Friday’s Activities Include: inspection sticker

Yesterday, I finally got around to tracking down the service notice my car had popped up last month. It had done the same thing for November, I called, they said, no, you don’t need that service, we’ll turn off the reminder. I figured, same thing, right? Nope. In the course of the phone call, my attention was directed to the inspection sticker. Ooops. That has a 12 on it. Guess I really do need to bring the car in. I didn’t need an appointment, so I showed up at 9 a.m., and waited. And waited. I did bring an iPad and tea, and they do have good wifi, so this was a largely pleasant activity, especially once the paid programming for some air brush makeup system was replaced by Food Network programming. Altho wow, I can’t _even_ with the biscuit recipe they had. Whatever.

After 1 hour, I went back and asked, so, where’s the car? (It is supposed to take 20 minutes, but might take an hour to have this done.) Then I went to the bathroom and checked the drop off lane by the cafe. Nope. Told the guy, car isn’t there, and he went to track it down. They washed it for me. They are so nice! It really needed it, and I had been putting it off in case I had to bring it in for that service reminder — kill two birds with one stone, sort of thing. I’m sure I am an ongoing offense to people who own BMWs. I am definitely not classy enough.

When replacing things in my trunk upon my return home (things that I have errands associated with), I accidentally dropped a glass dish that I’ve been waiting to return to A. Dang it. I really hope I got all the glass.

When Your Employer Quits Paying You, When Do You Get Another Job?

When I was still young, it was not uncommon for startups to try to continue to er, continue, even when they didn’t have the money to pay their early employees — usually by increasing their equity. I knew this — I knew or knew of a variety of people who had gotten screwed when the company inevitably fizzled, the equity proved worthless and there were no assets to make the back pay up. It made me very cynical about startups, and deeply influenced what I asked for when I went to work for one, and then another, and ensured that I would _never_ contemplate working for an employer who could no longer pay me. Not everyone learned this lesson, but a fair number of people did, and continuing to, er, continue when unable to pay employees seems to be mostly gone from startup culture.

The government shutdown has now gone on long enough that people are not getting paid for the work they are still required to do.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/01/04/politics/shutdown-tsa-screening/index.html

In general, of course, if you have worked for the government for a really long time, you’ve seen this before and you know you’ll eventually get the money and you are maybe at a point in your life where you’ve got a few month’s cushion or a better paid spouse or whatever and you just slog on through, annoyed, but relatively unscathed.

But if you are a TSA screener, maybe you _have not_ been through this before, and probably you do not have a few month’s cushion and, as this article notes, you may not be able to afford child care anymore. So, first things first, you start calling in sick. Maybe you’ll get paid anyway — I have no idea how TSA sick pay works — maybe you won’t, but at least you can avoid having to pay child care.

OTOH, maybe you’ll go get another job. And if you _do_ go get another job, maybe you’ll like that job better than your TSA screener gig. Maybe the other job will pay better, have better benefits, and when you look at it and try to gauge the likelihood of another lapse of pay due to government shutdown vs. being laid off or fired from the new gig, maybe you’ll look at Trump and think, that motherfucker will do this to me again. I know it.

The real risk of the government shutdown is how many government employees will never return because the economy is going great, and they can get other, better remunerated, more stable employment elsewhere. _Then_ what are we going to do?