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Wow. Just wow!

More people got cut this morning. I may well be the only remaining seasonal employee on third shift. Not just in the bindery, either. Quite possibly throughout the entire building…

Wow.
I may just make it to June, and another low cost month of health insurance.

This week was the week I was laid-off from work last season. Last night at work, I found out most of the bindery’s seasonal staff was finished today or tomorrow…

I was not on the list.

Of course, I understand that the great powers up in Minnesota may send out the decree sometime today, and I could be laid-off tonight, but so far it looks like I go at least into next week…

Having started the season in the digital departments offers some insight that most bindery staff don’t have. Since I was building the digital forms of the books, I saw how the submission schedule had been changed. Last year, there was big incentives and expensive penalties for the schools where submission deadlines were concerned. This brought all lot of the book pages in at one time, giving lots of over-time to most seasonal employees and than layoffs to almost everyone at once.

This year, the account executives tried to offer the schools less penalties, trying to find other ways to make the schools stay with the company. This inadvertently resulted in less work early on, leaving huge piles towards the end of the season. Well, once people started sitting around waiting for work, the lay-offs started. This left more over-time later on for fewer people.

Last year most people in any given department were laid-off together. This year, the lazy or less dependable workers were gone first, offering a better reward for good work than previous years. The same is still happening in the bindery. The collators, which is the job I have been during exclusively for the past month, have mostly been laid-off. Out of five teams of two (using two machines of three shifts) only two teams are left, both on third shift. Perhaps the single team on second is still there, I am not sure.

Now, I want to acknowledge the hateful that had been going on in the collating department. The day shift collators are the laziest bunch I may have ever seen. One team is also the most misery, cranky, hateful pair. They bitch about everything. They pick fights with each other and other folks. They bicker all day long. They waste hours diggin’ out the smaller easiest books to collate and still rarely manage to hit the daily work quota. This in turn, makes it harder for every other team to hit quota.

In fact, my ‘helper’ and I elected three or four weeks ago to only pull the big, huge books since all the other teams were so obsessed with what the bindery calls ‘cherry picking’. I think this choice is what led to us surviving the biggest staff cut yet this season. (Of course, my helper won’t be laid-off. He is my supervisor from digital. His workload is so diminished for the season, that he was asked to come work in the bindery until the yearbook crunch has passed. It’s a trip to have my old boss as a helper.)

This cut has even let folks with poor performance and/or attendance but with higher seniority go before me. This gives me a great feeling, plus it proves that my perceptions of my own job performance matches that of my bosses. That is always nice feedback to get.

I cannot yet let myself hope this might lead to a full time offer there, but I can be safe enough knowing that I may be in a good spot when one finally opens up, at least a spot out in the bindery, which is the most likely place to have the faster growth.

Enough rambling for now.

I think I have not explained myself so well. Or perhaps I simply did not manage to get what was in my head into the words I posted here.

I don’t consider this term to be derogatory when I use it. I don’t apply those negative connotation and insinuations to it, or to most things for that matter. I think of it more as reclamation, much like the pink triangle and the terms ‘fag’ and ‘queer’.

I enjoy using language in this sense to offer a positive, or at least embraced, view of the terminology otherwise seen as slanderous. Perhaps it is the challenge of finding the good amongst the bad. I understand that this fact may cause difficulty with how well understood I am by others. I have been putting some time towards this issue. Mostly, it would seem folks just need to know me better to get it.

Thus this post…

I am a cry-baby.

All my life to date, my emotions have hung out just below my skin, wanting for opportunity to arise. I have always been conscious of the negative connotations of this in a man (although I don’t recall which event taught me that lesson…). I also understand the importance and real strength of this ability, so I only ever concealed the easy access to my tear ducts as opposed to repressing it outright.

Over the years in college, I managed to learn to block it while in large groups. Or maybe a developing empathy worked to prevent the tears when the majority of folks surrounding me weren’t so emotionally upset. Either way, I mostly cries by myself, whenever I needed to heal. It is a nice ability and I have ben grateful for it.

Then the lump. The ugly orange-sized cancerous lump of lymphatic tissue…

As a metaphor to depict how the change feels inside me, I like to say that the toxicity and sensory overload of the treatment experience burned out those shields I learned to establish in college. Doesn’t matter so much how to explain it. That imagery fits well enough to do the job.

Now, don’t drop that hat, or I’ll cry! Honestly.

Some of the otherwise, or outwardly, bizarre or unexpected moments drum them tears up and out of me. Even t.v. shows like Roseanne and the Simpson’s do it when the episode hits the ‘moralistic’ undertone.

I pretty much walked away from news shows entirely.

It flows and I am thankful. I am grateful. I am feeling better already. For the most part, I don’t even care who sees it happen. I do however, still block it at work as much as possible, for conveniences and to avoid lengthy conversations about difficult topics with folks I may never see again. The memorial pages always break through anyway. But they have that power. It just plain ol’ sucks that a school yearbook gets dedicated to a child that only lived to 11 years old due to strange, violent forms of cancer. Come on… how am I not suppose to fall apart to that one?

I am a cry-baby. I embrace my inner cry-baby. I am empowered by my inner cry-baby. And if I hear you snicker or see you point, I will beat the piss out of you until you cry like a freakin’ baby!