Take this job and....

Work Work Work. All our lives is work. Now, DH and I are always complaining about work. We long for the days of retirement or just plain living without working. To not have to worry about paying the bills. Guess I need to start buying those lottery tickets, huh?

Hillsborough County, just like every other municipality in Florida is screaming about budget cuts. DH has more and more work piled on him and less and less people to do it. They threatened to change his work hours and shift him from a 4 day work week to 5. They’ve subsided for now, but the threat is still there.

And here is no different. It’s all about politics. Who kisses who’s ass and when. A good buddy of mine has been getting a beat down over the last few days. First they say she’s too talkative and too social. Well, she’s a marketing person, that’s what marketing people do. Then she’s told that she’s not friendly enough. Umm..which is it? You can’t have it both ways. And a lot of things that she was told she could do when she was first brought on, she now is no longer able to do. And this is a CPA. A CPA who’s worked for major firms and knows how things work, a professional. And I won’t even BEGIN to get into the actuary side of things.

But for all the faults, at least we have jobs. Jobs that for the most part we can depend on. Jobs that (fingers crossed) won’t just disappear tomorrow. Unfortunately for DH’s cousin Travis that is not the case.

Tyco, in their infinite wisdom, laid off 95% of their work staff yesterday. They have decided to go entirely to Independent Contractors. They showed up on the work site and took his cell phone, his lap top, his van and all his tools and then had to drive him home, because, well, he no longer had a car. Another guy on the site was 60 years old and had put over 40 years into the company. He was treated the same way. They were treated pretty much like criminals the way their stuff was confiscated and the way the security force treated them.

And here’s the kicker (WARNING: I’m going to get un-PC for minute), the 5% they did keep? Mostly low-paid Mexican workers. Nice, huh? Work your butt off for years, and then get kicked in the head.

Now he has no job, no insurance with 3 kids (one of whom has Type 1 Diabetes), and no car to even go look for a job. I hate to say it, but their days of living beyond their means and being one step ahead of foreclosure is really going to catch up with them now, as they have no savings, no nothing.

THAT I gotta be thankful for today. We’ve been able to pay all our bills on time, and been able to keep our debt manageable, and have never had to worry about living paycheck to paycheck. We have a little bit of emergency savings and put money into retirement plans every month for the future.

Growing up, we squeezed every penny till it bled. Every purchase was scrutinized. Miser was my grandmother’s middle name, and I’ve got to say a lot of it has rubbed off on me. DH wasn’t really taught how to save, just “rely on us, we’ll take care of it”, so when we first met, he really didn’t have a lot of good spending habits. But I’m happy to say I’ve rubbed off on him. And now we know and we can prepare for a crisis. Which I hope never comes.