Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department

You are here: Home / Archives for 2010

Archives for 2010

You bet, you lose, you pay

The economy, not just in the U.S. but around the world, is pretty much in the toilet. While I haven’t kept up with unemployment statistics in the EU, it’s not a stretch to imagine that people are having trouble paying their bills across the continent and that job prospects for folks who have been laid off are mighty slim right about now. What people in the U.S. may not have in common with our European counterparts is the results of the stupidity that was the housing bubble and the rampant speculation that went with it.

Two years into The Great Recession, many folks, even many who still have full-time, full-pay jobs, find themselves upside down on their mortgages. Also referred to as being “underwater,” being upside down on your mortgage means, roughly, owing more than your house is worth on the open market whether that value is determined by comparable sales or by tax assessment. The most immediate negative consequence of being upside down on your mortgage is that you can’t sell your house without having to pay the bank a ton of money you haven’t recouped in the sale of your house. The only morally upright option you have is to stay in your house and continue to make payments. This course of action is according to one LA Times reporter actually detrimental to the health of America’s economy.

This reporter’s thesis is that “…with home prices stagnant in much of the country, payments on mortgages that are underwater could absorb billions of dollars that might be used for other forms of consumer spending — a drag on family finances, the housing market and the overall economy.”1 On its face, this seems logical: Money spent on mortgage payments is money that can’t be spent on consumer goods. But let’s unpack this and find out what’s really going on. [Read more…] about You bet, you lose, you pay

State of the Blogger

It’s November again. How did that happen? Oh, wait, the usual way: time passed while I wasn’t looking.

November is when I usually do something mildly or extremely insane to jump start my creativity. Last year, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, that frenzy of masochistic novel writing in which you commit to 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, I chose to be a National Blog Posting Month, a slightly less masochistic 30 original posts in 30 days commitment. This isn’t the first year I’ve chosen NaBloPoMo over NaNoWriMo, but it’s the first year I’ve made the decision for so many different reasons.

The state of the blogger this year is in flux. It hasn’t been a good late summer/early fall for me. I turned 40 this year which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Turning 40 is better than the alternative but the experience wasn’t enhanced any by bringing my mother home from an unexpected 5 day stay in the hospital on my actual birthday. Though, I suppose, if you look at it from another perspective, bringing her home was better than the alternative.

My work situation has gone from bad – we’re moving office and sticking you in a dark hole with another person and all the servers among other events – to worse – and…here’s your 15% pay cut and yes, we’re going to be big enough assholes that we’re going to make you browbeat us into giving you compensatory time off – and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets even worse before I finally rid myself of these people. And it’s the ridding myself of these people that’s put me in this state of dry flux.

Though, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true. I was dried out and bored with my job before Management started in with the big, obvious cuts. For the past two years, my job has been affected by a curious entropy that isn’t quite expansion, nor is it quite contraction: the reduction of resources required to do anything interesting or unique while slowly, surely, turning up expectations. It’s a strange process, a little bit like that experiment that proved frogs will hop out of a pot of boiling water but won’t notice until it’s too late that you’ve gradually turned their nice, room temperature bath into a boiling death cauldron. [Read more…] about State of the Blogger

85% of something is more than 100% of nothing

It’s the rare event that has no upside. Right now, I’m trying really hard to see the upside of a 15% pay cut.

I sort of knew we were facing pay cuts. It’s not a surprise given the way things have been going lately. The company has moved two offices, in Minneapolis and in DC, to save money into spaces so small that staff in each location are practically sitting on top of each other. We’ve closed one office in Michigan and laid off at least two staff members that I know of, and we’ve had a highly paid member of the national staff resign and Management has chosen to spread his duties around rather than replace him.

While the pay cuts weren’t really a surprise, I was still a little bit shocked by Management’s cheek in presenting them. My boss laid out the facts: everyone making more than $30,000 a year is taking a pay cut starting November 1 for the 22 weeks. The brackets start at 10% and go up to 20% with “Senior Managers contributing more.”

And that was it. No mention of furlough days, no mention of compensating staff for lost salary after finances improve. Nothing. Just a flat we’re going to cut your pay by 15 percent. When I asked about furlough days my boss implied that people who had volunteered to take more than the five days they required us to take in spring 2009 hadn’t actually taken them. [Read more…] about 85% of something is more than 100% of nothing

L-Day

I’ve often wondered if the planners of the Normandy invasion had any idea that the military term “D-Day” would become synonymous in certain regions where English is spoken with “the day on which momentous, potentially hazardous things happen.” I wonder this because I also think that it’s not very often that we get advance warning that events like this are about to happen.

Sure, we plan for weddings and we get plenty of warning about most births, which are also momentous, but how often do we get a warning that our life is about to change in a major way that isn’t of our choosing? Likely we get warning more often than not, I think, but the signs are often small and we often ignore them because human beings have a large talent for self-delusion and rationalization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days because most of the signs in my professional life point to a major change coming.

I think I’m about to get laid off.

Actually, that’s not true. Getting laid off wouldn’t be the worst case scenario of what my obsessive brain has determined are the three most likely possibilities at an organization one of my local co-workers described recently as “having a whiff of the Titanic about it.” No, getting laid off is actually second shittiest thing Management could do to me at this point. [Read more…] about L-Day

Hurry hard

I attended one of the Fall “Learn to Curl” classes held by the fabulous folks at the Potomac Curling Club today. Here’s what I learned in both the lessons and our 3 end game.

Ice is hard
You find this out when you start to sweep because the fact is that most of us aren’t used to keeping upright on ice and sweeping requires that you not only pace the stone but that you work your hands while you’re doing it. Our instructor told us flat out that we would fall while we were sweeping. And I did…four times. While I was the first to go down, I feel better about the fact that I wasn’t the only one going home with bruises in embarrassing places.

Curling stone, courtesy wikicommons
Yep, it's made out of granite.
Curling is exercise
It may not look like it on TV but sometimes those 44 pound stones move fast even when they aren’t moving all that fast so there were times when I and my fellow sweeper were practically running down the sheet. Not only were we moving fast, we had to put pressure on the broom and move it in a tight little space to be at all effective. And all that takes not only lung stamina but muscle power.

Flexibility matters
But it isn’t everything. Spending 18 years squatting down behind the plate to catch a softball probably put me ahead of some of the people my age who were in my beginning class. Since curling is billed as a sport you can enjoy at any age, accommodations were made for the people in my group who had bad knees, and for the 68 year-old ladies who drove down from Harrisburg, PA. Oh, and that whole squat and push the stone thing…a lot harder than it looks.

Sportsmanship counts
So does fun. Many of us were just in this for fun and, much like chess, you are playing against yourself as much as you’re playing against the other team. If your sweepers did well, tell them. Even if they weren’t perfect, tell them it’s OK. Oh, and at Potomac the winner buys the first round.

Communication counts almost as much
OK, so for winning the game purposes communication probably counts more than sportsmanship but without the sportsmanship would it really be as much fun? As skip you have to make sure the person throwing knows what you’re calling, and when you’re sweeping you have to make sure you’re coordinating with your fellow sweeper so you aren’t knocking brooms instead of helping the stone move along.

The other thing I learned as we played a game to try to solidify the concepts from the lesson portion of our class: I’ve got the skip’s yell. I doubt I’ll ever be as loud as Eve Muirhead, and I’ll certainly never be able to do that thing she does to the R, but if I ever get good enough to skip at least my sweepers will be able to hear me.