A Day In the Life...

For anyone who may not already know, I quit my job back in September (at my wife's suggestion) so that I could finish my bachelor's degree. We thought it was a great idea then. I hope we're right. We basically decided that there were three options that made the most sense (the 4th being to not finish my degree because I was doing fairly well without it): I could either keep working and take a class or two at a time and graduate in five years, or I could take a full load of night classes for a few semesters and keep working (which would have been the smartest, probably), or I could quit my job and we could borrow student loan money to get by for two semesters so that I could finish. We chose the third option because the first one would have taken forever and the second one would have meant that I would not have slept for most of a year and would not hardly have seen my wife or kids during that time either.

So now I'm pretty much done. Officially I still have a few classes to finish online, which I'm working on now, but I'm looking for a job, based on the idea that while I don't officially have my degree, I can pretty much claim to be done. If questioned I just admit that I'll graduate next month. We're entertaining a theoretical plan to get me a CPA, too, but it turns out that the requirements may be more than I can cope with at this point. No decision has been made at this point, but we're looking into it.

What that leaves me with, then, is working on classes online and taking care of AJ all day. Kristin's working part time at a job she pretty much hates. It's actually been better lately, but it lost a good chunk of tolerability this week when they denied her request for a better raise than the standard 3%. It's pretty idiotic from almost any perspective. The first part is sort of funny to me: They hired her to get the new physical therapy clinic up and running, but after the initial stuff was done, there wasn't really much for her to do. She mostly does collections for the clinic now. She does a lot of other things, including filling in for people to take breaks (or vacations), but she told them a long time ago that she didn't have nearly enough to do. They told her not to worry about it. They said her job was to keep physical therapy running smoothly, which it is (or at least, it's running as smoothly as it can with such a collection of morons in charge. Well, that's an exaggeration. There's really just one moron in charge. Okay, two) and to make sure that her accounts receivable stay under a certain amount, which she does.

Well, a little over a year ago she cut back to working about 25 hours a week. The funny thing is that she still got all the same work done. Now, from my point of view, this should have been a cue to management to be really irritated with her. In their position I would have been wondering, why have we been paying you for 40 hours a week plus benefits when you could do that job in 25 (and benefits are forfeit when you're part-time)? That, apparently, never occurred to them. They have continued to praise her work for the entire two years she's worked there. So when her review came up a few weeks ago, and she got 4's across the board (4 is "exceeds expectations"), they offered her a 3% raise. She said she thought she deserved more, and the moron in charged (referenced earlier) asked why she thought she deserved it. She said that first, he had just given her a sparkling review. I suggested that she should have told him to either give her the raise or go back and change a lot of her 4's to 3's, but she thought that might have been counterproductive (and I have to agree, despite the fact that it was my suggestion). She also pointed out all the things she does that aren't even part of her job description and the fact that she's getting everything done that they need her to do in only 25 hours a week. That 15 hours a week plus the benefits they don't have to pay her should have been way more than enough to justify a little bit more than the 3% they were offering. Her moron (I mean, boss) said he couldn't give her more than 3% without the doctors' permission, but he would take it to them.

In the end they denied her the extra and said they could only give her the 3%. Their reason was that she already makes more than any other collector and that she's technically over the cap for her position. She explained that she wasn't just a collector, to which her boss said he knew that to be true. She said that if she couldn't be paid extra for doing extra, she might not have the motivation to continue doing extra. He said that made him sad (I may bomb his house. He's clearly too dumb to live. You don't know how dumb he is because I've only told you one small part of the big picture of how he runs the place. If the doctors really knew all the stupid crap he did, they'd fire him for sure). She said she would have to consider other offers. He said he hoped she would come to him before taking another offer. She asked why she should bother and whether he'd be able to offer her more money if she was leaving, and if so, why he couldn't just give her the money she'd already asked for. No good answer for that one. Big surprise.

So I'm a stay-at-home dad, which I love, but we really can't afford it. I need to get a pretty good job and pretty quickly. We've used up pretty much all of the money we borrowed for this adventure, and now that it's pretty much over, we've got to get moving. I've sent out my resume a little, but there hasn't been much interest yet. I'm hopeful still, because it's early in the search. But the difference between "it's early in the search" and "how are we going to pay the mortgage?" isn't nearly as long as I'd like it to be.

AJ continues to grow and make people smile everywhere we go. This picture is from when we took him to our Monday night softball game and the weather was pretty questionable for the second week of May. We had to bundle him up tight. The good news is that his little bear suit is ridiculously cute.