How is the economy changing your life right now?

[Menolly]

8. I have an office in Tampa, and I used to go down there each month. I have reduced my trips down there and tried to take care of things in other ways rather than showing up personally.

What? And you never thought to visit me? Sheesh!

And if he drives via I-75, there better be a future Cracker Barrel stop in Gator Town planned...

[iQuestor]

I shall. I usually go 75 right into Odessa. !!

Also many thanks to Brinn who gave me some good advice on handling the Bankers. without resorting to C4.

[Menolly]

I shall. I usually go 75 right into Odessa. !!

Alrighty then. Let me know when...
I'll bake some key lime pies for yourself, as well as to gift the Leonine One and TOM with. Then if you give me warning of your trip home, I'll bake a couple more for you to share with your wife...

Just make sure you have a cooler and ice packs available to keep them cold.

[Tjol]

Well, initially, the economy caused work to be a little less enjoyable. As money gets a little more scarce, owners tend to find or generate excuses for not paying their full contract. If it was after the project, so be it, comes with the territory, instead, owners were deliberately throwing wrenches into projects, and then coming back later and suggesting that it was the architect's fault not theirs in order to try to pay a portion of the contract instead of the full contract.

That was the first wave, when money gets tight, the people with the money go farther across the line to avoid having to spend anymore than the legal system will force them to. Shortly after that, we had a few pay reductions.

Next, we slowly lost employees from the office, so everyone who remained became multi talented... and multi-hatted if they weren't already. On top of that, several like myself, were asked to take on responsabilities that in all truth were probably too big for them, but someone has to do it, and with less employees, it's inevitable.

Then, the jobs that I was working on starting finishing up, and instead of working on 4-5 projects at a time, and having underbilling more of a concern than a lack of hours to bill, there were only a handful of projects in the office, and finding 16-24 hours of billable work started becoming quite an acheivement. Everyone in the office was pretty much in the same boat. People who were pure overhead were layed off, and those that remained were on workshare to make up for the loss of hours.

A month and a half after that, I was laid off. About five or six months after I was expecting to, thanks to my being able to manage the increased responsabilities competently I guess.

So the current state of the economy has me in the end pondering where and how I should be applying myself, because architecture related jobs just aren't there when the people who fund architecture are in fear of seeing no returns on any investment they might make in anything from a remodel to a brand new building.

Which in turn begs the question, since it can't only be architecture that's been impacted, how is it that so many talented and capable people are left to be ineffectual in terms of providing some lasting product to the societies they live in? Why at the same time are we giving out white collar welfare to the incompetant and incapable who never provided any lasting product to the society they exist in? 0=)

[JazFusion]

In a nut-shell, if the economy doesn't change by September, me, my husband, and my 2 1/2 year old son will be evicted with nowhere to go.

We don't pay for cable, we can't afford to turn on the A/C, we NEVER eat out, we've only been able to afford one car, eating ramen noodles & spaghetti o's is a feast at our apartment, and we have no health insurance. Food stamps are a joke ($113 a month? really??).

So yeah, we're f-cked if something doesn't happen sooner than soon.

[Tjol]

What we need is for government employees, including politicians and their staffs to be given a choice between one of two alternatives.

(1) They can take a 20% across the board pay cut.

(2) They can reduce their staffs by an amount of salary that is the equivalent of a 20% across the board paycut.

Cut all the taxes that punish the incentive for profit by even 5%. And voila, we'll be working again, because people will have a profit incentive to invest in workers being productive rather than where we are at right now, waiting for the opportunity to be productive again.

[dANdeLION]

Let's see....I got laid off, and it took me 9 months to find another job. The job paid over $7 less per hour, and that has given me endless problems concerning child support, and then, last friday, I was fired because I had been there six months and they either had to bring me on as a full-time employee and give me benefits, or fire me. They say they're putting my paperwork through so they can re-hire me, but clearly we'll be back in the same place six months from now. My field is directly related to the housing market, so who knows when things will get back to normal.......

[JazFusion]

I still like the idea of legalizing pot and taxing it. We still might be poor, but we'd all be happy 'til the end.

[Loredoctor]

I still like the idea of legalizing pot and taxing it. We still might be poor, but we'd all be happy 'til the end.

And fearful, paranoid, depressed . . .

[lorin]

Well.........

I've cut back on nearly everything. With food, its not in the house if it wasnt on sale.

My hair cuts are once every two months instead of once every month.

No new clothes, which is a problem since I dropped a load of weight. I look like a clown.

I take the long way home from work to avoid the $10 toll on the bridge and cutting my daily tolls by 30 percent.

I bought my house 3 years ago for 329. It went up to 429 the next year and today it is worth 266. So I cant sell the house.

No eating out period.

But my biggest problem is work. The city laid off 2000 employees in this month alone. I am on the cut list but havent gotten a notice yet. My staff has gone from 39 plus security to 14 plus security. So I have 14 staff and 350 clients. A VERY dangerous situation. And since the junior staff are the first to go they are transferring the dregs to me. Ancient workers who havent been awake in years. They are people that have been working for the city for 35 years and are just waiting for a buyout.