In which I complain about things I don’t like. Because I’m spiritual and restrained like that.

Finance

I spend a lot of time on Amazon.com. I just do. I’m a Kindle owner several times over, I like ordering stuff online and not having to deal with stores or people or shopping, and it’s just convenient.

Recently while looking over the contents of my cart (I always keep things in there, but rarely actually buy them) I clicked on the AMAZON STORE CARD banner ad they’d been feeding me for the last year or so and applied.

In less than three minutes I had an account with an $800 limit, and thereby learned that while my credit it still so bad I can only get an $800 limit, it’s healed enough since the divorce that companies are now willing to give me credit again. Neat.

I had absolutely NO intention of using the account, not ever, because I didn’t need it and I’d read in the comments that the interest rates and fees were high.

Shortly after getting this Amazon Store Card account I bought an ebook from my Kindle Paperwhite and, noticing that my phone didn’t ding with a text from my debit card carrier, went into my Amazon settings and set my regular card as the default. (Amazon had automatically set the store card as the default payment method. I didn’t want to use it, so I set my regular card as the default. I know I did this, because my next ebook purchase shows up on my debit card.)

Well, Amazon set the store card as my default payment method again all on its own and weeks went by before I noticed, because I’m often not within hearing distance of my cell phone when I buy an ebook.

Today I closed the card. I ended up paying $120.72, all told, for no service whatsoever — merely for “financing” some ebook purchases.

Fucking usury. This shit should be illegal. I could bitch at the account carrier, but I did charge those ebooks and I didn’t make the payments my acceptance of their terms and conditions said I would. And I could bitch at Amazon, too, about being charged fifty bucks for nothing, but they didn’t charge me the financing fees and they’d just look at their logs and say, “Well, it shows here that your Amazon Store Card was set as your default payment method between those dates, so we’re sorry for your trouble,” even though I know their software set the card as the default. Twice! Both times without my desire or permission!

Adding insult to injury, the previous month I had opened a Paypal debit card at my brother’s recommendation. And I closed that shit, too, as soon as I realized it was going to cost $59.88 a year just to have the thing, whether I used it or not. Basically I had a Paypal debit account for a couple of weeks, never used it, and paid five bucks in fees.

The job market

Have you read any job listings lately?

Holy shit. These people are insane. There are companies who want to pay ten bucks an hour for contract work, even though working from home means the contractor has to buy and maintain her own equipment, pay her own utilities, and file complicated taxes. Who the fuck would contract for ten bucks an hour! It’s absurd.

Then there’s the jobs that say “Part-time receptionist” and start the third paragraph with, “In addition to Sales, the receptionist will be expected to attend local trade shows…” Because on what planet is reception a fucking sales position? Is it the planet where the receptionist also has to be an expert at bookkeeping? Not, like, “Sure I can do basic bookkeeping,” but, like, they want to pay somebody ten bucks an hour to be a receptionist AND literally file the company taxes.

Then there’s the “Make $1500 to $2000 a week being a massage therapist” postings. You merely have to be, and I quote, “easy on the eyes.” Because we don’t hire no ugly whores, yo.

I just went through all of the part-time postings in the Minneapolis area for the past two weeks, and over 80% of them are bogus. Not because they’re not real jobs, but because they want skilled workers to work shitty schedules for $8.25 an hour.

These postings wouldn’t exist if people weren’t desperate enough to actually take these jobs.

I applied to the contracting one, of course, but in the last paragraph of my cover letter told them that their pay rate was a pipe dream and that I was applying anyway in case they wanted to get in contact with me after their other applicants turned out to be disappointing. Because sometimes, people just need to be told.

Shit schedules, shit environments, and shit pay: this is what most part-time job descriptions contain. Is it truly impossible for, say, a grocery store to offer regular schedules? Is it written somewhere that these places have to have random scheduling? Is it further written that people working that hard and in such uncertainty and discomfort should be paid too little to survive on, and also that all such companies must instead spend that money on expensive anti-employee theft training modules? Why does reading multiple job placement ads give one the impression that companies really think people don’t mind utter scheduling insecurity? “Must be available weekends.” “Prefer applicants with open evening and weekend availability.” “The hours for this position are M-F but the successful applicant will also be available weekends.” Because we want to pay you nine dollars an hour to have absolutely no personal autonomy whatsoever.

Jesus Christ, things are fucked UP.

All I want is a part-time office job. I despair of ever finding a part-time office job. I guess I’ll just start looking for full-time work so I can be depressed about that, too, because I fucked up and decided to not be “easy on the eyes” or have an advanced degree in accounting, so I can’t make two grand a week or nine dollars an hour.

In other news, I’ll be working all weekend again. Which means I haven’t had the luxury of sleeping in with the man I moved two thousand miles to live with in over a month. And yeah, I’m pretty mad about it. You try being 45 and finding a job that isn’t either full-time career path bullshit or Walmart greeter. It sucks, lemmie tell ya.