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
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October 20, 2011
Pardon, you might think you’re at the wrong blog today. But I’ve got to go on another career-related rant. My colleague told me today that someone was “upset” at the organization. When I asked why, I was told that the someone had wanted to apply for a promotion but wasn’t allowed to because of a lack of a specific key qualification. That someone was upset: I’ve been here for years, and I’ve never been given the opportunity to do that!
…….. Really? Really??
Ok. Nerve? Torched. Because honest to Jeopardy, darling, that’s just it, isn’t it? You’ve been here for years and that’s the end of your response? No one took care of you? Did you do anything about it? Or did you sit there like a limp noodle the whole time and then jump at the chance for more money without considering what you needed to do in order to land that peach? [I can answer that. No. Didn’t do nuffin’.]
And now you’re upset at the organization that wronged you. Honestly.
“I wasn’t given an opportunity.”
“I didn’t get a chance to show you what I could do.”
I’ll give you a hint: These are not the phrases to use when you want a job or a promotion and you’ve been told that you’re underqualified because of some missing skill or qualification.
In fact, I will heartily tell you that I am sick of hearing them. Don’t even think it. Imagine your upcoming job or career opportunities. Imagine what the recruiter, hiring manager or resume screener is going to think when he/she/it looks at your resume and compares it to the list of what they want or need. If you find yourself reverting to those up there as your only answer (aka: excuse) when your hiring manager disabuses you of the notion that you’re going to get the job, I want you to Shake Yourself.
Non. Non.
Not only will that not get you the job, it will, in certain eyes, reduce any respect they might have had for you. Like mine.
Tell me, why do you need the opportunities given to you?
Let me tell you what I’ve discovered that phrase and the utterers have in common: a need for spoonfeeding. It says to me, on your behalf: When you hire me, I’m going to ask you basic questions to which I should know the answers or should be able to find myself. And when you don’t have time to feed me, I’m going to do something else without bothering to try to find out the answer myself.
As it turns out, Google is your friend. As it turns out, there are tons of other resources available and when it comes to allocation of resources, do you want to waste our half hour on: “How do I write my review? How does this process work? What should I write?”
Or do you want to spend it talking over which skills you need to set you up for a cool new project and in line for a promotion? Because I will answer the question you ask. But if you want to throw away what I can do for you, then you are throwing away your own opportunity. And frankly, I have too many other people asking for time and attention to mollycoddle anyone who won’t do anything but flip their hair and flap their hands until the next question.
I’m inclined to helping people grow and learn but there’s only so much pushing I can do. I’ve learned my lesson – I’m not going to hire any more people who display that lack of savvy and initiative if I can help it.
Sometimes, it’s valid
Granted, there are certain things you need the support of others to do, you need the authority to do, or you plain cannot have without someone giving something up.
Very true, you must be given some of those things. However. You can show your initiative by learning about the things you want to do even if you cannot whole-cloth have them. You can take classes, you can shadow people who are doing the job, you can ask them to mentor and teach you, you can volunteer elsewhere to pick up the experience you want even if it’s not in the same place or environment.
If it’s an internal promotion you have your sights on, you should, without being obnoxious about it, express your interest clearly in the kind of advancement or experience you would like and why. In general, you should always be doing that anyway!
If you’re going for a new job and it wasn’t your job to do the work in question but you’ve gone and learned it anyway, you bet your boot nails I will rate you more highly than a person who did have the work and was not distinguished in any way by how they did it.
Think about it: who looks better? The one with fire in the belly, clearly has special interest and has done something about it? Or the one who has been flapping hands around in a puddle looking like doing a job? I’m no idiot – I want the fire-eater, every time.
That’s not to say that someone who already does the job always gets trumped by an up and comer, I’m just saying that there are clearly mediocre lifer-type candidates who barely do their job. We know they shouldn’t get promoted over someone with real potential because they aren’t capable. But — you can’t be that newcomer if you don’t realize your own potential. No one can do that but YOU.
Potential is just resting, potential is possibilities. Don’t tell me you have potential. Show me what that potential can be. Get out there and show what you’re capable of with every possible tool at your disposal. Ask for support and learn new things. Don’t just sit there waiting for opportunity to present itself. You’re just kicking opportunity in the face.
Show me your will, that is the way.
Ironically, as I write this, I clicked through an email notifying me that Erica.biz has posted on her blog, writing about
her journey of the past ten years. I keep an eye on people who have the same drive to succeed that I do, even if my path is nowhere near like hers. And you know what? The essence of her message is very much the same:
This world does not hand you success. It certainly doesn’t hand you a job. I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve had in this life. I’ve taught myself what I need to know to be successful. And, if you see yourself in any of this, my message to you is: You can do it, too. Just don’t expect it to be easy.
[For the record: I passed along a message to my colleague. If that someone did something like take initiative, I’d do a solid in return and recommend that a future application be considered. I may have learned my lesson but that someone should learn one too.]
October 17, 2011
I’m /headdesking/ so hard right now. I’ve made a huge mistake.
Back in June, we combined cell phone plans and I took over the financial responsibility for all four phones. Our family plan share 1000 minutes and unlimited text messages. It’s been a few months, and between having unlimited mobile to mobile minutes, and not using a ton of daytime minutes, we were fine on that plan. Since 250 daytime minutes isn’t much per person, I normally use Google Voice on my computer during the week for domestic calls to keep my minute use down as well, so that helps.
I let myself get complacent on this last billing cycle and didn’t check in, not even once, on it. And I’m paying dearly for that inattention.
PiC and I went way over our minute allotment. Shockingly over. I can’t even believe how much. On top of that, my mom’s phone listed five charges for Premium Services; those junk charges you get hit with because of any number of spammy services that sink their hooks into you the second you respond to their junk texts or however they do it. Well, they got my mom. Five of them, over two days, at $9.99 per.
For my part, I think my transgressions were the worst during two weeks out of the billing cycle,when I was sick at home, working most of the time. I was taking regular and conference calls on my cell phone instead for no good reason. !!!!
PiC went double on his allotment as well but I don’t even have the patience to see why. I just told him about the bill and left it at that.
*For the record: my parents were at or under their minute allotment of 250 mins/each. Only PiC and I went over ours. And considering we can log in online or check our minute usage via our phones or online??? UGH. Inexcusable carelessness.*
T-Mobile’s complying with my request to remove the Premium Charges and block any incoming charge texts for a month for free via a free trial of the Family Allowance service, but that’s going to take a couple months to remove $50. The remaining $400 is on me because I noticed too late to change the billing plan to a higher rate/minutes package – you have to do that during the billing cycle.
I can’t even tell you how hard I’m kicking myself. I haven’t seen a bill this big since the days of idiot brother yore, before I removed all long distance capability and stopped paying any cell phone bills for him back home.
This drives me crazy, not just because of the enormity of the bill itself. It’s also because of the way we’re currently handling our finances.
I’ve been dancing on a tightrope where PiC and I share but don’t share. We split but don’t split expenses. We’ve been discussing ways and means of combining but since I won’t do that until we get married, I live in financial purgatory where I’m only partly in control of some things, totally of others, and not at all in still others. It’s driving me a little crazy and making me careless. Careless enough for my hands to have slipped off the reins when they shouldn’t have.
There’s a vague sense that I knew this was coming. Not this specific thing but that some sort of financial issue was looming because of our laissez faire compromise style of management. Because I wasn’t controlling every last detail myself. And because of that vague sense that something, somewhere, was going to go wrong sometime, I’ve been trying to force all aspects of my life into financial order, still without imposing myself on everything. Like a bit of a manic fool, I’ve been paranoically looking over all the things I do control and trying to not to miss anything but worrying about all the things I can’t fix. Just like I used to do in the bad old days when I was paying the bills for my family but not actually in charge of them. Awful, in other words.
There’s an actual solution for this, you know. We could actually combine finances. Or set up a real system. This idiot’s excuse for a process was bound to crack, or I was. It was just a matter of time and a fool’s bet which went first.
October 11, 2011
Wedding planning: We’re doing it wrong.
Not that we haven’t attempted going at it forward but the few months of planning over the summer was fraught with other deadlines, an incredible amount of travel for other obligations. As usual, it seemed like everyone else’s lives came first. And as we did our research for the very simple, very small budget wedding I wanted to aim for, more bits fell off the wagon than stayed on.
I still haven’t figured out what to do about the guest list as far as the question of the whole of my family, for one. I’ve had long heartfelt talks with my closest friends who know the history, know my mind, and me. I’m conflicted because what I want to do is not what I need to do. My willingness to cut out my family out of the wedding isn’t only my personal choice. No matter how much my dad says he’s willing to bear the fallout, it’s a sacrifice that he’ll have to live with. And I will have trouble knowing I’ve contributed to complicating his relationships and somewhat tenuous support system.
So instead of dealing with it, and the parks that won’t cooperate by costing less than actual venues by the end of all the fees, taxes or restrictions, we resigned ourselves to not making the November date and backburnered the wedding.
Not the honeymoon planning, though!
We were gifted an enormously generous gift for the wedding: a week in a timeshare. That came with an expiration date, so we had to get on that straightaway.
After searching the world over for available locations, which my confused Twitter followers might remember from my very random tweets one night (Me: British Virgin Islands? Netherlands? Sweden? Paris? Spain?), we found that we had, in fact, very few choices because everything is meant to be booked a year in advance and we were hoping to finish this whole wedding business sooner rather than later.
Change of plans
A more exotic locale, improperly researched or timed for the high season can easily burst your budget. Doing similar research, comparing prices on airfare as a starting point, I found that the initial places that sounded fun to us (Australia and New Zealand) were easily twice as costly during the months we speculated about traveling. With my visions of belt tightening on our honeymoon, we were happy to turn our feet to a different path as well.
We’re going to Hawaii!
It’ll be a more manageable trip insofar as flights management and time management go. We won’t fly for a day and a half just to get to our destination, and we won’t be paying nearly $4000 just for flights. Instead, it’ll be a morning’s flight there, and a day coming back. I might even be able to wrangle enough points or miles to pay for the flights themselves. This is still a work in progress.
Neither of us are emotionally invested in the specific vacation or destination. It’d be cool to be going somewhere really cool, but at the end of the day we’ll be happy to relax, eat good food and not incessantly worry if we’re going over budget.
[Honeymoon notwithstanding, I will absolutely worry incessantly so it’s just better all around to have a moderately priced and planned trip where we can eat and play to our hearts’ content.]
So that’s one thing, the last thing on the list, decided.
October 9, 2011
After some grumbles, I set myself to the task of filing PiC’s taxes yesterday.
I was annoyed at first because, well, it’s October. I’m a February Filer. Different philosophies. He had to wait for a Schedule to come in that didn’t arrive until September, so he had a reason but it still gets under my skin to be doing last year’s taxes at the point when I’m already thinking about next year’s.
Setting up the account was nearly impossible – I couldn’t get the page to accept a password. Fifteen minutes of error messages.
Finally, I got into TurboTax’s guts and we were off to the races.
Income
I had a whole pile of forms and shuffling through them, nothing was terribly complicated.
I did hate on Wells Fargo for a minute for sneakily combining a 1099-Div and a 1099-INT onto the same page, though – I like order and since I was inputting the forms by type, that interrupted my flow. And they had this whole “see Details” thing going on for a few boxes. You’d obediently flip to the Details section and it’d show you … nothing. THANKS.
(In my New Order, I’m banishing Wells Fargo. Especially since they were such a waste of time.)
Deductions
This was fun. {evil laughter} The know-it-all came out. I had a couple items in the pile from PiC, and then made out my laundry list of things I knew he should have deductions for that he’d missed.
His proof of charitable deductions were missing, for one thing. Property tax, mortgage interest totals, car registration.
And then upon review, I was mortally certain, without actually having seen his property tax bills during the year, the total he gave me was still too low and sent him back again for another look. Right-o, there was a supplemental tax bill he’d been dunned for, more than $1000, and had forgotten about. That put nearly $500 back in his refund.
Analysis and Completion
Clearly, he wasn’t taking the standard federal deduction.
I think his CPA was shortsighted for telling him to send in a chunk of additional tax money this year for state taxes, assuming he was going to owe just as much in 2010 as he owed in 2009. Did the CPA not consider that he was going to be paying a full year’s home interest and property taxes? That seriously affects your AGI! Think this through, my good fellow. When your state refund is twice and more what you paid in quarterly taxes … *smh* There was no real good reason to do that, is what I’m saying. He wasn’t in danger of an underpayment penalty at the end of 2009, and he wasn’t going to owe at the end of 2010 as much as he did the prior year.
Filing
I’d snagged him a fantastic prepaid code for both state and federal, saving him $140 on both filings. Did him one better than my own, I even had to pay for my state filing!
One Day, One File
It didn’t take the whole day, but we finished his taxes on the Saturday I started them. I had him review it with me at the end to make sure he understood everything that I did and all the notes I had. I’d initially complained that doing his taxes weren’t any fun but halfway through I was a liar because I was having fun again.
I could actually enjoy doing this for other people, now that I’ve gotten past my initial weirdness of not having the fully organized, spreadsheeted, noted, checklisted pile of forms to work from. Maybe I’m not quite ready for the shoebox of receipts thing but, you know, I could deal with the less organized anyway.
October 7, 2011
I’ve never had to trick myself into saving, ever. Obviously. But I do have opinions that aren’t always in line with what’s “best” for me on a daily basis. Opinions that might sound a lot like: I hate this job I hate these people I hate this job! Her post reminded me of a dark and grumpy period when that was a daily refrain in my life.
I knew why I was sticking it out for at least a while longer – there were a lot of practical reasons.
I was learning the ropes of that job, of the industry and needed to really master as much as possible before I made my next move. There’s a natural break between levels of mastery, levels of maturity, at any job or in any work you do, and I was bound and determined to move up the next level before or when I left. I refused to make a lateral move or flounder in between an entry level which, in the newly breaking recession, boded ill for my upward movement just as much as a lateral move.
The job itself was paying for all the things at home, and was flexible enough for me to be there for my parents.
Buuut that didn’t change the Awful of the people I worked with or the Horrid of the .. people I worked with. Etc. So, to get through my days while I was Learning All the Things, I thought: how do I focus on Not the Horrible?
There was no positive thinking to be had at that time, in that place, so I had to bring the positive to me. I printed out a pretty picture of a place far far away. It had horses, it had amazing hot springs, it was really far away. I cannot emphasize how strongly that last point commended itself to me. There was no way on heaven or earth I could have afforded to go there. There was no sense in even dreaming of going there in real life. But it didn’t matter. I had a lovely picture of the hot springs, and an Icelandic horse and as each day tightened or loosened its noose, I focused on breathing in however I imagined hot springs air to smell and breathing out the stress.
I hugged a horse in my mind and smiled. And smiled in real life because even though I had no idea, still don’t, whether I would ever actually want to go to Iceland, it was saving my sanity one day at a time.
Iceland, and the bet on experience, paid off, by the way.
:: When’s the last time you lied, tricked or distracted yourself into doing something good for you?
October 5, 2011
I don’t even have the heart to post it, the progress has been so meager in the past two months.
Retirement Downturn
Since the last time I viewed my Vanguard fund, the fund that contains all the retirement monies I’ve saved between ages 21 through 26, it’s lost another $7000. In two months. !!! Yes yes, long term horizon, blah de blah. STOP THAT.
I’m still contributing to my current employer’s retirement account but that’s in a different fund at a different company. It still irritates me. I’ll stop looking now.
Cash Savings
The expense account did come up a significant amount (40%) but so did my spending (220% over last month). That figure’s actually misleading though – $1200 of that cash is a reimbursement for business expenses and so are the corresponding credit card charges. Part of it is prepayment of expenses as well.
Also, we are experiencing the first true combinations of expenses between PiC and me. We have combined forces to rack up all chargeable expenses on a single American Express card to meet a minimum spend threshold in order to earn a 20K point bonus for Starwood points.
On that plan, I’ve prepaid 2 months’ worth of cell phone bills, paid up on auto insurance and vet bills. O, vet bills.
Other Investing
I had grabbed a chunk of cash for my TradeKing account in case I made a decision about investing in a few more stocks. I’m steadily making a whopping $4.70 every quarter in dividends from my stocks. With the huge dive in the market, I thought there might be a worthwhile discount to buy. Nothing really caught my fancy, though, so that cash is still just sitting in the brokerage, waiting.
Total Net Worth
Up about a thousand dollars. I should really be doing better.
******
Specific Spending:
Wedding/Honeymoon: The reason we’re racking up the hotel points and miles is to defray upcoming travel spending. As much as possible, I’d rather use awards to pay for actual travel as much as we can. Starwood points are excellent for hotels and for exchanging to airline miles as well. They add a bonus 5,000 miles for every 20,000 miles you trade in.
Mortgage: I’m keeping an eye out for any other good refinancing options that we could qualify for and considering how quickly we might pay down the mortgage.
Saving Goals:
Emergency Cash: I’m really close to the $50K cash cushion that I wanted to hit for my peace of mind. It’s in a combination of CDs and savings accounts but I need to find a higher rate of return home for it. Or ladder all of it into CDs.
Then I think I’m setting my next cash savings goal at another $50K. The first $50K is total emergency fund only. (Hey, remember when you could earn real interest on CDs and such?)
Pie in the Sky? As an academic exercise, I sort of want to map out how we might work out life on a single income around here. Just to see what that might look like. Or perhaps one and a half at first.
Non-notables:
I don’t think I like spinach anymore.
Doggle now gets time outed. And he knows when he’s misbehaving so when he’s getting walked to time out, he walks himself the rest of the way.
September 28, 2011
It was a family truism that when I finally had kids, “Grandma” was going to pay me back for every sin I committed as a youngun, even the ones I couldn’t remember, with 10% interest.
“Just wait until you have kids of your own,” she would mutter after I’d upset her, the dire threat implicit enough. Sometimes she’d follow up with, “and if they’re not creative enough, I’ll tell them how you messed with me to start them off!”
She was going to get away with it, too, because she knew I wanted a career as much as she wanted grandkids. Since it wasn’t likely that I’d have a house-husband (though really, that’d be awesome), her babysitting availability was the best way to practically guarantee I’d be willing to take on that responsibility.
All joking aside, it was secretly a huge comfort to me knowing that my mom was fully committed to my future family and was excited about helping to care for them so that my spouse and I could work.
That was her dream plan for retirement: raising small children. Never let it be said that we understand how to relax in my family.
I had to, with much sadness, let go of that shared expectation and daydream some years ago when her health began its downward spiral. And I’ll always be a little sad that the person who bore the standard for me won’t be there in mind or body, though always in spirit, for my children if I have them.
It wouldn’t be safe or right for me to leave prospective children with my ailing mother in charge of them. Certainly she’d want to visit with them, but that would always have to be supervised. And so I haven’t really had the heart to think about that in a long while, until now.
In our culture, the idea that grandparents are available for long-term babysitting and practically take on the raising of the grandchildren is almost taken for granted. It’s doesn’t always happen in cases where grandparents were less nurturing or too busy or the math doesn’t work out. One set of grandparents to multiple sets of children and grandchildren requires a fair amount of logistics if everyone wants Grandma and Grandpa in residence.
But in general, there’s often a sense of expectation that first generation parents can rely on their parents for free childcare when the time comes to bring up the next generation. Some of that expectation is fostered by the prospective grandparents, some of it spins out of the understanding that “that’s how we do it.”
*************
I’ve recently started hearing a mismatch of expectations in families and started thinking about what the cultural and societal norms are now. If anything, my expectation was that more frequently, with the greater separation of families due to schools and jobs and kids moving further away, families would rely on technology to nuture relationships between generations. I also supposed that ethnic grandparents would be disappointed by parents who didn’t necessarily want their Traditional Parents rearing the grandkids.
Instead, I’m seeing a combination of adherence to the traditional grandparents-as-babysitters paradigm, as well as a parallel track where the new grandparents don’t necessarily want the caretaking or the raising of their grandkids. And the desire and trend toward more visitation-rights-only is more in line with what I’d expect from the American norm.
My maternal grandfather, for example, isn’t in the least bit interested in raising any of his seventeen grandchildren. He prefers to bide in peace and visit. His wife is all about the raising of them so she moves about, house to house, spending as much time as possible with the various nuclear families. One of my aunties helped raise her grandchildren for a period of time but because her idea of discipline (strict) wasn’t aligned with her kids’ (let them run rampant), she declined to continue babysitting the hooligans (my description, not hers) after they became too much for her to handle. As far as I know, the relevant family members found ways to manage their childcare without the grandparents in question.
My personal opinion is that if you have parents and family members who are willing to give of their time and energy to do your parenting, that’s an enormous gift. But that’s a gift and that’s their choice. At the end of the day, your children were your choice to have, and your responsibility.
Of late, I’ve been hearing statements that strike me as less than gracious even though I come from a culture that actually does “expect” grandparents to substitute for new parents. I’m hearing things that, perhaps especially as they begin to directly affect me and my health issues, are, I feel, less than considerate and it bothers me.
Stating “Well, the nanny learned how to do it!”, “it” being some part of the more specialized health care your child requires doesn’t sit right with me. In what ways does it make sense to suggest that a family member get equated with a trained-in-special-health-care, vetted, interviewed, and paid employee?
I can absolutely understand that parents want grandparents to be involved with the grandchildren, even highly involved. You certainly want that bond to form and for any other important people to be part of your kids’ lives. But if the grandparents aren’t comfortable with fulfilling all the needs, particularly any specific or special needs, of the kids, does it not cross a line to insist that they take on those responsibilities? What about other family members? Are they also asking for a babysitting assignment when they want to spend time with your kids, regardless of their feelings or capabilities in the matter?
And for the health and proper care of your child: when should you simply know better than to ask if that is the case?
Again, I come from a cultural place where it’s normal to just assume that Grandma and/or Grandpa can and will help out. Or will help out any way that they’re capable. So I would normally understand that, but at the same time, I come from a personal place where you take care of your own to the best of your ability first, so being taken for granted as free labor, particularly when my energy is so dear, strikes a few nerves. It’s hard for me not to feel like I’m judging when I’m asking these questions but it seems rather inconsiderate. And even if it weren’t me being taken for granted, I think my head would still be tilted forty five degrees to one side, wondering.
While I do, on occasion, happily help certain friends with their kids, I’m either asked or offering a set amount of assistance within my abilities and energy levels. They aren’t taking for granted that I’ll be available, and they’re making sure that they’re not putting me out or expending all my energy, or putting me in a difficult position by planning all their activities first and asking me last so that I feel guilty for ruining their plans if I have to say no.
I’m not a fan of this trend but I wonder if I’m the only one who sees this sort of thing.
::: Is there a prevalent assumption that family are fair game as childcare providers or is that coming from a dissonance when one of two parties doesn’t want to participate in the traditional exchange?
::: Am I overcomplicating the question? Is it just that there’s an assumption that it’s your familial duty to babysit if you are childless, no matter who you are, unless you’re a professed baby-hater like one of my girlfriends? (She’s my example because while chatting with her, she pointed out that no one in their right mind would ask her to ‘sit, she’s made it plain she hates babies. She tolerates children.)