general
Fun on the Phone
I’m looking for a second job to get a little extra money in the bank. We want to buy a house, and every little bit helps.
I was looking through the classifieds at Mountain Xpress when I found the perfect job scam. The nature of the company was pretty obvious from the advertisement:
Companies desperately need employees to assemble products at home. No selling; any hours. $500 weekly potential. Information: 1-985-646-1700, Department NC-6529. (Source)
Up to 2k a month, and you don't even have to leave your house? Sounds too good to be true, so of course it is. But I like playing the sucker from time to time, so I called.
"Are you calling about the ad in the paper?" a woman asked when I called. No greeting, no pleasantries -— straight to the chase.
“Yes,” I reply.
“Is this the first time you’ve called?” my inquisitor asks. If red flags hadn’t been up when I first read the ad, they would be up now.
“Yes,” I respond.
“Are you calling for yourself or for someone else?” Now comes a bit of a puzzle. If this weren’t such an obvious scam, I might in addition to myself be calling for my wife. Two people can put together twice as much cheap plastic crap as one person.
Thinking all this, I hesitate, the reply, “I’m not sure.” I was going to ask for clarification, but the pleasant lady didn’t give me a chance.
“Well, you call back when you are sure.” Click.
Being rude to me on the phone is not a good idea. I like to call back. And so I do. Unfortunately, another woman answers the phone.
I decide to go through the whole monologue.
It turns out there are simply dozens of companies out there who just need my help. “What will you be doing?” the operator asks rhetorically and almost breathlessly. I can put together wooden CD shelves, jewelry boxes, and so on. This fine company will put me in contact with all these other companies who need my help. All for just a small fee of forty-three dollars. “And you don’t even need to worry about that, because we have a money back guarantee, written -- on page three of our brochure.” It’s just too bad I don’t have one of these sitting in front of me. Still -talking- reading on the same breath as she started the -conversation- monologue with, the kind lady tells me that I can put this small, insignificant fee on a credit card, or I can send a check--why, I can even do it C.O.D.
“Come to me baby! Come to me C.O.D.” I think. She probably wouldn’t get the allusion. (Do you? Quick, quick -- name the song and artist. And no Googling!) Besides, I couldn’t get a word in even if I greased it up really well, so I just smile to myself and continue listening.
Finally, I sense the spiel is winding down, and I get ready to say, “I’m not really interested.” Here it comes… “And so do you have any questions, sir?”
“No, but I don’t think I’m interested.”
“Something-unintelligible-about-four-syllables-long” comes the staccato reply, then click!
I bemoan my poor memory: “Why, oh why can’t I remember this woman’s name?” I have to call back. There’s just no choice.
It’s a moral imperative. (Quick -- what movie?)
I get to the “Is this the first time you’ve called” point, and say, “No -- actually it’s the third time.”
“Oh?”
“I’m just calling to suggest you hire some operators with better people skills,” I continue.
“I know,” she sympathizes. She confesses that they’ve been getting a lot of complaints. I think, “Sounds like you should be monitoring your calls, with the little announcement at the beginning of the phone call that we’re all so used to hearing now.”
We chat for a couple of minutes. There’s no way for anyone to track down who it was that took my two calls, she explains. All the lines are directed to the one phone number, and there’s just a room full of people answering these phones.
“Well, then I suggest you get better telephone hardware, because tracking who answered a call like that is a pretty basic thing,” I explain. Whoosh -- over her head.
Should I ask for a supervisor? She probably wouldn’t know what one is. “We just clock in, start answering the phones -- we don’t even know who we’re working for.”
After I hung up, I thought about calling back again, but what for? These jerks have to deal with enough jerks like me, I’m sure.
They’re just tryin’ to make a buck…
No Non-Autistic Child Left Behind
One thing that can cause massive amounts of problems for autistic children is lack of consistency. Our classroom is strewn with visual reminders of one sort or another to help the children stay calm by giving them a pattern to their day. At the basic level, it consists of schedules given to each student -- rather, placed in "his/her" area -- that outline what we'll be doing the whole day.
Unexpected changes can send more profoundly autistic children into spirals of panic, which manifest themselves usually in a meltdown of screaming and other “typical” autistic behaviors.
Even with this, some children have trouble navigating through the day without having someone assist them exclusively throughout the day. These services are supplied by the Autism Society, which receives a great deal of federal funding.
Well, the Federal funding has been cut, and that means that all services in our area end 17 March. No tapering off; no warning -- just BOOM!
“Sorry Joey, but your one-on-one had to leave. You won’t see him again. The entire structure of your school day will now be instantly and violently disrupted. Have fun!”
Thanks, W. Really -- No Child (who isn’t autistic, and whose parents are middle or upper class and contribute to my campaign) will be Left Behind.
Peter Piper Left a Peck of Peppers
What would you do if you were walking into your apartment building and dropped a jar of hot peppers on the sidewalk? You'd probably come back and clean it up. Most people would.
What would you do if someone at your apartment building did it late Sunday morning and it was still there Sunday evening? (Apparently "most people" don't live in our building.)
In my "fury," I made a sign...
Immature? Sure, a little. "I'd have just cleaned it up," a co-worker laughed. That's sort of the point, though...
Oh well -- it was amusing at the time.
The Neighbors
Kinga and I are looking to buy a house -- sort of. Kinga and I have begun something we expected to start only after a year and a half in the States: we’re looking for a house. Our thinking was based on our likelihood of getting a loan, our lack of any kind of down payment, and initially, our lack of a job or any sense of security. But we’ve been pre-approved at a couple of different places; we have decent jobs, with the promise of it only getting better; and we’re sick and tired of paying several hundred dollars a month for nothing.
Granted, the rent is shockingly low compared to what I was paying in Boston. In 1999, I was paying $850 for a one-bedroom with barely enough room to turn around in. That place is certainly over a grand a month now. We don’t even pay seven hundred for a two-bedroom place. In the summer, when we were looking at the place, I laughed when told that the apartment is spacious but the rent “is a little high.”
The real estate market here is simply going through the roof. It’s tough to find anything under $150,000 that doesn’t need massive renovation. It’s easy to find massive homes:
Two decades ago, million-dollar homes were a rarity in these hills but not anymore. In 2002, Buncombe County had 38 homes with an assessed tax value of $1 million or more. In this year’s revaluation, the number will jump to 484. […]
“It’s just boomed,” Roberts said. “What we’ve noticed is there’s a lot of new construction of those type of homes, with those type of high-end materials: slate roofs, unique woods, specialty tile. The other side of that is that people will take some of the older homes and greatly remodel the entire home or add a whole new wing, and that pushes it over $1 million.”
The luxury housing boom is not news to Ron Olin and his wife, who moved here 12 years ago from Texas. According to the new revaluations, the Olins own the highest-assessed home in Buncombe County, a new, 15,449-square-foot French chateau style house in Biltmore Forest valued at just over $6 million.
Olin, a money manager who loves the Asheville area for its scenic beauty, climate and amenities, has no problem paying his fair share of property taxes to support local government. But one point sticks in his craw.
“Once we’re in the house, maybe it’s worth that much, but we haven’t even moved in yet,” Olin said. “They did an interim assessment in 2005, and we know they raised it a lot.”
The assessed value last year was about $4.6 million, but as the home nears completion it becomes more valuable. With amenities including an indoor swimming pool, an elevator, a hot tub, sauna and seven fireplaces, the price tag keeps rising. (Citizen-Times)
It’s because of people like the Olins that this area is soon going to become so expensive that no one can afford to live here unless they’ve got a six-figure income. Maybe not that bad, but it is fairly ridiculous.
Interest rates are yet another thorn in our side. We think enviously of those who bought homes a couple of years ago when the interest rate was not bearing down on seven percent. My brother-in-law took his home loan in Swiss francs, and pays some ridiculously low percentage – under four, I think. At today’s rate of 6.38%, a loan of $130,000 would generate monthly payments of $808.06. At 4.00%, it would be $620.65, with about 40% of that going to the principal.
And so instead of looking at actual single-family homes, we considered a townhouse or condo. What do you actually own in that? If it’s a townhouse, you might own the land directly under your portion of the building, but nothing else. With condos, you jointly own the land, along with everyone else in the same building. At least it was something like that. I can’t quite recall how our realtor explained it. I’m not really interested in the land, I guess, so I didn’t pay much attention. In the end, we decided that all we’d be doing is changing landlords. And so we’re looking for a moderate “fixer-upper.”
One thing we’ve learned quickly is the sometimes-tragic effect of neighbors on property value. We found a very warm, two-bedroom place with hardwood floors and a nice floor plan that was completely ruined by the neighbor’s lack of any sense of responsibility for the appearance of his house. The yard filled with junk; Christmas lights still hanging; a balding lawn – it was awful.
“These people will never get their asking price because of that,” our realtor said. So you lose money because your neighbor’s a complete slob.
We went to the south of the city where we found a rather nice home just about a mile from Biltmore Forest – Ron Olin’s neighborhood. If there’s somewhere in you don’t have to worry about the neighborhood, you’d think it’s the area less than a mile from the most expensive neighborhood in the whole city.
Wrong.
We pulled into the driveway and new immediately that there was no way we’d even consider the house. The view from the back-bedroom window explains it.
Hiking
Snow Storm!
We’ve finally gotten a bit of snow here, and the reaction has been comical.
Thursday there was a bit of powered sugar on the ground – nothing serious, but enough to make it kind of white-ish outside. I didn’t think anything of it until I was about to head out to school. “Maybe there’s a delay,” I thought. As staff I’d still have to be there at regular time, but still – I’d allow myself maybe fifteen minutes. I pulled up the Asheville City School’s site (after loading IE – the site doesn’t render properly in a standards-compliant browser) and suddenly realized I had a lot more than fifteen minutes. “School closed.”
Friday it was similar. At three in the afternoon, the principal came over the intercom saying that she knew people were eager to get out and stock up for the weekend. What? Well, there’s a storm coming, don’t you know?
It hit Saturday night, while we were at friends’ house just north of Asheville. It was snowing enough there that we drove home on I-26 at about thirty-five to forty miles an hour. In town, there was significantly less accumulation. Still, had it been a day later, I’d have another free day – and another day tacked onto the end of the year.
The point of all this? People here simply overreact to snow. Thursday there was maybe an inch and a half on the ground and people were panicking. Right now there’s about the same, and all the kids in the area are probably convinced that there’ll be no school tomorrow.
If northern Europe were run in a similar manner, there’d be no school from November to April!
Malkin Reconsidered
Thud pointed out an interesting piece via email by August Pollak regarding Malkin's "selective memory." Several points taken.
But...there's always one of those...
Pollak writes,
Are the cartoons freedom of speech? Well, yeah. Of course you have the right to print shitty, racist cartoons that serve no purpose but to inflame Arab sentiment and make racist right-wingers feel good about themselves.
"Inflame Arab sentiment?" It's done a great deal more than that.
Yet I can be extremely angry and yet keep my urge for violence in check.
If I piss someone off and get hit, even if I deliberately tried to piss the person off, he's still responsible for his actions. No matter what I said.
Self-control.
Same applies here.
Pollak accuses Malkin of being a racist. I don't really follow Malkin's commentary -- scratch that. I don't follow it at all. Maybe she is a racist. Maybe she isn't. The "right-wing" part of the epithet is true enough.
Still, does that somehow disqualify what the pictures (which she's simply assembled from various web sites) tell us about the reaction of a fairly significant portion of Muslims? Sure, the tag, "No, you go to hell," is a little silly -- but I do think the pictures speak for themselves. Am I saying all Muslims are reacting irrationally violently? No -- I am only privy to what the media presents to me.
Still, while purposely insulting someone is immoral, wanting to behead someone because of it is on quite another level.
One of the best things about being a teacher
is an unexpected snow day — when you’re fully dressed, ready to head off to work, and you look outside and notice it’s snowy and icy…
I loved them until I got to college, when I realized, “Hey, I pay for this day whether I get an education or not — not good.” (To be fair, only one or two days were classes canceled due to weather as an undergrad.) Now it’s come full circle.
Conversion