I took these pictures of my little waterfall this morning. The sky is overcast and the temperature is still in the sixties. The plants are doing nicely, without the searing heat.
I don't know if I have posted about this before, so if I have just indulge me.
At the tail end of my distinguished career at Tedious Systems I had a bit of a run in with a nasty little character in the marketing department. She was a new salesperson, out to set the world on fire. Nothing wrong with that. She also however, suffers from Obnoxious Personality Disorder (OPD) and to make matters worse, is a chain-smoker. I admit that I am a smoking bigot.
This salesperson was trying to position herself to get the inside track on a contract for a future hospital by making wild promises to the potential client. The key there is future hospital. This wasn't a real bid, it was something that might happen in the future. Seeing as how I am a "living in the moment" kind of guy, I had no interest in wasting my time on something that could happen some day. So, when her email hit my inbox with instructions get on it asap, I deleted the email.
The next email she sent was to my boss, the always hunky Randall Bing, copied to me. Randall, who has even less patience with dopey salesman than me, tore her a new one, as they say. I piled on by sending her an email letting her know that, (a) I don't work for her and (b) don't send emails to my boss, because it never works out and just pisses me off.
Imagine my delight when I opened the paper this morning to find a story announcing the indefinite postponement of the hospital project that caused this angst. Even though I no longer work for Tedious, I felt the need to forward the article to all parties concerned.
Here's something else. There is a rising drumbeat in the news about student loans. Lots of students are just learning the lesson that when you borrow money for education, they expect you to pay it back. Who knew?
One of the problems with student loans is that very often students use the money foolishly. The colleges take their tuition out of the loan proceeds and then hand over the balance to the students to manage, or mismanage. When I was a middle-aged student, many of my younger fellow students talked about what they wanted to buy when their student loans funded for the upcoming term. I was shocked that people would use student loan money for things beyond tuition and books. What is even worse is that students borrow without a thought to the reality of repayment.
There was a story today by the Associated Press which I think highlights some of the problems with the whole student loan mess.
Today's article focuses on a law school graduate in Michigan and a dentist in Connecticut. The article uses these folks to illustrate what students are up against after they leave college. To me they are as much poster children for stupidity, as the unfortunate victims of a flawed system.
The law school graduate is working at legal aid. She is referred to in the story as a legal aid worker, not a lawyer, making me suspect that she hasn't passed the bar exam. Believe it or not, one in three law school graduates flunked the bar exam last year. Many firms will not hire a lawyer who doesn't pass the exam by the second try, which makes matters even worse for some. This woman doesn't want to get a job at a regular law firm because she is "not dedicated" to that work. Well, that would have been a smart thing to realize before you borrowed $150,000 to become a legal aid worker.
The dentist owes a cool $300,000 in loans. Rather than making student loan repayment his first priority after graduation, this genius bought a home that he pays $2300 per month for and started his own practice with borrowed money, costing him another $1500 per month. How do you help a person with this level of self-absorption?
I may be an unsympathetic old fool, but this situation is just out of control. If a lawyer and a dentist struggle to repay how does the student with a non-professional degree expect to be able to repay?
Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky
2 comments:
My student loans were $2500 and $1000. Tuition was only $363 a quarter, and I had a part time job at a coffee house to make up the difference.
The loans were easy to repay because 1. the interest rate was 5% , and 2. They accrued no interest if I was in school. I think I paid $50 a month on them after graduating. Then, a few years later, I went back to school, during which time they earned no interest.
They made it very easy to repay the loans; you'd have to be a moron to screw it up.
I know so many people who are up to their necks in student loans, including a friend with a PhD who owes something in the neighborhood of $60,000. (Credit card debt, too.)
As I recall, my tuition at Average State University was something like $500 a semester. And my parents paid it! Woo hoo!
I do recall that story re. Tedious Systems. Justice is sweet, yes?
Post a Comment