I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday (and, truly, you don’t have to be a US resident to celebrate gratitude) had a lovely meal with loved ones, no fights (either about football or politics) and minimal meltdowns from the young ‘uns.
To mark this day-after, I’m listening to Eva Cassidy. In particular, her take on “People Get Ready” just speaks to me.
©2024 Bas Bleu
It’s Thanksgiving in the United States. Ordinarily I’d list some of the bigger things in the world for which I’m grateful—like having four years of a stable, sane and secure administration, run by a decent and empathetic president and vice president, and all the benefits that has brought the world. And I am grateful for that; profoundly.
But this year, I’m going to single out something that seems
passing strange to me.
As I may have expressed once or twice, I am not looking
forward to the next four years, when we will not have sane, decent or even
competent people running the US government. It will be a mixture of both
kleptocracy and kakistocracy; that does not bode well for anyone in the world
(except for the kleptocrats and kakistocrats). The week after the election I
was wigging out because I am now dependent upon retirement savings for my
income. Who knows what Republicans are going to do with Social Security, and
what happens to every 401(k) in the country when Cadet Bonespurs enacts
policies that tank the global economy?
So a couple of weeks ago I reached out to my financial
adviser to find out where I stand. (There was a bit of a kerfuffle about that,
but I don’t need to go into detail. It was resolved to my satisfaction and
someone is apparently getting a talking to.) We had a call, then he did some
research and we met again last Thursday.
He showed me the numbers and charts, and brought out his
sock puppets to explain to me. Basically, I’m in good shape. Even for the
upcoming chaos, I’m actually in great shape.
One thing he recommended was that I close out my money
market account and dump the cash into my portfolio account because interest
rates have gone down, and I can get a better return than the money market rate.
Me: Let me get this straight: a year ago, you recommended
that I open this account, and now you want me to close it?
FA: Yes—because the interest rates are down.
Me: Oh. Okay.
Well, when my adviser recommends something, it means I’m
going to get a call from someone else on the team to walk me through the execution
of that action. Tout de suite. I’d forgot about that when a couple of hours later, I got a call
on my mobile from a number I didn’t recognize. I swiped the reject button and
put the phone back in my pocket. Only apparently I’d actually swiped the accept button,
and now my pocket was talking to me. That was weird.
However, we got that sorted, and then the team member
reminded me that I needed to upload my latest eTrade statement to the portal,
because we’re going to move the stock from that account into my managed
portfolio. Well, naturally, I couldn’t log into my eTrade site, so I hauled out
the physical file folder marked “Investments”, which is where I’ve put every
quarterly statement of every single one of the approximately 247 401(k) plans I’ve
had in my career, to try to find something with a toll-free phone and an
account number on it.
To give you an idea—the folder (and its contents) is about
two inches thick.
Well, I found an eTrade statement, so I called the
number, got to MorganStanley (which owns eTrade, since about 2022) and then
eventually to Juaquín at eTrade. He got me in (I had to change my access email
from my work address three domains ago), then spent about five minutes trying
to get me to “take advantage of” a consultation with one of the many
MorganStanley financial advisers standing by ready to manage my investments.
(I talked with one about two years ago, and quite the
hard-sell conversation it was, too.)
Finally I got the statement and uploaded it to the TIAA portal.
But—in the process of trawling through the two inches of
papers in that “Investments” file, I came across a statement for 160 shares of
GIANT SOFTWARE CORP, which I was granted after managing to last there two years
after hiring. Just.
Well, the statement was from 2010, from Smith Barney (which
was acquired by MorganStanley in 2012). I’ve moved five times since that was
mailed to me. I wasn’t sure that the stock would be around—I was talking with a
friend on Sunday and he told me it probably went to Washington State's unclaimed
property.
(As an aside: that prompted me to look at the Washington
escheatment site. I discovered that Comcast owes me $52 for a refund I was due
when I moved 14 years ago. It’s on my to-do list.)
Well, that kind of deflated my sails. But on Monday afternoon (after
going through the whole Social
Security palaver), I called the number on the Smith Barney statement and got
through to a very nice woman who walked me through everything I needed to do to
get into my atwork.morganstanley.com account, update my profile details (they
actually had my current address, because of my eTrade activity, but it’s in a separate
system, and the two don’t talk with one another). I almost didn’t call, because
I was really knackered after that Social Security exercise.
But I got into the system, downloaded the most recent quarterly
statement and then uploaded it to TIAA, emailing the three people working on my
action items about it.
Tuesday I got a call from my financial adviser, thanking me
for uploading the MorganStanley statement—with a kind of implicit invitation to
tell him more about how this came about.
Me: So, I was looking through my two-inch thick “Investments”
file, and found the Smith Barney statement on Friday. And I looked up the current GIANT
SOFTWARE CORP stock price and thought, “That much? Oh, my!” And then,
yesterday, the nice woman at MorganStanley told me how many shares I now have (because dividends),
and what the total value now is, and I thought, “Such much?”
He laughed and commented that it’s not very often that one
of his clients finds a gigantic chunk of change unexpectedly. (Well—that’s part
of my charm.)
Me: I can afford to have cheese on my hamburger!
FA: You can go all the way—get avocado. The organic stuff.
He has to do some research to determine how to cash out to
roll over (can’t move the stock, since it’s in an employee stock ownership
account) without incurring a tax liability, and then the team member will work
with me to sort out the execution.
But today my gratitude is that—despite a number of
decisions made over a lifetime of basically fiscal illiteracy—I am reasonably
secure to weather the next four years. And that I’m working with someone who’s
patient and willing to get down to words of one syllable when talking with me.
And that my years at GIANT SOFTWARE CORP yielded an unexpected, ah, dividend,
just at a time when my spirits needed lifting.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Ordinarily, upon seeing this kind of thing before people’s Thanksgiving turkey has even completely thawed would be a few choice words.
But I guess we’re living in strange times, and maybe folks
just want to get some light in their lives.
However, I did rather get a kick out of this:
©2024 Bas Bleu
Got a notice Sunday that the Social Security Administration was going to deduct 3X of what they’re currently doing monthly to pay for basic Medicare because I earned $XXX…in 2023. Ipso facto, I can afford big bucks for the service, QED.
Well, okay, fine—except that I was employed for part of
2023, ergo the $XXX, but I was laid off in May of that year and so my income is
definitely no longer $XXX.
Which they know, because I submitted all the information on
the proper form back in February, when they tried the same thing based on my
income in 2022.
So yesterday I spent more than an hour waiting on hold for
SSA, getting disconnected and then talking with a guy who told me, “You have to
do this every year. Probably for several years. We can’t use what you submitted
before.”
Swell.
FYSA: When you submit the SSA form, you have to attach
documents to substantiate your income claim, “AGI, as used on line 11 of IRS
form 1040”. Only, in November I have no 1099s, W-2s and no 1040 for…2024.
So I spent another three hours trying to find statements (SSA does not let you
pull year-to-date information from their site, yay). I ended up doing a filtered
search on my bank site to kludge together that information, which wasn’t easy.
Printed everything out and took it over to the local SSA office (thank God they
opened one in the People’s Republic).
Last time, it took them three months to agree that I am no
longer making $XXX and reduce the premium deductions. I hope it doesn’t take
that long this time.
Since they already have all the information.
Anyway, that’s taken care of. For another year. Yippee.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Late (for me) Tuesday evening, I got a text from my friend (who is also my yoga instructor), asking if I’d be available to take her to her physical therapy appointment the next morning. (She had total knee replacement surgery two weeks ago.) I immediately texted back that I’d be there. For one thing, she’d taken me to a couple of PT appointments after one of my surgeries; for another, having gone through this twice, I know the drill.
I actually cleared the passenger seat of my Saab for her,
but when I got to her house, her husband looked at my car and suggested we take
her SUV. (For those who have not yet had the pleasure, one of the big
difficulties about getting into/out of a car is bending your leg as you pivot.
In the early post-op days, that’s nearly impossible, so a big boxy thing is easier
to negotiate than something low slung.) I have enough experience driving behemoths
from piloting Das
Auto, so the drive was uneventful.
(I did forget to lower the rear hatch after getting the
walker out when I dropped her off, but I realized my error when I found a
parking spot.)
After her session she very kindly took me out to lunch, and
we had a most excellent conversation, which we very seldom get to do, as our
meetings are yoga focused. The drive home was smooth and I did not need to bother
with dinner after having a club sandwich for lunch.
But here’s my gratitude: that I was able to do something
for a friend who’s done so much for me. That I was able to rough in some
expectations for her recovery (she’s doing really well). That I was able to
have a general conversation that, you know, people do.
Imagine that.
©2024 Bas Bleu
I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve had this song in my head for a couple of weeks. I know Three Dog Night was the first group I heard sing it—they wrote it, after all. But I just love Tom Jones’ cover. So here it is.
©2024 Bas Bleu
I believe that it’s time for me to tart up the primary bathroom in my house. When I moved in, it was clear that previous owners had slapped up some tiles in the shower cubicle and called it a day. Leaving it essentially as it was when it was built in 1970.
Which is to say, dark, poky and not a little creepy.
The home inspector informed me that the shower knobs
leaked, and a plumber informed me that to fix that, he’d have to go
through the tiles and the wall. It was easier for me to just use the shower in
the hall bathroom.
That was not possible in the first couple of days after
each of my knee replacement surgeries, and it’s recently occurred to me that I
really ought to consider the walk-in option, as opposed to the step-over one.
So last week I went to a Ferguson showroom and mooned about
the plumbing. In the process I came across this, which I absolutely do not get:
Whatever in the world is the point of a three-person sinky
thing with only one faucet?
©2024 Bas Bleu
Alright—this is just beyond the beyond.
Giant has Christmas trees (the formerly live ones, not
artificial) for sale more than a week before Thanksgiving.
I just do not know what to say.
©2024 Bas Bleu
I believe we are just past peak Autumn colors now; probably a week or so later than “normal”. (Which, I hope, means that my cluster landscapers should be out blowing away the foot-deep carpet of leaves in my back yard. Come on, people: I have birds to feed here.)
So here are a few shots of the panoply this year.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Interesting thing happened last week. I’d finally said out loud what I’ve been feeling for months: that I have no skills that any employer would value, so there’s no reason for me to be competing in a hugely cutthroat job market. I’d stopped even looking at the job search alerts LinkedIn sends me five times a day.
But the thought of having to depend on Social Security
(which the Republicans have been trying to kill since FDR implemented it during
the New Deal), Medicare (which they’ve been trying to kill since LBJ got it
passed in the 60s) and my 401k (as we head into administration whose policies
the vast majority of economists say will tank the global economy) really wigged
me out.
I was in a bad way.
Then, Wednesday I saw a listing for a PM job that I thought
I could do, generally useless though I be. But their applicant tracking system
crapped out every time I hit the submit button on the application. (Tried
multiple times on three browsers.) I looked on LinkedIn for a connection, and
there was a product manager connected to a friend/mentor of mine. I reached out
to the latter for an introduction, which he graciously gave. Thursday morning
the PM responded, saying he’d already passed my “very impressive profile” to
the hiring manager, who’s already in interviews, but was interested. He sent me
an internal referral link to the application, but I still encountered the
submit problem. He also contacted a recruiter, who at least looked at my LI
profile.
I can’t tell you how much this basic interest and
acknowledgement lightened my perspective.
But then, also on Thursday, I was scrolling through
my Twitter feed and came across this tweet:
It had only been posted a few minutes before, so I was the
first to stick up my hand. The poster DM’d me with the job description and a
link to the internal referral. It’s a job I cautiously think I might be able to
do, and my background at least carries gravitas in this field. As I was filling
out the application, a guy I know only on Twitter, CISO for a law firm and an
elder in cybersec, tweeted, “Recommend!”
As of time of writing, I’ve heard nothing further on that
first job (remember—they were already interviewing), and I have a screening call
tomorrow with a recruiter for the second job. (The tweet got 17 replies, and several were from people also interested.) I’m not delusional—scores of people
go through multiple rounds of interviews for every job in tech out there and
still don’t get hired. But the fact that—after months of considering what I
need by way of Plans B through R to feel financially secure in the coming
chaos, to have two actual human connections, from people willing to help
me, is such grace; it makes me cry. Whatever the outcome.
And that’s my gratitude for today.
©2024 Bas Bleu
