The Return of Employment

Well, I cracked.

I had resisted taking a PA job for three months, since I didn't want to take a minor step back professionally just because I didn't want to sit around the house all day.

That resistance came crashing down yesterday when a friend emailed looking to replace herself, and I'll be working on a pilot for the next few weeks to months starting tomorrow.

The pay is crap (as all PA pay is), but when you add in the mileage, it's at least more than I'd be making sitting on my ass and collecting unemployment.

It will hopefully have the added benefit of the restoration of my sanity, which has recently been hanging by a frightfully thin thread after three months of unemployment.

The people seem cool, and luckily fairly okay with the idea that if I get a better offer, I'm going to take it. The transience of employment in pilot season actually works in my favor there.

The main downside is that the office is in frickin' Santa Clarita, so that's a nice little 70 mile daily round trip, before I even start doing runs. At least it means I'll get a lot more mileage, since it's way far from pretty much everything.

The people who sell me gas and change my oil are going to love this job.

This Is Why I'm A Hermit

Mark was in town this weekend, which was great fun. However, it led me to do the one thing I've tried to avoid doing at all costs while unemployed: I left the house.

This had two dire consequences. I am now a) broke and b) sick.

A) was expected and worth it. I do miss at least pretending I have a life, and it was nice to eat something other than another crappy frozen Healthy Choice dinner.

B), however, is proving more problematic. I initially blamed Mark and his Chicago-style germs, all covered in cheese and mustard.

But really, the problem is that I have had little human contact other than going to the gym for the last two months and my immune system was basically asleep in a dark corner of my pancreas when I needed it most.

Mark, his constitution hale and hearty from being tempered in the snows and bars of Chicago, was completely unaffected.

So now I'm left exhausted, coughing up a lung, with my nose running like a leaky faucet, but at least glad that I don't have to work through this nonsense.

I shall provide further updates when the exhaustion lifts to the point that I can type more than 50 words a minute without feeling like I've run three miles.

Ruh Roh

Two things causing concern.

First, I got on the scale, and was happy to see I'd lost another pound. The bad news was, I realized I hadn't weighed Chaplin in a while, so I picked him up to do the whole "weigh self holding cat, weigh self, subtract" method to see how much he weighed.

The big fucker weighs 18 pounds! Somehow, he's put on two pounds in the last few months. I've been feeding him roughly the same amount, so I'm a little mystified as to how he's porked up so much.

Second, I'm trapped in my apartment. After months of fighting with my landlord, they finally replaced part of my rotting doorframe. However, when they re-hung the door, they did a piss-poor job of it.

At first, the door was just sticking, which I could live with, but it's deteriorated badly. Now it takes a ridiculous amount of effort just to enter and leave the damn apartment. It's worse than it was before, which I didn't think was possible.

What's sad about this is that it really doesn't affect me too much at all, since I've barely been leaving the house anyway. Hopefully they'll get this fixed by a reasonable hour tomorrow, and I'll be able to at least take the trash out and go to the gym.

The Broke-Ass Chronicles

Not a lot going on with me at the moment, mostly scraping along while I try to find myself a new job. A few points to share from the trenches of brokedom:

- My $3 a meal effort seems to be working well. 30 days a month x 3 meals a day x $3 meal is $270/mo for food, and I'm ahead of that pace even counting the few times I've gone out in the last couple months, and the food I bought for my Super Bowl party (though to be fair, I froze the considerable leftovers and have been eating them myself).

The fact that I've been eating much less food than I used to (at least as measured by volume) and drinking very little alcohol due to my ongoing diet and exercise program is probably helping this initiative considerably.


- The one thing I have to stop doing is just spending days in the house watching TV and movies, and surfing the internet. The fact that not leaving the house is a much cheaper proposition than leaving the house has led me to several movie marathons and sessions of power-watching TV series.

I've seen dozens and dozens and dozens of movies and TV shows in the last couple of months, but there's one distinct downside: I feel like I'm turning into a zombie.

I should at least go sit out by the pool and read for an hour, or ride my bike aimlessly, or something that does not involve staring at the TV or the computer. Otherwise I'm going to need glasses, and I don't think my COBRA covers vision.


- One thing that's killing me: Now instead of being able to see my work friends at work, I have to go to their various houses to see them. With gas costing about $3.20 a gallon and many of them living way the fuck out in the Valley, this is getting to be an expensive proposition.

I've already spent the same on gas this year as I had this time last year (not counting my trip to SF to pick up my TV), and I haven't been driving to work, for work, from work every day. Stupid giant LA with its severe sprawl and piss-poor public transportation.


- Finally, I've been selling a bunch of old electronics and such through eBay, but the prices people pay for DVDs there just don't make it worth it. Have any of you guys ever sold anything through Amazon Marketplace? You seem to be able to get more reasonable prices for used DVDs through there, but I recall hearing their cut of the sale is really huge.


Anyway, hopefully I'll be working again soon, and can go back to eating 3 meals a day at work, and being too busy to go out rather than too broke.

Excelsior!

You know you're a geek when you think, "God, this job-hunting would be so much easier with a spreadsheet."

You are an even bigger geek when you actually make that spreadsheet.

You realize being a geek is a good thing when said spreadsheet actually does turn out to be helpful.

Waiting For A Phone Call From The Fat Lady

So as you may have heard, the strike seems to be just about over. Official voting will finish Tuesday night, and if all goes well, the writers will be back to work Wednesday.

What that means for me personally is a bit unclear. Seeing as how it's about 10pm and I haven't gotten a phone call from my ex-employers yet, I'm under the impression that I at least won't be working tomorrow.

All I know is, even if that phone call for some reason doesn't come (although I expect it to sometime this week), at least with the strike lifted, there are going to be actual jobs that I can go out and compete for, with some confidence that I'll actually get one of them.

That's been the most frustrating aspect of all of this: Not only did my job disappear, but 95% of the other jobs that I'm qualified for disappeared as well.

All in all, as much as I enjoy being able to blow off doing my laundry because I can do it in the middle of the day Monday, it'll be very nice to go back to work and be productive again, as well as seeing all my friends.

At least the end is in sight. Hooray for that, at least.

Not Dead

Just not doing anything terribly interesting, and have had a serious drop in motivation this week. After working for a couple weeks, to go back to doing nothing is awfully frustrating.

I will note a few random things I've noticed in the last few days:

- Chaplin falling asleep on my chest means I will, without fail, be asleep within 15 minutes as well.

- If ever you're cleaning out your apartment and you find old letters or printed-out emails from your ex, for the love of god, do not start to read them. Save them if you must, but shove them in the drawer before you start reading them. Do not do that to yourself.

- I have to vacuum up dirt and cat hair substantially more often now that I have hardwood floors, but I doubt there was actually any less dirt or cat hair when I had carpet. I'm not grossed out by much, but that thought grosses me out just a bit.

- Apparently the new guy next door to me is some sort of classical pianist. It's kind of interesting when the music bleeding in matches up with whatever movie or TV show I'm watching. And sometimes its hilarious when he's playing some delicate thing while I'm watching an action movie.

- No matter how much food I buy for a party, it's inevitably way, way too much, and I wind up freezing a bunch of meat and throwing out a bunch of buns. I just cannot get the calculus right.

- I have several hundred DVDs, most of which I never watch, so I thought I could sell some to bring in some extra money. But combing through them, I can only find about a dozen that I'm actually willing to part with, most of which will not bring me a damn dime because nobody else wants to watch them either.

It Could Be Worse

I could have worked for a company that used Axium for its payroll services, since they just declared Chapter 7, leaving many creditors (including the IRS) with questions about where all the money went.

Defamer has been covering the whole mess pretty well (with "Rhymes With Shmembezzelment" being one of my favorite tags they've ever used), but the story's barely made a ripple with most of the local media.

Pseudonymous blogger Peggy Archer, who's a lighting tech and way better at explaining this stuff to non-entertainment-industry people than I am, explains both what payroll companies are in Hollywood:

For tax and unemployment insurance purposes, when we work, we are technically employees of the payroll company instead of the production company. This is not a bad thing - it cuts down on the tax-season paperwork (16 W 2 forms instead of 138) and reduces instances of in-house rubber checkitis (back in the bad old days of tiny shows run by fly-by-night production companies, one would pick up one’s check at the office and then drive like a bat out of hell to the production company’s bank to cash it while there were hopefully still funds in the account. When everyone started using payroll companies, the checks, when they eventually arrived, were usually good).

...and the worst case scenario:

...although the taxes were deducted from my checks, as of right now there’s no way to know if I fall into the happy group who had the deducted monies actually paid to the gub’mint. Since I doubt the IRS cares that I had the money deducted, they’ll probably make me pay twice.

‘Cause that’s how the IRS rolls.

As fucked as I am being unemployed, I'd be super-duper fucked if I had to somehow magically come up with my taxes twice because some douchebag embezzled all the money from the payroll company that was supposed to KEEP me from getting fucked.

My deepest sympathy goes out to Peggy (or whatever her real name is) and everyone else in this town who's about to have a real pleasant tax season because of these schmucks.

Budgetary Realizations

Two things I realize now, after going through my budget with a fine tooth comb to try and kick out a few extra pennies, that I probably should not have done:


1. Moved out of my old Russian-Mob-Owned shithole apartment in Venice. I might have wanted to strangle my neighbors on an hourly basis, but I'm paying almost half again more rent than I was, which is definitely in the category of Not Helpful when unemployed.

Also, the dipshit management company here is just as unresponsive to maintenance issues as the mobsters were, so why the fuck am I paying them all this money? I mean, other than to live in a neighborhood with fewer drive-bys.


2. Fucked up my ankle, requiring me to pay exorbitant COBRA rates instead of finding cheapo individual insurance because my ankle turns into a monstrously expensive preexisting condition if I get the individual coverage.


These two things alone are absolutely killing my unemployment budget. I've just looked at how much I've spent so far this month, and realized I can't leave the house again until approximately February.

Dork Dilemmas

Being unemployed in January is probably a good thing for the average gadget geek like myself, since the twin peaks of lust for shiny things both take place during the first couple of weeks of January.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place in Las Vegas this week, where almost every electronics company is unveiling its product lineup for 2008.

Next week brings the annual MacWorld Expo, where Apple faithful come to drool over whatever lickably shiny object Steve Jobs deigns to unveil during his keynote address.

Both of these events lead to an absolute orgy of gadget blog coverage (Google Reader is buckling under the weight of the feeds just of Engadget and Gizmodo), and to try and keep up even without having a job to do on top of it is a bloody nightmare.

I mean, it is fun to read about crazy shit like the leopard-print Taser with mp3 playing holster, the LCD you install on your car bumper so other people can watch what you're watching, or the 150 inch plasma TV that is over five times the size of my Gigantic Damn TV.

What would have been even better is to have seen these ridiculous items in person. Alas, it is not to be.

The thing that really sucks is that theoretically, if I had the money, I could have gone to both CES and MacWorld and at least gotten on the exhibit floors. This is also one of the very few times I would actually be able to attend either conference.

The problem is, between rent and COBRA, I'm burning through my unemployment checks completely before the first of the month is even over, and every other expense I have comes straight out of savings.

So burning $40-50 on admissions fees per conference plus approximately one billion dollars per tank on gas (just over two tanks to Vegas and back, more like three to SF) is not really in the cards.

I tell you, it is going to kill me next week to be sitting here, knowing that I could have been in San Francisco groping the goofy gadgets I'm simply staring at pictures of, but my stupid fiscal responsibility is winning out.

Unemployment Update

Sweet God, I'm already so fucking bored.

Maybe I should consider this unemployment program in India, at least that'd be a change of pace.

Courtesy Dave Barry's Blog.

You Would Think...

...that going to Best Buy at 3pm on a Tuesday, it would be at least a little calmer than it generally is around the holidays.

You would apparently be wrong, as evidenced by the HUGE line there when I stopped by to pick up gifts for my cousins this afternoon.

You would also think that since I only moved downstairs in September, a thorough cleaning of my apartment wouldn't take me two days.

You'd be right in one sense: It's going to take a third day. Seriously, where the fuck did all this damn dirt and cat hair come from? Chaplin sheds like I live in the jungles of Belize with no air conditioning.

You'd finally think that it would at least be nice to relax a bit when you're unemployed.

I think you'd be right about that, but between the cleaning and the errands and meeting people for lunch and the other nonsense I have to take care of, I really couldn't tell you for sure.