A Sign Of The Times

So I start a new job and I go all in. Really throw myself into it. I'm talking diving into flood waters and flying with the current.

Had no choice, really. That's just the way the job works. I made a conscious decision to grab onto something I knew would beat me down and wear me around because I gambled that I could handle it and because I would be rewarded with a fat paycheck.

I am coming out of the fog and realizing that I will be able to handle it as experience procreates. I am convinced of that. I was stumbling quite a bit here and there but I have had a few days of enlightenment recently that prove to me, short of heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer's or cancer, that my life is about to get immeasurably better. Assuming I can survive the idiots I work for.

I worked four weeks to get to The First Fat Paycheck. Four 49 hour weeks. Working Sundays, missing every race so far, sharing only one weekend day with my lovely wife.

Waiting for the check.

Yesterday was the magic day and they f***ed it up. I'm talking royally f***ed it up. This check covered two weeks.  80 hours regular pay, 18 hours time and a half. The payroll idiots only got 2 and 1/2 hours right. TWO AND A HALF. I don't even know where they came up with that number. The rest of the check was calculated at my old part time rate, and the number of hours for OT was wrong and way less than it should have been.

They paid me hundreds of dollars less than I deserved. HUNDREDS.

I was furious. Talk about sucking the life out of a moment.

This is a sign of the times. One thing you never screw up is a paycheck. It is sacred. It is the only thing you can count on as an employee these days. Your employer will screw you in every way they can, openly and with glee. But they have a legal and moral obligation to get your pay right.

If your employer screws up your paycheck, it is black and white proof that they don't give a damn. Are you telling me nobody is checking to see that the hourly rate is correct, the hours are correct? That is the ultimate statement of callousness.

I just finished a book by Dan Rather. He devotes the end chunk of the book to what he calls the corporatization, politicization and trivialization of the news. Comparing the joke that the news is today to what it was when he started.

It occurred to me that those three words, corporatization, politicization and trivialization, perfectly  define life in America today. Perfectly define the nature of hopelessness most of us experience, the lack of substance and soul, the lack of control over our own destinies.

This stuff has gotten so big, so pervasive, that it is all there is. There is no American dream. There is a dream of the wealthy and powerful and that dream is to control everything, to own everything, to call the shots and to leave no room for individuality. Individuality in achievement or in personality.

This kind of mentality results in f***ed up paychecks.

We are beyond the point of no return. It is too late. The powerful are entrenched and they will never let go. And they will keep pushing to make our lives trivial.

I grabbed onto this job as a means to an end. Something that popped into my life giving me a temporary chance to turn my financial life around so I would not be so vulnerable to the vultures.

And the vultures f***ed up my first paycheck. Royally.

I fired off an E-mail to payroll yesterday. I will follow up with a phone call on Monday.

I expect a fight. How wrong is that, that I expect a fight regarding what I have worked so hard to earn?

For now I will give them the benefit of the doubt. I'll see how it goes.

It was a wake up call. A wake up call to continue on this "means to an end" approach while, more importantly, keeping my eyes and spirit open enough to recognize when enough is enough.

I refuse to kill my soul for people who would cheer it's demise.