In A Jar

I am going into this post blind, so to speak. I seriously have so much to share with you, stories from old blogs to repost, some good true ghost stories for Halloween and the like, that I don't even know where to start. I haven't had a lot of time to blog recently and I hope that changes. I love my friends on my blog and I love my blog, too. I know it's inanimate, but inanimate objects deserve some love. Just because they can't feel anything doesn't mean they won't now when you treat them with care and kindness. Oh wait...

I think I will start out by updating you on my health. The reason being that some of you know about what happened to me last week and some of you don't, but it's easier to explain it on here where my friends gather all at once than keep explaining it over and over. I'm too exhausted to do that.

I haven't been online much in the last few weeks; particularly the last week, so for those of you who don't know, I had a little incident last Sunday/Monday. I feel asleep fine, but woke up and couldn't breathe. When I was finally able to do that again, I went back to sleep only to wake up and start having heart problems. I felt like I had two heartbeats. I've had issues with my heart for a long time now and it rarely beats normally. It beats faster than it is supposed to, combined with arrhythmia plus a PFO. But I had never felt this before. Then my arm started to go numb, which also happens to me way too often. My first inclination was to go to the hospital, but every time I've done that I was sent away being told I had anxiety. This is one thing that really pisses my autoimmune doctor and general practitioner, as well as myself, off, because they know of my other issues and have proven time and time again that I do not suffer from anxiety. I can be as calm as can be, sleeping even, and have a bad attack. It was fine, as I didn't think I was going to die or anything, but I knew something was wrong. I just wanted to troop it out until my doctors appointment on Wednesday.

And I did troop it out. Luckily, as far as we can tell, nothing more serious than before is going on. She thinks it was a reaction to one of my medications that I had not had before. It's a med I take as needed and it's possible that this time it just didn't mesh well with my body. I've been fine in regards to my heart since, but I've felt like complete crap; more so than usual. I could just sleep and sleep and be fine with that. When I am up I feel like a zombie. I talked to my doctor about this as well, as this has been going on for almost a month, and she's referring me to another doctor. She thinks I'm having complex migraines, which is something we passed up in diagnoses because my blood disorder can cause migraines. However, I'm having a lot of neurological symptoms and have had MRIs done on my head and back, as well as MRAs and cat scans. There's nothing neurologically wrong. I will be seeing the doctor to discuss them in February, which was his first opening.

When you put it all together and stuff it in a jar, none of this matters because eventually the right test and right appointment will come along that will help us find out what's wrong. I've never lost hope on that, but what I did start to lose hope on was my work life. I am a busy body by nature and being sick has taken that from me physically, but not mentally, which is not good for my soul. I've kept hope that I will be going back to work soon. But it's been three years. A little spark of light came six months ago when my auto immune doctor gave me the go ahead to work, as long as I could lie down when needed and go home if I got sick, since I will get sick and drop to the floor with no notice. Somewhere in my mind I thought the work program for the state would find me something that I could do from home, or a job that would be possible, but instead I was basically told that there were so many people going through the work program without job restrictions that it wasn't worth bothering with me. It was all the same in the end because my doctor was really weary about me working, but trying to work with my insurance and state and what not so no one thought I was just trying to get out of work. And I was willing to work. I told my caseworker that if she found anything, anything at all that I WANTED it. One hundred percent, I wanted to work. I meant it. I still do.

However, the time has come where the decision has been made to put me on permanent disability. This rips me apart, and for those of you who know me, you know this. I can't imagine never working again. I genuinely like to work. Sure, working sucks in a lot of ways, but when you're not working you don't realize how much you felt productive when you do so. How much you enjoy earning your own money. How much you miss it. Call me crazy, but I miss it. I can't go my whole life without working. I will feel like a lonely piece of garbage left to rot. I feel like that now in so many ways. I need to work. I need to be a productive part of society. In my heart of hearts I'm keeping the faith that I'm going through this and this is happening for a reason. There's something better and unconventional that I'm supposed to do. I'm also telling myself that one day the decision can be revoked. I don't know how true that is, but I will tell myself that until the day die.

I will also continue to work on my novel and know that it is going slow because of my health, not because I don't want to write. There's many days where I will just blank out. This can sometimes go for a week at a time. I can't write. I can't make good conversation. Hell, I can barely think. I just want to sleep. I try to get up and go on with my day, but all that happens is I end up getting sick, passing out, giving myself a migraine, etc. It's hard for me to accept that I can't write a chapter a night anymore. Sometimes it takes me a month to write one chapter, but at least I know I am trying when I can. I also have a few great contenders for a novel that I've been going back and forth between, and honestly, I'm struggling with which one I want to make my first novel. I thought I knew, but the story became so personal that I've caused myself writers block on it. But it will be okay. I will persevere. As Dean on Supernatural would say, "I have a GED and a give em hell attitude." I hear that.

Speaking of jobs and working, I don't want you all to think that I've had such amazing jobs that I'm jaded to the world of work. I am not. Trust me when I tell you that I've had worse luck with jobs than probably ninety percent of the population. Since I didn't know what I was going to write going into this blog, it seems like now would be a good time to tell those stories. However, I have had great jobs that I did love. Some days at work are just going to suck, but that's what it's about and I miss it. Period.

When I was eighteen I was forced into my first job. My mom pulled a cute one on me and got me a car, and then made me go get a job to pay for it. It was really one of her better ones and was time I got a job, so I did. I worked for Payless Shoes. This was the job from hell, but not because it was my first job or the customers screamed a lot. It was and they did, but that's not why. Although I will take a moment to highlight some pretty special moments working there.

*On my first day of work ever I arrived with high hopes to be trained by the assistant manager. She promptly left me within my first five minutes there, not knowing how to use the register, where anything was, or what to do in general. She said her contact was bothering her and she had to drive home to fix it. This is why people usually carry a change of contacts, or their glasses, but I tried not to judge. I was still optimistic.

I tried to call the store manager but she had her cell off and refused to pick up her home phone. This all should have been a clue, but instead I called my grandma to come stay with me since, let me be honest, it was my first job and I was super nervous, especially after being home-schooled for four years with minimal interaction with others. I was painfully shy at one time, you guys. Plus, it was getting dark. She did come and I spent the four hours before the assistant manager slid in on the seat of her ass at closing time turning customers away and telling them I couldn't even begin to help them pick out shoes, far more ring them out. I hadn't even been given my code for the register yet. This girl just straight up split. And to be gone as long as she was, she obviously did more than change her contacts.

*This became a habit with this girl. Which was fine when I knew what I was doing, most of the time. The store was really never busy and there was no reason to have two of us there other than safety. Then one time she left to get lunch and didn't return for several hours. A wedding party came in to order custom dyed wedding shoes. I had only been there a few weeks and didn't even know we did that far more where to start. I called her and she promised she'd come back right away. She didn't, and after attempting to call the manager with the same results, the customers got very pissed, left, and then turned us into the company. The manager felt the need to tell us about it after getting reamed out by corporate, when really it was no one's fault but hers for not training me at all, ever, and the girl who I was working with for up and leaving. She should have been fired, but for some reason never was. Probably because she did her job and the manager's, too

*Another time the same girl went out to eat and came back with a new car several hours later. This incident is unrelated to the above.

*In yet another incident she went and got her nose pierced and also came back five hours later claiming that it got infected, but it is totally fine now. Yes, I'll believe that when I turn into a moron. If it was infected, that would not have cleared up in the matter of a few hours, and her nose looked as fine as it could considering she had just gotten it pierced. She also knew she wasn't allowed to have her nose pierced at Payless, and then got upset and threw several tantrums when she was forced to take it out and put in a clear piece for work, which later ended up in a real infection and the hole closing up in spite of changing out from the stud to the clear piece so many times a week right after getting it pierced.

*The manager never once even attempted to train me. Never. Ever. When I left there after six months, I still didn't know how to do several things because no one really cared to show me. It was the employees that were on the same pay rate as I was that taught me; not the manager or the assistant manager. Sad.

*I quickly learned the manager never picked up her phone no matter what. When she left work, she left. Which is great except she chose to take the job as a manager knowing it was the job. No one ever bothered her unless we had to, and still there was no response. She wouldn't apologize the next time she saw us even though she knew we called, as we would leave her messages. She acted like it never happened, except for one time. This will come in dandy soon when I reveal what made this job a thing of nightmares.

*One time the power went out. We searched the store high and low for a flashlight. The irony of searching for a flashlight in the dark back room is awesome. We couldn't find one, but it was fine because it was daylight and the whole front of the building was flanked in windows, so we could see enough to work. Except someone, and by someone I mean the manager, never ordered paper receipts so we had no way of checking anyone out. We knew if we just wrote things on paper, she would have a conniption because according to corporate that wasn't an acceptable receipt. Not being able to do anything, we locked the doors and tried to call her repeatedly. Surprise, we tried for an hour and she never picked up. We decided there was no way we were going to stand in a store with no power for the next three hours of our shift when the manager wouldn't even pick up. When she found out, she asked us why we even tried to call her and didn't just do that in the first place. Then she asked us why we didn't clock out. The obvious answer was we had no power and we had to clock out on a computer. This was the first and only time she ever acknowledged we had called her.

*I had been there maybe a month and a half or two months when I got a call from the manager. Apparently the alarm had been triggered and she wanted me to go back to the store and take care of it since I lived closer to the store than her. I didn't live that close; I had a fifteen to twenty minute drive. That's not that bad, but my problem was that I wasn't the manager. This wasn't my job. She was getting paid to take care of this stuff. I didn't even know what I would do when I got there. Obviously the place would be crawling with police and what not, and I just didn't know enough about the store to even begin to know what to tell them or how to deal with it, nor was I wasting my gas and going back there after ten at night. She got mad.

*This has nothing to do with the insanity of the manager and assistant manager, but this lady probably remains my most memorable customers. Maybe it was because this was the first time I had a psychotic customer, or maybe it's because this lady just had issues, but here goes. The lady came in right in the middle of a horrible snow at the end of January looking for boots. Naturally, we were sold out of her size. She got irate, and we apologized and went back to work. A few minutes later we hear her screaming, "I FOUND A PAIR AND I WANT THESE!" The lady had gone into the back room and pulled the pair she wanted out of the hold section. We could not sell them to her as they were already partially paid for. She stood there and insisted and screamed. The only thing I can't remember is how we got rid of her, but we did.

*Still not that bad of a job? I know, it could be worse, right? Everyone takes abuse from a slacker of a manager and an assistant manager that is never in the store when she's getting paid. The manager and assistant manager hated each other, by the way. Then something happened that I really thought only happened in movies.

I had been working there for six months when one night I was vacuuming ten minutes out from closing time, while the other woman I was working with stayed at the front counter in case someone came in. I finished vacuuming and put the vacuum away. Just as I got into the back room I heard the door buzzer going off, indicating we had a customer. I started out of the back room to try to assist my elderly coworker who worked two jobs and was tired, when something stopped me cold in my tracks. When coming out the door from the back room, you could see straight down the aisle to the side of one register. I saw a man with a ski mask on pointing a gun at my coworker. I am a quick thinker in bad situations, and realized nearly immediately that, because I had been vacuuming where I couldn't be seen by the windows for a good ten minutes, and the door buzzer went off after I was in the back. This person didn't know I was in the store. He thought my coworker was alone. I backed up quickly out of his sight and quietly waited for the door buzzer to go off again, indicating he had left. The last thing I wanted to do was go out there and surprise a man with a gun. I didn't know what else to do, but I thank God every day I didn't go out there, and my intuition and gut feel kicked in almost immediately. Always listen to your gut.

I gave it a few minutes so that I knew the person was really gone, then crept down the aisle slowly, looking outside little by little to make sure there were no cars in the very, very small parking lot. Once I knew the person was gone, I went out only to find my coworker on the floor. I said her name a few times. She cried and asked me if he was gone. He was. Apparently he had told her to go down on the floor and stay down for five minutes. All this for $400. I soon found out, however, that this guy got lucky. My coworker was counting money on the counter in front of the windows with the doors unlocked when this happened. At first we figured he just happened by and saw her doing this and used it as a crime of opportunity. He then went on to rob four more Payless Shoes, one twice, until he was caught. Anyway, that's not so important to the story. I just thought you all would want the ending to the robbery scandal of Payless. He was even called The Payless Shoe Bandit. How lame for him.

After the robbery we called the police. The alarm wasn't tripped on the register because the coworker had removed the money herself and set it so that alarm wouldn't go off. Had he robbed the register and she wouldn't have had the money out, they may have caught him in the act since the police barracks were right down the road. I am also thankful this did not happen because who knows what a gun wielding man backed into a corner would have done. This is a situation that could have ended so badly, but luckily, by the grace of God and a lot of luck, did not. We were both safe.

We then tried to call the manager. The police tried to call her. Nothing. She didn't work the following day either and no one could get a hold of her. It was two days until she knew about the robbery. She never asked if we were okay. We sat that night for three hours filling out statements and interviewing the police. The coworker went through hell, as the police thought she was involved because she had admitted to counting the money in plain view of the parking lot. Then, when the manager didn't get back to the police for two days, they suspected her. It was a huge mess. The coworker who had the gun held to her quit, obviously. I, too, followed right behind her. I may have stuck it out figuring it was a one time thing, but my final straw came the day after the manager found out; the next time I saw her.

I went into work for my next shift, only to be paired with her. She mentioned the robbery, but didn't seem to care all that much about us or the fact it happened. She only reason she mentioned it was to tell me the other coworker quit and now she was going to have to find her replacement. She was annoyed. Then she asked me why I didn't push the alarm button to summon the police in the back room. Oh, I don't know, maybe because in the six months I was there, no one had told me there was one back there. It didn't take me long to realize that I did not want to work there; not when the manager didn't even care that, with any simple variation of events, we could have been killed. When the police finally did catch him, they confirmed he had been carrying a loaded gun. I never went back and two other employees, upon finding out about the situation, followed out behind me, leaving her and the assistant manager to hash it out. I've never once felt bad about this.

It was another job I had that tops this experience, though. It wasn't so much with the job itself, or the manager. I loved the manager. I really didn't mind the job so much even though I got yelled at by people often, as it was a UPS Store and people apparently assumed you could get your package somewhere not only in a few hours, but for a few bucks. I liked the people I worked with, too. What I didn't like resulted in the place crawling with police...again. Let's count it, people. This will be the second time in three and a half years that police swarmed the place I worked, however, this time was much more dangerous, and I knew I had an angel at my side after the sum of both experiences.

I worked with a pregnant girl. A dear, sweet, wonderful pregnant girl. She was in her twenties and had just found out she was pregnant. She was happy, however her boyfriend had become abusive and was scaring her. She left him and didn't look back. Things were fine and she was fine on her own and excited for the baby. We were checking out customers when she got a telephone call on the work number from her brother saying the ex had showed up at her house, where she and her brother both lived, looking for her and threatening to harm her when he found her. He was headed to the place of work next.

As I said before, I am a good and calm, quick thinker in the face of danger. I freak out later. I picked up the phone and called the cops, explaining the situation. They told us there was nothing they could do until he was physically there and threatening us. Awesome. That was okay, though. There wasn't a lot he could do with a store full of people. And then, just as quickly as the people came, they overheard part of my call, since there was nowhere in the store I could take it and left. It felt a lot like the apocalypse had come and wiped everyone out. As luck had it, the store beside us was closed due to a family emergency, and we were otherwise isolated except for the pawn shop across the parking lot. They couldn't see in the store, though, because the windows pointing that way were covered with those stupid advertising posters. Companies, take note, these things are dangerous.

I was going to slide out and get the owner of the pawn shop, who was a nice, albeit scary looking guy who told us if we ever needed anything to come get him. Just as I was about to do that, a customer came in. I waited on him, trying to do it as slowly as possible. After a few minutes, he left. He was barely out the door when my coworker started screaming that she saw his car pulling into the parking lot, and then locked herself in the bathroom. It was fine. I had this handled.

Her boyfriend came flying in with a long jacket on in the ninety degree heat, and his hand in the jacket. Instantly I knew something was wrong and we had a problem. This was going to get ugly. He starts screaming at me, asking me where she is. I told him she had left. He pressed out about her car still being there, and I simply told him that her brother had come and got her after he had showed up at her house, figuring that information would prove to him that it really happened, since I'd have no other way to know he was at her house. But that didn't appease him at all. He got more angry and more violent. I started to step back when in steps the last customer we had. Part of me thought "thank God," and another was scared that something was going to happen since this guy was walking in on an angry man with his hand in his jacket. But this guy was good. Instead of saying he had an issue with his previous trip in there, he looked right at her boyfriend and asked him what was going on. He turned and started to flee when the guy grabbed and detained him while I called the police.

After the police got there and took him into custody, the guy got my coworker out of the bathroom and asked us if we were okay. Then he told us that he was actually a cop turned CSI who had just gotten off duty and came here. He was leaving when he saw her boyfriend pull in at top speed and knew in his gut something was wrong. He nonchalantly walked down the sidewalk and passed the boyfriend, and noticed he had a jacket on and knew something was going on in this kind of heat. He stood by one of the windows further over that wasn't covered and watched for a few minutes where neither of us noticed him to see what was going on, and thought about how he was going to handle it and then came in.

After a much to do where he talked to the police and lots of insane things happened, he came back to talk to me, while the cops questioned my coworker. He never would tell me if they recovered a gun off of the boyfriend directly, but in so many words, he basically told me that was what he was hiding in his jacket, which I had figured all along. If that guy had not known something was wrong and watched the situation for the right moment to diffuse it, I honestly don't know what would have happened. But as frightened as I was and from what I know in my gut, neither she nor I would have made it out of there that day. It was by total happenstance that he was there at that very moment, and as far as I'm concerned, it's quite possible he saved our lives.

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I know he ruined her car pretty badly while the ex cop/CSI had him outside trying to detain him, but unable to completely without handcuffs. All he could get him to do was not leave until the police got there by taking his keys when he ushered him out. He also kept him from coming back in. Where we were, there was nowhere to run to unless he ran toward the police station, so he was stuck. Luckily the boyfriend only took it out on her car and not on the ex cop, but the ex cop/current CSI was far bigger than him and I think he knew better.

My coworker was fired for "causing trouble at work." This pissed me off because it was in no way her fault. She was the victim. I decided this time that I would keep the job and not quit like I did when the robber was going around Payless with a gun. Fate must have known better, because not even a week later I had a 120lb pound box come down on my foot. When my boss refused to follow my doctor's orders of having me sit when I worked and scheduled me alone in a place where boxes had to be moved just to process each order, I was forced by doctor's orders to quit working there.

From what I understand, the coworker moved far away, and when the boyfriend discovered this he proceeded to harass the store looking for her. I believe he is in prison now, but I'm not positive on that. I am thankful, however, that I did get out of there because I heard his constant harassing of the store was pretty intense, and I was scared of the guy for good reason. If I never see him again, it would be too soon.

On second thought, maybe the angels were sick of the crazy crap that happened to me at work and this is someone's way of telling me that I'm just not meant to work without guns involved. And since I never worked in a police station, this would be considered a bad thing.