So, I worked at a Chevron four days, and everything was going pretty well ... until one Wednesday evening when I received a text including a photo of my new schedule. Instead of being off work until the weekend and then attending the lot (I'd been working the store the past couple days), I was to work Thursday through Saturday at the damn store again — bantering with customers and checking IDs and looking out for thieves. “Fuck that!” I thought reflexively, and so I no-called and no-showed.
I signed up for a part-time job, which I figured would entail at most two days on the lot and two in the store. Anyone who knows me knows that I grow agitated with prolonged exposure to my fellow human beings; it's a HUGE part of why I despise living downtown and am generally on edge any time I have to stand in a meal or food box line (or even at a grocery or convenience store). Put simply, my seemingly disintegrating legs can't handle forty hours a week of standing, and my delicate psyche can't put up with forty hours a week of human interaction.
Not only that, but I found it galling that my employer would exhibit a landed gentry mentality, treating me like some hapless, festering bumpkin of a Medieval villein. If I owned a business I would NEVER change an employee's schedule on such short notice and in mid-week like that! I would call people up and see if I could make whatever changes my employees would be amenable to, and simply work the rest of the hours the business is open; in fact, as a business owner I would be prepared to spend long hours on the job ... because that's just reality: people call in sick, quit, or what have you.
I suppose I could have weathered it out; manned up, toked my CBD for anxiety and gobbled up Tramadol® for pain, and resigned myself to a full week-long vicissitudinal schedule of incessant human traffic and commerce. Would the money have ultimately improved my life more than the work have diminished it? I don't know: I've been spoiled all these years canning: I set my own hours, work at my own pace, answer to no one greater than a very forgiving set of societal mores, and can just plug into my music and tune out (as best I can) the vexing human environment — shit pay in trade for autonomy and no obligations.
I can see how this could send certain Clackistanian Tea Party trolls into paroxysms of rage: the government pays my rent, so I don't have to grit my teeth and kowtow to a humiliatingly corrupt system wherein making ends meet means working harder at shit jobs for less every year, wherein American-Dream prosperity is a reality that flees like a dream upon awakening, even as cheap Chinese bread-and-circus crap commodities grow more expensive ... and, good luck if there's enough retirement money to buy a trailer to park on a lot full of dope fiends!
My knee-jerk response to such misplaced anger is to say “it's not my fault,” but even voting Democrat I've participated in some of the most egregious one-percent collaborating; the Clintons have been even worse finance deregulators and union busters than their prior Republicans. We're all in it together, slowly filling out little boat full of our own turds, until it's time either to wait for Sharknado or to embrace coprophilia.
