----- Original Message -----
From: Z
To: X
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 5:24 PM
Subject: RE: X has sent you an e card

Hi X

How are you? I hope this email finds you and the family well!!
I am little unsure what you are congratulating me for - I am currently looking after Y's job for the next few months and having a lot of fun trying to get my head around how things work - it definitely has been challenging but it is a very interesting job so its not all bad!!!

Tell me what is happening in your world!
(Thank you for the card - it was a lovely gesture.)

Cheers,

Z



Hi Z Dear,

I did not answer immediately to your polite question because in My World, things are more than a bit rough around the edges and when they get like that, I do not feel much attraction for e-mail writing. When I do, I have outbursts of anger or fury or frustration and out of some shred of respect left in me when it comes to the others out there, I refrain from writing, in order to shelter some delicate/sensitive creatures from too much trauma exposure...;)
Briefly (could you believe it? I personally can’t, ‘cause I know it’s just a figure of speech) :

Since I've left that place of milk and honey where we worked together, called DEFG for short, apart from not getting paid from anywhere a cent for about 5-6 weeks and using all my savings to survive, my son was diagnosed about two weeks into my unemployment with type 1 diabetes ( juvenile diabetes with late onset, just 2 weeks before his 30th birthday). Although he weighs only 63 kg at 1,72 m tall, and never been in his life anything but a skinny boy, never hooked on sugars or such, that hit us with the speed of a turbo jet. In intensive care, he was administered about 25 insulin injections in 24 hours to prevent an imminent irreversible diabetic coma = death. The silly boy thought just few days before that he had a sun stroke, lucky he saw a doctor the last minute. No wonder the doctor once got his results panicked so much that he went in person to my son's home to pick him up and take him to the hospital in his personal car.
Unfortunately the silly boy was not home, so by the time he checked his messages on his mobile, after the flat battery was recharged, he hardly had time to reach the hospital - driving himself there. Lucky he did not lose control of the will with all that blurry vision he had due to advanced hypoglycemia of 25 when the normal would be 5.5.

But that's another insane story, with which I had to deal at a time of great distress and believe me, I had very little strength for that, if any. My strengths were eroded to the bone by then by my psyche shadowed by the way I was kicked in the back by DEFG for which I broke my bones (in my shoulders).
Meanwhile my left shoulder started to play on me bursitis symptoms because I abused it for almost 1 year, forcing it to do the job of 2 shoulders and the damn thing was not used to that type of abuse since I am not left handed, but rather right handed. For which reason I had to have now injections with steroids in both shoulders - a bit of a pain in the ass (or rather in the shoulders).

I even had a job interview, but unfortunately I had to tell them that I had bursitis - that is just fair or maybe the law - you have to tell those things, just in case.
Of course, I did not get that job. Who wants a disabled person of my age on their payroll? I am somebody else's mess, why should they want to take me in, if those that I “belonged to” and turned me into a mess discarded me?
The Unemployment Office refused to pay me unemployment because DEFG could not be bothered to issue a separation certificate for me on the spot, they took their time hoping that I had some secret lover to provide for me, judging perhaps by themselves. So, until that desirable separation certificate happened, I had to live on my savings. Although I went in person at DEFG HR to ask for it in February and even met V in the street while coming from there (not long before she left you all...) I was not issued one, not only on the spot, as I stupidly believed possible, but not even weeks after my visit there.

Lucky I had some little savings that I was building up slowly with my daughter, trying to dream a trip to our personal corner of Nesblandia in the future, since we had no chance to go there in years; otherwise now I would not have had a computer to write you this message from...because if I could not pay my bills, I must have had the need to sell it to pay the movers. Considering also that under a bridge would be no power plug to operate such fine machinery.

Therefore after a month and a half when I finally got that separation certificate attached to my recreational leave entitlements, the Unemployment Office refused to pay me again, because now I had 1200 dollars in the bank from what was supposed to be my holiday money...I was rich! Wow! So until that lasted - no charity for me. Who did I think I were - some drug addict, to deserve help?

In my knowledge, always doubted by the blessed people at DEFG, I knew for a fact that a person who sustains a work related injury of any kind, physical or emotional, cannot be put in the street like that, because of the law that precludes such things. I'm a law abiding person and I like to investigate legalities on my own, just in case I might be tempted at times to be in the breach, due to ignorance - a thing that I would warmly recommend to anybody, just in case.
Personally, I hate ignorance.
Ignorance is the mother of stupidity and I hate stupidity too. So I try to work on that all the time - a fact that attracts foes - because ignorance is for some, as they say - bliss.

In my informed state, I knew that in a banana country like my corner of Nesblandia upon which we look down onto, such things like throwing people in the street just because they were on a contract of some description or another, were avoided in case of injury, and here even more so.
At least module number 6 of my course in Community Cultural Development told me so when I took that module about insurance covers. Which I brilliantly passed at the time - a big while ago. Not to mention the module that was part of the recent Certificate 4 in Government that I so honorably acquired at the generous expense of DEFG past November - so fresh still in my little devious mind.

But hey - who trusts my knowledge of certain things since I am not as credible as a high school drop-out would be...because I am old-ish, do not drink regularly except at Christmas and do not exhale the right pheromones any more...?

I have this obsessive idea - the wrong one, of course - that people with education have more knowledge than those without education. A defect of mine generated by my 24 years of studying all those courses and getting all those degrees. In my silly/sick mind, that, counts for something.
I know it's wrong and selfish and frowned upon in this country, but what can I do, that's who I am.
I am - the Other as Simone de Beauvoir said = a crazy gal coming here with the wrong ideas, like this one about education. European arrogance - I believe must be called by some.
Very despised here by most.

To make a long story short, In April things started to precipitate:

* My daughter graduated from Uni and looked good in a toga and cap;
* Few days later the Unemployment Office started to pay me those glorious almost 500 a fortnight;
* My son's glycemia went back to normal with the help of adjusted insulin, instead of jumping up and down all the time;
* I finally found a pair of flared jeans that were no hipsters ( could you believe it!?) for just $14 at Harbortown. That, even I was able to afford;
* Somebody from DEFG called me on the phone and insisted to return to work because I was their responsibility and not the Unemployment’s Office's (Nooo…, really....!!?);
* It rained, finally.

It was all fine, except the idea that I should come back to DEFG.

I might not generate pheromones any more, but I can sense what other people generate, so named vibes. Some of those at DEFG stank too much for my sensitive-big-potato nose.

1. Although I knew that now you would be my boss - what a precious thing that could have been in the end! - I also knew that this would put you in an awkward position, me being such a bad person that you would have to discipline/sanction/punish me in order to make the rest of the mob happy...or at least 2-3 of them: roughly those directly beneath and above you on the Management ladder; namely the bunch that thought I getting injured through hard work meant such a personal inconvenience to their cushy comforts;
2. I'm over J D that I used to like and consider a younger friend of mine; same goes for Y who promised me as I was leaving the building for the last time that I'll never work in Government again because I sent that long good-bye letter to all...(ha ha ha, see now how ignorance can be bliss?)
3. There are 2-3 faces there that make me want to turn my head around the other way instead of wanting to say hello;
4. I need a place where I could gain a different type of experience and from the very beginning keep entirely to myself, not talk to anyone and not befriend anybody

So I told that guy that No thanks, not DEFG where my injury report became mysteriously lost for more than 3 months, NO WAY.
As a result, starting Monday, I'll be at HIJK 3 days/week and across the street for 2 days/week, at number 50. If I can make it with modified duties and all. We'll se how my health goes. They did not have apparently a full job for me in one place, of course. There's not enough miserably paid positions around - how unfortunate...
If anyone tries this time to play me around even one bit, I will go straight to the person in charge with industrial relations/work ethics/people capital or whatever - no more friendships, extra hours, smiles and jokes.
I'll be a Tash, as simple as that.
And maybe one day, I'll stumble across you in City - who knows.

Cheers, all the best,

X