The screech owl that lives somewhere near me—down in the grove of trees behind the Elisabet Ney Museum, at an offhand guess—was very talky right at dawn today. I usually don’t hear him then; more often I hear his quavering, warbling call at eleven or midnight.
None of the temp firms have anything for me this morning, so I wrestled around with getting a new unemployment claim filed with the workforce commission. I’d have had to do that anyhow to keep my (still theoretical) WIA retraining benefits active into the new claim year, which began on the first of the month. I’m beginning to feel that I’m only going through the motions there as a just-in-case if the Spherion job doesn’t turn out. I also got a call Friday from an editor at Holt, Rinehart asking me if I was available to do another freelance job for them, this time indexing and cross-referencing workbooks. They issue a complete cross-reference for all the books in this series, and it has to be done in a month’s time. My unfortunate habit of being too honest for my own good got me here, because when I mentioned the possibility of the Spherion job in passing, the project editor’s feet went chilly and they decided to break the job into three pieces and give one part to each of three people, instead of handing me the whole thing. And that means I knocked myself down from 110 hours of work in the next couple of weeks to about forty. Shit. The project editor is out of town this week, so I can’t meet with them to find out the scope of work and get my part of it until Friday morning, making the deadlines even tighter.
Meanwhile, I’m supposed to go to the Spherion interview Wednesday afternoon. As far as I can make out, I’d be working at a Level 2/premium service help desk operation, for those customers whose problems can’t be fixed by the first-level tech support in Bangalore, or those who are willing to pay extra to talk with somebody who doesn’t have a foreign accent and whose first language is probably English.
I’m trying to figure out how to cover my bets between Spherion and IRS; I don’t want to give up on the Feds just in case Spherion decides I’m not sufficiently imbued with team spirit, or I can’t keep the pace, or I wear a repulsive necktie or something. Saturday morning I ran into my boss’s boss’s boss from IRS while I was working KUT pledge drive and she was working as a volunteer usher for an ACL taping (Jason Mraz, for those who’re interested). I gave her a quick summary of the situation, and asked if she thought I could come back to IRS part-time next season, and then convert to full time if I get shown the door at the Empire. She said she didn’t see it being a problem, that they could be fairly flexible about scheduling and shifts. I think that, as I do, she sees a perfectly horrible tax season coming at us and wants to keep as many good, experienced people as possible. The advance child tax credit payments mailed out this fall are already shaping up to be as enormous a muddle as the Rate Reduction Credit Débâcle of 2001, erroneous 2003 returns are likely to go through the roof based on what the service centers are already seeing in late-filed 2002 returns, and they’ll need all the help they can find to untangle the mess. And that will probably mean lots of available overtime and a longer tax season this year, which is all to the good for me.
And speaking of KUT, the fall pledge drive is continuing and money’s coming in, but I’m gonna be surprised if they get to end the drive early, as they did last spring when they reached their goal in five and a half days. First, they’re trying to raise a full $600,000, which is $65,000 more than they asked for in the spring, and second, weekend pledge totals were running significantly below target for most shows. The financial beating that public-sector employees have taken in the last few months is showing up at last: with layoffs for hundreds and no raises for the ones who weren’t laid off, people are calling less, and pledging less when they do call.
Yesterday I worked as phone-bank captain on a split shift, doing Weekend Edition Sunday and This American Life in the morning and World Music in the evening. When I looked down the pledge table at the beginning of WESun, I thought “What were they thinking to give me fifteen people for this shift? I’ve never needed more than seven.” And that only proves I can’t predict worth a damn, and the station’s membership staff knew more about what they were doing than I did, because while WESun was slow, the phones began jumping off the hook as soon as American Life began, and didn’t quit during the entire show. Several times I had thirteen or fourteen lines working, and at one point all fifteen volunteers were taking pledges at once, so any extra calls were going to the call center in Lubbock the station contracted to handle overflow.
The evening shift was a LOT more peaceful. I only had seven volunteers, and I probably could have done with five—the calls just weren’t coming that fast. However, there were enough calls that nobody had to feel really superfluous or useless, which is always a concern. I hate it when a volunteer has to go away without feeling he’s made a real contribution. World Music missed its goal of $2,500 by $255, which isn’t at all bad going. I’ve seen shows where we missed goal by a couple of grand. Before the shift started I had to dash down the street to pick up supper for the volunteers from Ruby’s BBQ, which left me with sauce stains down my shirt front after I hugged the box incautiously while carrying it in. I’m not fond of Ruby’s food, because I think they put too much chile in everything they make, from the shredded beef to the black beans. Not everything in Texas is supposed to be peppery, guys.
One oddity came out of the drive. Many, many KUT listeners will remember Dan Del Santo, who started the World Music show at KUT during the early 1980s and who coined the term “world beat” to describe the Afro-Cuban fusion music for which he was best known. His house in Austin was sold after his death, and recently the new owners began a remodeling project. They pulled up the floorboards in one room and, underneath, found several cardboard boxes full of still-new, packaged copies of Dan’s CD DV8, recorded and released in 1990. They donated all the CDs, several hundred of them, to KUT to give away as premiums to the members.
The contents are pretty far from world beat. Largely it’s straight-ahead big-band and cool bop from a whole raft of Names in Austin jazz: Jon Blondell, Tony Campise, James Lakey, A. D. Manion, John Mills, James Polk, Tomás Ramirez, Paul Constantine, Paul Glasse, Danny Levin, Mambo John Treanor, and Steve Zirkel. I never did care all that much for Dan’s world beat stuff, but this is downright tasty, and well worth joining the station to get as a premium. Aside, that is, from the obvious benefit of KUT membership helping to guarantee that the best godsdamn radio station in Austin continues to produce the best godsdamn radio programming in Austin. DO IT!!
Agent Orange takes my amiable photocopy. Fnord.
