The past week has been a week long reason to drink. Perhaps thanks in part to it being a five payday month I have kept my word of a previous post and have not felt guilty about the amount of money that I've spent over the long weekend. My monthly total is now approaching October's current high, but with good reason after all the fun I had these past several days.
That said, it was also a sort of farewell celebration of sorts to that free spending out at the bars as well as in my daily habits in general. With my plans to quit my job impending, I am going to have to watch my spending a bit more scrupulously once again. $3 dollar beers and shots have once again increasingly grown annoying and I'm going to be looking to instead go out to bars with some sort of bargain (ie, Essex St. Pub). As well, I haven't been as focused on posting here and have even grown sloppy in some of my daily habits--sleeping (too much), reading (too little), cleanliness in my apartment--that could use a second wind as far as attention paid goes.
It's nice to think that the cold weather alone would keep me in more on the weekends and cut back on the spending, but a colder house is also hard to stay in. Either way, beginning today I've begun to take the necessary steps to be a bit more prepared to be focused once again.
Then again, it is only one day and the bars are open everyday.
Showing posts with label jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jobs. Show all posts
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Monday, August 6, 2007
Something for Nothing
I just heard that the national minimum wage was just increased last week from $5.15 to $5.85.
Who knew there were fucking hippies in Congress? Couldn’t they have gotten real jobs like all the other hippies of ages past and become lawyers instead? Who else would pass such legislation?
Now a worker making minimum wage will be making upwards of $28 more a week for the exact same amount of work they had been paid to do before. (Or, if they really catch on, they might see that they can work five hours less a week and still make the same amount of money, but who thinks like that?).
This new increase in money will put a full-time minimum wage worker even more comfortably over the poverty level (currently seemed to be $9800 for one person). Whereas he previously would have been $912 above the threshold, he would now be a much more comfortable $2,368 above it. And now even a parent supporting a family of four (whose poverty level is deemed to be an even $20,000) making minimum wage no longer would have to work 3,883 hours over the course of a year just to reach their poverty level, but instead only 3,417 hours. That’s 466 hours—more than an hour a day!—just handed over to these workers for nothing.
Obviously this is beneficial for the workers. But what about a hypothetical company? Let’s say a mere multi-million dollar company (they can’t all be billion dollar companies) had 1,000 employees working for minimum wage for forty hours a week over the course of a 52 week work year (I’m assuming they don’t get any vacation). Suddenly this company has to pay each of those 1,000 workers those $28 whole dollars more a week over the course of 52 weeks for doing the exact same amount of work! That’s $1,456 more per employee, coming out to $1,456,000 straight out of the company’s profits. Just like that. Gone.
That’s not the worst of it either. You know who really suffers here? The stockholders. Suddenly not only are workers working the same amount for more money, but now stockholders’ money is working even less for them than it was before.
One person gets something for nothing and now others are getting a little less for nothing? Seems a bit disproportionate. I’m beginning to see just how unfair Capitalism can be.
It also makes me wish I had a minimum wage paying job. It seems like they're getting quite a sweet deal these days.
Who knew there were fucking hippies in Congress? Couldn’t they have gotten real jobs like all the other hippies of ages past and become lawyers instead? Who else would pass such legislation?
Now a worker making minimum wage will be making upwards of $28 more a week for the exact same amount of work they had been paid to do before. (Or, if they really catch on, they might see that they can work five hours less a week and still make the same amount of money, but who thinks like that?).
This new increase in money will put a full-time minimum wage worker even more comfortably over the poverty level (currently seemed to be $9800 for one person). Whereas he previously would have been $912 above the threshold, he would now be a much more comfortable $2,368 above it. And now even a parent supporting a family of four (whose poverty level is deemed to be an even $20,000) making minimum wage no longer would have to work 3,883 hours over the course of a year just to reach their poverty level, but instead only 3,417 hours. That’s 466 hours—more than an hour a day!—just handed over to these workers for nothing.
Obviously this is beneficial for the workers. But what about a hypothetical company? Let’s say a mere multi-million dollar company (they can’t all be billion dollar companies) had 1,000 employees working for minimum wage for forty hours a week over the course of a 52 week work year (I’m assuming they don’t get any vacation). Suddenly this company has to pay each of those 1,000 workers those $28 whole dollars more a week over the course of 52 weeks for doing the exact same amount of work! That’s $1,456 more per employee, coming out to $1,456,000 straight out of the company’s profits. Just like that. Gone.
That’s not the worst of it either. You know who really suffers here? The stockholders. Suddenly not only are workers working the same amount for more money, but now stockholders’ money is working even less for them than it was before.
One person gets something for nothing and now others are getting a little less for nothing? Seems a bit disproportionate. I’m beginning to see just how unfair Capitalism can be.
It also makes me wish I had a minimum wage paying job. It seems like they're getting quite a sweet deal these days.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Job Replacements
As I slowly approach employment—two possibilities fell through yesterday though two more came up at the end of the day—I have been debating as to whether or not to ever here specifically mention what it is that I will be doing to pay my bills once I find a job.
On the one hand, as most of us have somewhere inherited the belief that anyone who is underemployed should immediately feel ashamed of their job, I would either feel the need to specifically mention my job to dispel such an unnecessary absurd notion or for no other reason than to prove that I have nothing to shamefully or regretfully hide. Yet, on the other hand is the great fallacy whereby we define ourselves by jobs and thus to never mention it directly would be a direct assault upon this, yet another, absurd notion.
It is not in knowing full well I will more than likely either find a $7/hour job at a store or restaurant or an office job that might pay slightly more that I do not feel compelled in any way to specifically mention my future job. For even if I were to find a job as a Scientist or [insert some other widely respected profession here] I would not specifically mention it for, as I have said here before, I see no difference between one job and another: they are all annoying, yet still necessary, interruptions. Besides the only two truly necessary occupations in the world (Bartenders and Doctors, though, besides the vast difference in required education, there is little difference between the two) everything else, Lawyers and Politicians more than all else combined, are simply unnecessary roles we have agreed to become; to play for pay upon this stage. To even recognize my job in my attempt to work as little as possible is a contradiction I am not willing to take up here, doubters that I am ashamed of something be damned.
Still, if one is still stubbornly holding onto the idea that our job is a defining quality to what we are, one needs look no further than all the factories, mills and vacant shops now closed in Buffalo, NY. (Perhaps it the abundance of such reminders of the temporal aspects of jobs that Buffalo has that brought me so willingly back?) The moment those jobs no longer produced profit was the moment those jobs were no longer in existence and the men and women who had put in more than half of their lives into that factory or the shopkeeper who lost his savings were suddenly turned away and the very thing that they allowed themselves to be defined by was suddenly taken from and deprived of them. Again, nothing personal, it was just business.
I often think just how replaceable we each are to our jobs, just as the factory workers of previous generations were to their jobs, and worry just how soon the office and service jobs that people are defining themselves by in our current job market might be gone as well. Because it still is, after all, nothing personal, just business. Those rules will never change.
So while I continue to look for a job I keep these things in mind while remembering to never allow a job to be any more irreplaceable than I am to that job.
On the one hand, as most of us have somewhere inherited the belief that anyone who is underemployed should immediately feel ashamed of their job, I would either feel the need to specifically mention my job to dispel such an unnecessary absurd notion or for no other reason than to prove that I have nothing to shamefully or regretfully hide. Yet, on the other hand is the great fallacy whereby we define ourselves by jobs and thus to never mention it directly would be a direct assault upon this, yet another, absurd notion.
It is not in knowing full well I will more than likely either find a $7/hour job at a store or restaurant or an office job that might pay slightly more that I do not feel compelled in any way to specifically mention my future job. For even if I were to find a job as a Scientist or [insert some other widely respected profession here] I would not specifically mention it for, as I have said here before, I see no difference between one job and another: they are all annoying, yet still necessary, interruptions. Besides the only two truly necessary occupations in the world (Bartenders and Doctors, though, besides the vast difference in required education, there is little difference between the two) everything else, Lawyers and Politicians more than all else combined, are simply unnecessary roles we have agreed to become; to play for pay upon this stage. To even recognize my job in my attempt to work as little as possible is a contradiction I am not willing to take up here, doubters that I am ashamed of something be damned.
Still, if one is still stubbornly holding onto the idea that our job is a defining quality to what we are, one needs look no further than all the factories, mills and vacant shops now closed in Buffalo, NY. (Perhaps it the abundance of such reminders of the temporal aspects of jobs that Buffalo has that brought me so willingly back?) The moment those jobs no longer produced profit was the moment those jobs were no longer in existence and the men and women who had put in more than half of their lives into that factory or the shopkeeper who lost his savings were suddenly turned away and the very thing that they allowed themselves to be defined by was suddenly taken from and deprived of them. Again, nothing personal, it was just business.
I often think just how replaceable we each are to our jobs, just as the factory workers of previous generations were to their jobs, and worry just how soon the office and service jobs that people are defining themselves by in our current job market might be gone as well. Because it still is, after all, nothing personal, just business. Those rules will never change.
So while I continue to look for a job I keep these things in mind while remembering to never allow a job to be any more irreplaceable than I am to that job.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Heat and Humility
The nearly unbearable heat and humidity that last couples of days has basically prevented me from doing just about anything other than irritably and immaturely overreacting to the constant sticky feeling that I’ve had for the last three days. When I’ve ridden my bike that breeze is only a temporary relief to the full body sweat that is awaiting me as soon as I stop, so I haven't ridden that much. It’s been so hard for me to concentrate to even so much read that I watched a movie yesterday, something I rarely do, and the entire baseball All-Star Game tonight, something I probably haven’t done since I was twelve (just a couple of years ago if you ask the right person), just to take my mind off of the heat. And I swear that the next fucking bug that lands on my monitor (I write this in the late night dark, undried from a shower just to be able to sit still long enough to hopefully finish it) just might land a perfectly justifiable punch that will more than likely break my hand rather than the monitor. And yet I’m still not convinced that I won’t do it.
Still, I was able to get my weekly food shopping in this morning. When your house is on the eastern end of a duplex and facing south (or north for that matter), there isn’t much in the way of what is popularly known as “air movement” brought on by wind blowing into your house unless you have a fan or two (we only have one and it’s on the opposite side of the house from my room). This lack of movement creates a somewhat—that is: somewhat insufferable—warm, uncomfortable, and still air that sits smugly in the house all night and day. If you manage to get any sleep, it’s not even that good of a sleep and makes you wish you didn’t even bother wasting your time.
So when one finally steps out of the house from this sort of setting, it seems a lot cooler than it is. So as my roommate and I walked out to ride our bikes to Wegman’s, we thought it was far cooler than it was. Only after getting to Wegman’s and leaving did we finally realize otherwise.
(A bug came by again and I tried to smack the shit out of it—I went with more of a slap—but I goddamned missed him. It won’t happen again.)
After unloading those groceries we then went to my new favorite place for food, and where I now do the majority of my grocery shopping, Guercio and Son’s market over on Grant St. By no means a well-kept secret, as evident by the lines always accompanying the deli and the checkouts, I nevertheless had never gone there until just a couple weeks ago. It is now a weekly stop if not more frequent.
For a store that has an old-time feel in the face of the overabundance of a Wegman’s and the impersonal convenience of convenient store, it offers exactly all I need in the manner of both abundance and convenience. Half the bike ride that it is for me to Wegman’s and, by all noted calculations, cheaper or on par with most of the items that I buy there, it’s an obvious preference for me
(And why in the hell does my left hand smell like a goddamned flower/weed all of a sudden?)
Combined between the two stores I spent just over $24 for the week. Other than the half gallons of milk that I’ve been buying at the Lexington General Store just across the street for $.99 (better even than a gallon deal at Wegman’s), that will pretty much be the entirety of my spending for food this week. In fact, it is just under half of the $52.23 I’ve spent thus far for at least two weeks’ worth of food, putting me right in the $100-$125 per month on food, which I will be tallying as a separate field and figure that it will either be the second or third biggest expense each month.
This is more than affordable enough, especially considering that today I found out that we haven’t paid our deposit in full and we’ll have to pay a little extra over the next few months in rent to even that out, thus giving me my first unexpected expenditure of the year. This normally wouldn’t be a big problem except that normally people have a job to pay such bills. To make matters a little more irritating I finally did my federal tax return today (filed for an extension in April due to a long overdue W-2) and am getting $100 less that I originally thought and planned for. This of course means that I have to step up my job search immediately.
And by step up I mean begin. And that might be the most irritating idea of the entire irritating few days.
(You never really know just how much you have to look at the keyboard for characters like ‘$’ or parenthesis until you try typing in the dark, which you’re only doing in hopes to spare yourself of the one more degree the light would add to the room.)
I hear that it isn’t supposed to be more than 80 degrees for the next week and I certainly hope this is true. Because my room still feels like 95 degrees, I haven’t got a decent night’s sleep in three days and probably won’t again tonight, bugs keep coming out of nowhere and in different shapes (just had to kill a spider spinning down from the ceiling that went right in front of my face), the beads of water that I didn’t dry from my body now feel like bugs so that they very water I meant to cool and calm me is now further irritating me, and I think my right hand now smells like that weed or flower as well.
(And now my computer, with propitious timing, is acting obnoxiously slow.)
If it’s the little things in life that make it enjoyable then it’s certainly true that it’s the little things that make it sometimes insanely irritable.
At least I have food and a place I like to get it.
Still, I was able to get my weekly food shopping in this morning. When your house is on the eastern end of a duplex and facing south (or north for that matter), there isn’t much in the way of what is popularly known as “air movement” brought on by wind blowing into your house unless you have a fan or two (we only have one and it’s on the opposite side of the house from my room). This lack of movement creates a somewhat—that is: somewhat insufferable—warm, uncomfortable, and still air that sits smugly in the house all night and day. If you manage to get any sleep, it’s not even that good of a sleep and makes you wish you didn’t even bother wasting your time.
So when one finally steps out of the house from this sort of setting, it seems a lot cooler than it is. So as my roommate and I walked out to ride our bikes to Wegman’s, we thought it was far cooler than it was. Only after getting to Wegman’s and leaving did we finally realize otherwise.
(A bug came by again and I tried to smack the shit out of it—I went with more of a slap—but I goddamned missed him. It won’t happen again.)
After unloading those groceries we then went to my new favorite place for food, and where I now do the majority of my grocery shopping, Guercio and Son’s market over on Grant St. By no means a well-kept secret, as evident by the lines always accompanying the deli and the checkouts, I nevertheless had never gone there until just a couple weeks ago. It is now a weekly stop if not more frequent.
For a store that has an old-time feel in the face of the overabundance of a Wegman’s and the impersonal convenience of convenient store, it offers exactly all I need in the manner of both abundance and convenience. Half the bike ride that it is for me to Wegman’s and, by all noted calculations, cheaper or on par with most of the items that I buy there, it’s an obvious preference for me
(And why in the hell does my left hand smell like a goddamned flower/weed all of a sudden?)
Combined between the two stores I spent just over $24 for the week. Other than the half gallons of milk that I’ve been buying at the Lexington General Store just across the street for $.99 (better even than a gallon deal at Wegman’s), that will pretty much be the entirety of my spending for food this week. In fact, it is just under half of the $52.23 I’ve spent thus far for at least two weeks’ worth of food, putting me right in the $100-$125 per month on food, which I will be tallying as a separate field and figure that it will either be the second or third biggest expense each month.
This is more than affordable enough, especially considering that today I found out that we haven’t paid our deposit in full and we’ll have to pay a little extra over the next few months in rent to even that out, thus giving me my first unexpected expenditure of the year. This normally wouldn’t be a big problem except that normally people have a job to pay such bills. To make matters a little more irritating I finally did my federal tax return today (filed for an extension in April due to a long overdue W-2) and am getting $100 less that I originally thought and planned for. This of course means that I have to step up my job search immediately.
And by step up I mean begin. And that might be the most irritating idea of the entire irritating few days.
(You never really know just how much you have to look at the keyboard for characters like ‘$’ or parenthesis until you try typing in the dark, which you’re only doing in hopes to spare yourself of the one more degree the light would add to the room.)
I hear that it isn’t supposed to be more than 80 degrees for the next week and I certainly hope this is true. Because my room still feels like 95 degrees, I haven’t got a decent night’s sleep in three days and probably won’t again tonight, bugs keep coming out of nowhere and in different shapes (just had to kill a spider spinning down from the ceiling that went right in front of my face), the beads of water that I didn’t dry from my body now feel like bugs so that they very water I meant to cool and calm me is now further irritating me, and I think my right hand now smells like that weed or flower as well.
(And now my computer, with propitious timing, is acting obnoxiously slow.)
If it’s the little things in life that make it enjoyable then it’s certainly true that it’s the little things that make it sometimes insanely irritable.
At least I have food and a place I like to get it.
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