Senior Needs

If you follow me on Facebook, you've already seen this.  

Just got back from shopping and so am prompted to post this Public Service Announcement for those who serve everyone but seem to forget about us "senior" consumers.

We didn't ask to get old. It just happened, as it will to you, too. Still, we seniors need to eat and shop and be out and about as we are able. If you are a manufacturer or the CEO of a big store chain, or a restaurant manager--or even just a regular shopper--here are some things I wish you'd understand.

1. If you want me to spend my money at your store, you need to have carts for me to lean on and put things in. I have a bad back that affects my legs. I can't carry things. Can't walk far. Without some sort of cart, I can't shop at your place of business.

2. I'm slow. I know it and do my dead-level best to stay out of the way of younger people who are in more of a hurry. I'll even step aside and tell people to go ahead of me because I am less rushed than they, with no ill-will. If you are behind a senior and getting impatient, just say "coming around you" and carry on.  Unless you are being rude about it, I don't know of a single person who will mind.

3. With old age comes vision problems. There's a reason why many of us, myself included, no longer drive after dark. What it takes to see well is bright light and contrast. Colored writing on a shaded background doesn't cut it. If I am to be able to read the label on your product--and there are a whole bunch of us aging Baby Boomers out there--you need to fix this. Black print on a white background works best.  The bigger the better.

4. With old age also comes hearing problems. Young people all joke about that, but it WILL happen to them, eventually. I don't know why, but when the ear stops hearing properly, the brain fails to be able to sort out background noise from what the sufferer wants to hear. Any little drone noise will drown that out. Your restaurant generates enough noise just by having people in it, but if there is music going on, that makes it worse. If you, as a manager of that restaurant, are running TVs that you expect people to watch and/or hear, please turn on the Closed Caption feature. I might not be able to hear the people I am dining with, but at least I'll be able to figure out what's going on with the TV.

5. I may get through the store okay, but then I have to load my car, return the cart, and figure out how I am going to get my purchases from the car to the house at home. As much as I hate being seen as a charity case, I also accept my limitations. A number of times, I've been blessed by younger folks who stop and say, "May I help you with that?" "Can I take that cart for you?" God bless you if you are one of them! I love you for that!  You simply don't know how very much the little things help!

This message is brought to you by your favorite Baby Boomer. Just think about us as your grandma or grandpa--or even your parents--trying our best to live out the rest of our lives with dignity. In the light of today's societal attitudes and feelings of entitlement, I will say....

                                                                                                        You got a problem with that????  :):)

The Michigan Funeral

Once funeral arrangements were made for my dear friend, Major Patrick McPherson, WW9E, I started getting my act together to attend both visitation and funeral services in southern Michigan. Pat had been chiding me for years about coming up for a visit.  I had resisted forever--not only because I had mobility problems, but also because I felt that just the trip up was formidable enough.  His home in Coloma, Michigan, was just about level in latitude with my daughter's old place in Illinois, except he was on the east side of Lake Michigan, while she was to the west of the lake.  I feared what would be uncharted territory for me.

I got on Facebook and talked to Pat's brother, Larry, in Missouri.  I thought he and wife were already in Michigan, but it turned out that they hadn't left yet.  I asked where they were going to stay.  As it happens, Coloma has no motels.  In short order, Larry told me that they had reserved rooms at a Fairfield Inn and Suites, in Watervliet, adjacent to Coloma.  He had been quoted a ridiculous low bereavement price of $39 per room.  On his lead, I called and got a high class room at the same rate.  Unbelievable!  I got on Mapquest.com to determine routes from Indy to the motel, and the motel to the funeral home....even the motel to their house.  (As it happened, I never went to their house.)  I was a little befuddled because Mapquest wanted me to choose a route.  The most familiar route to me would take me at least 30 miles out of the way and put me in Chicago traffic.  The other routes were more direct but not interstates and unknown to me.  I figured they would take me through every little burg along the way...but I was wrong.  I chose to take US 31 from Indy all the way north and found that it was anywhere from 2-4 lanes of somewhat-limited access highway and light traffic.  It was a beautiful day.  I found the motel in good time.

Immediately upon arrival at the motel, I discovered that I had left my train case at home.  Ack!  The train case contained all of my toiletries--shampoo, hair dryer, hair spray, toothbrush/toothpaste, deodorant, etc...but for reasons known only to God, I had taken my medicines and makeup out of the train case and put in in another bag at the last minute!  The gal at the motel desk directed me to a close Family Dollar store where I was able to replace all that I needed for $13.  Not bad!

I stayed at the visitation on Wednesday for most of the duration.  I was so relieved to see many of our SATERN/Salvation Army friends in attendance--some from quite a distance.  Canada, for example...and Alabama.  It was such a comfort to see all of those familiar faces.  There were a few I had never actually met but knew about because of Pat.  Some were Salvation Army officers (ministers) and some were "just" SATERN members from the Chicago area.

At the end of the visitation, I was pretty much spent.  I had an invitation to go out to eat with our Canadian friends, but I declined.  I knew that I was done for the day.  I hope they understood.  I stopped at the Subway across the street from the motel for a sandwich, and went to bed.  True to my pattern of the previous several days, I only slept about three hours, even though the bed was comfy.  I did the best I could to kill time.  Got myself ready and packed up, drove into Coloma on a wing and a prayer looking for a car wash because my car was filthy and not worthy of a funeral procession, ate the motel's breakfast (which was good), and headed to the funeral home.

Before I even left Indiana, I had written probably three pages worth of things to say about Patrick, should the opportunity come up during his funeral service.  At the visitation, I had pretty much decided to chicken out.  In fact, on the day of the funeral, I left the papers in the car, knowing that the ceremony didn't need me.  Still, I noticed there was an "open mic" opportunity on the funeral program, so I nervously stepped forward.  I didn't want to let Pat down.  Basically, I winged it.  When I look back at it, I'm not sure that what I was saying was followable by the congregants, but my heart was in the right place.  One of Pat's dear SA friends said, "I can see why he liked talking to you."   I feel that I might have made a fool of myself, but it was what it was. The SA officer that presided over his Promotion to Glory service was a fellow that I had met before...a fellow that was born in Streator, IL, the same as I was.  No one gave me a hard time about speaking up at Pat's funeral.

Of course, at the end of the services in the funeral home is that one last pass by the casket.  I stopped to touch Pat's hand and say good-bye to my friend.  Big mistake.  I managed to make it into the hallway before the tears totally took over...and I just sobbed.  One thing I have accepted through my years of funeral attendance is that if there is ever a time when it's okay to weep shamelessly, this is it.  And I did.  Fortunately, there was a sea of ministers and friends there to comfort me.  

Before the service even started, I saw a guy that had been a faithful friend to Pat and SATERN, out of Chicagoland.  His name was Bill.  When we greeted each other, I put my arm around his shoulder and said, "We've lost our boy."  He teared up, as did I, and started to search for words.  I tried to ease the moment.  "There are no words, Bill.  Nothing needs to be said."  He agreed, and we moved on.  It hurts to lose a friend.

After the service, we drove in procession through several towns over country roads to a really lovely cemetery.  I chuckled to myself, "Looky here, Patrick!  We have traffic stopped all over the place, just for you!"  The final words of commitment were spoken in a room inside a mausoleum at the cemetery.  A recording of Taps was played, followed by Reveille--a reminder that as we leave one life, we are called to awaken into the next.  (The recording was made by yet another Salvation Army Officer/friend of Pat's.  TSA is noted for its brass bands!)

As we left that place, I was in trouble.  I had no idea where we were and no idea how to find the Benton Harbor Salvation Army Corps (church) where the luncheon for Pat would take place.  I'll bet at least five people asked me if I had a GPS.  Uh...no.  So I asked the officer in charge to let me follow him...which I did.  I spent the time at the luncheon talking to Pat's wife and children, brother and sister-in-law, and some of our SATERN friends.  Soon, it was 3:00, and time for me to hit the road for Indiana.  That presented another problem.  I had no clue how to get from the corps to US 31 that would take me home.  At the time, I was sitting across the table from Pat's daughter, Tara, and son-in-law, Danny.  Danny is Mexican...fluent in English but sometimes hard to understand to my untrained ear.  Danny got on his phone to check out the route, then volunteered to lead me out of town to where I needed to be.  God bless the man!  It worked.  When I began to see the road signs to know where I needed to go, I passed him, honked, and waved in thanks.  I arrived home maybe 3 1/2 hours later...tired but happy that I had done all I could for my friend, Patrick.

I slept for many hours the day after getting home.  I didn't understand how truly exhausted I was.  It's been a whirlwind of emotions.  I think I even shocked what I thought was my hard-boiled self with the impact of losing this friend.  Seventeen years of talking to and being with a legend of a man in amateur radio is worth something, I guess.  It is now time to get on with the next chapter.

God rest your poor tortured soul, Pat.  I hope I did something to make your passing a bit easier for your family.  I'm content in the knowledge that you loved me, had faith in me, trusted me, and made me your confidante.  I did the best I could to live up to all of that.      

How to Grieve a Friend

Once upon a time, when I was a fairly new licensed amateur radio operator, I heard a conversation on the local radio repeater between a man that I knew (Larry, W9CCL) and a man that I didn't know.  I could tell by the tone of the conversation that Larry really respected the man he was talking to.  The next day, the man came back on the air and was calling for W9CCL, who wasn't answering.  So I did.
He was wending his way back to Chicago from somewhere south of Indy.  I talked to him until he was out of range.  Two days later, I had a packet of information to join the Salvation Army Team Emergency Network in my mailbox.  Turned out that I had been talking to the Director of Emergency Disaster Services for the Metro (Chicago) Division of The Salvation Army, who was also founder and National Director of SATERN, Major Patrick McPherson, WW9E.  Pat was an officer in The Salvation Army (TSA), which means he was an ordained Christian minister.

"Major Pat" was smitten with my radio presence and energy.  At the time, I was only a Tech, but soon upgraded to a General radio license.  When that happened, he started calling me daily on his cell phone.  I told him over and over again that I didn't care to see his phone bill at the end of the month, but he had a package that allowed him to call at random.  He called every day.  We shared personal stories.  The purpose of his calls was to work on me to accept the position of SATERN Coordinator for Indiana.  I kept saying no.  I was still teaching then and felt that I was too busy, but I thanked him for having such faith in my radio enthusiasm.

The first time we met in person was in Remington, IN, somewhat halfway between Indy and Chicago where he was stationed.  He had, in the trunk of his car to give to me, a regular solid state radio--so much better than I had for High Frequency--I was floored.  It came from his collection of HF radios.  You might say it was a bribe, although he never qualified the gift as such.  How could I say no to a person who had just given me a $500 radio???  He gave me other radio equipment as well.  My fate with SATERN was sealed.  This was probably 1999.

The daily calls continued.  I started making treks to Elk Grove Village, IL, where Pat and his wife (Carmella) and family lived, to help them paint some walls in the parsonage.  (They had not painted a wall in their lives.)   We all gelled as friends.  Poor Carmella didn't know what hit her.

Every morning, Pat had as his normal routine to go out for breakfast/coffee.  Carm never went with him although she was always invited.  When I went up for a visit, he and I had breakfast out together, without Carm.  If we were both in our respective states, he went out for breakfast alone, but still called me on his way back home.  Every day except Sunday.  As near as I can figure it, this went on for 17 years.

We became solid friends.  We met on HF radio several times a week and talked by phone daily.  We also had Internet chat.  I drove up to Chicago to visit or to attend meetings, everything from a SATERN manual revision weekend to helping out with disaster work.  SATERN paid for me and one of my local friends to attend a TSA conference in Atlanta, GA, and teach a 2-day crash course for radio license testing.  We manned SATERN booths at hamfests together, then started doing the Dayton Hamvention (a yearly convention in Ohio) together.  We became the Bobbsey Twins of amateur radio.  On the air or at hamfests, people would come to me to find him, and to him in order to find me.  He directed.  I had his back.  When returning from any TSA trip east, he would often detour through Indy just to stop and visit.  When I was recuperating from brain surgery in a hospital in Peoria, IL, in walked Patrick.  I was happy but not surprised to see him.  That's just the sort of thing that Pat did.  He drove down from Chicago just to see me in the hospital.

I know there were people who thought Pat and I had "something going" on the side.  We did: close personal friendship.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  You can't talk to someone on the phone for 30-45 minutes, six days a week for 17 years, and not know them.  In some cases, familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.  In my case, familiarity with Pat bred understanding.  I came to know that the man was full of anxiety.  The cause was a touch of OCD.  He was stressed if things were out of order or out of place.  He forbade anyone to touch his radios for fear of scratching them.  Even he couldn't touch the buttons on the radios without covering his finger with a handkerchief.  Any microscopic mark or scuff on his radios or his car were cause for days of fretting over them.  He worried about every little ache or pain or mark on his body.  In the last couple of years, the nurses and doctors in the ER at the hospital in Michigan (where he and his wife retired to) knew him by name.

Aside from that, what he sought in relationships was love, acceptance, and respect.  He was honest to a fault, had an enormous sense of what was right (which sometimes put him on the outs because he was unable to play internal politics with TSA), and was mischievous beyond what one would think of as appropriate for a minister.  (I once told him that it was a good thing he'd been called to the ministry because he would have been in sooo much trouble if he hadn't!)  In the end, he was convinced that he wasn't getting his "due" where SATERN was concerned and that he had been somewhat snubbed in treatment by TSA.  He would get on those subjects and talk himself into a terrible funk, unable to let go of the past.  I finally had to ban certain topics from our daily conversations in order to protect him from working himself into a stew about things gone by.  He was retired, for Pete's sake!  Time to move on, Patrick!  I began to see my role as his friend just to listen and reassure.  Most of the time, I couldn't get a word in edgewise, anyway!

Pat needed constant reassurance that he would be okay, especially where his health was concerned.  He would ask me, "Do you think I'll get through this?"  I always answered in the affirmative.  Lately, however, I began to say, "I'm no doctor.  I don't know.  But you have a dermatologist, a urologist, a nephrologist, a cardiologist, and a pulmonologist.  There isn't a single organ in your body that hasn't been scoped, scanned, operated on, poked, prodded, or otherwise messed with, except your brain, so I'd think that you are on top of the game."  Still, I thought it profoundly unfair that this man, who never touched a drop of alcohol or smoked a single cigarette in the entire 70 years of his life should be suffering from emphysema and pulmonary fibrosis...and kidney problems.

I talked to Pat on the phone, as usual, on Friday, May 13th.  He had been in the hospital for a few days while the doctors tried to figure out why his BP would drop dangerously low and he would pass out when up and about.  He had already been on home oxygen for a number of months--something he hated but realized he truly needed.  There was some talk of a heart/lung transplant, but it was only just talk.  I don't think anyone quite knew what was wrong, but when I talked to him that day, he sounded really upbeat and hopeful.  The doctors had finally begun talking to each other.  They had decided to wean him off of some medications that were known to counteract each other as well as cause light-headedness.  He said he felt better than he had in a long time.  I was encouraged.  When we hung up, it was "Talk to you later.  I love you."

Still, I woke up two days before this, writing a eulogy for Pat in my mind.  Strange.  He had jokingly said something to me about hoping I'd come to his funeral, when it happened...and I jokingly said back, "I'll miss you."

I waited for his call on Saturday morning, but it was getting later than usual.  Then I began to see things on Facebook from family that sounded ominous.  His son-in-law, who is Mexican, had posted something in Spanish.  I don't know Spanish, but I do know French, and enough words in both languages are similar that I said to myself, "Danny is saying that Patrick has died.  This can't be." Just minutes later, I began to see FB posts from Pat's children, asking for prayer.  I begged his daughter, Tara, to tell me that what I was reading wasn't true...but sadly, it was.

I'll spare the gory details.  Suffice it to say that Pat had gotten up, unattended, to go to the bathroom or something and had passed out.  The nurses found him on the floor awhile later, resuscitating him twice. By the time Carmella got there, they were doing chest compressions on Pat...but he was gone.

Gone?  How gone?  Where gone?  How can a legend die??  Major Pat, WW9E, SK.  (Silent Key in radio jargon.)  It wasn't supposed to happen this way.  When my dog died a horrible death in a hot car in the care of a person who knew better, I went berserk.  When my grandmother died, I was resigned. When my grandfather died, I was emboldened.  When my mother died, I went numb.  When my father died, I was accepting.  I've had friends die before...but none quite like this.  My brain couldn't take it all in.   I guess denial set in.  How could someone so much a part of my solitary life actually die without my permission??

I pulled myself together and drove to Michigan to attend Pat's funeral.  My next blog post will be about that adventure.  It was the last thing I could do for my friend.  

Mom-isms Revisited

It eventually happens to all women.  One day, in a moment of stark realization, we take a look at ourselves and say, "Oh no!  I've become my mother!"  That's not always such a bad thing.  I mean, I loved my mother dearly.  I didn't particular want to look like her, though (which I do); yet, my acknowledgment of becoming my mother wasn't so much about the way I looked.  It was about the way I acted.  My sister and I long ago accepted that we are the way we are because of the unwitting influence that our mother and her mother before her had on us.  We come from a long line of strong women who just dug in and did what they had to do to make things work for their families.  How much of that is in the genes and how much is in the raising, I don't know, but here I am on Mother's Day of 2016, remembering my mother and some of her favorite sayings that sometimes drove me nuts as a kid.

Some of my favorites, none of which are Mom Originals:

I have eyes in the back of my head.  That was Mom's response when we thought we had gotten away with something, but somehow, Mom knew what we had done.  How did she know?  She had eyes in the back of her head!

If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about.  To my childish mind, that was the dumbest thing I thought she should say.  I already had something to cry about or I wouldn't be crying, right?  Of course, it was her way of saying that I was weeping piteously over nothing important.  She saw it as manipulation to get my own way.  Ha!  I wanted a horse.  I wanted a horse RIGHT NOW. Surely she could see how important it was to me.  I was crying about it!

Because I said so!  I was a typical kid in that I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it, and I wanted it now.  Regularly, when I was denied something that I thought was reasonable, I immediately asked "Why??"  And regularly, my mother answered, "Because I said so."  The message was clear that I should not be questioning her authority, but my brain didn't think that was a good enough reason.  She knew that engaging in further conversation about it would be unproductive, but I always tried to push it.  (Don't we all?)  It was my first lesson in being a kid.  Whether I liked it or not, my parents were in control, no matter how much I whined.  That didn't stop me from trying, but I figured out soon enough that I was better off not arguing...because in the process of arguing, I was bound to make Mom angry.  I couldn't stand that!

You don't pay for your raising 'til you have kids of your own.  Ahhh...the Curse of Motherhood!  It's akin to "what goes around, comes around".  I didn't use this one with my daughter so much, but I did tell her several times that I hoped she had six kids and that they were all just like her.  Then, and only then, might she come to appreciate what I did for her.  I think that was what Mom was trying to say.

Three moves is as good as a fire.  This is in reference to the damage done to personal effects as a result of changing homes.  Mom was a Navy Wife.  She knew what she was talking about!  I am never quite as embarrassed as when my furnishings are moved into the light of day to show what bad shape they are in!

A pint's a pound the world around.  Oh, how very many times have I run that little ditty through my head when making measuring conversions.  Thanks, Mom!

Well, I'll be damned!  Okay...I just threw this one in here.  My mother never swore--at least not in front of us kids, even after we became adults.  This one sticks with me, however, because it was uttered on November 24, 1963, when all the world was focused on the funeral ceremonies of President Kennedy, and the newsflash on the TV said the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had just been shot in Dallas.  I was a teenager and somewhat shocked by her obvious dismay.  He deserved it, didn't he?  She said, "Now we'll never know."  And she was right.

It's hell to get old.  Mom never complained about how she felt unless we asked, so I never quite understood where she was coming from.  I get it now, Mom!

If you know what you want to do, you know what you have to do.  That gave me courage more than once to face things I didn't want to face.

You aren't going to like this, but...  Every time Mom hit me with this one, I knew she was about to tell me something she thought I would reject.  The first time was when I was pregnant and I complained that my ankles were swelling.  "You aren't going to like this, but you need to lay off the salt."  The next time she said it was many years later.  "You aren't going to like this, but I am giving my sterling silverware to your sister."  She was right on the former but wrong on the latter.  I DID object to her giving my sister the sterling for the reason she stated--"you got the college education that she didn't get"--but quite okay with her having the silver for any other reason.  My sister didn't want a four-year college education.  If she had, my parents would gladly have paid for it.  My whole logic was that Shari should have the silver simply because Mom wanted her to have it, not as some guilt gift!  You're not going to like this, Mom, but Shari has never, ever, exhibited a shred of jealousy about my college education, and I have never, ever, felt the least bit jealous that she has the Royal Danish silver!

But I digress.  On this Mother's Day, I miss my mom--as I do every day.  She passed away suddenly in 1986, when I was 39--way too young to lose my mother.  I confess that, a short time after we buried her in that quiet old cemetery, I went alone to visit her grave.  I stood over that spot knowing that she was a scant six feet below me, recognizing that I would claw my way down to her if I thought I could, just for one more hug.  One more sound of her voice.  I wept in raw grief and was grateful there was no one else to witness it.  Then I did as my mother would have done:  I pulled myself together, got in the car, and left.

All the mom-isms in the world, I got from her.  I am no longer worried about how much I am like my mother.  Happy Mother's Day in Heaven, Mom!  

Shady Employment Practices

For the last few days, I've been reading entries on an Internet site called Reddit.  It is a site on which people post things of interest and sometimes respond to a question that is posed.  The responses I was reading were in answer to the question, "What was the worst thing that an employer ever did to you?" I've been reading for two days in my spare time and STILL haven't come to the end!  Everyone seems to have job horror stories to tell.

I've been retired since 2009, so I am no longer in the work force, but even I have employment horror stories.  I was fortunate in that I had two factors in my favor, for the most part:  membership in the National Education Association (NEA) which is, essentially, a union; and tenure in education, which specifies that after so many years of employment in a school district, one cannot simply be fired without cause.  I was also lucky enough to be a teacher in a field that is required for all four years of high school education.  It's complicated.  I won't go into the gory details.

I am totally aware of shady company policies when it comes to employment...NOW.  But I spent a lot of years trying to teach my students AND my child (and even my grand-nephew) about the realities of corporate life, even though I didn't have a lot of experience in it outside of education.  I taught them to show up on time for work, to do everything that was expected, and to give appropriate notice if they were going to quit.  In short, I was The Establishment.  I believed that everyone and everything would be professional and fair.  I was wrong.  What I didn't understand was that companies could/would manipulate things to make work issues impossible for some.  I've been reading all about that!  It personally hurts me to discern that American business has no loyalty to employees, when I worked hard to make employees loyal to them.

I've had several run-ins myself.  One was in a school district just outside of Pontiac, IL, (where my husband was principal.) There was a teacher on maternity leave in that district.  I was hired to take her place for the remainder of the year--4th grade.  I ran into trouble with the principal because he paddled a student who had choked another of my kids, but didn't inform the parents.  I specifically asked him if I needed to call the parents.  He specifically said NO.  "These kids need to learn to stand on their own two feet."    The very next morning, the parent was knocking on my classroom door demanding to know why she hadn't been informed.  I told her, in all honesty, that the principal had told me not to.   She squawked, and I don't blame her.  The next time one of my students got paddled, I called the parent to inform him/her.  The principal, who had no children of his own, called me into his office and read me the riot act.  "I have to live with these people in the community.  You don't!"  I'd gone over his head, and he didn't like it.  At the end of the school year, the regular teacher resigned.  I applied for her/my job but was told that my one-year contract would not be renewed.  (Big surprise!)  I went to the NEA for support.  I had never been evaluated.  In fact, the principal had never stepped foot in my classroom.  They sent me a totally literate and charming rep, who happened to be African-American.  He stood out like a sore thumb in that community.  In short, my termination stood, but I was still allowed to sub in the district.

One time when I did sub in the high school the next year, the Superintendent was watching me closely.  When I had a particularly challenging class, he stuck his head in the door and was pleasantly surprised that I was getting along just fine.  He told me later that day that he could see that I was capable and was sorry about how the whole thing had transpired the year before.  He didn't change a thing about my employment however.  He was as powerless as I was in the good-ol'-boy district politics.  (I think he left the district at the end of that year.)

Another time, I was working under a principal who didn't seem to like me.  (I never knew why.)  I was teaching seniors at that time and had received a hand-written list from him of the names of students I was supposed to work with outside of class to "remediate" for ISTEP testing---the test to pass in order to graduate.  I happened to pass a classroom that he was supervising for an absent teacher one day.  He hailed me and started to berate me, in front of that class, because one of the students I was supposed to be remediating had reported to him that I hadn't been doing that.  He wasn't pleased.  When I told him that the student in question wasn't on my list, he didn't believe me.  I marched up to my classroom, picked up the remediation list in his handwriting, and went back downstairs to show him that the student was not on it.  Confronted with the truth, he got flustered, realized that he had made a mistake, but never softened his tone nor apologized for the way he had just treated me.  

My first excursion into this new view of companies was when my daughter was in her earlier throes of new jobs.  Invariably, she was the Valedictorian of training groups, but six-to-eight weeks into employment, she would be let go--because that is the cut-off for companies having to offer benefits.  What the companies were doing was hiring young, inexperienced folks, training them to do the grunt jobs, then letting them go without cause just before they had to start providing benefits because it was economically better for them to do that.  This happened a couple of times to Meg, and it enraged me.  (Part of the reason for my outrage was due to the fact that there are safeguards in place--or used to be--in education so that school districts can't do the same thing.  That's the paradigm I was used to.)

The only time in my entire working career that I was fired from a job (by mutual agreement) was right after my family (complete with husband in those days) had moved to Indiana.  I hadn't finished the requirements to obtain an Indiana teacher's certificate yet, so signed on with DePauw University as office manager for the newly-formed Media Services Department.  The director of the department (I'll call Susan) and her right-hand person (I'll call Jane) had developed the whole department and its services.  Not only were they very rightfully proud of their efforts, they were in cahoots.  The gals stuck together in an unholy alliance, only I didn't know that at the time.

Susan and Jane were nothing alike in personality.  Susan spent her time doing the legal stuff of obtaining permission from companies to use their videos, while Jane spent HER time bullying the rest of the office staff.  After weeks of working there, I became discouraged because, according to Jane, I wasn't doing anything right.  I was being criticized by someone who was not my superior.  Finally, at the end of the probationary period, I asked for a three-way conference with Susan and Jane, hoping that Susan would mediate.  Only moments into the conference, I saw how naive I was. Jane personally attacked me.  While I tried to defend myself, Susan did nothing at all to stand up for me.  I saw the handwriting on the wall.  I looked at Susan and said, "This isn't working."  She agreed. I told her that I would be leaving the position.  She didn't try to stop me.  In fact, when I turned in my official two-weeks' notice, she (respectfully) told me not to bother to come in.  It would encroach on the end of the probation period...so I was done.  Had I not quit, I would have been fired.  Plain and simple.

I was both devastated and relieved.  I had never, ever, been considered anything but a contributory employee, so I was crushed.  But I also understood that there was no way I could save myself in that job with the current level of supervision.  I tucked my tail between my legs and left.  How did my husband respond to the news that I'd quit?  He got angry with me, even though I had been telling him how unhappy I was.  So much for support from the spouse! Thereafter, I started substitute teaching in several districts in the area.  I kept track via a pocket calendar, and because I said "yes" 99% of the time, I was called back often.  (Heck, I was a certified teacher in IL and was working on IN certification.  Why not call me to sub in Indiana??)  Long story short, I think I was occupied four out of five days a week.

All of this, of course, was before I got my permanent teaching position in Monrovia, IN.  Thank God for that job!  It supported my daughter and I for the rest of my career and some of hers!

Life isn't always fair.  That seems to be the conservative politicians' cry du jour as they dissolve labor unions and champion people like Donald Trump.  And I KNOW that it isn't fair, myself...but being the eternal trusting optimist, I will continue to say that it doesn't have to be that way.  If thinking people will continue to think; caring people continue to care; Christian people will act more like Christ; and employers embrace fairness in their practices, the world will be a better place!