Mile
Zero

Today is tax day, as you probably know. I knew that it would bite me hard, but hopefully--seeing as how I'm no longer working full-time at the World Bank--I can look forward to a much simpler, more withheld tax experience in the future.

Yesterday I called the tax office at the Bank just to check on something. "I've heard that you pay half my self-employment tax," I said. "Is that true?" "Not for you," the accountant said. "We only pay that for term and open-ended employees." It is always nice to have a reminder that even while I worked 40+ hours a week for the Bank, on paper I was working for myself--and now I get to pay for it.

I suspect that the reason that the Bank decides to just drop the tax burden on its low-level employees is that, as I've noted before, most employees of the World Bank do not pay taxes, since they're working outside their home countries for an international organization. Perhaps it's just a sense of fairness: why do paperwork for Americans when the rest of the staff needs no such help? The fact that our situations really are dissimilar does not seem to have entered the equation.

Still, I don't particularly want to gripe about how the Bank treats its employees, even the American ones, because they did pay me very well. I suppose that's worth some hassle every quarter. It could be worse: for some time, employees living elsewhere were paid on fixed salaries in dollars, which was not terribly comfortable when the currency began to fall relative to the Euro. Or at least, that's what I told myself when I sat down every few months to write out what seems like a mammoth check for my "self-employed" day job.

"So pretend that you're a team at Chapeaux Hat company. What does Chapeaux mean? Right, it means 'hat.' So that's kind of a double entendre."

[for literally any situation at all]
"The example I like to use here is the iPod."

"'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.' It was Abraham Lincoln who said that."

"And I'm sure that you all are very aware of budget. You're a bank, after all."

Sometimes, especially as we've been holding job interviews, people ask me what I enjoy most about working at the World Bank. Is it the feeling of satisfaction that comes from working at a non-profit, albeit a huge and controversial institution? Is it the multicultural environment filled with brilliant and interesting people? Is it the wide-ranging nature of the issues that we get to present to the world? Is it the compensation package? Is it the big, shiny building?

Well, I say, those are all very nice. But I also really like the chocolate. Because on days like today, when our colleagues from offices in Europe or Latin America drop in at headquarters for meetings or training, they usually bring chocolate from around the world to share with the rest of us.

I'm getting spoiled.

Now that they're finally done, I've added one of the Learning Week podcasts to the audio section of my portfolio. It features Andrew Law, Head of BBC Worldwide Interactive Learning, and he talks about the impact of different formats and accessible media production on educational programs.

Although I'm not adding them to the portfolio, anyone who's interested in e-learning might also want to listen to the podcasts of David Kolb and Lorin Anderson. Kolb is one of the earliest proponents for experiential learning, and talks about its history and interaction with learning styles. Although he's arguably more important than Law, he required a lot more editing (sometimes more than 50 cuts per minute) to make his speech fully fluent. He still sounds a little odd sometimes, and I didn't want that to be a portfolio piece. Anderson was one of the academics who worked on an elaborate revision of Bloom's taxonomy in 2001. He discusses how the learning taxonomy is used for education, and also how to evaluate learning programs using these tools. It's slightly more obscure than Law's interview, but still interesting given the current emphasis on testing in education.

I have 26 days of leave accumulated over my soon-to-end two-year extended term at the Bank. 26 days--that's just slightly more than five work-weeks. And when I transition to a temporary short-term contract next week, the Bank will buy that leave back. Thoughts:

1. I am going to miss the benefits when I leave this job. I may complain about the tax hassle, but you can't beat the health care (even if I didn't use it) and the vacation time (even if I didn't take it).
2. Seriously, 26 days? I have got to get out more. Look, it's not that I'm a workaholic. I just like what I do. Really.
3. When the check does arrive, it's going to be manna from heaven. I can finally get that ING savings account I've always wanted. Because honestly, it's barely worth it with a brick-and-mortar bank anymore. Bank of America's savings accounts only earn 0.2% a year. I made $3.48 in interest for 2006. And people wonder why most Americans don't save.

One of the weirdest parts of my job is that I know all the VIPs at the World Bank, and nobody knows me, since I watch them speak at conferences every day for B-SPAN. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that: in Belgium, a senior economist came by to speak to my manager at the hotel breakfast, and I had to stop from greeting him by name. How creepy would that be? "Hi, you don't know me, but I watch you all the time."

Anyway, another perk is that I also type a lot of international names, which is great touch-typing practice, since they often step outside the English letter frequency and ordering rules. Some names are just tongue twisters for an American. Rarely you run into one that's just a joy to say. And I'm proud to say that Haja Nirina Razafinjatovo, Minister of National Education and Scientific Research for Madagascar, has one of the latter. Razafinjatovo. A little hard on the fingers, but so much fun to speak aloud.

Too bad I can never tell him that. But then, that's probably another odd conversation starter. "Hi, you don't know me, but your name amused me for hours." Doesn't come across as terribly respectful, I think.

They have installed a solar-powered faucet in the men's room at work. I work on the second floor, in a building with eleven floors, so there are no skylights in the bathroom. Neither are there windows.

In theory, this makes more sense than you'd immediately think, because it's one of those water-conserving auto-faucets, and the solar panel means that it's powered as a side-effect of the bathroom flourescents, instead of requiring its own electrical connection.

But it's still a little odd.

Sometimes my job is simply awesome.

This is my proposed intro music for the IFC's Business Enabling Environment Newsletter, nicknamed "The Buzz." The first section serves as a theme, while the second is a musical bed for the narrator to provide an introduction (that's why it gets a little monotonous and then ends abruptly). There are still mixing errors to fix--UPDATE: corrected!--but gives some idea of what I'm trying to do. I was told to make it "newsy" and I had to have the buzzing sound somewhere.

All bass and guitar sounds were created using the Variax. The slap bass during the first half is the Stingray model, and the second half is a pickstyle Rickenbacker. I also used the 12-string model through a Sansamp PSA-1 distortion plugin for the guitar accents, where it almost creates a doubletracking effect that I really like. The thing is a recording monster.

The week of March 12 I will be in Brussels, Belgium for a conference on Improving Governance and Fighting Corruption: New Frontiers in Public-Private Partnerships. I'm not sure entirely what I'll be doing there, but right now it looks like I'll be writing summaries and status reports for the conference website, as well as possibly creating audio interviews and podcasts for those who can't attend.

I mention this partially because the extra work for this conference, as well as some exciting internal projects, explain the relative paucity of posts during the last couple of days. But primarily I mention it because, hey: I'm going to Belgium for a week, and I think that's pretty awesome. Any tips from former visitors (or, who knows, any Belgian readers) are welcome.

One of the video editors has been giving me a hard time because I'm phobic about needles, and he claims I'll need vaccinations. Against what, I'm not sure. I wasn't aware that Belgium was some kind of plague-ridden hellhole, ravaged by disease and lacking proper sanitation--or, indeed, the discoveries of fire and the wheel. At about the point that I was making a protest to that effect, my manager stopped in.

"So, you are headed off to the land of chocolate," she said, and for a second I thought: I'm also going to Switzerland?

"Does he need shots to go to Belgium?" asked my coworker. My boss simply stared at him for a minute.

"Not unless he is allergic to chocolate."

I think I can state firmly that I am not, and that this trip is sounding better and better already.