Rant #2,509: Betcha, By Golly, Wow

 

Today is October 9, the 283rd day of this already horrid year.

 
We have 83 more days this year to end it, and I know that people are counting it out, firmly believing that 2021 can’t be any worse than 2020 was.
 
I don’t know if I agree with that—I think that we could still be in a complete mess next year—but I actually want to focus on day 284 of this year in this Rant.
 
Tomorrow, Saturday, October 10, is a day that will live in infamy in my wheelhouse.
 
Exactly a year ago on that day, the company I worked for went out of business and I lost my job.
 
This was pre-coronavirus, of course, several months before it hit us, but little did I know the chaos the loss of my job started in my life and the life of my family, and every morsel of horror that ensued.
 
I got a head start on quarantining back then, quite unknowingly, because for the first time in eons, I had nowhere to go during the workweek, nowhere to ply my skills and my trade, nowhere to bring home a paycheck from.
 
Look, I knew that something was afoot at my place of work, and I often brought all of this up right here at the blog, telling you that we were teetering on the brink for several months before the inevitable happened.
 
I ahd been there, done that before—I was out of work twice for long periods in my work career—and I knew the signs, and the signs were all there; it just took a little time for them to come to fruition.
 
I remember that fateful day so well.
 
I came to work early as I always did, and as I waited for the door to the office to open, I spoke with one or two of my fellow co-workers, and no matter what direction our short conversation veered off to, it would always center on how long our place of business would, or could, remain open.
 
When the door finally opened, I went into my office—which I had shared with a co-worker who some months before died of a massive heart attack—and I started my workday—sitting parallel at my back to a workspace that was once occupied by another co-worker, who had committed suicide some months earlier.
 
I got right into my work day, as did the other employees—a grand total of six of us full-timers, down from the 30s during earlier times—and the end of the line was not in my mind at that time.
 
I wrote a story or two for our supposed next issue, and before I knew it, it was lunch time. I sat at my desk to eat lunch as I always did, surfed the Internet while doing so, and before you knew it, lunch time was over and it was back to work for me.
 
In the middle of doing something related to work, we all got a call to meet in the conference room, and I grabbed my writing pad as I always did when summoned to that room, but I have to tell you that I kind of knew what was going to happen once we got there, and no, I would not need my writing pad this time around.
 
We were told that the company could not longer continue as it had for several months or even years, and that they were closing down that day We were told that due to some administrative things that had to be tied up, the office would still be open for a few weeks, but as far as our services, they were not needed anymore.
 
We were given some time to clean out our belongings, we were given a few payment checks to cash, and we all said our goodbyes …
 
After 23 and a half years, I was unemployed.
 
I knew that the road I was going to try to hoe as an unemployed person was going to be a tough one—I had spoken to fellow co-workers and others for months prior, telling them that I kind of knew that when this place went out of business, I was going to have a tough time finding anything else because of my “advanced” age, and I figured that this was the last full time job I would ever have—but honestly, the road I was now on was way tougher than I could ever have imagined in my wildest dreams.
 
And that agita began immediately.
 
I applied for unemployment, but a case I had with them 25 years prior, the last time I was out of work, was never closed out by them, and it prevented me from getting any assistance for weeks. Due to a good Samaritan in the New York Department of Labor, who found the mistake that had been made by the department and fixed it for me, I was then able to gain unemployment insurance, but it took nearly two months for me to get it, which meant I had no money coming into my house from me for all of that time.
 
That led me to deplete my savings to pay off some bills.
 
Right after I became unemployed, I suffered a terrible sciatic episode, so bad that I had to go to physical therapy for several weeks, where I was summarily taken advantage of by the company offering me this therapy.
 
They also tried to fleece me beyond anything I had ever seen—or anyone had ever heard of—and I was ready to sue them for their actions, but decided to go the Better Business Bureau root first. It was a good decision, because after several months of haggling with the physical therapist, I got back all the money that I paid them with their improper practices, every penny of it,
 
As I got better, I continued to look for work each and every day, a painstaking routine that got me nowhere, and nowhere fast. All told, I applied for probably a thousand or more jobs during the past year, getting only two in-person interviews and one or two phone interviews.
 
It hurt my ego, hurt my pride, forced me to doubt myself, and proved that what I said about my employment future all those many months prior to had truly become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
 
And then the coronavirus hit, and all the mayhem that I had been through during the prior months were going to wane in comparison to what was happening in our country and worldwide.
 
If I thought I would have problems becoming employed again prior to the pandemic, well now, with this scourge in place, all bets were off. There was no way that I was going to be hired, not with the world put on hiatus, and ultimately changed forever, by the coming of this illness to our civilization.
 
Everything shut down, everything I did was akin to running in place, and I was strait-jacketed as far as doing anything related to finding a job.
 
And in the meantime, my son was put on furlough, so two of the three people in my family were now out of work, and looking back, out of luck.
 
Healthwise, we were fine—I even tried to use this as a selling point in trying to find a job—but other things were happening that were out of my control.
 
My sister, my brother in law, and my nephew all got the coronavirus, with my sister being one step away from going to the hospital and being put on a ventilator. The only way she stayed out was because at this time, hospitals were full of coronavirus patients, and if even there was a smidgen of hope that the affected person could survive without hospital care, they would be kept out of the hospital. Happily she and her family survived.
 
My own family had a major scare when my wife’s co-worker at her bank came back to work from COVID and then supposedly got sick again while at work. We all had to be tested, and happily, none of us were infected.
 
And then there were my parents, my mom at 89 years of age and my father at 88, and I became something of a caretaker for them, taking them all over the place to all their doctors and other places whenever they needed to go somewhere.
 
I continued to dutifully look for work, but there was nothing out there. Getting bored and antsy, I decided to write a novel, and although it went nowhere, I still can say that I wrote, and completed, my first and only novel, and maybe one day, it will see the light of day in a real, honest to goodness book.
 
Things continued through the months, and I applied for more jobs that I knew I would never even get a call on.
 
Then in August, my father became very ill, and he succumbed on Labor Day. How he held out for as long as he did was God’s decision, but we laid him to rest knowing that he was a good man who had a good life.
 
But even on his last days, he did what he had always done for me: helped me to do what I needed to do.
 
I had been using a number of job search sites to send out my resume to, and it all was so fruitless, but I did it anyway. I used Indeed, I used Zip Recruiter, and I used several other of these sites to try to find work, with no avail.
 
I also used LinkedIn, which I have labeled as the most overrated site on the planet, but one that you have to be “in it to win it,” so to speak.
 
After awhile, I used it more to vent my frustrations at my lack of job success than for anything else.
 
One day< I saw an announcement that someone I had worked with—not directly, but certainly worked with through my prior job—had become the president of a trade organization related to what I had been doing for nearly a quarter century. The person is a former Pentagon executive who was well known in my former line of work, which was military resale, or the coverage of military stores, commissaries and exchanges.
 
I congratulated him on his new job, and one thing led to another, and after several weeks of discussion, I had secured a freelance job with this organization, a remote job where I would write up various things for this group.
 
How did my father get me this job? My dad was not well off at the time, sinking every day, and the organization was here and there with the job offer, and I finally told them that I had to know “now: about what was going on due to my father’s illness … and they graciously agreed.
 
So now I finally had a job, a job that I could hold while being a retired person, which I had filed for in desperation weeks earlier, and it set to go through by the end of this month.
 
So yes, I have kept it under wraps, but I have a job, I have a job that pays me minimally, I have a job that I can do in and out of the day, and while it is not a job like the one I am used to, it is a job, one that I finally gained my very first paycheck from the other day, so I can announce it to the world that yes, I am employed as I go into retirement.
 
Now there are other challenges before myself and my family. My sonsl furlough has morphed into unemployment, and we have started to help him look for a job. He has applied to a few places this week, and has a job fair to go to today.
 
It is not going to be easy for him. He is a special needs person, and it is never easy for people like this to find work.
 
That is my direction now, helping him to find work as my father had helped me to do.
 
So things are what they are; still bad, but they could be worse, I guess.
 
Onward and upward!
 
Have a good day and a great weekend.
 
Speak to you again on Monday.