So after a grueling week of orientation, I started my first night of work/on the job training yesterday. I have been awake since 4pm yesterday and I feel surprisingly fine. My shift was 5pm to 5am and when I got home I could not sleep. In fact I am still buzzing.

It will catch up with me soon enough because my next shifts are Wednesday to Friday in a row.

But for now I will crash later. I am too awake right now. Iced tea really does the trick.

Of course I could do a hell of a lot worse than $700 a week!

I have successfully moved and started my new job here in Hickory.

I am still living our of boxes as there is so much crap I have accumulated over the years, but it will be put away in time.

I accepted my job at the Long Term Care Center (aka Old Folks Home) because of the 45 some jobs I applied for on Indeed it was the first I heard back from. No interview, just paper work and a start date.

All places like that are essentially the same.Once you walk in all you want to do is walk the hell out. Nothing makes you lose your fear of Hell and Death like an old folks home. You are surrounded by misery. Its one of the reasons that I plan to kill myself when I turn 50.

This place is particularly poorly run. Flys abound and there was human shit on the walls and floor of some of the rooms. Vital supplies constantly run short and trash and soiled linen overflow their containers and into the floor.

The staff is rude and poorly trained. It took me until halfway through my second day that someone showed me were the charts are. They punish me for being ignorant of things that they have known for years.

There are people there that scream and howl. They have been their for decades, bloated and useless, tubes and wires running in and out of holes in their bodies. 

At a staff meeting the administrators told us that October 24th will be our next audit by the state.If we do not correct the 17 violations and 3 imminent danger violations they will shut us down.

I will stick with it as long as I can. But the first chance I get I am jumping and getting the fuck out.

I told some of my co-workers about my two weeks notice and my plans to be moved and gone by next week. I actually got a little choked up. I worked my ass off for 3 years and I have nothing to show for it. But, some of the people, which I can count on one hand, actually made it less hell for me. They were the only ones that ever thanked me for what I did. They never insulted me, or tried to get me in trouble or sabotaged me.

I’m really going to miss them. I would have put up and stayed with it more if I was permanent, but I can’t.

I did my orientation for my new job on Friday. I took EIGHT HOURS. I got up at 5 that morning to get an early start because it takes about 2 hours to get to Hickory from Boone, and damnation it is hot in the flat lands off the mountain! We had to fill out reams of paperwork and take tests. Essentially we had to go through the application process all over again and sign and date every single piece of paper we were presented with.

We then went into an office and did it all electronically!

After I was done I propped off a load of my stuff at my new place and met my mom and went to her house. Her place is only a 10 minute drive from mine. She insisted that I stay for dinner so I didn’t leave until 8:30 that night. It was 10:30 by the time I got back to Boone. I had time to take a shower, read two chapters of “War of the Worlds” by HG Wells and fall asleep to be at work again the next morning at 5am.

I told my boss that I was putting in my two-weeks notice but he barely acknowledged it. Too bad. I had some more choice words about how he treated me.

I start my new job on the 27th. So, I have this week to call Duke Power and get them to connect my electricity, and I have Friday, Saturday and Sunday to move the rest of my stuff with Wednesday to do the final walk through with my old renter to get my security deposit back. I also have to file a change of address with the Post Office, give my renter my new address to have my mail forwarded and change my billing address with the NCSECU. I still get mail for the people that lived their before me. Just junk mail. I’d hate it if that Anubis book I contributed to on Kickstarter didn’t get forwarded to me. Maybe I should contact them too.

Today me and mom, with the aid of my car and her pick-up truck, moved a significant amount of my furniture. Now, all I have left is three futons (one not in use) a chest of drawers with no draws, my mattress, my chest, entertainment center/bookcase and a couple of end tables. I’ll try to take some on Friday, but mom thinks that we should just get a 10′ truck from U-haul or something. That will cost about $90.

I got the job and apartment! I’ll be living and working in Hickory in about 2 weeks. I passed the interview and signed the lease today. I’ll soon be leaving Boone. 

At first I felt nostalgic. I’m going to miss Boone. I thought that I will never look at its hills or walk along its streets again. Then some idiot frat boy screamed at me from a passing car and laughed when I flinched. Then I remembered why I wanted to leave in the first place.

The up shot is that my cost of living is going to be much lower, but I will have to take about an dollar an hour cut due to my level of experience as a CNA. But, now I can get more certifications and that can raise my pay. Also I can learn other skill sets to get me out of CNA work. Its not a dream job by any stretch of the imagination but it will keep me alive until something better comes along. And I hope something better will come along. 

But, I will miss Boone. I hate change and I hate moving. My parents divorced when I was three and even though they lived in the same county, they moved around a lot and shared custody of me. I moved around a lot and not to sound to cliche but I loved the stability living in one place. But when all your friends move away and your family is a two hour drive away it makes for some lonely, desperate living.

Found myself in yet another odd scenario at work last week. It was snowing like crazy and even though I walk to work every day, because it only takes me 10 or 15 minutes to do so, one of the people I work with who spends her days ignoring my existence or going out of her way to cause me trouble just out of the blue offers me a ride home.

Keep in mind that this is a woman who once tried to get me fired for “religious discrimination” because I asked “What in the goddamn hell do you think you are doing?” when I caught her stealing cleaning supply and stuffing them in her purse. She tattled first so it was “her word against mine” even though her purse was bulging with rolls of toilet paper and bottles of window cleaner.

At first I thought about asking her what game she was playing or declaring that I was not going to fall for her traps, but I simply said no.

A leopard never changes its spots.

It got back to me that she told everyone what an “ungrateful bastard” I was for not taking the ride.

What the fuck ever, man.

This is a bit long over due. Anyway, the university shut down for Christmas break and to make end’s meet I decided to put my CNA training to work by going to work for Glenn Bridge, the worst goddamned nursing home on Earth.

Nursing homes as a rule tend to suck. You are surrounded by human misery. From a guy who’s son told us not to let him call him at home any more, to a man fighting to get into a flu quarantined hall because he believes his dead wife is in it, to a man who fights and then sobs just from being transferred from wheelchair to bed, to people who are going through withdraw because the doctor does not give them the same amount of pills their families kept them doped up with. 

What really sucks about it is that in Raleigh, a CNA starts out at $14 and hour, but here in Boone you start out at $8.25 and stay there! On top of that, we are constantly running out of supplies and have to scrounge for basic things like gloves. The ventilation system is broken in two halls so its always 98 degrees and smells like shit. So for six days of wiping asses and dealing with every type of madness you could imagine I got $326. Fuck you, Glenn Bridge. No wonder everyone quits.

But on a high note, the night they gave me a hall to myself to patrol I got to handle a dead body. One of the residents died and I helped give him postmortem care and load him into the back of the mortician’s van ( they send a modified minivan instead of a hearse because they don’t want to scare the residents. 

It really didn’t bother me. I was surprised at my own lack of reaction to it. And then the next night my mom told me that mortuary science degrees are only two years at a community college. And that was before I told her about the body removal!

I’ve decided that I want to get my medication aide certification and them get certified as a pharmacy technician and become a pharmacist. And then maybe do the mortician thing. I had always wanted to be a mortician after seeing “Phantasm” as a child. 

Its that time of year again when the great state of North Carolina decides to save some money by making me take a full month, 31 whole days, off from work. I will be able to collect some minuscule amount of unemployment, though I would rather be working. Of all the people who only have to take two weeks off, only one knows how to do my job and none want to. 

On top of that, the summer manager wants to mess with my hours. I usually work 5:30 am to 2:30 pm. I get there early enough to get all my vitally important work done before the students arrive and wreck the place. She says she needs me there at 7:00. That means I have to work my way around HORDES of people. That means that no actual cleaning will be achieved. Plus, it means that I would get off work at 4 pm. That gives me 30 minutes to walk home and another 30 minutes to show dress and get to class. She says that it is because I am the only housekeeper this summer. I was the only one last summer because I did all the work! The girl who “worked” with me got there an hour and a half after me so all the important stuff was done. On top of that, she lacked the upper body strength to take out the trash or run the floor machine! 

I have class at 5:00 pm! She told me that I need to be flexible! Why is it that I have to be more flexible than everyone else?! Its not my fault that they won’t hire more people! And I am most certainly not going to sacrifice my education for that place! Nursing School is my way out of that festering rats nest of a university!

Why won’t the world just DIE!?

Sometimes I wish one of those little bastards would go Virginia Tech and shoot up the place. I’d have a good chuckle and the fucker would end my suffering forever.

I work for the college I attended. Appalachian State University.

Because I had to graduate school at a time that the economy got screwed up and no one has made any great strides to fix it, I had to take whatever job I could get. Mine happens to be cleaning.

For over a year and a half, I have been doing the work of a permanent employee at temporary pay. I have no benefits and make about $10.90 an hour before taxes. Normally that would be ok, but I have to take TWO MONTHS off every year. So, it comes out to be a minimum wage job.

For the entire time I have done this job, my employers have been promising to make me a permanent member of the staff, which would mean $500 extra a month plus health benefits. Making permanent was dependent on another employee retiring, a 66 year old, 450 pound lazy retard with the social skills of a rabid dog and the work ethic of a log.

He leaves at the end of this week. Two different supervisors told me that I would still have to go through the regular application and interview process for the sake of formality and to conform to state laws.

Before I left work today, I asked my one of my supervisors (one of 5!) when the job will be posted on the employment website…

He said IT WAS NOT GOING TO BE POSTED.

That’s right! They have been jerking me around for a year and a half! They said that a lot more people would have to leave before I would be made a permanent employee!!!

I have put up with threats, belittlement, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance from a bunch of backwoods retards (my co-workers) and the bourgeoisie yuppy larva capitalist piglets ( the students) for going on two years now! And I have nothing to show for it! All that loyalty and rolling over! Not a God… Damned… THING!

The lesson children: Never be loyal to something that keeps you poor. Fight it in anyway you can because otherwise you are just breaking your back to make some son of a bitch rich! A son of a bitch that gets a 5 figure bonus at the end of the year for keeping operating cost as low as possible.

To give you the idea of the shit I have to put up with. I got called into the boss’s office and he said:

“Its come to my attention that you say that we promote racism here at ASU.”

“I never said that! I said that it happens! I was speaking out against it.”

I got called into the boss’s office and threatened with discipline for speaking out against racism for fuck’s sake! That is how much those fucks will go to smooth over everything!

There is an asshole there who harasses one of my friends for being Jewish, makes Holocaust jokes and got caught looking at looking at porn on company computers on company time and he has permanent pay and benefits when the racist perverted fuck should have lost his fucking job!

But its ok! As long as it does not become public knowledge!

Just turn a blind eye to racist jokes and hiring practices! Just remove the chairs and trays and tables that the students carve swastikas into! Its not a problem here!

… Because we delude ourselves into believing it does not happen at our quaint 93.5% white college! Ignorance is the best bliss and PR!

I now have new motivation to earn my CNA. TO GET THE FLYING FUCK OUT OF THIS CESSPOOL OF A UNIVERSITY!

Oh! And despite the rampant racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism that runs rampant. ASU made a top 10 list of schools who are the worst about freedom of speech! 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/the-10-worst-colleges-for_b_4475755.html

And just because you are white does not make you safe! The say all kinds of horrible things about Russians, Italians and Irish!

I know from experience. I made the mistake of letting them know that I am Irish! That meant that I was automatically an alcoholic, that I ate nothing but potatoes and that I was an IRA terrorist!

If your not a WASP you don’t belong in that hive!

I got called into the office and got a stern talking to from 3 supervisors.

It is not because I am doing a bad job. Quite the opposite. The commended me on my work and my response to orders. The problem they said was with my language. Some of my co-workers used the fact that I use expletives to express my anger as an attempt to have me fired. Which is BULLSHIT!

The real reason is not my language but the fact that I dare to stand up to them. I won’t let them brow beat me, I won’t let them take from me, and I call them out on doing things that inconvenience me.

One example is that I tend to say “God Damn It” a lot, and it offends them because they are all “good little baptists”. Meanwhile these hypocritical fucks do nothing but cuss and gossip.

The real difference is that I have long hair, I speak my mind and I am not a “good little baptist”. In short, I am not a hypocritical piece of back woods shit from Mountain City, Tennessee that barely finished high school let alone got past it in maturity level.

I clean for a living. I would love to see any one in that building clean one of the bathrooms at 5:30am and not go into a cussing fit over what was left the night before. If you have to use bleach and other chemicals to scrub human shit off a God damn, mother fucking toilet bowl, or piss, or period blood, then you will find find yourself muttering things that would make Samuel L. Jackson cringe.

But, fuck ‘em. Within the coming year I will have my nursing license and I will be making 4 times what they could ever hope to make there. Then I will laugh my ass off at them while I am living comfortably.

ASSHOLES!!!