Unemployment–Earning Every Day of It

Except, remember how sick I said I got at that old job? In retrospect, it was wild. I can only describe it as a never-ending flu. Every time someone coughed or sneezed, I was immediately sick with whatever they had the next day. I was continuously waylaid by full body aches so severe I couldn’t get out of bed; exhaustion that would knock me out for hours at a time; and general malaise that made me quietly seethe and resent ‘the well’. My immune system had packed up and checked out, leaving me feeling like the walking dead; I could get from office to office, muttering and scrawling, but I wasn’t accomplishing much. Then I’d stress that I’d get fired for being sick, which would add crying, guilt, and paranoia to whatever illness I was fighting. Sometimes this would add a panic attack on top of the flu or my personal favorite, bronchitis. I also had some charming people in my life who would say helpful things like “You sure do get sick a lot!” and “I don’t know anyone who gets sick as much as you do!” I wouldn’t grab any of these people up around the throat, but the beginning of an ulcer would burn just a bit more intensely in my gut.

After I was handed my hat, however, I got well. I didn’t do anything wildly different. I ate the same foods—but I didn’t eat them at a desk, in a rush, out of a plastic container. I mostly drank the same drinks—but they weren’t caffeinated, and were usually pure fruit juices or just water. I gave up coffee and Coke because I didn’t need to force myself to stay awake anymore. I still exercised off & on, but I was able to listen to the instructor or lose myself in a book and not replay the day’s disasters on an unending, negative loop in my brain. There was no loop. There was no job! At work there was a constant, nameless net of stress hanging over my head. Every week I dodged a new set of invisible minefields. I’m still stressed now, but it’s a stress I can quantify. I need to do what I’m best at and get paid for it so I can feel good about myself and simultaneously keep Cablevision and Visa off my back. It’s a much simpler equation.

Lest you think, however, that I’m sitting around listening to Pandora, doing air guitar and waiting for my nails to dry so I can hit up my newest ChristianMingle blind date—let me get back to that whole maxing out on unemployment thingy.

When I recently went to an office to inquire about said health care, I filled out a bunch of paperwork and quietly waited my turn, reading my Kindle to pass the time. Around me, there was the absolute chaos of a small civil war, with four separate instances of clients cursing out the employees, supervisors and/or the security guard in the 15 minutes I waited on line. Their beefs were that they were tired of waiting or that no one had told them which line they should be standing in. A woman on crutches, standing about 5 feet tall, garishly cursed out a guard looming at 6 feet tall and a minimum of 280 pounds. His crime? Suggesting she use the handicap accessible exit. All this, and it was barely 10 am. New York, I just wanna pinch your cheeks sometimes.

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