In which I ponder the economy.

There is a company-wide meeting every Friday afternoon in the office where I work.

We all get off the phones and eat lunch together, and management goes over various topics and we discuss them as a group. Usually it’s changes in products or fine points of procedure. Sometimes there are assigned presentations about the products or services we offer, and there’s usually a harmless little team-building discussion topic at the end, like What was the make and model of your first car? or How long did your longest relationship last?

Last Friday at the top of the meeting, management went over our current customer count and incoming call statistics and then told us that the national unemployment rate had hit 8.1 percent… and left it at that. No verbiage tying the figures into anything like attrition procedure or new policies: just a statement, short and sweet, hanging in the air while all of us employees quietly scrunched down in our chairs and didn’t look at each other.

I glanced at the handout I’d been given and under one of the headers it said, “Our employees need to be exceptional.” Oh. Ooookay.

The clincher was the general discussion topic at the end of the meeting, which, and I’m not even kidding, was, “What would you do if you were not working here?”

I ain’t no Agatha Christie but I can solve mysteries with clues like those. They’re going to have to cut back whether they want to or not. It’s just how it’s going for everyone these days.

Maybe I’m being paranoid and my personal job is not in danger, but in my department the only person who has less seniority than me is my brother. So. If there are layoffs, it’s gonna suck for my household either way.

~+~+~
I spent time between calls browsing depressing recession images on Flickr pools.

Slate magazine’s Shoot the Recession and the Economic Clusterf*ck (a.ka. Recession) of 2008-9 both feature picture after picture of the economic crisis. Closed schools, closed banks, and closed small businesses… abandoned, foreclosed houses across the nation… photo essays of Circuit City’s last day… empty, abandoned malls and empty parking lots… abandoned historical buildings in Detroit, New York, and DC.

It’s just plain spooky when there isn’t enough money.

~+~+~
There was an article in the U-B last week about a white collar dude’s experience of applying for assistance. Fifty-something, upper middle class, educated, a business owner… the market he and his wife consulted in has dried up, and now they need public assistance just to pay their heating bill.

My uncle went out to the Midwest just before Christmas to bring back to the Northwest my cousin, who though educated and experienced in his field of retail, had been unable to get a job for so long that his duplex was in foreclosure.

~+~+~
I’m trying to decide if I should freak out and start looking for work immediately, or if I should wait and get laid off. Walla Walla is a small town and has at best only marginal employment opportunities for someone with experience and intelligence but no credentials like me; with a recession going on I’d be lucky to find another job at all.

I doubt that any of the ISPs are hiring, especially when they’re losing their customers to phone and cable companies who can bundle, or to dial-up because it’s cheaper. (Yes, people are switching back to dial-up to make ends meet. It’s true.) And with five restaurants closing in the last month alone, I probably won’t be waitressing either. Normally in a I-need-work-NOW scenario I’d go straight to a temp agency, but I doubt they’re handling any volume these days either.

I moved here to get back on my feet after the divorce. And I nearly am, but I’m still paying off the debts of my marriage and the last dregs of the Uterine Monster surgery. I still don’t own a car or furniture or kitchenware, and now if I were to leave in search of decent employment opportunities I guess I’d feel strange about abandoning G’ma to live alone. I think she thinks I’m lazy and maybe a bit of an idiot sometimes (and frankly I’m too lazy to disabuse her of such notions, so she’s partially right), but at least she’s not alone in the house and we do on occasion have hours-long discussions about cooking that are very satisfying to both of us.

I don’t have any savings. I have no retirement fund and no insurance. I’m 40 years old and in all honesty I made only $20,000 last year.

The only relative I know of who owns her dwelling outright and who actually has empty beds in it is my grandmother. My dad lives in a motor home and my mom’s got a mortgage. I think everybody else either rents or has a mortgage, and I’m pretty sure they all have some kind of debt – I mean, doesn’t everyone? What will happen to all of them if they lose their jobs too?

~+~+~
When I mentioned the unemployment rate on Facebook, someone replied, “91.9% are still employed.”

Which is comforting, until you realize that the official unemployment statistic apparently includes only those people receiving benefits. If your bennies run out or you’re not eligible for them in the first place, you’re not “unemployed,” you’re a non-entity. So in an economy that has thousands fewer jobs than it did a year ago the actual number of persons who wish to work and who are not doing so is probably higher than that.

~+~+~
I buried myself this article from last weekend’s NYT Magazine and finally realized the scope of the housing crisis:

“Just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000. Most of the vacant houses are owned by lenders who foreclosed on the properties and by the wholesalers who are now sweeping in to pick up houses in bulk, as if they were trading in baseball cards.”

The wholesalers apparently buy properties for pennies on the dollar, and then resell them to naive people who end up homeless themselves when they can’t pay the years’ worth of fines and property taxes they assume when they buy. Then the house sits abandoned, gets the damage all abandoned buildings eventually do, and then the city has to find funds to raze it.

One in 13 dwellings, empty. Where did all the people go?

~+~+~
Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

~+~+~
So I have a roof over my head and income. My debt is still there but if I can stay employed for another year I should be out from under all of it (except my student loans, which, quite frankly, I don’t ever expect to pay off). At this rate maybe I’ll have a retirement fund and insurance in place by the time I’m 50.

Yeah, right. Who am I kidding? I’m gonna freakin’ die on welfare.

I think it’s time to do my part in stimulating the economy: I should be utterly irresponsible and get a big fat tattoo come payday. I can even justify it since I’ve been taking my lunch to work for months now, saving myself at least enough money for a tattoo.

I bet tattoo artists and dive bars don’t even notice recessions.

In which this morning was your typical stupid Monday morning.

I went to bed early, so I woke up early.

Very early. Pre-dawn early.

I read for awhile. The sun came up. It was bright and cheery until dawn was complete, and then a valley’s worth of clouds rolled in and there was a 4-minute wind and dust storm. The sky turned from brown to sullen gray. It began to rain.

I read some more. I got up twenty minutes before my alarm went off.

I made a mug of tea. I cooked up a little pot of sticky rice. I took a shower. I noticed a repeating and annoying pain in my right breast; apparently I crushed it in my sleep last night and it’s pissed off about that.

The bed I sleep in is older than I am and there’s a trench down the center. I wake up every morning with pins and needles in my hands, arms, feet, or hips. The only thing that keeps me from sleeping on the floor is the temperature at night, but when it warms up that’s where I’ll be.

I got dressed. I made maki rolls. The sun came out. I packed the roll I was going to eat for breakfast to take to work with me because I was running late. I grabbed my purse, my coat, and put on my shoes.

It was a quarter to. Not enough time to walk. I decided to take the truck.

I went outside, threw my lunch on the truck’s seat, and then briskly walked my dog up and down the alley so she’d get at least a little bit of a run. It started to rain again. We returned to the truck… and it had a flat tire.

I pulled out my phone, texted my supervisor to tell him I’d be late, and hoofed it to work. In the rain.

I was twelve minutes late.

~ ~ ~
Saturday morning I slept in, threw on some clothes, and went immediately to the fabric store. I bought rayon knit fabric (1-1/2 yards of dark brown, and 3-1/4 yards of a gold color in the brown range), four spools of matching German thread, and a plastic zipper.

The zipper I intend to use to turn a too-small wrap around skirt into a non-wrap around skirt. The knit is for homemade attempts at clothes I’ve seen on Etsy but can’t afford.

Saturday night, Teh BF took me out after he got off work for a few drinks but I had a raging headache and felt like I was coming down with something. He took me home. I slept really hard.

~ ~ ~
Sunday I made a dress out of the dark brown fabric. I did some basic math in my head and cut out a bodice – a tube top, in essence – then cut out a four panel skirt. Then I realized that 9″ x 4 = 36″ and I was going for 38″ and I hadn’t left enough room for seams. I was worried that I was wasting $12 worth of fabric on a dress that I’d stupidly cut too small to wear.

Rayon knit is very stretchy; in actual fact I had to take in 3″ inches up the back seam of the dress just to keep it from sliding off my body.

I reinforced the seams at the waist and the hem and called it complete. It’s a knit tube top with a skirt on it – a blatant copy of a dress I bought from Etsy.

With the other fabric, I’m going to make the same dress with long sleeves and a loose cowl. Just in time for summer! Because I’m a genius like that.

Sewing slinky knit fabric on a regular machine sucks. I lost a couple of centimeters of fabric when the machine decided to stuff it through the plate down into where the bobbin lives… luckily I was able to hide the tear in the finished item, but having the machine eat my fabric was irritating. I want a serger. And if I actually continue to sew for awhile, maybe I’ll treat myself to one.

~ ~ ~
My first three calls today were from customers canceling their service.

During my interview here, I said that I what I wanted to do was tech support. “Not billing, not collections. Tech support. That’s what I’m good at. It’s a waste to put me in any other queue. I like to do third tier the most.”

Management managed to keep me out of the billing queue for quite awhile, maybe five months or so, but now a solid half of my job is apologizing for billing SNAFUs and explaining to morons that the Internet does-indeedily-do cost actual money and that when they don’t pay for it their account gets closed and their mail gets erased from the server. Permanently.

It’s a joy.

~~~
All but two of my first ten calls dropped out for 2 to 15 seconds. Two of them dropped off altogether.

Turns out that my freaking headset has failed.

Luckily, MR had one that he could give me so I’m back in business. I cannot even imagine doing tech support with a handset under my chin for 6 hours.

~~~
Today I received the two demi hoodies I ordered from Etsy with my some of my tax return. They were supposed to be custom made and I’d requested extra ease in the upper arms, but the blue one doesn’t fit at all because the arms are too tight and the hem is huge. The brown one’s okay, though.

~~~
I need a vacation. I don’t do much but sleep and work and eat and go to one of the two or three restaurants and bars Teh BF and I have added to our routine – and we’re very much following a routine. We do the same things every week, sleep at his place certain nights, sleep apart others. I’m starting to feel like W2 is too small and has nothing new to offer me. Which means I need a vacation because my attitude is going to shit.

I’m not gigging because the band leader is pissed off at me for some reason apparent only to him. I think it has to do with my turning down a gig last December: he asked if I could do it, but I had family stuff that night so I said no. He hasn’t booked me since. (Months later he gave me two pieces of information that I suspect were very important: [1.] the venue wouldn’t book the gig without me, and [2.] he really needed the money that week. I’m not clear on why he didn’t tell me that at the time; I would have complained, of course, but I’d have blown off my G’ma’s party to do the damn gig if he’d really needed me to.)

I’m not yet willing to bend to his demand for face time; I really don’t want to go listen to him say whatever it is that he has to say about what a bitch/non team-player/bad friend/prima donna he’s now decided I am. I’ve emailed but haven’t called him, because what’s really pissing me off is this: we both know that if I want to play there’s really no other game in town and I’ll have to call him eventually. That sort of manipulation just pisses me off. He’s also been telling the other band members that I think they all suck. High school much?

I’d like to audition for Grease with the local theatre company (I’d love to play Rizzo, though I suspect that I’m far too old to do so now) but my work schedule won’t permit me to do a musical. I work until 8 every night so there’s no way I could make rehearsals. Maybe I could trade my beloved closing shift with another tech and do a musical in the fall.

~~~
I lose my temper easily with customers. I say “no,” to them a lot. I talk over them because they tell me all kinds of dumb shit that isn’t germane, or they argue with me, or they’re just plain pissed off and aren’t listening.

I spend far too many minutes each week waiting for people who have called me to boot up their machines. Who the fuck calls tech support and doesn’t expect to need to have their machine on? It’s like going to an auto shop without your car and expecting them to be able to fix it.

See? I told you I need a vacation.

A vacation and a serger!