I know that everybody's life is like that too, but this is my pity party, so zip it. Plus, I swear to god that I really think that my life is cursed or something, because every single thing, no matter how big or small, always, always goes terribly wrong for me. Seriously. You can count on it every single time. It really is true. It's freakish. If anything at all can possibly go wrong, it will. Every. Freaking. Time. And it's probably amplified to me by the fact that I just recently stopped taking my "crazy" pills that I've been on for probably the past 6 years because 1) they made me too sleepy, and I figured if I'm going to have to attempt to get off my ass and get a job to try to help support this stupid family, the last thing I need is to be too sleepy to function properly, and 2) I lost my medical insurance when Jamie got fired and can't afford the "crazy pills" anymore anyway, so what the hell.
Welcome to The Unmedicated Deana. Be forewarned. It's not pretty. And if you even try to tell me to "lighten up"/"it's not that bad"/"you just need to think positively"/or anything, then you better have a deathwish, because I WILL windmill-kick your skull directly off of your neck. And just in time for Halloween, too! :D >:|
Anyway. As you recall, Jamie got fired from his job back on September 14, which has been almost exactly one month ago. But it's felt like an absolute eternity because of the sheer hell we've been through since then. To recap the reason he got fired, Jamie had been driving his regular garbage truck on a Friday, when it broke down. Since it was so close to being the end of the day anyway, Jamie decided to just go ahead and call it a day, and go back into work the following day (which was a Saturday), and borrow another guy's garbage truck to use to finish up his route that he wasn't able to get to after his regular truck broke down. Well, the borrowed truck turned out to be faulty, but Jamie wasn't aware of it until well after he had the accident. So as Jamie was turning a curve on his way to get a dumpster in a gas station's parking lot, the faulty borrowed garbage truck that Jamie was driving turned over on its side onto the pavement. There were probably about 15 people around the gas station who saw it happen, and they all said that they can't figure out how that truck managed to just go and simply tip over the way it did. When the State Patrol officer came on the scene to write up the accident report, he quickly determined that Jamie was not at fault (that Jamie didn't do anything to contribute to the accident), and the officer simply wrote the accident up as a "load shift" that caused the truck to turn over. After the turned-over garbage truck was loaded up onto a wrecker and hauled back to the shop where Jamie worked, that's when it came to light that the truck was actually faulty. The guy that usually drives that particular truck came forward and told Jamie that the truck wasn't bolted down to the frame at all. The truck was supposed to have a total of 8 giant bolts bolting it down (4 on each side), but the truck had no bolts under it bolting it down whatsoever. The only thing attaching the truck bed to the frame was one flimsy little plate of metal. The guy that normally drives the faulty truck explained that the truck had come from the factory that way, that he knew about it, and had been begging the mechanics at the place they worked to fix it for the past 3 years. Nobody would ever fix it, and the problem was never detected during any inspections. The guys that drive these trucks are NOT responsible for getting under these trucks to make sure everything is OK; that is strictly the job of the mechanics. All the drivers are supposed to do is simply make sure their tires are OK and that all their lights work, which Jamie always did.
However, the company Jamie works for (and really every trucking company that even exists) has a shitty, unfair policy that states that if a driver flips a truck over, regardless of the cause, then the driver must automatically be fired no matter what. Even if the driver was unknowingly driving a shitty, faulty truck. So they fired Jamie. The company did their one-sided "investigation", during which they said that they had retrieved the security camera tapes from the gas station parking lot where Jamie had turned the garbage truck over,and the footage showed that Jamie was "going too fast". (They obviously had the "FF" button pressed on the VCR whenever they were watching it). >:{ Jamie said that he was going 5 MPH or less when the truck tipped. He was merely turning a curve when it happened. And no witnesses at the scene said that he was going too fast. The truck seriously basically just did this:
Jamie got to the Department of Labor as fast as he could to try to sign up for unemployment, since as you know, I don't have a job, so if Jamie doesn't have a job, then we wouldn't have any income whatsoever. We were relieved when they immediately told Jamie that YES, Jamie did qualify for unemployment benefits of $330 per week for 18 weeks. Whew.
But guess what -- the money never came. Weeks passed, and we never saw a dime of it. Finally, I got worried, and told Jamie to ask the Department of Labor about it. He did, and they told him that they had to have a "hearing" first to determine whether or not Jamie qualified to receive unemployment benefits. Wait, what?
OK. They already told us that he did qualify, told us how much for, and for how long. And they even mailed us a letter stating that fact. But now they were saying that Jamie might NOT qualify for unemployment after all? What the hell?!?!
So even more days went by, and we still didn't know what was going on. Jamie called the Department of Labor again, and the man explained that the reason for the holdup was because the company that Jamie got fired from (Advanced Disposal) was refusing to return the Department of Labor's phone calls.
So we were being held hostage. And we didn't know if Jamie would be able to receive unemployment or not. The man at the Department of Labor told Jamie that they had given Advanced Disposal an ultimatum that they HAD to respond to them by that Friday at 3:10 PM (which was this past Friday).
Days later, the deadline came and went, and that very Friday afternoon, Jamie called the Department of Labor to find out what was going on, and they told him that he would receive a letter in the mail on Tuesday of the following week about it. They wouldn't/couldn't tell him the outcome of the "hearing" over the phone because of privacy reasons. >:{ Great. 2 more days of nail-biting.
I didn't expect the letter to come in the mail today, since yesterday was a holiday so the mail didn't run, and I also didn't expect the letter to have any kind of good news whatsoever in it. But lo and behold, the letter did come today, and it states that Jamie IS entitled to receive unemployment benefits after all. The letter also goes on to read:
"Your employer fired you for reckless driving. The available facts show that you were performing the duties for which you were hired. The facts show that you did not fail to follow employer's rules, orders or instructions. Therefore, you can be paid benefits."
THANK GOD. Now if the money would just come in, it would make me feel better. We've been living on our savings, and what little money we've been able to scrounge up selling scrap metal, and a little tad of jury duty pay, for a month now. Not to mention the fact that now me and Jamie no longer have medical insurance since he got fired, and I just had to pay a $300 dental bill since the dental insurance that we did have through Jamie's work was shitty, and to top it all off (like an even shittier cherry on top), we really need to buy a new hot water heater, since ours has been leaking all year and has caused our entire house to completely mold-over inside, top to bottom. Especially since our heat-pump had been broken all year, so we didn't have any air conditioning running during the spring and summer to help pump out any of the humidity in the house. So our whole house has reeked of moldy mustiness for months. And it's going to take forever and be a whole lot of work on our part to get it all cleaned up.
So I don't really feel like a "ton of bricks" has been lifted off of me, but more like just maybe one or two bricks has been lifted (just to finally know that Jamie will be getting money from unemployment after all).
But Jamie reminded me today that even though he is entitled to receive $330 per week in unemployment, they still have to take taxes and crap out of it, so the amount of unemployment pay he would actually receive would probably be more like around $260 per week. :/ Well, I guess at least we can buy groceries and maybe afford a few bills without having to deplete our savings any further. >:{
I eagerly applied for a housekeeping/cabin cleaning job several weeks ago, but never heard anything back from them at all. And of course Jamie has applied for trillions of jobs since he got fired, but he never has heard anything back from any of them either.
So I still don't know what the hell we're going to do.
I don't want to work in an office/administrative assistant situation ever again, because I hate people, I hate office politics, I hate the cattiness, gossipiness, and tattle-telling asswipes that inevitably go along with it. I hate being practically chained down inside of a depressing-ass 6x6 cubicle every day for 8 hours a day for years and years and years (it actually makes your body physically hurt when you're not allowed to get up from your desk chair and walk around very much at all -- and "if you're not at your desk, then you're not working"), and you must be available at all times just in case the telephone rings (never mind the fact that the department finally joined the 21st century and allowed everyone's phones to have voice mail capability). And you have to be at the beck and call of a shitty, stupid-ass boss who literally doesn't even know the difference between a letter opener and a staple remover, and treats you literally like a slave, forcing you to constantly use your own money, vehicle, time, and energy to go out and get food for everyone to eat and serve it to them like a waitress, do completely shitty tasks such as retrieve her stupid printouts from the main, common printer (even though she had her very own private printer located at the end of her desk in her office), and force you to do bullshit work from other departments just because everybody else was "too busy" to do it. (That's where my crippling anxiety got the better of me, and that was the actual reason that pushed me over the edge and made me feel as if I was forced to quit) -- regardless of being on medication for anxiety, if I was ever asked to do anything new in my job (which started happening constantly because "management is watching; look busy" and "just be glad you have a job"), it set off my panic attacks to the point that I was barely able to function. My boss knew this, but didn't believe it, and didn't care. The job I fled from was basically like a prison. I never want to be put in that situation ever again.
But anyway. *deep breath*
I'm going to try once again to get Lilly on PeachCare medical insurance soon, since the Blue Cross Blue Shield policy we have on her now costs us $142 per month. They denied us before (since Lilly was currently insured back when I tried to apply, and she would have to go uninsured for 6 months before she could qualify, but I was scared to do that because as sure as I cancelled Lilly's insurance, she'd have an accident -- especially with her taking dance and gymnastics classes). But I think now that Jamie's unemployed, they might allow her to be enrolled in PeachCare with no waiting period.
And I'm thinking about applying for another housekeeping job soon, but I'm not getting my hopes up about it.
I'm sure lots of people probably wonder if I'm regretting quitting my job at the bank a little over a year ago. I've given that some thought, and I've decided NO, I don't regret it. What I do regret is the fact that I had such a shitty boss, and that, coupled with the fact that I suffer from crippling anxiety and depression, caused me to want to flee from my job at the bank in the first place. Not to mention the fact that I don't believe that I was ever really meant to work at the bank anyway. I am seriously completely learning-disabled when it comes to anything to do with math, money, or numbers. I never actually even belonged at the bank.
I don't know WHERE the hell I belong. I'm just completely lost in the world. I don't have a purpose, and don't have a clue. I know I could be really damn good at something, but I have no freaking idea what the hell that 'thing' is. And now it's too late for me to even try to find out. My life's just a total waste.
Everything in my life has always been a mistake or something shitty, and it just won't stop happening. I can't get a break. I wish that life had an "undo" button like computers do. I would put one of those bricks that has recently been lifted off of me on top of my life's "undo" button until I got back to when I was just born. And every single path that I had gotten on originally, I would do the complete opposite this time around. But that can't happen. :/ Dammit.
I'm not happy with the way my life has turned out at all, and I'm stuck with it. It's like a shitty gift that you absolutely freakin' hate, but it's impossible to return, and you are required to use it around the person who gave it to you every freakin' day, so it won't hurt their feelings. I feel like I'm just hanging out 'til the end, and then at the end, I'll look like this:
My life sucks. I want a do-over. >:{
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