after eight hours underground coated in coal dust. My young life wasn’t put on hold to take four years off to go liberate Europe. I’m not up at 4AM to milk the cows. I’ll bet most of the fast food workers who think they need $15 an hour aren’t any of these things either. And for the record, I’m not saying they should be doing those things. All I’m saying is that what I really want to see is what they’re doing to improve their employment options beyond holding up a sign and demanding more money. Not everyone needs to go to college and get a job wearing a tie, but if you’re strolling around waiting for your CEO to pay you more just because you think it’s what you deserve, well, I hope you’re dressed warm because you’re in for a long wait.

Maybe you can’t put a value on a human life, but the market can damned sure put a value on the work we do with the life we’re given. It’s up to each of us to maximize what our labor is worth… and if you personally find it worth $15 an hour, I’d recommend you set your sights a little higher than grill jockey at the local greasy spoon.

What Annoys Jeff this Week? (The Centennial Edition)

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Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the 100th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. With nearly two years of weekly annoyances under my belt, the only thing I can say from the writer’s perspective is that despite living in a universe that seems personally intent on agitating the shit out of me, I always look forward to Thursdays. They’re the day I get to compact many of the small issues into one great big ball of pissed off and launch it out into the world. It may not be classy, but it’s cathartic.

I thought about working up something special for this auspicious occasion, but decided quickly that the best tribute would be letting it out the same way I do every Thursday – a simple list and brief description of the week’s three most pressing annoyances.

1. Technology. Honestly, I don’t know who I would be if I weren’t wrapped in the warm electromagnetic cocoon of modern technology. That’s also the problem. In a week that’s been a near constant battle with my laptop, with my wireless router, and my internet provider just to stay connected, I wonder if perhaps I’ve put a bit too much reliance on the network. Yeah, that’s really not so much a question as a statement of fact. Still, I’m pretty sure what I’m really looking for is a system that works flawlessly all the time and not a way to disengage myself from it… because the only thing more annoying than having every bite of universal data at your fingertips is not having it when you want it. Stupid double edged sword.

2. Insurance. I got a notice this week that my prescription drug plan cost is going up about $40 a month. The cost of my general insurance plan is jumping this year too, but that’s not what annoys me, really. After all, the insurance premiums and out of pocket costs are basically just the price I pay to avoid being dead. As far as I’m concerned, not being dead is basically worth every penny I need to pay. Quite frankly, I don’t want healthcare in the country to be “average”. I want to nation’s best hospitals and corporations to dump money hand over fist into developing innovative treatments and medical equipment. Like it or not, 300+ million people can’t all get the best care on the planet, but over time the ideas they pioneer at the best hospitals can develop into common practice across the country. That’s good for everyone. Until then, if I want to drive myself eyeball deep into debt to get treatment at Hopkins, Sloan-Kettering, or the Mayo Clinic, that’s my decision because at least for now I’m the one paying the bill. When someone else foots the bill and tries to be all things to all people, we inevitably end up with a mediocre “standard level of service,” and I like being alive entirely too much to let any government entity of company decide what treatment checks off the box that says “good enough.”

3. Chicks. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but love for you ladies out there. You’re soft and curvy and smell nice. I love the way you walk and the way you talk… but after 35 years I still have no ability to understand the way you think. Although I am an accomplished man with many skills and talents, the ability to read minds is one that, thus far, I haven’t mastered. I’ll keep working on it, but in the meantime I’d consider it a personal favor if you could just go ahead and tell me what’s on your mind rather than letting me speculate wildly on my own. Trust me, left to my own devices my mind can conjure notions that are generously described as “bleak.” And that tends to be a situation other than good for everyone involved.

Resource constrained…

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Everything in life more or less comes down to a competition between wants, needs, and the resources to make those things reality. Needs are fairly basic – those things we must have to sustain life. Wants are more problematic in that the more we have, the more we tend to want. Resources, of course, are very nearly always constrained in one way or another. Having spent six days sitting at home over the previous month and a half when I would have otherwise been working, the constraints are a little tighter now than usual. That’s a shame, because we’re ramping up to that time of year when the wants start following an upward trend. Put another way, it’s the time of year when Apple starts rolling out it’s new mobile toys.

Over the next two months, the boys and girls in Cupertino are set to roll out new versions of the iPhone, iPad, and several varieties of actual computers. Given that I’m currently limping along with a 2008 model MacBookPro, upgrading that really should be my first priority. Of all the machines in the house, it’s the real workhorse and takes the lion’s share of abuse in blogging and general writing. Now that the battery issue is resolved, my iPhone is working well enough and could easily last another year in service. The iPad mini gets its share of daily use, too, but basic web browsing doesn’t exactly tax its considerable abilities. It really should be the last thing I’m looking at replacing right now.

When it comes to new toys, of course, logic and service life remaining don’t exactly play a role in my analysis. It’s almost a mortal lock that I’ll be up in the wee hours of a morning soon after September 10th ordering a new phone on its first day of availability. If I have to make a case for needing a new one, I can always fall back on the fact that the old, standard 8GB of mobile storage isn’t what it use to be. Which is both true and sad all at the same time. I’m a little more hesitant about replacing the iPad at this point. If there isn’t a true retina screen built into the mini this time around, I think I can justify waiting for the next generation in my own mind. Without some exceptional change, a two year replacement on tablets almost feels reasonable. As far as getting over the hump and bringing a new laptop into the family, well, it’s probably going to remain in the easy to justify but unlikely to happen column this time around.

Funny how I can justify a new phone every year in my own mind, but not a laptop unless there is literally smoke poring out of the back of it. Stupid resource constraints always forcing me into the fun decision instead of the responsible one.

Change…

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Most people don’t pay any attention to pocket change. It usually ends up in a jar, run through a sorting machine, and traded in for fresh folding money at the first opportunity. As is my way, I’m a bit of a contrarian on the issue. I’ve always like loose change. Every time I get a handful of the stuff, I pick though it looking for the illusive steel penny or wartime silver nickel. I don’t put enough effort in or find enough of the “good stuff” to even consider it a hobby, but I still look. If you’re patient, every once in a great while you’ll manage to pull out a real gem.

Not long ago I pulled a 1917 “Mercury” dime out of a handful of change picked up over the course of the day. It was beat to hell and back, worn almost slick by the passing of time and changing hands. It was almost a dime sized slug rather than an actual coin. Still if you knew what you were looking at, the barest outline of Winged Liberty was right there waiting for someone to recognize her.

In 1917, when this little dime rolled out of the die at the Philadelphia Mint, Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States and the First World War raged in Europe. By the time the Korean War was halted by a ceasefire in ‘53, it had already been in circulation longer than I’ve now been alive. Sixty years have passed since then, yet here’s a little dime sitting on my kitchen table. Minted before prohibition and before women in America had the right to vote, it’s been out there circulating for the better part of a hundred years. It’s banged up and gritty, but I should hope to be doing so well in the summer of 2072 when I’m as old as that dime is today.

If you ever happen to wonder why I’ve paused to look though my handful of change at the gas station or fast food drive through, now you know. It’s because every now and then you get to hold a sliver of history right there in your own grubby little paw… and you can’t have that much fun anywhere else for just ten cents.

Wrong gear…

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It’s the end of July. The part of me that spent two years checking off classes good for a teaching degree and then spent 28 months actually teaching still rebels this time of year. Some people go into teaching because they have a passion for their field. Some do it because they like kids and want to “touch the future.” That always seemed like a particularly pervy phrase to me, but I digress. The point is, I mostly went into teaching because it seemed like a great way to maximize time not working.

By now the average teacher is probably yelling at me about all the time they spend prepping, planning, grading, collaborating, talking to parents, and taking refreshed training after class, on weekends, and over the summer. My solution to that was to simply not do those things. I was usually in my room 30 minutes before the first bell only because that gave me time to eat whatever breakfast I picked up on my way in from the house and the busses barely cleared the parking lot before I was headed for the doors at the end of the day. As for grading on the weekends, at night, or at some other time when I wasn’t getting paid for it? Yeah. Forget about it. I guess someone people work for love, but I’ve always been more a “work for money” type of guy. Maybe that’s another reason the whole teaching career never took off, but again I digress.

What I seem to have at the moment is a distinct lack of motivation and the deep seated wish that all manner of jobs came with a 45-day chunk of free time right around the middle of summer. Sure, I’m making sure the paper shuffles from here to there, but in my head isn’t even in the same city as the ballpark where the game’s being played. That’s not a good long-term plan. Once the days start getting shorter and the nights cooler, I’ll snap back to reality. Right now I feel like a car running in the wrong gear – still moving forward, but doing it in a monumentally inefficient way… and you just can’t fix that shit with more cowbell.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Nature. I’ve never made any bones about not being a hippy tree hugger. I like the idea of the outdoors… as long as it’s neat, and orderly. Wandering around in the woods looking for a place to poop isn’t high on my list of things to do without a damned good reason. I like to think of it as the difference between enjoying an English garden and enjoying the rain forest. Both have their role to play in the great scheme of things, but I really only need to be involved with one of them. Being a practical man, I know that I need nature to cooperate with me from time to time, though. Basically, what I need it to do is stop throwing thunderstorms around every afternoon so I can get some stuff done outside. Stupid nature. Why can’t we control that foolishness yet?

2. Lunch. I use to enjoy a wide range of lunch options – assuming you consider a score of fast food joints and gas station sandwich shops different enough to count as “a range.” Part of my furlough survival plan was to reduce the cost of lunch by bring it from home. It doesn’t sound like much at first blush, but $200 odd bucks a month adds up respectably over a few months. Now that I’m bringing chow from home, I’m thoroughly bored with everything. I’m philosophically opposed to being one of those people that brings in home cooked leftovers to reheat for lunch (throwing good food in the microwave is pretty much on step above reheating it on the engine manifold – sure it’s warm, but it probably tastes like ass), the options do tend to dwindle. There are only so many ways to be creative with salads and sandwiches when you don’t run your own deli counter or just happen to keep a lot of exotic ingredients on hand. When this furlough is over, I may never touch finely sliced roast turkey breast again. Ever.

3. Shipping. I’ve never exactly been known for my patience and I’ve been spoiled by features like Amazon Prime that default all of my purchases to 2nd day delivery. For a few dollars more, I can arrange for an item to be at the house in less than 24 hours. That’s the kind of service that makes me happy. Then there are the surprising number of things I order online that don’t have an Amazon Prime-like option for rapid shipping. They want to take my money, wait two or three days, and then get around to shipping my item by standard mail so it will take an extra three or four days to arrive safely on my doorstep. Maybe it’s just me but a seven day interval between flash and bang feels a bit like an eternity. They say patience is a virtue. Apparently “they” are idiots.

The worst part…

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The worst part of vacations is that they inevitably come to an end. Maybe if you sat on the beach for a few hours every day it wouldn’t feel like a vacation after 30 years, but I’d be happy to be the test bunny for just such an experiment if anyone out there wants to fund the study. If I thought for a second I could scratch a living out of a combination of writing and being the guy on 27th street who set up beach umbrellas at 9AM and took them down at 5PM, I’d be there in a hot second. Unfortunately, I’m almost positive that I couldn’t manage to get by on a starving college student budget again. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that there isn’t a completely irresponsible voice in the back of my head telling me to say fuck it, sell everything, load up the dogs, the laptop, and whatever else fits into the truck, and head for the coast.

I know everyone has a daydream, but hell, life has got to be about more than sitting in a cube five days a week creating brilliant PowerPoint charts, right? Yeah. So now all I have to do is sell a million books or find someone who wants to pay me $25 an hour plus benefits for setting up umbrellas. Let me know if you’d like to see a resume.

Dedication…

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One of the people I work with loves her job. I’m making that assumption anyway because most days she seems to always stick around until 6:00 or 7:00 when end-of-tour is closer to 4:30. According to her, there’s always something “hot” that comes up after the rest of us pull up stakes for the day that needs done and just can’t wait for the next morning. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that this is true, but based on my own observation of daily workload around here, I’m somewhat skeptical.

I guess someone might look at her and think the late hours were a sign of dedication. The fact is, though, we’re not a life-or-death operation. It’s probably not politic to say in a world of 9.2% unemployment and a collapsing stock market, but sometimes a job is just a job. As much as an escort sells her body for cold hard cash, I whore out my big beautiful brain for the same consideration. Maybe some people do it for the love, but me, I do it for money. I do it so I can afford to pay the bills, eat nice meals, and occasionally travel to new and interesting places. I don’t do it out of a misplaced sense of loyalty as I’m quite certain the powers that be would have no qualms about throwing me over the gunwale during a reduction in force.

Sure, there was a time when I was young and idealistic and my sense of self derived directly from my position title and placement on the org chart. I got a little older and a little more jaded and discovered that no matter how cushy, the job is pretty much just a set of handcuffs keeping you from doing the things you really want to do because you’ve got bills to pay. And we should have bills to pay. We should have to work for our supper. But we shouldn’t be working instead of eating our supper.

I’m too old to be naïve about how the world works. Maybe sticking to the ol’ eight-and-out is committing slow career suicide. Missing the next rung on the career ladder still sounds like a better option than missing out on everything that isn’t work. The only shame is it took me so long to figure that out.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date