Here’s my conundrum, however.  On every application there’s always a question that asks, in some form or another, whether or not I’ve ever been terminated from a job.  It’s a fair question, but I’m having a crisis on whether to answer it honestly or not.  Yes, I have been terminated from a previous job, but I don’t believe that should disqualify me automatically from the one I’m applying for.  I believe that it may doing just that though.

I have been answering “yes”, of course, because I believe honesty is always the best policy, but I can’t help but wonder if this is what’s been keeping me from getting the jobs for which I’m applying.  Should I tell them “no” on the application, and hope that it never comes up again?  Or should I continue to be honest in the hopes that it really shouldn’t matter that much?  Are employers really judging me for this, or am I just being paranoid?  They are more than welcome to ask me about it in the interview process, and I’ll be completely honest, but so far I haven’t managed to get to that point.  I’m really getting frustrated.

I do think being honest is the right way to go.  I just don’t want it to bite me in the ass.

Today marked the completion to some goals that I’ve had for a while.  There were two major ones:  Get a job, and get a new place to live.  Having started my new job on Monday, and having signed a lease to a new apartment late this afternoon, those two important goals have been accomplished.

Allow me to be introspective for a minute.  It’s been a tough year so far, and the toughness isn’t over yet.  In sports terms, this year is a “rebuilding” year for me.  Lots of basic changes and adjustments to my life and my lifestyle.  Gone is the $50K per year job that I used to have.  Gone is the freedom and laziness of unemployment.  Gone is a lot of money that I used to possess, and gone is the sense of optimism I used to have for myself and my endeavors.  These things have been replaced with a low-paying job, daily commitment, a tiny bit of income, and a very unsure feeling about how to continue.  My, how the mighty have fallen.

Not that I was every really all that mighty, mind you.  It’s just that I was used to a certain standard of living, and that standard must be lowered if I’m to survive with my sanity intact. 

I never thought this is where I’d be at my age.  When you’re young, and you picture yourself as older, you tend to picture things as being wonderful.  Good job, nice house, cool car, maybe a hot wife and even a couple of kids.  You don’t think that as you approach 40, you’d be scraping by on an unsteady income without a sense of direction or purpose for your life.  It’s difficult to see it even when you’re inside of it  It’s almost like a bad joke, and you just can’t believe it.  I feel like I’m having a bad dream, and I’m ready to wake up any time now.  Yet the dream continues.

It’s not all bad, so don’t get me wrong.  I have a job, I have money, and I have a place to live and food to eat.  That’s more than a LOT of people have, and I’m grateful.  I am thankful for the things that I have, but I used to have more.  Now I have less.  Sometimes change is hard.

I know I’m whining.  I apologize, but reality has bitch-slapped me into submission, and I just need to vent.  I need to get it out of my system so I can wake up tomorrow and embrace my new future, work as hard as I can, and hopefully turn things around.  I need to find that purpose again.  I need to re-find myself, for I sometimes fear that I am truly lost.

I am wishing it paid a little better though.  Definitely not gonna get rich doing this, but hopefully it can pay some of the bills.  I’m still not giving up on my writing or photography, and my hope is that I can make some money from those endeavors and top off the old checking account every month.  My little stint at being self employed was seriously derailed by two factors:  One, I apparently suck at marketing myself, and two, the United States economy sucks at everything.  I’m still in better shape than most people though, as I have absolutely no debt.  I’ve also still got a good amount in savings, although it was getting perilous there at the last.  Actually, I’m still not out of the woods yet, because my new job pays about half of what I used to make, so my belt must continue to be ever tight. 

Where did everything go so wrong?  Why are so many people out of work, and why is it so hard to find work these days?  I just don’t understand the brain-dead attitude that got us into this mess.  I sure wish someone would fix it.  This whole “recession/depression” thing is getting seriously old.

Today I finally decided I’d had enough.  There are two things that have been nagging me incessantly for a while now, and I wanted to do something about them.  They are:

• Get my Utah state driver’s license.
• Get a job

First the job thing.  As everyone knows by now, I was forced into early retirement by my previous employer over the matter of a plastic DVD case which ended up in hundreds of small pieces scattered about the carpet in the DVD isle.  Fair enough.  Since then, I’ve been lounging about my apartment, sleeping in until 10:30 every day, staying up until 3 AM, eating poorly, and writing.  I keep my high standard of living by subsisting on interest and dividends from my investments, all the while looking for that elusive "career" that allows me to work, yet do something I enjoy doing.  Because of insane gas prices and a major — shall we say "downturn" in the recent economy however; my investments aren’t going to see me through much more early retirement, so getting a job has moved up somewhat on the priority list. 

The other nagging issue is that of my driver’s license.  See, I’ve lived in Utah now for two-and-a-half years, while retaining my Ohio driver’s license.  This is well past the 30-day requirement for switching such things over, so this is also high on the list.  I know I should have done this earlier, say a couple years ago, but I just got my new license right before I left Ohio, and my picture is so pretty and… Well, you know how it is.  Things intervene. So I go to the web site for licensing in Utah.  For some unknown and completely unexplainable reason, getting your tags renewed and getting your license renewed are two separate and different agencies in Utah.  This is unlike every single other state, where everything is simply done at the DMV.  Anyway, here you have to jump through lots of hoops and run through tons of red tape while the state employees giggle furiously as you attempt to accomplish anything, so I wanted to be prepared for what I’d encounter in my attempt to become legal.  I found I’d have to re-do the written portion of the driver’s test.  Ok, annoying and unnecessary, but whatever.  I’ve been driving for 20 years, and can drive better than 85% of Utahans while blindfolded, and if you’ve ever driven in Utah, you know what I mean.  Still, taking the test won’t be so bad.  I also found the list of items necessary for proving my identity to the cheery and assuredly helpful government employees upon their request, and I set about gathering them together.

This is where the problem comes in.

• Old driver’s license. Check
• Birth certificate. Check
• Social Security card. Che… wait.

Where the hell is is my SS card? It’s been living in my wallet (succession of wallets) for thirty years. It’s always been there, always. I remember going to the office in Piqua Ohio with my mom and my brother when I was like 5 years old and getting it. I’ve had it ever since, and it’s never left my person as long as my wallet is with me. Where could it be?

It dawned on me then that not only could I not get my license renewed, I also couldn’t apply for a job, because a requirement for working in this country is proof of Social Security. I proceeded to tear my apartment apart to no avail; the damn thing simply grew legs and disappeared. What beautiful timing.

Let this be a lesson to all. Laziness is unbecoming. I should have done both of these things (get a job and renew my license) months, if not years, ago. I’m quite certain my Social Security card deliberately took advantage of my tendencies to teach me a lesson in humility, and now I must pay.

I went to the Social Security office today and filed for a new card. That in itself was pretty frustrating, but not as bad as it could have been. They gave me a giant sheet of paper that the guy said would suffice as a temporary card until my shiny new one arrives in the mail in “about two weeks.” He said it would work for employment purposes (I kinda doubt it though), but upon my questioning as to the usability of said paper to obtain my Utah license, the reply was negative:

“You may want to wait a little while. It’ll take a couple of weeks.”

Perfect.

]]> http://sovknight.com/trying-to-get-off-my-lazy-ass/feed 7 http://sovknight.com/a-parting-shot-in-the-back http://sovknight.com/a-parting-shot-in-the-back#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:40:58 +0000 sovknight http://sovknight.com/?p=17 Continue reading →]]> As many people know, I was recently liberated from my long-term employment at a well-known international retailer. The details of this are a boring story, but suffice it to say that there isn’t a single person who knows the details, friends or ex-coworkers, or even people that I didn’t even get along with, that thinks I got a fair shake. I spent ten years with this company, starting in the state of Ohio in a store location, then branching out to a traveling position which took me all over the country setting up new stores, remodeling older ones, and training employees throughout the company, and finally ending up here in Utah back in a brand-new store location, working hard to make my department and my store successful. For my troubles, I was unceremoniously dumped without so much as a goodbye or a thanks for giving them a decade of my life. Today I received a small, yet frustrating surprise… a big wonderful twisting of the long, curved, bloody knife that’s been embedded in my back for the last four weeks. Let me explain a few things first though.

Now, ten years is a long time in retail. In that decade, I saw so many people come and go in so many ways. The turnover rate in that industry is absolutely hideous, and no one is exempt. Everyone from the lowliest part-timer to district managers, vice-presidents, and even presidents come in and go out with surprising regularity. The nature of retail is so volatile and sketchy that you never really know from one day to the next what’s going to happen. Sure, you can speculate, but you tend to be wrong more often than not. For me to survive ten years in that environment is quite the achievement. It’s actually something I’m proud of in a lot of ways.

You may ask why I spent so long working in retail. After all, isn’t that for starving college kids and just-out-of-school teenagers looking for their first jobs? Don’t retail people make minimum wage and curse themselves daily for filling out that damn application in the first place? Do you have a vast collection of plastic name tags and khaki-styled pants? How could an intelligent, college-educated person subject themselves to the torture of retail for an entire decade? Shouldn’t you be dead or in jail for shooting the place up by now?

Well, most of those are valid points. I’d say a majority of the people that work on a store level are young adults, or even outright kids. The average age is probably about twenty, give or take, and for many of them, it is their first or one of their first jobs. Retail is easy to get into, and it offers a lot of promises if you stick it out. Sadly, a vast majority (and by vast, I literally mean over 90%) don’t stick it out, and those that do realize that those promises will eventually be broken.

As for that other stuff, well, I do actually have a pretty good stash of old name tags, and I do own probably about 10 pairs of khaki pants. I’ve never actually fantasized about shooting the place up, but I’ll admit that if I were to have had, say, some sort of cool super powers, like electromagnetism, it would have potentially served me well in a number of occasions. I never worked for minimum wage though, and I actually made pretty good money at my level. The benefits were fantastic (ten years had its advantages), and there were perks, like a healthy employee discount and a good social experience.

Lest you think I’m actually advocating retail however, know that it wasn’t all fun and games. The biggest problem with retail is that it promises lots of things but doesn’t deliver. Do a search for your favorite retailer and you’ll undoubtedly come up with all kinds of articles and posts about how this person got screwed and that person got screwed and so forth. You’ll get some positive responses as well, but it only takes one negative experience to balloon out of proportion, and the whole thing collapses. Retail is hell on Earth, and you don’t have to look any farther than Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) in order to know that. It’s a day of absolute misery for employees and customers alike.

I stayed in retail for selfish reasons and stupid reasons. After a point, I made pretty good money. Money isn’t a huge driving force for me personally, but like anyone, I have to eat and have a place to live. I also have expensive hobbies, so good money was definitely a positive. As I mentioned, the benefits were good as well, so I didn’t have to worry too much about medical expenses killing me. Mostly though, it was my life. It was routine, it was normal. After so long, you get to a point where you just sort of cruise on autopilot. You don’t have to think about work, you just sorta know it’s there and you go. Like eating a meal that you don’t particularly hate or like, it’s just sustaining. You know what to expect, you know how it tastes, you know the routine and the outcome, and you just let it happen. A little effort is required here and there, but nothing too spectacular. You just drone on, day after day in sort of a numb capacity. It becomes who you are and how you define yourself. You stop thinking about it.

This is so unhealthy. You should never, never let a job you don’t care for define your life. If you love what you do, say if you’re a musician or an artist or whatever, and you are lucky enough to make a living from that, then that’s a different story. I’m not a retailer though. That’s what I did, not what I am. My existence became about going to work, getting my paycheck, then getting some sleep so I could go back to work again the next day. That’s no way to live.

A parting shot

So today I’m looking at my finances and I discover that I’ve received a paycheck from my former employer. Now, It’s been four and a half weeks since my liberation, and they’ve already paid me for my vacation hours and whatnot, so I’m a little surprised. I logged on to my direct deposit account, and low and behold, I see this:

This is an actual screen grab of my paycheck. I’ve taken the liberty to blacken out the sensitive stuff, but I highlighted some things to prove my point.

Firstly, I know that I have no argument in this case. I know that this is all perfectly legal and I have no recourse. I’m simply posting this because IT SUCKS. It’s a perfect example of why so many people can never get ahead, and that there are certain rules and laws in effect for no reason other than to make life harder.

As you can see, during my last dying gasp with the company I managed to accrue 4.62 extra hours of vacation time beyond what they paid me after termination, at a rate of 16.15 per hour. This equates to $74.63 in taxable earnings. However, they’ve deducted $56.61 in pre-tax dollars for my health plan. This is all well and good, except that my health plan was discontinued last month. As of January 31st, I was no longer covered by my health care plan. What does this mean? Exactly. I just paid $56.61 for nothing. Gone. Vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. I get absolutely no benefit from that $56.61 at all. Nothing. That money was stolen from me.

I know this is an automatic process. Still, it feels like they screwed me. It feels like a knife in my back. It’s not enough to take away my livelihood and my means of supporting myself, no… You have to dangle a tiny carrot in front of my face, and then snatch it away at the last second while laughing gleefully at my expense. I get $16 of my original $75. A pittance. Somewhere, the retails gods are rolling on the floor in a fit of laughter and spite. I can just hear them now. Fat bastards.

Happier even though

I don’t regret my time in retail. It’s given me invaluable experience in dealing with people, it’s given me a skill set that can prove handy in other aspects of my life, and it’s given me some friends that I’ve come to know over the years. It’s also given me some money that I was able to invest and live off for the time being until I find a new job. Still, what did I trade for that time? What did I give up to get these things? Was it worth it? Was the price too high? It’s hard to say right now. I can say this though, I’m happier without it. The job I mean. It was eating me from the inside out, and controlling my life in a way that I didn’t like. It was like a cancer growing and stealing away precious time. You should work to live, not live to work. Life comes first, job comes later. Notice I didn’t say second… I said later. These things I’ve had lots of time to ponder over the last few weeks, and in the end I have to admit, I’m happier now. I have more control over my life, and I don’t miss the old job one bit.

Now it’s time to move on and find my path.

Here’s to the future.

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