I'm on Vacation! (Patreon)

Shego, taking a much needed vacation at an unnamed island resort, previously occupied by the Billionaires Club.

Speaking of self-imposed and as yet undetermined lengths of rest and relaxation...

Yeah, some of you that follow Gagala may have read that I quit my job several weeks ago.  Yes indeed, I did just that...and I'm a better man for it.  This time last year, I was on my second month of unemployment after being furloughed from my employer of thirteen years.  The situation was much different then, what with my step-daughter, her fiancé, and his three year old daughter living with the wife and I...holidays approaching, a time of year when employers don't generally hire for permanent positions, and (unknown to the entire planet) a global pandemic on the horizon.

The children have since moved out, gone off to get their crash course in adulthood (in the worst year possible), leaving just the wife and myself at home.  In March of last year, just as the pandemic was hitting most of the world, sending employers into a frenzy of furloughs, firings, and work-at-home options...I managed to get a job.  Not the most ideal job, with significantly less pay (like, 25% less), stupidly expensive health benefits, and the worst time-off / vacation policy I'd ever seen...but it was extremely close to home.  My commute was four minutes.

The first couple of months were fine.  The company-at-large kept it's distance (not by choice), leaving me to answer to a single manager, who more often than not left me to my own devices.  The job was labor intensive, but (at the time) not what I would consider stressful.  I was the maintenance guy for a gated, golf course community of roughly 350 high-end and uber-high-end homes.  Call it 900 reasonably pleasant residents, most of whom were stuck at home just like everyone else back then.  No unclogging toilets or fixing broken air conditioners like my contemporaries would be doing for some apartment complex or condo, with their always-irritable residents stacked on top of each other like so much cord-wood.  Rain or sunshine, 95% of the job was outside...fixing what-have-you (lighting, irrigation, etc) or (more often than not) driving a pressure washer.

Annnnd then May comes along...  In the next eight months I went through four manager changes.  That company doesn't fire it's management...it simply relocates them to other communities, thus making a bad employee someone else's problem.  All of which were...well, lets just say that micromanagement and vindictiveness are not admirable leadership qualities.  Every two months I would literally have to start all over again, like it was day one.  The last one, who was reassigned there on Christmas Eve no less, wanted to do nothing but get into the good graces of her bosses and began by instituting a laundry list of cost-saving measures.

Never judge a company by the size and diversity of their portfolio...judge them by how they treat their employees.  Number one on the list: change everyone's (it was just me and five security guards) job titles so they could justify paying us less, while doing more work.  Number two: cut everyone's hours so that we were all below the company's full-time / part-time threshold of 32 hours per week...and subsequently not eligible for full-time benefits.

My job title change in particular made me the maintenance guy...and the fucking janitor...at 45% less than what I was making at my old job.  Yeah, no...I haven't been paid to scrub toilets since I retired from the military nearly 14 years ago, so there's no way in hell I'm gonna start doing that again at age 50.

In the immortal words of Johnny Paycheck:  Take this job and shove it! 

That was two weeks ago.  Since them however, the wife has said that I'm noticeably happier now than I have been since...well, nearly a year ago.  Apparently I would come home every afternoon looking absolutely beat down, miserable, bitchy, and had nothing good to say about my....ex-employer.  Oh, and I had to start taking high blood pressure medication while working for them.  So, not only was I unhappy...it was also unhealthy to work there.

*takes deep breath*  *sigh of happiness*

So, where does that leave us?  Well, about the same as this time last year...me looking for a job and you reaping the benefits because I suddenly have significantly more time to devote to creating content for my patrons.  :D

...and, if you're still reading this, having not been driven off by of my excessive bitchiness about my ex-employer, yes, there will be an alt version of this pin-up.  See, I'm already lookin' out for ya'll.  :)

Original Art by Gagala

Edits by Phillipthe2