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Welcome to MasonCTE, MsMcMadness, Gussieunv and CaptSugarsnack, my latest followers via Twitter. Glad to have you here!

In My Head: Nice one, Universe. Just sayin’…

In The Cup: Coffee with a splash of organic milk, because we’re out of almond milk.

Currently Playing: Cats and Dogs, The Head and Heart

On The Desk: The Power and the Glory

On The Nightstand: Characters, Emotion and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress

Papers Graded: 3. I have 2.5 left in this batch. And guess what? The new batch is coming in today. Ah, the never-ending cycle….

Good morning, Blogland. We’ve had an interesting forty-eight hours here at Casa Chaos (Are there any other sorts of hours around here?)

I received a phone call right before I headed out for my lunch appointment with a student, rescheduled twice now: My eldest daughter had a stomach ache and could I come pick her up? GREAT. DH was out sick yesterday, so it’s entirely up to me to handle this, even though I was just out sick myself last week. (Good People, if your freaking kid is sick, DON’T SEND HIM OR HER TO SCHOOL. Because when you do that, every other parent has to take time off work to take care of sick kids and ultimately, gets sick him or herself as a result, thus all missing more work and getting docked more pay. SO NOT FAIR. Have some modicum of fair-mindedness and keep your cooties to yourself).

ANYHOW. Having re-scheduled twice on this particular student I was supposed to meet with at lunch, I told the school nurse I would come and pick my daughter up in an hour. I talked to her myself over the phone and she was fine, with an unspecified “my tummy hurts” problem. I’m betting it was constipation. She’s prone to it. One day when she is old enough, she will stumble across this blog post and be mortified that I was discussing her bowel movements with the World Wide Web. But by then, I’ll probably be a world-famous author and college professor, so she won’t really care too much. This is going to pay for her education, after all. Where does she think the money to study digging up fossils comes from?

ANYHOW. My ADD is really bad today, don’t you think? Oh, right, the story. Sorry.

SO. I have my appointment and I’m off to pick up the DD, and I put a call in to my husband to let him know she’s sick. And he says, “I’ll get her.”

“But I’m already on my way.”

“But I’m in town.”

“What are you doing in town?”

“I got fired today.”

Confession: I almost side-swiped a fence on that beat. ALMOST. Fortunately there wasn’t anyone coming in the opposite lane as I corrected the car violently. “What?”

“I got fired today.”

Of course. Of course you did. Because that is how the Universe rolls. Kick me, Universe, go ahead, kick my ribs in while I’m down. I’m blaming the Tamoxifen again. Obviously, it’s the fault of the Tamoxifen that my husband lost his job.

I mean, you can all totally see that, right?

Stupid Tamoxifen. This shit needs to come with a better warning label. Never mind the faint possibility of stroke, blood clots and endometrial cancer. The immediate reality is so much worse – hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, depression, job loss – I mean, it’s really nasty stuff!

ANYhow. “WHY?”

“They said they wanted to go in a different direction.”

“Seriously, that’s it? THAT’S what they gave you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s ALL? They didn’t give you a REASON?”

“They just said they were going in a different direction.”

OK – so, companies of the world, I’m going to give it to you straight: Anyone who fires a management position employee and does not give a straightforward reason is a COWARD. Just tell the truth – his breath smells bad. You don’t like his sense of fashion. He eats too much fast food. But “we’re going in a different direction” is a bullshit, cop-out answer when you are sitting face to face with someone who has given you all s/he has to give for years and essentially wrecking his or her life. At the very least, if you have any sense of decency, or any moral courage or virtue, or any true sense of being actually professional, you should just TELL the person WHY you fired him or her. People need closure – especially people who have been with a company long-term. Someone who’s been there a month or so? Whatever. But after more than a year, you actually do owe your employees better treatment than that.

“We’re going in a different direction”. What a fucking cop-out.

And as I was driving and thinking all of this, I realized that I was not at all upset that my husband was fired from his job.

Not at all.

As a matter of fact, I am somewhat delighted with this turn of events. Actually, the more I think about it – “We want to go in a different direction” the more I think this is great. Who the fuck wants to work for people who think that way? Who wants to work for a company that has such a vague sense of its future? Who wants to work for a company that has no good reason to fire you, so they come up with “we want to go in a different direction” as their BEST reason to let you go?

Frankly, my husband is better than that. He deserves better than that. And he is too loyal and too concerned with finances to take that step for himself. I’m GLAD he got fired, because now he has the time and space to find a job with decent hours and better pay, where he has employers that respect and value his contributions instead of taking him for granted.

How taken for granted was he? He drove an hour to and from work every day, with no gas allowance. He worked for three years without a vacation because he had no one to take his place editing while he was out. He went to work sick unless he was physically throwing up – the only days off he took in all that time were days he took so I didn’t have to when our children were out of school. He worked 9-5 PLUS an hour before that when he woke up in the morning. Some days until 6. Then he covered meetings three days a week until after 9 p.m. before driving home. Where he promptly sat down to his computer to check emails, set up meetings, and lay out pages – because he was not just managing editor but also responsible for layout. He had one full time reporter for each of the two papers he was in charge of. He covered half of what his paper wrote on because he didn’t have anyone else to do it. He was gone every other weekend covering this-or-that event. For the past year, being in charge of two papers at two different locations forty minutes from one another, he was driving back and forth – again, no gas allowance – several times a week, scrambling to get things done and always feeling stretched beyond capacity. He had multiple meetings trying to sort all of it out, kept asking for feedback, kept asking for ideas on how to make things work, and kept getting told “everything’s fine, you’re doing a great job, keep doing what you’re doing.” Until yesterday. All for less pay than I make as a teacher. And he would have stayed with it until it killed him, which it would have done, eventually, because he’s loyal and has a sense of obligation and responsibility. He’s thought about leaving before – but he didn’t want to leave them hanging. He was worried about finances. He was going to look for something else – but he hasn’t had a whole weekend off in years, much less time during the week to scope out possibilities.

“Because we want to go in a different direction”.

Well, guess what, stupid publisher? You did us a major fucking favor and while you are scrambling to find a replacement for him and trying to figure out how to publish two papers twice a week without a managing editor who knows what he is doing, we are actually laughing at you. Because WE WANT TO GO IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION, TOO.

And you are going to be hating life when you realize how much he was shouldering for that paltry salary. Actually, one of his reporters called yesterday to tell him they are screwed because there’s no one to do it – they didn’t have the sense to hire someone before they fired him. And their only full-time reporter doesn’t want the editor’s job, even if he were qualified for it, because of the crap hours and crap pay and what he’s watched my DH go through in the position.

Meanwhile – I’ve told my husband to talk the week off and do whatever he wants to. He’s going to watch all the episodes of “Arrested Development”, play a video game, shoot some photos, and then we’ll start looking for something else. Something better. Something in the other direction. We’ve got six months before I start my PhD program; he gets his vacation time as pay in his next paycheck, it’s tax return season, I’m doing SAT Prep so we have my stipend to fall back on a little, and it’s not so cold so we don’t have to worry about heating the house. I think the timing is perfect on this.

Good one, Universe.

And so, my husband’s being fired from his job is the best news I’ve had all week.

And also, if you know of any jobs in the Greensboro, North Carolina area in the news, marketing, advertising, communications or PR industries, let me know, would you?

And also, I’m not nearly as depressed now as I was two days ago. I might be the only person in the world who can cure her own depression with really bad news. Do I get a medal or something?

And also, if anyone wins the lotto, think of me…the subsidizing of writers and thinkers is a time-honored tradition. You’ll be just like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. I don’t require much – just a small annuum… enough to cover my Pyramid Collection addiction…