Orientation

One of the disadvantages of working at a public university (like University of Houston) rather than a private one (say, Northwestern) is that they have to satisfy Federal requirements, such as making all their new employees sit through many hours of boring lectures on sexual harassment and the like. So this was how I spent my day on Monday... my favourite speaker was the Police officer telling us how to secure our vehicles.

The one piece of information I seem to have taken away regards the "90 day wait" all Texas state employees have to endure before they are eligible for employer health insurance. Apparently, several years ago, the state of Texas had some massive deficit, and they had two choices - increase taxes, or cut spending. Of course, increasing taxes is completely against the Texan mentality (there is no state income tax), so they decided the best way to save money was to stop paying for so much health insurance for Texas state employees. Nice one.