The Path of the Bookseller

The shock came last week, on Tuesday afternoon. On my way to work, I had dropped by the ATM machine at the bank near the store to withdraw some money. The withdrawal failed. The machine claimed that I had no money in my account. Since I knew that there was at least $300 in it, I went to hunt down the mistake.

Logging on to a terminal within the bank, I found that, again, my account was empty. My last paycheck appeared to have been $350 less than usual. I stormed up to the store to find out what had happened.

After rapidly plowing my way up the hierarchy of our scheduling supervisor, payroll supervisor, human resources manager, and general manager (all good people who were eager to help straighten things out), I discovered that when I had taken what I believed to be a two-week paid vacation last month, I had actually been out of vacation days, and I didn’t get paid. The supervisors tell me of a conversation that we had in which they told me that I wouldn’t be paid and I decided to take the days off anyway. I have no memory at all of such a conversation, and can’t picture myself choosing to take days off without pay. But it’s their word and memory against mine, and if I were an outside person, in this situation, I would probably believe them.

The managers worked to figure out something that could be done. The corporation does have a foundation which can help out workers in need. My general manager gave me an application form to fill out and leave in his mailbox. He said that he would fax it and a personal recommendation letter to the appropriate people first thing in the morning.

I had about four dollars in my pocket, which was about enough to get lunch at the corner Walgreen’s (where, if you look carefully, there are some good things at reasonable prices). I wouldn’t be able to eat dinner away from home as I usually do after work. But I recalled that I had picked up a handful of Clif bars a few days earlier, and had some in my shoulder bag.

I stomped through the rest of the evening in a mixture of rage and embarrassment, the frustration only abating when I threw myself into helping customers. On the way to the BART to go home, I wolfed down one of the Clif bars, and was surprised to discover, over the time that it took me to do my rounds at the church and get home, that it really did take care of my after-work hunger. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple when I got home, and was quite satisfied.

The next day, after some procrastination and covering it up, I told my friends of my predicament. To my surprise and gratitude, some of my roommates pooled together and gave me about a hundred dollars. “You’ve been cooking these huge dinners on Thursday nights for us for years without ever asking for anything,” they said. “This should help toward covering some of the costs.”

That did make a big difference. Doing my shopping the next day for our weekly dinner, I was a touch more frugal than usual, though the Berkeley Bowl sells very good food very cheaply.

One of the busiest yet friendliest places there is an unlabeled rack near the back of the store. Bags randomly dumped here contain produce at deep discounts. It’s the final in-store abode of the dinged, the overstocked, and the almost-overripe. Anything that doesn’t sell that day ends up in the dumpster.

None of the bags have labels. Most of the food is easy to identify, though there are always mysteries. Strangers frequently ask each other if they know what the heck some odd bagged item is. I’ve been turned on to some good new foods from the racks, including, in recent weeks, nopales, jicama, some tiny red bananas whose name I don’t know, and bitter melon. (OK, so the bitter melon wasn’t so good. Maybe it’s an acquired taste.)

Shopping that day, I got bags of sweet potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, apples, the aforemention bananas, and a canteloupe, each for well under a dollar. I also got a big stalk of brussel sprouts for $1.99, and two rainbow trout for surprisingly little.

Dinner was even larger than usual, and some of the elements didn’t make it to the table. I cooked the eggplant (sliced and baked on oiled parchment paper) while we ate, saving it for later.

We had lots of leftovers, which turned out to be quite useful. I’d gotted into the rather expensive habit of eating almost all my meals out, believing that I didn’t have time to prepare and pack lunches, and that I would be too hungry heading out of work to do my rounds effectively without eating dinner first.

Forced into frugality, though, I’ve discovered that I can, indeed, make things work out well. Fixing lunches takes about fifteen minutes a day. On most days, I cook up a serving of buckwheat noodles, then put them in a microwavable plastic dish with different combinations of vegetables. I have also cut up some chicken breasts that I had cooked and frozen a while ago, and mixed up the whole with a light tahini sauce. That, with an apple, makes for quite a satisfying lunch.

(I also discovered that our breakroom is very low on forks. We have a plethora of plastic spoons and knives, but we just seem not to get forks. There are two metal forks available, but they are often in use, or have been left in the sink, unwashed, by the last person to use them. Sometimes I wash one and use it, and, if it needed to be done, wash the other one, too, dry it, and put it away. But I also have used the pair of chopsticks that I keep in a case in my shoulder bag for just such emergencies.)

Instead of eating dinner out (though I did indulge in a Tiger Burger at Au Coquelet on Sunday), I wolf down a Clif bar or something like it before I head down to the BART or once I get out of the station at the other end. (Eating and drinking on the BART is strictly illegal, and seeing people doing that is one of the few things that instantly gets me angry.) I then do my rounds and eat dinner at home — frequently a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (which, with good whole-grain bread and one of the better jams or jellies, appears to be more nutritious than its popularity — or the Elvis variant — would suggest) and a piece of fruit, or something very much like the lunches I’d been preparing.

I also usually have a big breakfast, of a couple of scrambled eggs (sometimes with grated cheese), toast with jelly, coffee, and fruit. (Uh-oh — is this the canonical dreaded “What I Had for Breakfast” blog post?). I’ve stumbled onto a better way of making scrambled eggs than I had been doing. I now pour some canola oil onto a pan, heat it until it’s very hot, and pour the scrambled eggs onto it. They cook very quickly and are quite fluffy. If I’m adding the grated cheese, I wait until the bottom of the layer of eggs has become solid, sprinkle the cheese in, and fold the eggs over it.

In cutting back on food expenses, I’ve also realized how much I’ve been spending on other stuff. The Half Price Books store right at the BART station is a constant temptation, as is working in a book and CD store. I’ve also bought a few things online that I might have passed up if I had to actually go to a store to get them.

But one thing that really gets me is the overdraft charges on my bank account. My paycheck has been pretty constant for a while, so I hadn’t been taking a close look at what I’d been getting with each check. Since I have Direct Deposit, I don’t have to pick it up on payday, but just sign for a stub, which usually happened after a few days.

In this case, I got paid on a Friday, as usual, and spent money as normal until I discovered the disaster on Tuesday. My account went into the red on Sunday.  After that point, I had made six purchases — two of online music, one CD, and two dinners — as well as having a monthly charge (for a podcasting service that I’ve never actually used). These totalled about $75. But with the way that the bank works, I got hit with an overdraft fee for each one, plus an insufficient funds fee for something (probably the PayPal transaction for the podcasting service). At $35 apiece, these leeched me of a further $245! (This once again proves that “money in the bank” is a convenient illusion, and that any money that you aren’t holding in your hand isn’t really yours.)

So now, as I await tonight’s paycheck, my bank account is $318 in the hole. With tonight’s check (assuming no further disaster), and the $100 in savings I have in another account at another bank (which I thought was nearly empty until I looked at the statement that arrived today), as well as a regularly scheduled Employee Gift Card that I should be getting over the next week (plus ones that I will probably get for an employee contest that I win most of the time) I should squeak through until the following one.

I think I’ll probably also sell off many of the cheap CDs that I acquired during the vacation. I would probably only ever listen to a subset of them, and I have a pretty good idea by now of which they are.

The application to the corporate foundation, by the way, now looks quite doubtful. Living here at the Priory, I have very few bills, and few receipts for what I do pay. And when I look at my expenses versus my income, I really have no one to blame but myself for my living so near the financial brink. If I were the person in charge, I don’t think I would approve this application.

So the belt remains tightened, and I carry on.