Asking for Help
SOMEONE NEEDS TO HELP ME PLEASE, says the answering machine this morning.
I’m fifty-nine and I’ve worked every day of my life, and I have a hi-lo license and a CDL and a perfect record and the plant I worked at closed in January and I’ve been looking for a job every day since then and no-one is calling.
When I lost my job I had to start paying my mortgage on credit cards. Now I’m running out and I’ve had this house for 20 years and I’ve never made a late payment and can someone PLEASE. HELP.
I’m fifty-nine and I don’t deserve to be homeless. PLEASE HELP ME. There has to be a program or something that will help with my mortgage or my credit cards or something, find me a job, something, anything. Please.
I can’t stay home to wait for your call; I need to go job-hunting today like I do every day. I can’t even get work in a fast-food restaurant.
PLEASE HELP ME.
(I can’t. And I don’t know how to call and tell you, to deliver what must be a crushing blow of bad news - that I do know what’s out there and what the programs are and none of them will help you - and you’ll be even madder if I don’t return your call, and the really stupid thing is I’m having to fight my fear in order to even talk to unemployed people anymore, because my lizard-brain has been watching it spread and has now decided it’s contagious. And what about the other six people on the answering machine? They may have sounded less panicked and scary up front than you did, but we both know that more and more often, it’s the same story when I get them on the phone. And I want to help and it’s my job to help, but for so many of you there isn’t help and sometimes I really fight the urge to just go home rather than have to be the one to tell you.)
(But probably I should just be damn grateful that I have a job, and do it.)
EDIT: I couldn’t help you today, but I did help three other people who were really, really relieved to get the information I had to offer them. This work IS worth doing, even when its hard: Thanks for the reminder.
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.