On Wednesday, it will have been 3 months since I was tossed on the Human Resources Discard pile.
Just another day.
I don't understand what is happening in the world anymore. I guess I never did. I just thought it made sense.
Minnesota's Unemployment Insurance system has been down all morning. By this time today I was hoping to be doing something other than reading Kos and waiting for my UI login to be successful.
I don't know exactly why they system is down but I would be willing to bet it has something to do with this:
In March, the number of unemployed persons increased by 694,000 to 13.2 million, and the unemployment rate rose to 8.5 percent. Over the past 12 months, the number of unemployed persons has grown by about 5.3 million, and the unemployment rate has risen by 3.4 percentage points. -- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Bad as this is, it doesn't count the 423,000 people who in March joined the number of people -- now 9 million -- who are involuntarily working part-time because their hours have been reduced or they are unable to find full-time work.
It also doesn't count the number of people, estimated at another 4 percent of the potential workforce, who aren't counted in either the unemployed or underemployed categories because they have quit looking for jobs. --Chattanooga Times Free Press
Of course, this only counts the small percentage of people who are on the rolls, but not those who have formally given up looking, or quit because they were being poorly used by their employers, or were fired "for cause" (which can mean canned for a reason, or merely that when the comapny wanted to cut the workforce they found a reason to fire them so as not to have to pay unemplyment. You can't tell me that doesn't happen. You can find a reason to fire anybody. I know -- I used to be a supervisor.)
I do not understand why anything less than full employment is tolerated by society. They say they need some unemployment to prevent inflation. So it's good for a certain percentage of people unable to find suitable work. This doesn't make sense to me anymore.
***
Last night I ran into a former co-worker, someone who would have been my boss today if I was still working there. Someone who, I firmly believe, knew I was about to be laid off. I literally did not know what to say to them. I couldn't even say their name. It was a short, uncomfortable conversation. There wasn't much to say. I did show them how much of my hair had turned back from gray to brown over the last few months, and they said I did not look as tired as I did when I still worked at [redacted]. I have only the tiniest vestige of loyalty left to the company that fed me a shit sandwich.
Saying bad things about the company you work for will get you in trouble, evcen when it's the truth. What prevents me from doing that about a company I no longer work for? What are they going to do, fire me? Am I a coward, or am I reluctant to do harm when it would profit me nothing at all?
***
It was our 17th wedding anniversary this weekend. I guess that means it's slightly more than a fling. Hats off to Iowa -- I hope that 17 years from now many many people once thought too ooky to get married will be celebrating their happiness.
It has never made sense to me that there's so much of a fuss made in this world over who's doing what with whom. Seems to me there's not enough love in the world, and putting up roadblocks is a bad thing. Here's something -- it's acceptable, on network TV, to show the corpse of someone who died by violence. Witness CSI. It's not acceptable to show an erect female nipple. Unless it's on a corpse. How screwed up is that?
***
Loyalty. Every company I have ever worked for has demanded loyalty, and I have given it. I've signed non-disclosures, non-competes, you name it. The paradigm of company loyalty has changed, tho.
In my father's day, it was not unusual to spend a large portion of your working life with one emplyer. He walked into an aerospace company with a high-school diploma and retired 35 years later (at 55) with an engineer's title. The company was making some cutbacks, so they offered him early retirement. This meant medical insurance (damned good insurance, too) and a pension until Social Security kicked in.
They don't do that anymore. There are no pensions (and please, please don't get me started on 401k plans -- if they are anything other than a mechanism for allowing stock speculators to use retirement funds to enich themselves at the expense of others and fuel for the stock market balloon, then tell me why IRAs are not supported the same way), medical insurance is more and more leaning toward high-deductible HSA plans that are just driving people to bankruptcy with the illusion of health care. The HSA plan is based on the idea that people will shop for cheaper health care if it's going to cost them more out-of-pocket, and that cheaper is better. Let me ask you this -- is the amount your doctor charges the most important reason to choose them? Paging Dr. Nick...
***
The MNUI system just came up, and I filed for last week. So that's taken care of.
***
Although it's been diaried a couple times, with varying amounts of impact, I'd like to mention the Star Tribune's print-only pean to Michele Bachmann. She's "The Messenger", describes herself as
"a foreign correspondent on enemy lines"
and while the article mentions that
The liberal blogoshpere, meanwhile, has erupted in howls[...]
the article doesn't bother to mention that this congresscritter is insanely stupid and dangereous. She's also managed to make MN-06 look like we're a bunch of inbred raving right-wing lunatics. We're not. We're just gerrymandered. Honest.
***
I'm just waiting for spring, and then summer. I want to go outside without worrying about getting chilblains on my chilblains. My mental state, after 3 months, is a combination of mild depression with glimmers of hope and a large portion of free-floating hostility toward the system and the media, who insist on running stories about how retired businessmen may need to unload their California vacation homes because their investments lost 6 figures this year. I wonder how many people in the tent city at Cal Expo have any sympathy for him?
I just can't understand. It does not make sense to me. None of this makes sense. The world has spun into a state of total incomprehensibility. I feel like a scribe in the dark ages, endlessly copying manuscripts without understanding.
"It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches. I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I know longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" -- Adsom