Tales from the Steppes

2005-01-17

8:36 a.m.
For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside

So life has been a tad bit on the stressful side of late. We still do not know what the terms of the SU's job termination are. This is a bit bizarre because when a mere mortal is layed off, these things happen very speedily. In fact, they are usually determined well in advance.

The SU is basically getting pulverized by a glacier in a bit of political jockeying. There is a gentleman named Ashish, a few levels up, who is reorging the department to bring it directly under him, instead of the local company president. And of course he wants one of his guys to run it. Nothing personal here - just the way things go sometimes.

Tomorrow the announcement gets made to the SU's department and the company as a whole. Ashish would like him out of there ASAP but the president wants Matt to stay on for a few weeks. Hard to say who will win this particular power struggle. Richard needs the SU but he also needs to not piss off Ashish.

It currently appears that the SU will have a very nice "thank you for playing" package, as a result of some agreements made when GE bought them last year. But since we do not know how this is being framed yet, we do not know for certain whether the terms kick in or not. Without this money, we can probably last a couple of years, at a much reduced standard of living.

One of the biggest problems we are facing is the loss of benefits from this particular action. It is absolutely critical that we maintain full healthcare coverage with the SU's health issues. Any lapse would mean that the cancers would be considered a pre-existing condition and not covered by insurance for a full year. I don't even want to think about how much it would cost to treat one without insurance. The copays are bad enough.

And of course, with all of these health issues, we can not really buy into self-employment insurance. Any insurance that asks for either a questionaire or a physical exam would not accept him, and rightly so. It is not a good business policy to take on a known health risk like him. And we will not even talk about life insurance or disability benefits. Those are just right out.

Fortunately we just found out that we can buy health insurance through COBRA to continue the current policy for only $1000 a month. I know that seems exorbitant but compared to the other options, I am happy - it is less than half what we were expecting.

One of the other options is that I get a job with the Commission on a full-time basis. Right now, I get paid about as much as someone working at McDonalds. It would take a couple of months, but I could probably leverage myself into a full-time position for more money (but still a comparatively low wage) and decent benefits. The problem with doing that is that I still have that pesky thesis I am writing. And between night meetings and regular hours, I am hard pressed to understand how it would happen in any sort of timely fashion. The SU thinks I can get it done with no real loss of time. I want whatever drugs he has been smoking.