The season of stupid people

This is the time of year when everything goes sideways. A lifetime of Septembers has left me with a vague sense of dread. What will I wear for the first day of school? Will my classmates laugh at me when they see me with my new glasses? What if I don't like my teachers? What if they find out I'm smart? So much to worry about. New year, new classmates, new teachers, new clothes, same dread.

I don't care anymore about classmates and teachers, and I really don't care what I wear, much to my sister's consternation. But the season still deflates my will to live. I think it has to do with the angle of the sun. We've had a lot of sun this summer, and it's been great. Then Labor Day, and bam, the air chilled, just for a few days, but now the air knows it can grow colder, and so it will, without regard for hothouse flowers like me, plummeting to 50°F, and if it can fall to 50°, what's to stop it from plunging to 40°, or 30°? Or even lower? Labor Day is when the bottom falls out of summer, and I can feel the dark clouds piling up just beyond the western hills, raging in from the ocean to drench us in bone-chilling rain. Any minute now. Even though today the air is warm, it's a vile deception: There is something in the air that smells like death.

When I was struggling to finish my Ph.D., whining almost continuously about my woes via this blog, I always knew there would eventually be an end to the struggle. Either I would fail, or I would quit, or I would finish. Whatever happened, I always knew that it would end someday, and that helped fuel my persistence. Finally, I phinished, as they say.

I launched my business with hope and mild excitement. Now, nine months later, I am thrashing in the messy bog of my startup debacle, and I realize, there may be an end to this suffering as well, but unlike with the doctorate, it's not as easy to see the finish line. I mean, I know the ultimate finish line could look like me admitting defeat and joining the ranks of America's jobseekers. That is not the outcome I would prefer, but as every day passes, it's looking more and more likely.

To earn money, I've been editing academic papers. It's not fun, and the pay rate is erratic: How much I earn per hour depends on how fast I can edit. Sometimes the authors are good writers—not much for me to do, a few formatting suggestions, a word change here or there. I can easily earn $40 per hour. Other times, English is not the first language, which means I'm editing what pretty much amounts to poetry, not good when the topic is land use in China. The paper I edited yesterday was some poor schmuck's literature review. “My Chair has returned this seven times! I just don't know what else to do!” Sound familiar?

By the time I had compiled an extensive list of suggestions to expand and revise his/her literature review, I calculated I was earning $17 per hour. I guess in some (third world) countries, $17 would be a princely wage. Maybe I should move there. As long as I have internet access, I can edit academic monstrosities from anywhere.

I just finished editing a journal article for someone in Texas. I calculated I earned $25 per hour on the paper, mostly cleaning up Word tables. (How the hell do people manage to butcher Word tables so thoroughly? I don't get it.) I submitted the paper and prepared to start my real work for the day: writing the workbook for my first marketing research test class. Five minutes later I got an email from the editing agency: The client has a new version of the article. Can you compare the two versions for differences?

Really? I spent a couple minutes doing a document compare between my revised version and the author's new version and realized that was a waste of time. Then I compared the author's first and second manuscripts: Word found no differences between the two files. WTF? Is someone trying to gaslight me?

What did I tell you? Everything is harder is September. This seems like proof to me. Of course, I am biased toward chronic malcontentedness.

The chronic malcontent feels resentment at a sorry-ass data entry snoid

While I wait for my Chair to chew up and spit out my dissertation draft, I have the pleasure of doing... nothing much. I wasn't going to blog today; I have some important things on my to-do list (clean tub, take nap, put away laundry). However, something happened today that I need to whine about. I have spent the last hour pretending that it didn't affect me. But I can't seem to focus on getting anything done, so clearly it affects me some. After all, when you decide to clean the tub, you must have laser-like focus, otherwise someone could get hurt. Know what I mean?

So, here's my rant. I checked email this morning, like I always do, and found a terse note from my big megabank, which has hosted my money since it took over Security Pacific back in the early 1990s. I have never had a problem with big megabank, and I still don't. But imagine my shock and horror when I read the email telling me that my account was now at $0.00. Yep. Not even any pennies. Zip. Zilch. Empty. All gone.

Hoping it was a phishing error, I logged into my account. Nope. Zero. And the culprit was in plain sight. September's rent check (which [full disclosure] was a replacement check [minus a $30 stop fee] for a check that had gone AWOL, not my fault!)—Septembers' replacement rent check had been posted in error: instead of $695, some drunken data entry snoid probably somewhere back east had added an extra zero, causing $6,950 to be extracted from my checking account. Well, I don't know how you roll, but I don't normally keep that much in checking, so bam! That misbegotten nameless bank hoovered out all my funds and then proceeded to tap my savings account to make up the difference.

After a few tense moments, I found an 800 number. I wrestled the voice mail system into providing me with a live person by shouting “Fraud! Help! Help! Help!” into the phone. The neighbor probably thought I was being robbed (although he never showed). Finally a polite young gal got on the phone and calmed me down. She could see immediately what had happened.

“I'll put in the order to reverse the transaction,” she said sweetly. “And I'll credit back the $10.00 overdraft fee.” Ha. Like I cared about a lousy $10.00 when $6,255 of my money had been siphoned out of my accounts in the blink of someone's bleary hungover eye.

“How long will that take?” I asked, thinking of all the October automatic payments that will soon be hitting my account. Please tell me a few hours.

“Up to five business days,” she said cheerfully. “And now, if you have ten minutes, would you like to talk to a financial advisor about how to invest that money in your money market savings?”

I almost said, what money? Seriously? You are trying to sell me more services, when I've just been electronically violated? Jeez, it hurts to sit down, and she's telemarketing me! God grant me strength. Well, I had a good excuse to refuse her offer: my breakfast was overcooking. In my freaked out haste to alter my circumstances, I had forgotten that my veggies were sweltering on the stove. Oops. Well, at least I hadn't cracked the eggs yet.

So the remedy for my tattered bank account is “pending,” and I'm realizing that living in an electronic world has its curses as well as its blessings. But we've always been at the mercy of data entry errors. It can happen to anyone at anytime. Banks track their error rates. If they are really good, they keep it to 2%. That's why they have fancy validation procedures, to make sure this doesn't happen. Imagine if I had had a business, with irate employees and bounced payroll checks and vendor payments. We would lose all trust in business. Not that we had much to begin with.

And I can't even register my phone number on the Do not call list, because the darn government is on holiday in Tahiti. So I keep getting robocalls from the credit card consolidation companies. What is up with that? If they did a little homework, they would find out I haven't had a credit card in years. Well, what the funk. Enough ranting. Am I sufficiently calm to begin the task of scouring the tub? I wouldn't want to try it when I'm tense with fear and resentment. I might do something crazy.