Rant #2,497: Pillow Talk

 

Another good morning to you.

This has not been the best morning for me thus far, even at this early hour.

I did not sleep well last night, and if I did not finally fall asleep like I did, I would probably have been typing this Rant out way earlier than I am doing now.

I was really about a minute or two away from getting up out of the bed and doing that, but I fell asleep around midnight, and then was up several times after that.

Too much going on in my brain last night.

The main thing I was thinking about was my son, who is going on seven months on furlough and out of work. He will reach that point in mid-October, and right now, there is no solution to his problem.

He works for a good company, and he had a job that he really liked. But in mid-March, companies were forced to close down due to the pandemic, and his company shut down, leaving him on furlough.

And we had no idea it would last so long.

His company has kept in contact with him, by and large, and he is still a member of their employee team, but at nearly seven months and counting, I simply do not know what his future is with them.

And he is hard to place to begin with. He is developmentally disabled, so his chances of finding a job elsewhere are limited.

But every day he gets up from bed, and hopes that he hears some news, some positive news, from his company.

They had a team-building effort some weeks ago, where they organized a parade for their employees who were on furlough, and I know that that made my son feel really good.

But since then, he has heard little from them, and it is getting to the point that you have to wonder what his future with them actually is.

We know that many of their employees are working at home, with just a skeleton crew working in their office.

But thus far, my son has not received the call he is waiting for, the call to come back to work. He only worked part time there—20 hours a week—but he loved doing what he was doing, and the staff loved him back.

It was a win/win for everyone, until the pandemic struck, and then it became a nightmare … and last night, this is all I was thinking about.

What is our next move?

When all of this happened in March, I did speak with the executives there, and they basically laid out what was happening, and they stated that my son still had his job, but they had to wait to see how they would progress in the middle of this environment.

I subsequently spoke to them once or twice afterward, just to assure myself—and my son—that his job was still one that they hoped to call him back to.

But now, it is nearly seven months, and we have not received any updates at all, and we only heard from them when my son was contacted as part of a call list they have when they had some type of computer glitch related to their at-home workers.

We have heard nothing else, and I mean, nothing.

So last night, this is all I was thinking about, and I was also thinking about our next move.

I think what I am going to do is give it until October, and then, I am going to have to contact them as I did months ago to find out where my son stands with his job.

Is he still in their plans, is he going back, is there some type of timetable for his return … I think after all this time, we have a right to know one way or the other.

This has been a horrid time for us all, and our family has really been hit hard during these past several months.

My personal situation is pretty horrid, but my son’s is even more dire because of his own personal situation … and he is just 25 years old, right at the beginning of his work career.

So this is what kept me up last night, tossing and turning and trying to find a good place to put my head.

As it is, the past several months have put my head completely out of joint, and I don’t know the next time I will find that soft spot in my pillow.

Getting my son back to work would be a step in the right direction.