I have some time off this month. The company I work for gets a little slow around this time of year, as I am told. This coming May will mark one year of my having worked there. Hopefully I will have a new job by then, before then.
We still have bills to pay, even if my employer does not have so many dollars to give me for my work for them. It gets old having to sit down with your wife and discuss which bill coming due you will have to put off until the next paycheck.
The place I work is noisy. The work is mundane and repetitive, and my supervisors expect us to push the pedal to the metal. The shifts are, assuming we have enough work to get through the day, 12 hours long, starting at 6am and concluding at 6pm. It takes over an hour to get to where I work from where I live. That means I am up at 4:30, gone by 5, home by 7:10 or so.
Most people work Monday to Friday in a week. I work Monday and Tuesday, have off Wednesday and Thursday, work again Friday, Saturday and Sunday. That inverts to just the opposite days worked and off the next week. I lose track easily of what day of the week it is.
I am a Christian. My family goes to church, but not on the Sundays I work. Hopefully my next job will not ask me to work on Sundays.
Insurance is going up this year, but I planned on canceling mine anyhow. The HR manager kept asking me, "Are you sure?" No, I'm not. I just don't feel right about taking money away from paying the bills I know we have just in case of some bills I don't know whether we'll have. Maybe my next job will pay me well enough to where I can afford insurance again.
At the beginning, the impression I was given was that learning to do more in my department would pretty immediately result in higher pay. I work in a factory. We have five positions in my department, each with a particular set of duties and responsibilities, each with a set of equipment and paperwork items you have to know what to do with. At first, I was so enthusiastic about learning how to do everything. "I am an intelligent fellow", I thought. "This will be easy. As soon as I show them how quickly I can learn all this, how hard I work and how well I do my job, they will jump at the chance to give me a raise as a reward."
In case you hadn't noticed, "the economy" is not doing well. That's what everyone tells me, anyways. That's what I keep hearing. I don't know what that means, exactly. Maybe it means my employer doesn't have as much money as they thought they would when they hired me. Maybe it means they can't afford to give me the raise they told me they would. Or maybe it means that a lot of people aren't doing what they said, so nobody trusts anyone else, and no one really puts as much forward in their business activities as they really could if they were going all out.
No one at work can believe I pay the bills with this income. They hear about my pregnant wife, about my three little boys in diapers, about my wife and I being full-time students taking online classes, and they can't believe she doesn't work outside the home. "How do you pay the bills on what you make here?" One of them asked me that the other day. "I don't know, man." Sometimes we don't.
I hate borrowing money to pay my bills, almost as much as I hate having to decide which bills not to pay with this check, because there isn't that much to pay with in what I earned. My dad helps out. I can be thankful that at least we have people who are willing to help. And I am thankful. That doesn't mean I don't look forward with eager cynicism to the day I don't need that help anymore. When will it come?
The thing that gets me is that I know this isn't right. Smart people make more money than this, right? Maybe. Or maybe they just feel fortunate to have a job in "this economy." I feel so conflicted sometimes, and I can't tell whether I should relax and make the best of what I have, or push on, fighting as hard as I can for more. Perhaps I should do both.
My sweet Lauren and I enrolled with Kaplan University after I was "terminated" from my last job. Not knowing how long it would take to find a new job, to get income flowing again, I figured that going back to school would at least put our tens of thousands of dollars in student loans in deferment again, plus give us something to do to keep our minds off my unemployment, plus give me some hope of being more employable someday. So we are full-time students. I am studying to get my AAS in Business Administration, Lauren is pursuing an AAS in Early Childhood Development.
What are we going to do with these degrees, though? I worry that my Business degree is going to be cheap, overly general, too common, unimpressive. Yes, it's better than putting "Some College Coursework Completed" on applications. But what jobs are there for me to get with this? Maybe I shouldn't worry so much. Herein lies another of the many dilemmas which plague my mind: is this okay and I just need to chill, or is this a waste of time and I am going to regret not having done more to change this later?
I intend to pursue a Bachelor's in Communication Arts once I have my Associate's. I like communicating. Maybe I could find some good employment with a degree like that.
