Today, my brain and fingers felt like a train pulling into the station, chugging slower and slower, gears working their way creakily towards a full stop – but without the satisfaction of a full, restful halt. I have this notion – maybe far off – that once I’ve figured this game out, wrested myself free from the claws of “full-time” drudgery, all of the muck and rust fiercely clinging to the vulnerable bits of my thinking cap will fall away, leaving me with an entirely bearable lightness of being.

In the meantime, I sit wrapped in two blankets, snugly between my space heater and Christmas tree, snacking on Nestle Semi-Sweet Morsels – they’re much cheaper than Green and Black’s bars.

In 1822, the word “coupon” entered our lexicon. It’s from the French word

From the LIFE Magazine archive

“couper,” which evidently means “to cut.” Evidently it originally referred to a certificate of interest due on a bond – more specifically, to a physical part of a bond certificate that could be cut off and presented for payment. As an advertising strategy, coupons are about 100 years old. They’ve come a long way from their original meaning – these days, an estimated $318 billion worth of grocery coupons alone are issued. And less than 1% of those are actually redeemed.

For as long as there have been coupons, there have been people whose have clipped and saved them. The religious folks who colonized New England were big on the virtues of savings and thrift, and despite all the egregious consumption and accompanying waste this country is (let’s face it) known for, we continue to see ourselves as thrifty. Or at least keen on getting a good deal.

Kathy Spencer is perhaps a bit more keen than most of us on getting a good deal. She claims to feed a family of six (with assorted pets) for less than $10 per week, and is part of a larger group of “couponing” personalities with Internet presences. Yes, “couponing.” It’s not enough that we clip and save coupons (“Qs” in the lingo) – we need to make it a verb. Or at least an adverb.

Online couponers have their own language, and forums boast abbreviation decoder lists like this one:

• Cat Catalina= group of items when purchased together triggers a special coupon to print
• ECB= Extra Care Bucks (obtained from CVS) money coupons that print at CVS that work like cash
• OYNO= On Your Next Order
• Rolling =When you get a OYNO Q or ECB Q and use it to buy more stuff that gets you even more Q’s
• DICABON=Depends if cashiers a Bitch or not

Earlier this fall I got interested in learning about these people and their frugal practices. It seemed to me that we could be spending a good deal less on groceries than we were, and I thought that with some study and a bit of organization we could dramatically reduce our grocery bill. Now that I’m on the other end of the initiative, I’m just not sure about that. I want to talk here about what I learned in my brief digression into the couponing world – at the very least I hope to share some of the weirdness of the subculture. There may be some readers who find the things I’m about to say to be effete, redundant, inspiring, or even offensive. As always, I’m fine with all of that.

I found out the big sites that the major couponers use to do their, um, couponing. Turns out that collecting just one Sunday circular is for amateurs. And that you may need to keep some kind of database. Check it:

• First stop – the “Big Tent” site “How to Shop for Free”: You have to register to see the forums. Annual membershiop costs $1. When you joined (and I did, in the name of “research”), you choose from 50 different categories you can receive all emails or daily digests , including all the major grocery store chains and drug store chains and incidental titles like “How to get a years worth of toilet paper for free” and “Black Friday” (“Black Friday is the Best Day of the year. For those of you that have no clue what it is , it is the day after Thanksgiving.”). After a week of receiving emails from this site I unsubscribed. That is all.
• Next stop -  Stephanie Nelson, aka the “Coupon Mom.” She’s got a website and a book. She’s clearly a major player in the online coupon biz. If you sign up, you get weekly emails when the national newspaper circulars are updated. This allows you to access coupons for various Glade and Cheerios products that you might never otherwise buy, unless you need to smell Mountain Fresh while eating fortified oat rings. Seriously, though, the Coupon Mom is pretty amazing. The online documents she’s posted are especially thorough re: Strategic Shopping (more on that in a minute), and her site does link up your state’s grocery circulars with the national offers to clue you in to grocery deals if you’re so inclined.

This is where I slowed down a bit. The Coupon Mom’s system, like similar ones available for free or pay online, seems to involve a surprisingly large amount of time. You need to know the things you buy all the time and what their average price is. This involves tracking prices over time in charts and then matching coupons so you can use them at the right time to maximize your savings.

Until I started reading this stuff, I was right there. I thought: I can do this. I can clip and save, and organize in envelopes, and by God go to the grocery store and buy stuff on sale and save us a bunch of money. Then I realized a few key things:

1. We don’t buy the same stuff all the time. This is because we are experimental cooks, maybe, or just unreliable – either way, our grocery list is surprisingly mercurial.

2. We don’t buy most of the stuff coupons are for. Once you get beyond the initial euphoria of 50 cents off toothpaste and $1.50 off detergent, you realize that if you are a vegetarian who tries to cook most of your own meals using local and mostly organic produce, couponing is not gonna help you beyond the initial salvo for detergents and other products. So many coupons are for processed foods and weird scent-type products. It’s easy to forget that coupons are advertising strategies and not altruistic devices. The online coupon ladies (and yes, they’re all ladies  – if you decide to go on this kind of adventure you begin to feel some weird gender role issues when you cash in your coupons at the register like a triumphant gatherer while your fellow ladies look on enviously) all claim to see through this marketing for their own naked self-interest, but of course we’ve seen this sort of jive before. It’s why Sprite still exists as a brand, after all. In any case, couponing seems to basically be a lifestyle without produce. Which is not a lifestyle I want to live.

3. Stocking up makes you feel like a weirdo. They say one of the points is buying to stock up, not necesarily when you need things, so that the mustard will be free (and you will have 38 bottles of it ready to deploy at a moment’s notice), but this starts to seem absurd around bottle #3 and positively pathological around bottle #5. I do not want to be the lady with 58 tubes of toothpaste stockpiled against nuclear holocaust or an Adam Lambert presidency.

It’s easy to get into coupon saving as a kind of hedge against financial chaos. To be honest, the first few times you get the Sunday paper and organize the meager bounty into envelopes, you feel surprisingly virtuous. And then, after the first few halcyon weeks, when you’ve got a hall closet full of dishwashing detergent and own more floss than basically was used for all of human history, you start to question the virtue of The Method. Part of this is because your time is worth money. Which does not seem to be much of an issue for many of the people freaking out about coupon use and its got-to-spend-money-to-make-money ethos. Also it may occur to you at some point that one of the fundamental assumptions of couponing is to Make Shopping Fun, and you’re not so sure about that at all. Which is when it’s a good time to step slowly away from the discount Glade, BOGO or no.

You’re in a hurry and that’s the only reason you’ve made the phone call to begin with.

You just want the answer NOW. You know you can get the answer through just a wee bit of trial and error, but you have to run out now and you plan on doing this LABORIOUS task later, and you just w…a…n…t (yes, say in a whiny way) to be ready when you get back so you can get to work on something you REALLY know you WON’T like doing, but that MUST BE DONE.

So you make the call to: TECHNICAL SUPPORT. No names, no put-downs here – it could be for a refrigerator, a dishwasher, a pc, a laptop, an ISP, a whois change – WHATEVER. And the guy knows LESS than you.  That’s not a brag; IT’S A DISAPPOINTMENT!!!!!

yOU called because you HATE – or severely dislike (Yes, Mother, I remember – NEVER say hate) – the rote task you will have to do – OVER AND OVER – in order to accomplish what you must…and you’re on the phone with someone who is having trouble understanding you, LOOKING things up in a book (more training, please before you get on the phones by yourself – I have done  such work, so I feel authorized to say so) … And he keeps repeating as he’s looking up, and he’s honest, poor soul, and doesn’t hide that he’s looking up….as he goes along…trying, really trying to help.

AND………SO………you go through all the testing while you’re on the phone with him – figure it out – and now know WHAT MUST BE DONE – even MORE steps than you imagined (and they call this the super highway!??? – I’d say there are PLENTY OF YIELDS and blinking yellows around this cyberspace).

Anyway…guess it was just meant to be…and guess the bright side is, I had company while figuring it all out, which I couldn’t seem to find the patience for on my own….so

Thank you, Mr. Customer Service Man.  I have yet to do the LABORIOUS work that awaits me…but I now I know how!

-beeha

Howard Demopolis sat drinking coffee at his desk, staring at a pile of receipts. After a moment, he picked up his podphone and dialed up a distraction. A half-hour passed quickly, and he was thankful. Then it was back to the pile of receipts, which hadn’t moved at all. He sighed. He pulled out a pocket mirror and studied his face. He had done a good job shaving that morning, and he smiled at himself approvingly. He adjusted his tie. It was a tired old tie, which had lost the richness from its blues and yellows. He thought to buy a new one, and was about to dial up a clothier on his podphone when the podphone rang. He answered it dutifully.

“Howard Demopolis.” He spoke the words with manufactured cheer into the phone. He paused. He closed his eyes. “I see,” he said to the phone. “Thanks for letting me know.” Then he pushed a button to terminate the call and sat staring at the pile of receipts again. He got up and moved to the narrow window that looked out over Daryllyn’s Garage and the Time and Again Diner and beyond. He suddenly needed a sandwich. He looked at the podphone to check the time. 10:32, a bit early for lunch. He shrugged and grabbed his jacket, checking the pockets for his wallet and change as he put it on.

At the Time and Again Diner, Howard ordered a ham on rye with a side of cheesy fries. “Coffee, black,” he added as the waitress took the menu from him. He lit a cigarette. The Time and Again Diner was one of the last places in Battery City, outside of the Tumbledown District, where a man could smoke his cigarettes without fear of reprimand or even legal action. It was all bullshit. Howard exhaled fiercely, his mood soured by the news he had received just a little bit ago on his podphone. As he waited for his order, he dialed up Lacewell’s department store and navigated through their customer service menus until he found a bright blue tie with yellow floral prints that he liked. “I’ll take that,” he mumbled to himself and purchased it with a few clicks and instances of data entry.

His sandwich arrived, and the coffee, which he sipped pensively as he finished the cigarette. He was thinking about the call he had gotten just a little bit ago from Jim Daws, his dog’s veterinarian. The news was not good. Howard was not happy. That dog had been with him for how many years now? Fifteen? Sixteen? Howard bit viciously into the ham on rye. A little mustard dripped down his hand. He squinted back his troubled feelings.

Back at the office, he got nothing done. The receipts just stared at him as the digital clock on his desk slowly ticked away time. He tapped a mechanical pencil on the desk, then took out his accounting ledger and powered it up. It flashed through twenty screens in as many seconds as it loaded his files. A bird slammed itself into his window. Howard looked up just in time to see it stagger away, struggling to maintain flight after stunning itself.

The noon sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky and filtered through his window. He looked over at the accounting ledger, which was idling at the main menu. He double-clicked an icon and sighed. A spreadsheet instantly dominated the screen. Howard scrolled down through figures and phrases and costs, landing after a moment at an empty row. He picked up the first receipt and began to enter values.

Drudgery of farm women is an important aspect that has attracted wide attention of researchers. It is needless to emphasize that farm women are involved in numerous activities. If measured by the extensiveness and intensiveness of their involvement, farm women shoulder much more burden than men. Importantly, women are involved in more strenuous activities as compared to men. Many of such activities are drudgery prone to varying degree. Even women suffer from different health problems which adversely affect their working efficiency ad family welfare. Unfortunately, data on the extent to which women are affected in the working environment and the effect on their work output are not available. Hence, it is required that studies should be commissioned on drudgery assessment, and drudgery reducing interventions should be identified;
Department of Family Resource management is working in these directions and have identified many drudgery reducing technologies such as revolving stool , weeder, face protector etc,

Drudgery of farm women is an important aspect that has attracted wide attention of researchers. It is needless to emphasize that farm women are involved in numerous activities. If measured by the extensiveness and intensiveness of their involvement, farm women shoulder much more burden than men. Importantly, women are involved in more strenuous activities as compared to men. Many of such activities are drudgery prone to varying degree. Even women suffer from different health problems which adversely affect their working efficiency ad family welfare. Unfortunately, data on the extent to which women are affected in the working environment and the effect on their work output are not available. Hence, it is required that studies should be commissioned on drudgery assessment, and drudgery reducing interventions should be identified;
Department of Family Resource management is working in these directions and have identified many drudgery reducing technologies such as revolving stool , weeder, face protector etc,

I am feeling so sleepy. I could – actually I can – roll my head to one side and it will roll off my neck.
Directors are such headaches. The one I work under is useless. He just cannot convince his boss that whatever it is I am doing isn’t exactly going to take merely to hours! As a result, I got into a little heated discussion with him and told him that I thought his boss was expecting the Moon and in so doing, was being very unreasonable!

Well, the fellow just shakes his head vigorously and reiterates that he can tell the boss how difficult it was for us to finish the task. But thereafter, he gave me no concrete solution to this problem at all.

I guess he has been inducted into the fold!

Keep peace with your soul.

With all its shams, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

Desiderata Max Ehrmann

http://www.fleurdelis.com/desidera.htm

I like the whole poem, I feel it’s quite quakerly in its acknowledgement to

“Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.”

To conclude that life is over would be freeing, but that is not my conclusion. I only conclude that the good part of my life is over. What is left now is decay, decline, drudgery and indignity. As long as there are those who need me, I will stick around.  Not one moment longer.

Hm. Here it is, day three of my three-day challenge. How have I done?

I finished the Vs in Word Mysteries. Which means I have X, Y and Z…about twenty pages. On the plus side, I’m subbing at my mum’s school tomorrow, so I can finish and return it then.

I (we) washed three loads of laundry. Unfortunately, at least three remain.

I bought another 1 1/4 pounds of rhubarb, after discovering that I didn’t have enough to even third the recipe. Of course, after eating a huge slice of very green rhubarb pie after church, the urgency has gone out of my desire for the cobbler. Perhaps I’ll go stare at the recipe and photos again.

1. Finish reading Word Mysteries & Histories: From Quiche to Humble Pie…the last of last summer’s reading list.

2. Wash every piece of dirty clothing in the house.

3. Make rhubarb cobbler before my gorgeous ruby-red stalks of rhubarb dry up and blow away.