For a few tense hours yesterday, it was a real possibility.
I decided instead to take a sanity day off.
The failure of my keto diet (c'mon, we knew this was inevitable) and resumption of regular binge drinking ("Yup. I've been drinkin' again.") has got me reeling in self-doubt and pity. Coupled with the weariness of the irritating new neighbors from hell (more on them soon), the rebirth of the tire problems (How many times do I have to buy tires? The fuckin' car has only 19,000 miles on it but I've been plagued with deflating tires since the get-go.) and a deteriorating tooth (or set of teeth, more likely) that simply won't be ignored anymore, I'm at wits end. I'm not even going to get into the fact that my body is waaay over this upside-down night schedule. It's dark, cold, and very lonely. Yes, admittedly, I. Mr. Greta Garbo "I want to be alone" himself is actually feeling the result of my years of isolation. I mean, there's Ric, but we've drifted far from where we used to be as time's gone on and even so, he's not what I imagine as an armchair bestie.
Tuesday night I went down to my car prepared to go to work and found out my squishy tire had deflated over my one day off to totally flat. Luckily there's an air pump not a hundred feet from my house but it meant I'd be late.
I called as I u-turned on 17-92 and Renee seemed irritated like it'd hold her back from clocking out. What did she care, she's 'till 11:30 anyway and it wouldn't affect anything.
As I counted off with her, one of the cards numbers wasn't jiving with the book. The correct card was behind it was an AM card and the PM card was placed in front of it. Renee, wordlessly started to swap the pages in the binder but I told her that actually it was the cards that needed to be swapped, not the pages. She stabbed me this look like I was being a picky bitch, huffed and slowly replaced the page. I could see she was really ticked off. Excuse me for wanting to keep it right. She said well it wasn't her responsibility since she wasn't the med lead at the start of the shift. I reminded her that if she was counting with me, she's the med lead now regardless of how the shift started.
This happens frequently during shifts where the med lead is swapped with another according to Susan's handwritten instructions on the Assignment Sheet. It clearly says "so and so count off with so and so at x o'clock" always but I often wondered if the staff, we'll into the evening and without management there, actually do count off. I think this boo boo exposed that and Renee got defensive knowing it did so.
What's more, unbeknownst to me as we were counting, Jessica was sitting in her office having stayed late. As we completed the count Renee said that she would like it if I didn't talk down to her again.
Here we fuckin' go! Another one of these Michelle-shit-talk-apostles berating me for daring to be an employee more concerned with doing things properly and making others aware of their lack of conformity. So this makes me the bad guy. I won't play their game and collude to throw away the rules and make them up on the fly. I won't just shut the fuck up like they now demand because they are Women and I'm oppressing their rights. I have no doubt Michelle flavors her tales about me...and oh yes, she's THAT triggered to have tales about me...with all kinds of fantasy vices: obnoxious, pompous, sexist, racist, atheist homosexual snitch. The last bit is true. I am an atheist homosexual snitch. But in her mind, while atheist and homosexual may be correctable and thus forgivable (Praise Jesus!) snitch is not. I'm sure she agrees that "Snitches Get Stitches" is a great philosophy.
Jessica came into the med room to play referee as, of course, Renee and I were now barking at each other about me supposedly "talking down to her." I hate having been obviously baited into this junior-high school bitch session with Missy Polyanna in earshot, but after we had a brief People's Court right there and then, I think she delicately sided with me but, admittedly, she pointed out I was taking it a bit too emotionally.
Yes, I was. And so for the rest of the shift and rolling into the day I kept metaphorically grinding my teeth over this bullshit. I mean, I've written in this blog over the years about other times shit like this broke out at this place...June, Mikisha, Katherine, Tosha, Kim, Kym and Windy. And yes, coincidentally enough, they're all black women. Hmm.
Michelle and everyone she infects with her venom though. She will not let up! She's actually a white woman. But I've found that lower-income WASP native Floridians are totally apologist. They grew up in the later 20th century pressured to atone for their cracker ancestors in the growing atmosphere of civil rights so they have now become highly-vocal "anti-racists." Whether they've actually shrugged off and condemned their cracker heritage non-vocally is another question entirely though.
But, I fit the perfect model for Michelle's vendetta to align herself to the Great African-American Struggle.
Just as I'm sure more than a few nobles changed their names and joined in the furor of "fraternity" during the Reign of Terror, cheering as their cousins were sent to Madame La Guillotine, we now have the Redneck Reformation here in the American South. Tear down those Confederate statues! Monuments to fallen generals that were erected mainly in the early 20th century as a dedication to men of honor who engaged in the Constitutional right to overthrow a government that was amassing too much power over the sovereignty of individual states. Our forefathers wrote about the dangers of such a paradigm shift. Now, true, the system they supported did uphold slavery and sought for its continuance, and that was wrong. Had they given up on slavery, a lot of what the Confederacy held dear made quite a lot of sense.
I don't know how I got on this tirade about the Confederacy and shit but I will say that this BS I have to deal with at work is tainting my whole outlook at my younger-self's decision to move down here. I'm a long way from New England. And I'm not sure I really like it down here anymore.