About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
I’ve been needing to call the insurance company to deal with the removal of my mom from the insurance. I knew it’d be a bit more complicated than taking my brother off because MaDucky’s actually the policyholder, so I’d been dragging my heels a bit. Also because I wanted to compare rates with other companies while I was at it.
Instead of the usual, “So, you know how we agreed to take your mom off the insurance? Have you done it yet?” conversation, PaDucky actually told me that he’d spoken to the insurance agent and had gotten a couple quotes for the new insurance, and made some inquiries about how much we’d save when the truck comes off the insurance.
Holy … cow …
He’s NEVER handled any of our paperwork. Never. He ferries the tax documents every year, but that’s because he’s had a working relationship with the accountant for more than ten years, and it’s best for him to go chat with the guy. But bills? Rent? Medical records? Banking? Nope. Nope. No and no. He won’t even go to the bank! I’m glad, but still mostly in shock.
Something’s finally pushed him to take the initiative to do something more around here, and I’m sorry it had to be MaDucky’s complete deterioration of health.
I’m super excited to chop that up into the categories I’ve finally settled on. In combination with my remaining $4800 once intended for tax payment, I have $5400 to “play” with.
$2000 will go to the emergency fund. I don’t have quite six months’ worth of expenses in there, so it’s going to be e-fund’s e-fund. I’d rather not kick up the bar to 20k yet, I’d like to enjoy having a full goal bar for a little longer. $1250 goes to auto maintenance. $1250 goes to auto insurance. This feels like a windfall. I usually use “put together” (ie: reimbursements, etc.) money for the insurance because I was having trouble squeezing any more money out of the paycheck. Now I have a nice cushion! That leaves $900. $200 goes to my expense fund because work refused to reimburse me for something they’d promised to, and given the climate these days, I’m sure I won’t be able to force it out of them. Oh well.
$700 is now intended for ME!!! I struggled with this, but I’ve been trying to learn to how to live for me at least a little bit, and letting myself have 13% of a “windfall” isn’t the end of the world. The bulk of it is going towards being really responsible, after all.
$300 was earmarked for Con, of which $92 is already spent, so I’ll have up to $200 in gas and spending money for 5 days.
The other $400 will be my travel fund for the year. I could take a trip to Phoenix (tickets are approx. $140), I could go to Oregon (use an award ticket and have a wee bit of spending money), and then maybe even get in another trip to New York (again, use an award ticket, have a little transportation and spending money). That would definitely be the end of all that money, but it’d be fantastic! I have over 150 vacation hours accumulated, and will stop accruing soon, I might as well plan to have some fun and clear my head.
I’m thinking of other trips I wish I could squeeze in: BF’s family invited me on their two weeks to Cancun and backpacking in Belize. (Backpacking! In Belize!!) A coworker’s going to a timeshare in Hawaii for two weeks, I just pay for food and transportation. (Hawaii!!)
A couple of our student workers got their jobs here because their parents know the boss’s wife. One kid gets away with blatant insubordination, as described by a coworker:
1) When I asked him to write down instructions, he straight out told me no, and 2) When I asked him to look into a hard copy reviewer, he told me to “Chill.”
This coworker was put in charge of the insubordinate one, and wanted to know what punishment she could dole out if the kid was rude or refused to comply again. LB: Nothing. At most, a talk.
Nuh-uh! No wonder the kid doesn’t feel the need to do squat! His buddy was trained by me, and in MY day? If you didn’t want to do what I asked of you, you could go home. Forget authority, I just about kicked him out one day for talking back, and he never defied me again. I was younger, and rasher, then, so I know that maybe it wasn’t the best way to deal with things, but I’ll tell you what. It worked. He’s not contradicted me, and has been working diligently ever since. If he slacks off, it’s only a little bit and certainly not blatantly surfing the ‘net in front of me.
Another student, BB’s favored family friend, was finally fired after her list of responsibilities that she could handle correctly had dwindled from twelve to fifteen tasks to ONE. She also had the freedom to set her own schedule, but never showed up on time, if she showed up at all. I believe we were at a 1:3 show:no show ratio. The firing didn’t take, as BB undermined LB by telling her to come back anyway. Then she up and quit because she was bored here; privately, she told me it was probably best for the office so we could get a better coworker.
Guess what? She’s out of work again, a year and some later, and BB has decided to create a job for her, instead of looking at what help we really need on staff. Our already strained resources will now have to extend to putting a useless employee on the payroll so that BB feels good about himself, and the rest of us are just a little more screwed.
Daaaang, reeee-diculous. It’s all about nepotism and cronyism.
The funny thing is I can’t get het up about it anymore. It is what it is.
Back in the day, I was relatively decent at office politics. I knew who the enemies likely were, after a while, after a few hard knocks, and learned when to keep my mouth shut and when to talk, mostly. I did ok for myself. But over the last several months, I’ve lost my groove. Somewhere along the path of chaos and upheaval, I just plain lost my way.
Well, no more. I may not be long for this job, but I need to learn from this mess and get my political sea legs back under me. Determination alone, though, hasn’t been enough, so I’ve ordered this book for a refresher and perhaps new insights that I haven’t learned through observation:
In Ms. Miniducky style, I didn’t just order it from Amazon and add another $15 worth of filler order to get my free shipping, though I was tempted. I ordered through ebates for a 4% rebate (less than the 5% from Fatwallet) but that triggered my first purchase bonus of $10. Yay! Here’s hoping this has good information.
Here are the two steps back, where’s my one step forward??
Yar! Not only has the rebate not hit my bank account a day early, my car’s arbitration date was moved, without rhyme or reason, to June 20th! It was originally scheduled for May 6th, so I was anxious to hear the outcome today, only to find out that the case was transferred to another adjuster and the date was moved back more than a month.
Ok, I’m just whining about the rebate thing, it’s not like it’s late, after all.
Holy cheezits. I’ve got Bag Lady Syndrome today, and I’ve got it bad. I’m thinking to myself: 15k is good for an emergency (aka: I quit!) fund. But what about all those other things that could happen, like carproblems ? That’s almost as certain as death and taxes, especially in the Ducky household. Or something goes terribly wrong with the house? Or if our rent suddenly increases astronomically? How would I cope with money-draining chaos if I’m reducing every expense I can think of and maximizing my income now, and still having a rough go of it?
PaDucky’s out of a job again because the company he was working for went out of business. He’s having a really hard time finding another one because of age discrimination. Prospective employers are telling him that they’re looking for younger people, which is foolish and rude. I wasn’t expecting to rely on his income any time soon, but he’ll certainly have to have one if I’m to implement my plan to move out.
Instead of panicking or becoming anxious, or resigning myself to living here forevermore, I kicked into super-analytical mode:
I should keep the 15k as a cash cushion for job loss.
Then start another emergency fund for catastrophes such as the above.
And bulk up the car maintenance fund by, say, another couple thousand.
And have a supplemental fund for rent, just in case the rent goes up insanely. [This is a possibility, our rent hasn’t been increased in years.]
And … and … and … whooooaaa!!!
That right there? I just tried to mentally justify building up 100k worth of what-if money because I’m paranoid. Where I’d get that extra 85k, Lord only knows, but the point is, I’m falling into that mentality where no amount is ever enough because I’m fueled entirely by emotion. Namely, fear.
It’s subsiding now that I’ve written it down and can see how ridiculous it looks on “paper”, but now I understand how easy it is to become Chicken Little and run from imagined terrors. I always wondered how people I consider comparatively or absolutely wealthy could look at what they have and still be afraid that they’ll be broke, but I realize that the problem is the mentality of what they don’t have, not what they do have.
It’s not that any of the above couldn’t happen, but a million other things that I couldn’t ever foresee could happen, too. I can’t live my life under a rock making lists of the things that could go wrong and how much money I’d need for it to be ok again. Silly ducky.
