I’m Fine. It’s Fine. We’re All Fine. Really.

Life is going on, but the most interesting stuff is not shareable on the innerwebs, out of respect for the privacy of others. Nothing awful, just drama.

Work remains…work. It’s fine. I’m fine. Really.

The person they “hired” (quotes because it’s a contractor position) for my former job after months of searching, quit last week. She lasted…maybe three or four months?

I called my buddy in my old department who had trained me and also was training her, and he said she was very frustrated because she wasn’t catching on to the job. (I was asked to review her resume and told the manager that her background wasn’t a good fit. He brought her on anyway.) My buddy begged me to come back – he was joking because he knows I need the money and benefits from my new job. I said get the boss to make it an employee position and I’ll be there in a hot minute.

I literally cannot afford to be a contractor again, I’m scrambling to save for retirement as it is. Next week I will be taking my first real vacation and first week off in nearly five years. I had to plan and budget to take an unpaid week off five years ago, because I had no PTO after years in my contract position. It has been that long. I am grateful for the money and the benefits and adore my manager who hired me, and I can’t afford to go back to contract work even though I’m far better suited for that job than this one.

Everybody who understands my former job knows it needs to be an employee position for someone with enough time with the company AND enough experience dealing with local governments and state offices and regulatory stuff to have an understanding of how shit works. Upper management is not part of “everybody who understands” and my former boss also knows it but has been unable to break through on that.

This is a classic Corporate America situation, where the people on the rise to upper management move through lateral layers of the company on the way up the ladder, so you’ll have, say, a finance person move into a job managing nuts and bolts stuff they honestly don’t understand, and until something majorly bad goes off the rails, nothing’s going to change.

Counting down to retirement. Seriously. I’ve been dealing with this shit for 40 years, isn’t that enough?

So, in other news, I’m less than six months away from Medicare! I’m getting mailers, calls, texts, selling me all the insurance I’ll need because I’ll be on Medicare. Yes, you will have Medicare, but you’ll also need this and this, and oh, do you need glasses? There’s a separate plan for that. This country is just so fucked up, I can hardly bear to think about it.

One of the good things about my current gig is we have a company (Starts with an F and ends with a Y) that manages retirement plans, etc. and they help with Medicare shit too. I’ll call them. I honestly don’t know how the millions of Americans who don’t have access to advice and get their news from Fox and their brother-in-law survive this shit. The reality is, many of them don’t.

Anyway, I’m taking my first paid week off in a DECADE next week, and I’m going to the Bahamas, baby! First ever cruise, first time to the Bahamas, waaay overdue.