Power and privilege

One thing about my refinance issues is that if I didn't need to refinance - meaning if I wasn't having financial issues - it wouldn't have been a problem. The fee for the appraisal wouldn't have put me in the hole, and the necessary work would have been done, so I could still have gotten that reduced interest rate and have some breathing room every month. The more you need money, the more obstacles there are to getting it.

Rather than exploring that theme further, I am going to tell two more stories.

One is about my first job after college. I actually started there about a month after my mission, and we liked each other. I went back there and worked on school breaks, and they made me an offer right after graduation. I thought things were looking really good. They turned bad really quickly after that.

Suddenly the work started drying up, and hours started being cut. It got so bad that I actually took some temp jobs during this time and they did not interfere with my scheduled hours. A lot of people left. I was staying available but also looking for other work. Then, one evening as I was leaving the office, the owner said we would need to talk about lowering my pay since I was working on a different project now. She didn't even call me into her office for an actual discussion, it was "Next time we'll talk about paying you less!" I said let's not worry about that and I would look for another job.

The part that really surprised me was that as I got downtown she called on my cell phone and said she wanted to make sure about the conversation we'd had. Had I quit? I guess I had. I didn't realize until later that the whole purpose of that conversation was to be able to deny my unemployment claim. Fortunately, the reason business had been drying up was she was turning down previous clients. I ended up temping at one of the former clients for something they tried to hire her for. That temp company kept me going for the next year.

I am sure there was some perfectly logical reason for her turning down work and pushing out people she had once really wanted as employees. In retrospect I probably should have just said "okay" and stepped up my job search, or perhaps swore at her to see if that got me fired. I don't know. I was young and naive, and she knew a lot more about working the system.

At least there were still jobs out there when that happened. I wasn't so lucky the next time.

I have written about the other situation before. We were going to Australia. We were going to be gone for a month. I had some vacation stored up, and then I think there would have been a week and a half unpaid. I asked what I needed to do to get that arranged, and corporate kept saying they would get back to me, then not getting back, until the week we were leaving, when they said it was my manager's decision and he decided not to let me go on the trip. They were researching if they had to keep my job for me, which is fine but it was not the question that I asked or the question they told me they were looking up.

Looking back I can see some things differently. There was a goal on the part of the manager not to take me back to teach me a lesson, but I don't think that was corporate's goal. I think corporate just wanted to pay me less, and having me re-apply for my job would facilitate that. The mandatory pay cuts that went through the group after that seem to back that up.

Again, this counted as me quitting. It had not been my intention to quit at all, but that's how it turned out, and once again I was ineligible for unemployment. 

It didn't matter in either case that I was a really good employee, always taking on new responsibilities, accommodating the needs of other employees and the employer, and that I kept things running smoothly. This is important, because I thought that meant something, and even though that other job had kind of shown me that it wasn't true, I thought it was an exception.

It didn't matter that in the second case it was the manager's own ego that made me a liability, or that the replacement he hired was completely unqualified which led to a heavy burden on the people left who were still good workers at the same time that the employees who were not such good workers started getting a lot worse, or that the downward spiral that was starting there led to business being lost. At that point, integrity was just going out the window, and so really it is not surprising that said manager started an affair with one of his employees, although there are a lot of dangerous places that can lead to. Ultimately, they were the ones with the power, so they were free to make a bad decision that hurt me.

Losing your job is never fun, but losing it two weeks before the economy collapses is worse. If they had told me that the job was lost when I first asked about it, I might have decided not to go on the trip, or I could have started my job search sooner, before the collapse. Maybe the collapse would have negated anything I did prior to leaving anyway, but it would have been nice to have the option.

Unsurprisingly, that financial collapse had a lot to do with people with money acting unethically. They could get away with it because they had money, and they did it because they wanted more money. It's never enough. They get so much they run out of things to buy so they stockpile more in the Cayman Islands, and it's still not enough.

By talking about my finances I know that I have opened myself up to criticism. I know because I hear how other people talk when we see stories about the poor. They shouldn't have gotten that degree; you don't make any money with that. They shouldn't have kids if they can't afford them. No one stops and thinks about the dreariness of a world where only the rich can have children (and pets), and where there are no adjunct professors, and no one ever evaluates any decision based on anything but self-interest.

There can be real consequences for talking too. The guy who was working two full-time jobs at two different Subways lost one of those jobs now, and he was by all accounts a good employee who loved his job.

So, I'll talk. It is deliberate that there are only pronouns and no names.