A doozy of a week…

July 18, 2015 by My Spoken Heart - Andrea Crowell 8 Comments

I have been absent for the past week. I haven’t actually been absent as I’ve been reading, liking and commenting but I have not posted. I had planned on it but last week was a bit of a doozy. My daughter, 17, applied to attend the local college. She doesn’t know what she wants to do “when she grows up” and so she has decided to take hairdressing now as she will always be able to use those skills and it’s a great way to pay her way through university when and if she decides that is the route she wants to go. Anyways we paid her registration fees on Thursday the 9th. I got laid off on Friday the 10th.

It had been a usual day, my co-worker D (who only works part time) had left for the day and as my other coworker M had taken a holiday day I was the only one in the office besides the boss. About 15 – 20 minutes after D was gone he walked up to my desk and bluntly informed me that I was being laid off due to a shortage of work. I’ve been there 4 years coming up on 5 this September. Things were slow, but no slower than they had been in the past. Truth be known there had been tension between the 2 of us from day one (he was hired 2 months after I started with the company). To put it bluntly he rubbed me the wrong way… but I was always amicable. Regardless it was well known by me, M and D that he did not overly like me… needless to say I was “shocked, and  yet not surprised”, which I told him.

Sometimes life is like a bathroom without any toilet paper…

Marcus over at It’s my Blog, Innit! nailed the routine work experience in his post ‘Embrace the Authentic You‘. The post is about work politics and how we often are not free to truly be ourselves in our work environment. I have lived that for the past 4 years and it was a very slow form of torture as my life, my energy and enthusiasm were slowly sucked away. At any rate I have been doing OK, and as weird as it may be I in many ways feel relieved. However I now have to get serious about finding another job.

A few days ago Becoming Minimalist shared a post on Facebook ‘12 Factors to Look for in a Job Other Than a Paycheck‘. The timing was absolutely perfect and it has been very inspiring for me. It has helped me put things in perspective so that I do not take any job just for the sake of having a job, and end up in another soul sucking conundrum.

I have applied for E.I. (Employment Insurance) so that I won’t be left with no money, but it will be fraction of what I had before which was already just barely enough to live on, and the process can take weeks before you actually see any money. So I must admit that yes a part of me has been on the verge of panic mode. At least I got severance pay. It wasn’t much but if I’m careful…

I had made plans to take holidays the last week of July, I was going to go visit a friend for a few days – have some child free girl time (the same friend I went to OneRepublic with back in May). I was going to take 15 shopping for new clothes and go to Squamish for a day, and was thinking if I had enough money maybe I’d take the girls to Kamloops for a weekend and they could meet some of my family. All of those plans have vanished like mist. I need to watch every penny.

At the moment much reassessment is going on in my little world. So I apologize in advance if I’m not around too much in the next few weeks. But I will try to post and will definitely be reading, liking and commenting…