Anger

Again, from the sheet...

I am angry that I have had three employers screw me over.

Significantly, I only started allowing myself to feel anger at anyone but myself in January 2018, so this came about 18 months later.

The reason I include it is that this is a big part of me no longer being ashamed of being poor.

Now, I know "poor" is a relative term. There can be a lot to be explored there, but right now I want to focus on digging into those employers, which I will nonetheless do without naming them.

The first one I started working for about a month after I got back from my mission. I went back to her on school breaks, and when I was about to graduate she asked me back and raised my pay. I thought "Great!" 

I went back in June. She started messing with my hours while it was still summer, supposedly due to lack of work. I actually took a temp job while I was technically still working for her, and it didn't interfere at all.

Since I was looking for other things, I did not come out and quit, but that is what she was trying to make happen. One night as I was walking out the door she said that since I was doing a lower class of jobs, without the more complex ones coming in, she would have to lower my wage. I told her I would just look for something else, and not to worry about it.

That was not good enough. She called me while I was on my way to the bus and asked me, "Are you saying you quit?" 

I was so done with her; I said, "Yeah, fine. I quit." 

What I did not realize -- but she understood perfectly -- is that she was guaranteeing I could not collect unemployment.

Shortly after, I got a call. In fact, one of the clients had been desperately trying to get her to take their money, and she kept putting them off. A few of us were shortly reunited on the client's site. It was temporary, but through that contractor I got two other assignments with that client, and was kept busy for over a year.

The explanation I got later was that the boss had a faulty heart valve and was not getting enough oxygen to her brain, making her behave irrationally.

Personally, I think she was trying to work out a business loss for tax reasons. I say that because in retrospect I recognized behavior I had observed with other employees as being really unfair and manipulative. It was uncomfortable at the time, but I was giving her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe these people really were thieving and irresponsible and bad. After all, she was always good to me... until she wasn't. 

She was a small business owner, but the next time it happened with a big corporation. Two, actually. 

The client did kind of set things in motion, with one VP getting a plan to outsource our entire department. They offered retention bonuses to the crew, but not the manager. He found another job by the time the outsourcing vice president was fired and the switch was deemed impractical. We had a succession of weak, disinterested, and corrupt managers after that. 

I needed some extended time off, which would involve one unpaid week. The one corrupt manager knew and was fine with it, but he didn't get it on the books. He was replaced by a different corrupt manager who wanted to teach me a lesson. 

I admit I asked the wrong question to corporate. I asked what I needed to do to get it arranged, but what they really were researching was if they could just not save my job for me. They told me the day before I left, but even then they were lying and thanking me for being so professional and please call when I get back. Once again I was jobless and with no unemployment.

It screwed them up really badly, too, because they had a hard time finding someone, settling for someone incompetent and a little irrational, but at least I learned I wasn't special to them.

Finally, another big corporation did send our jobs to India, but they promised they weren't going to. The training in India was just for the overflow. I don't even think they were deliberately lying; they were probably just like "Wow, this is so much cheaper!"

At least in that case, I was able to get unemployment. Still, some advance notice would have been nice. There were coworkers who saw the writing on the wall, but I was too preoccupied with my mother's decline.

I am not saying that there were not any bad choices on my part. There was certainly naivete, more than once. 

However, circumstances always favored the big guy, and the big guy also was way more likely to be a creep. Also, the big guy was not always making smarter choices or choices that were better for the economy.

That is not coincidental.

(For this last job, no one really screwed me over. The problem there is that health care is collapsing. While that is an important issue and there are economic principles that could have some overlap, that's a whole different subject.)