I've been thinking lately and my thoughts have led me down some distasteful paths and, of course, 'thinking' has been said to get one into trouble.
I've been thinking of what my life would be like if I did obtain a position in my former profession, at or near the hourly rate as an IT contractor that I've enjoyed, would be like within the context of lifestyle and financial responsibility.
Even if I took a position that payed my former hourly rate, my monthly payments for 3 or 4 years would reduce me to a spartan lifestyle, which I could tolerate. If I found a job that pays the median national salary, lifestyle would be somewhat more spartan for a longer period of time while I repayed the corporate masters, leaving little to nothing for savings and life enjoyment; again, which I could tolerate. At minimum wage, lifestyle would be even more spartan with nothing left to pay debt and accumulate savings, and to enjoy life's little pleasures (movies, eating out, nice clothes, deep tissue massage, etc.) and yes, I could put up even with that. Of course, my current circumstances are bit below that level now. Talk about being indentured for life! Yet all four alternatives leave something to be desired. But what if this is as good as it gets and the circumstances continue to deteriorate until I end up with just the clothes on my back?
Maybe the best I can hope for is to endure one day at a time like I'm doing now and keep seeking a part-time position that allows time for the other writing project. Oh, well, maybe another option will present itself.
There was something I read a while back about two students that just graduated; one was a dentist and the other with a law degree. According to the article they would have one to two decades of high monthly payments ahead of them with little to live on. The one with the law degree found that job prospects were not as plentiful as the college recruiters led her to believe. She wondered what would happen if she were unemployed for an appreciable length of time. Now you can read in the papers or hear about on the news about people working 2 or more jobs just to keep their home from being foreclosed, leaving little time to enjoy the American dream, whatever that has evolved into - somebody is going to have to tell me what that is these days. It seems the middle class is being squeezed more and more by taxes and rising prices due to fuel, transportation and food shortages due to world demand. Maybe the majority of us are indentured to a significant degree to keep the corporations alive. But as long as we have a bed and a roof...
I've read where 3 out of 4 people are dissatisfied with their job. The articles didn't specify why; whether because of the condition of the corporate environment, co-workers' behaviour, unsatisfactory job function, lack of emotional investment, policies or managerial shenanigans. I guess I was fortunate to have enjoyed what I once did for a living despite the intelligence of the ...managerial personalities and/or corporate policies. I'm thinking of the toll that those conditions extracts from the workers in terms of absence from family, and the psychological, emotional, physical stress and how that is vented thorough health issues, abusive behavioural expressions, drugs and alcohol usage. Is it any wonder that the health care costs are rising at such a rate? Face it, happy people are sick less often than the unhappy ones. I think I read that somewhere or heard it on the Cartoon Network. Seems the corporate world could be structured better but that would probably cost the major stockholders too much. When people say that they love their job, are they trying to convince themselves and/or others? I hope in a lot of cases it is true. Maybe there is a lot more weight to the expression 'TGIF' than I originally thought. I always enjoyed the weekends but I was not opposed, intellectually or otherwise, to returning to the job Monday morning to gleefully address the challenges that I left Friday. More times than not, I would have thought about a particular software issue over the weekend and came up with another approach. At this point, I'm wondering about those other sayings that I've come across in the corporate environment over the years that I laughed at and didn't put much emphasis on over the years.
I've read that the baby boomers are slated to stay in the work force longer because they enjoy better health and are living longer. Those two attributes seem to be true but now the media coverage has shifted to the issue of the boomers retiring at 62 ASAP (or ASAFP!). Who can blame them for getting out of the crap at the stroke of midnight when they reach 62 and doing something that they can really enjoy?
There was a film produced several years ago that didn't get much fanfare that I saw at the end of last year called 'The Corporation' on a educational channel (IFC I think). It traces the birth and purpose of the first corporations and their evolution to current times. If you are a 'green' person and see this movie, I doubt you will ever buy anything from a store again. I recommend viewing it just as an exercise in corporate history.
Sometime ago I read of when a mining company, in the old days of course, set up an ore extraction facility that they would bring in the workers and their families to company sponsored housing so the men could do the work but the location was far from the usual retail centers and the mining company, in the spirit of caring for the rank and file, would bring the merchandise to them...at a considerable markup. More often than not, over the course of time, the families couldn't leave because of what they owned the company and their employment was reduced, in principal, to servitude. Glad that practice is no longer in vogue or all of us would be in the same shape regardless of the industry we worked in, right? RIGHT?
I know that this entry has been a bit gloomy but the employment options stated earlier have been on my mind and thought I would share it with you. Doubtless some of you are thinking Why? We didn't want to think about it either! Well, maybe we need to lift our heads up from harvesting the wheat sometimes, shrug off the lashes being dealt across our young muscular backs and see what the foreman is doing.
On an even more depressing note is the place where I sometimes clean up in the early morning hours that I've wrote about in an earlier entry. It has been a couple of weeks and they still haven't resupplied the soap in the men's bathroom!!! Jeez!! What's even more scarier is that there is not any soap in the women's bathroom either!! I would prefer to have the soap around to wash my clothes after the hot tub cycle and some for me. But the women's bathroom being out of soap for this long is appalling. Verily, I say unto thee, this doth smacks of the dark lord himself.
Keep plugging away,
David
NOTE:
The acronym ASAFP has a patent pending. And I don't think I need to tell you what the 'F' stands for.
