An Unanniversary
If the fates had ignored a certain serpent then today I would have been marking 19 years of servitude in Salazar’s Sanatorium for Superannuated Sorcerers. Also known as the day job.
Thanks to the intervention of a certain toad, the clock stopped just short of 17.5 years. The loss of those 500 plus hours of accumulated sick leave still peeves me to this very day.
The grand plan back in May 2012 was to pay off a $25,000 mortgage in 250 days. The simple act of creating this deadline provided the motivation to nuke half of the total in less than one week. I raided several nest eggs to achieve this aim. This was largely inspired by the Queen of Cane Toads slowly and steadily picking off the old house elves one by one. The place was becoming so toxic, it was time to make plans to join the rest of the rats leaving the sinking ship.
I always turned up on time, did the job properly, was helpful to the other elves and residents and was liked and respected by most of the folks on the lower rungs of the pecking order. So I naively believed that the old toad would leave me alone since there was no plausible cause for concern. She was a nasty piece of work but never once did innocent Izzie imagine that she would just simply make up stuff if she could not find some cause for complaint.
She started with sending warning letters for such serious matters as wearing supposedly unsuitable shoes and making uncomplimentary comments about the company and its ‘core values’. Should have sussed from the use of the trademark trick of giving 3 days to respond to the allegations in writing. She was such a paragon of pink fluffy evilness that she dated the letter Monday 25th June and demanding a written response by close of business on Friday 29th June but did not bother to pop it in the post until the afternoon of Thursday 28th.
The fact that I had the envelope with the postmark as proof as far as she was concerned was ‘neither here nor there’. When the fox is the judge, the chicken is never acquitted. Even the bimbo union rep did not see the significance of that postmark in spite of the toad vehemently proclaiming that I was lying about the date the letter arrived.
I did not resign or stick the serpent head in the gas oven so she got plotting on a second letter.
It should have been obvious by then but 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. By no later than the second letter I should have already gone to her telfon coated cockroach of a pay clerk and declared that I was giving up working Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. All in writing of course and in triplicate.. Of course he would have kept putting me on the roster for those days forever if no member of his freaky family was happy to grab them and obviously that would be all my fault and likely a sackable offence. Absence from duty without reasonable explanation etc etc
Working weekends only would have meant never ever having to see the toxic toad’s face again. Weekends pay extra and alone would have been worth 39 hours a fortnight. This was a perfectly affordable option as all it needed was a couple of emails or phone calls to raid the rest of the nest eggs and that mortgage would be paid off in less than two weeks. This was a genuine emergency after all. But Izzie was still in denial about the toad’s obvious intentions and went about business as usual.
She kept on sending those letters and the accusations became more malicious and outrageous. Reporting an injury to a resident was equated with causing it in spite of the fact that it was obvious the bruises in question were several days old. The Izzie thinks like a lawyer but by that stage should have known better. In a rational, just and logical world, going to the resident’s files, finding and copying the entry where a nurse had reported those injuries several days before I had supposedly caused them and then producing this paper as evidence did not end the matter but just enraged the old toad beyond boiling point. She resorted to rants about unauthorized access to classified information.
At that stage she had several slime dog minions on the serpent’s case. It was just constant harassment including demands to do obviously unsafe jobs knowing that any refusal to do so would be her long awaited third strike for ‘disobeying reasonable orders from qualified professionals’
At that stage I had started trying to take sick days but it has become increasingly difficult to get doctors’ appointments and long gone are the days of doctors giving anything more than a week off even in the case of obvious emotional and mental stress.
The serpent is not blessed with nerves of steel and was heading towards serious danger of a stroke or worse. The war against the toxic toad was just not worth the risk.
So when the inevitable third letter came I mistakenly believed that the choices were to resign or to fight. It turned out that there was a third option which was to simply do nothing. That would have made it very difficult for them to get out of paying all entitlements including those precious 500 hours of unused sick leave. But of course the whole idea is that they mess with your mind so much that you simply cannot think rationally.
So in an alternative universe I would still be working weekends at the mad house, the old toad would have left around Easter 2013 to inflict her own special misery on other unsuspecting house elves and it would have been possible to have a guilt free five days a week to play with. I probably would have started looking for another job for two of those five days. It’s so much easier to get a job when you already have one.
In the real world things turned out quite differently. It’s not easy finding a paid job being a frumpy lump on the far side of forty. Apparently more than a quarter of folks on the dole are in that age category and now the government tells us that we have to work until we are seventy! Half that age and most employers consider you past your use by date.There’s so many more gatekeepers to get past than there was nineteen years ago. Now most jobs are advertised online and if you turn up in person they tell you that they only accept online applications. It’s cheaper and easier and a lot less hassle than the old ritual of endless photocopying of resumes and writing cover letters and then pottering off to spend those precious pennies at the post office. But the chances of ending up in some inbox below 500 other emails are pretty high indeed. It seems that robots answer them and always with the same cliche phrases.
So now the serpent works 15 hours a week as a volunteer in various places. It’s good for preserving sanity, providing structure to the week plus lots of inspiration for squiggling. It’s not good for paying the bills. Just as well there are not too many of those. I made the most of the many years of plenty and it is now paying off big time. Izzie must be the only person in Australia who can get by on $250 per week. Most folks need $400 just for the rent. But I still feel guilty for being on the dole more than a year now. Since July 2013 paid workers get to keep the first $180 per week before paying income tax. I have not earned a single cent in all that time.
It would be poetic justice indeed if future earned income included royalties from assorted novels featuring that psychotic toxic toad as the main character. Toad Creek? The possibilities are endless. But now it’s time to get back to procrastinating.
Thanks to the intervention of a certain toad, the clock stopped just short of 17.5 years. The loss of those 500 plus hours of accumulated sick leave still peeves me to this very day.
The grand plan back in May 2012 was to pay off a $25,000 mortgage in 250 days. The simple act of creating this deadline provided the motivation to nuke half of the total in less than one week. I raided several nest eggs to achieve this aim. This was largely inspired by the Queen of Cane Toads slowly and steadily picking off the old house elves one by one. The place was becoming so toxic, it was time to make plans to join the rest of the rats leaving the sinking ship.
I always turned up on time, did the job properly, was helpful to the other elves and residents and was liked and respected by most of the folks on the lower rungs of the pecking order. So I naively believed that the old toad would leave me alone since there was no plausible cause for concern. She was a nasty piece of work but never once did innocent Izzie imagine that she would just simply make up stuff if she could not find some cause for complaint.
She started with sending warning letters for such serious matters as wearing supposedly unsuitable shoes and making uncomplimentary comments about the company and its ‘core values’. Should have sussed from the use of the trademark trick of giving 3 days to respond to the allegations in writing. She was such a paragon of pink fluffy evilness that she dated the letter Monday 25th June and demanding a written response by close of business on Friday 29th June but did not bother to pop it in the post until the afternoon of Thursday 28th.
The fact that I had the envelope with the postmark as proof as far as she was concerned was ‘neither here nor there’. When the fox is the judge, the chicken is never acquitted. Even the bimbo union rep did not see the significance of that postmark in spite of the toad vehemently proclaiming that I was lying about the date the letter arrived.
I did not resign or stick the serpent head in the gas oven so she got plotting on a second letter.
It should have been obvious by then but 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. By no later than the second letter I should have already gone to her telfon coated cockroach of a pay clerk and declared that I was giving up working Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. All in writing of course and in triplicate.. Of course he would have kept putting me on the roster for those days forever if no member of his freaky family was happy to grab them and obviously that would be all my fault and likely a sackable offence. Absence from duty without reasonable explanation etc etc
Working weekends only would have meant never ever having to see the toxic toad’s face again. Weekends pay extra and alone would have been worth 39 hours a fortnight. This was a perfectly affordable option as all it needed was a couple of emails or phone calls to raid the rest of the nest eggs and that mortgage would be paid off in less than two weeks. This was a genuine emergency after all. But Izzie was still in denial about the toad’s obvious intentions and went about business as usual.
She kept on sending those letters and the accusations became more malicious and outrageous. Reporting an injury to a resident was equated with causing it in spite of the fact that it was obvious the bruises in question were several days old. The Izzie thinks like a lawyer but by that stage should have known better. In a rational, just and logical world, going to the resident’s files, finding and copying the entry where a nurse had reported those injuries several days before I had supposedly caused them and then producing this paper as evidence did not end the matter but just enraged the old toad beyond boiling point. She resorted to rants about unauthorized access to classified information.
At that stage she had several slime dog minions on the serpent’s case. It was just constant harassment including demands to do obviously unsafe jobs knowing that any refusal to do so would be her long awaited third strike for ‘disobeying reasonable orders from qualified professionals’
At that stage I had started trying to take sick days but it has become increasingly difficult to get doctors’ appointments and long gone are the days of doctors giving anything more than a week off even in the case of obvious emotional and mental stress.
The serpent is not blessed with nerves of steel and was heading towards serious danger of a stroke or worse. The war against the toxic toad was just not worth the risk.
So when the inevitable third letter came I mistakenly believed that the choices were to resign or to fight. It turned out that there was a third option which was to simply do nothing. That would have made it very difficult for them to get out of paying all entitlements including those precious 500 hours of unused sick leave. But of course the whole idea is that they mess with your mind so much that you simply cannot think rationally.
So in an alternative universe I would still be working weekends at the mad house, the old toad would have left around Easter 2013 to inflict her own special misery on other unsuspecting house elves and it would have been possible to have a guilt free five days a week to play with. I probably would have started looking for another job for two of those five days. It’s so much easier to get a job when you already have one.
In the real world things turned out quite differently. It’s not easy finding a paid job being a frumpy lump on the far side of forty. Apparently more than a quarter of folks on the dole are in that age category and now the government tells us that we have to work until we are seventy! Half that age and most employers consider you past your use by date.There’s so many more gatekeepers to get past than there was nineteen years ago. Now most jobs are advertised online and if you turn up in person they tell you that they only accept online applications. It’s cheaper and easier and a lot less hassle than the old ritual of endless photocopying of resumes and writing cover letters and then pottering off to spend those precious pennies at the post office. But the chances of ending up in some inbox below 500 other emails are pretty high indeed. It seems that robots answer them and always with the same cliche phrases.
So now the serpent works 15 hours a week as a volunteer in various places. It’s good for preserving sanity, providing structure to the week plus lots of inspiration for squiggling. It’s not good for paying the bills. Just as well there are not too many of those. I made the most of the many years of plenty and it is now paying off big time. Izzie must be the only person in Australia who can get by on $250 per week. Most folks need $400 just for the rent. But I still feel guilty for being on the dole more than a year now. Since July 2013 paid workers get to keep the first $180 per week before paying income tax. I have not earned a single cent in all that time.
It would be poetic justice indeed if future earned income included royalties from assorted novels featuring that psychotic toxic toad as the main character. Toad Creek? The possibilities are endless. But now it’s time to get back to procrastinating.