Pooch, I feel I should apologize. I still think your assessment of libertarianism is wrong, but I got pissy about it and that was unnecessary. My attitude was wrong. I apologize.
Oh great. NOW I read this!!! You might want to retract it when you read my latest post on that thread.
You don't really need to apologize, but I appreciate the gesture. I recognize that the debate is heated in that thread, and I wasn't really offended. Just pissed off at the tone because I prefer less snippiness - and I was certainly giving as good as I got there.
The fact is, my wife has been going through employment hell for about a year now, and I've been trying to help her deal with some of the issues over the last couple of days. So I took a step back from the thread to recharge.
She had a great job with a lousy boss for five years. She ended getting him fired when he made enough threats to cross the line. You know what they say about the devil you know . . . The new manager was ten times the idiot that the previous one was and with a month or so of his taking over she was fired. She was the best CSR in the region (and had the stats to prove it) but was fired for willful misconduct, insubordination and disorganization. We had to go through three appeals just to get unemployment. (I used the skills I have learned here to draft the final appeal, and we managed to win.)
Then she got a new job that looked like it would work great. She lasted a couple of months there, with inadequate training in an environment with such a high turnover rate that they replaced some of the workers there two and three times per position in the short time she was with the company. We are now in the process of fighting THEM for unemployment, but the bennies have run out now anyway. (If we lose we have to pay back what bennies we got from that job.)
Last week she got a job in a billing place. The girl she was replacing told her she wanted her to join a walkout they have planned for April 1st. She kept bugging Val to join the rebellion so the company would be screwed when they all left. Val refused. The girl told the boss lady that Val wasn't able to do the job (she was learning it in spite of the attempts of the girl to evade the training). So after exactly one week on a job that required by THEIR estimate two months to train, Val was gone again. The girl told the boss (who is completely clueless) that a former employee wanted to come back to do the job. (This former employee had walked out in a huff before.) The boss thought a bird in the hand . . . so she told Val her services weren't needed after all. That was last Friday. Yesterday the ad showed up in the paper again. Looks like the former employee is a no-show. Val considered ratting out the rebellion, but decided that she didn't need the drama.
Today she had the first appeal for unemployment for the last job (at the high turnover place). They had to postpone because the manager was called to jury duty (of all things). So that's on hold for another month. Then she had an interview for a job which went extremely well. She has a second interview next week. Here's hoping. But her self-esteem is shot to heck, and the hole in her otherwise very impressive resume is getting larger. She is just catching hell and she doesn't deserve it.
Funny thing is this. She drew unemployment from that first job until the initial decision was overturned on appeal. About the day the bennies stopped, she got the second job. We appealed again on lack of due process and error and won, and the money started coming back in again just as she lost the second job. The benefits just ran out in January and she got the third job, for which she will get a week's salary next week. Oddly, she was supposed to start that job a week before, but the HR department wanted her to start in a fresh period, so we got the week to go on a mini-vacation while I was in training. (That's when we saw the opera and all of that.) So we have been able to survive financially because the situation worked out that she was either drawing benefits or working for the entire period (close to a year) since she lost her first job. Plus we got the time together we rather desparately needed in Charlottesville. With luck, if she gets the job she went for today, we can get through this. We have had our income badly curtailed, and our finances are a wreck for now, but we still feel like someone up there was steadying the boat.
Anyway, random vent. Thanks for coming back with that apology, but again, it was unnecessary.
