Well, it seems needless to say, but if you are in the minority of people who read my blog but don’t follow me on “socials,” I didn’t get the job at Ward Trucking, my current employer did cease all operations as of Sunday and I did, in fact, wind up in Puerto Rico. I don’t believe there is a single part of that equation that I feel bad about. The only real hurdle that I see right now is that I have a trip to Venice booked for the first week of September and it’s going to seem odd to ask for time off, two weeks after I start a new job. Assuming, of course, that I land a new job.
Also, YRC robbed me of my vacation time, which in dollars and cents, comes to about $2000. When you consider the fact that they’ve managed to consume $700,000,000 of the government’s money in three years, my two grand is just a McDonaldland cookie at a Roman feast. It’s still lame as hell. The way the management would skulk around looking for anyone not constructively engaged in fattening their wallets at every moment of every day, you’d think they’d be less apt to rob us. But not really. I imagine the mindset was something like “These guys are used to being stolen from. This is part and parcel of existing in the working class. For us, though, it’s a real hardship.”
I kept an eye on the Yellow employees page on Facebook for the last two weeks and the shift has been a scientific curiosity to observe. Last week there were so many people who were holding onto the hope that the company was just bluffing. Like they were playing a real aggressive poker game where they were trying to give the impression that they were holding junk but had a straight flush.
Well, in a way they were right. Whatever malfeasance was going on behind the scenes led to them flushing a 99 year old company straight down the crapper. With regard to “going out of business,” even that shows signs of corporate shenanigans. On Sunday, when I received the straight to the point “we’re shutting down operations” voicemail, the stock was at about 80 cents a share. It opened yesterday at over $4. As usual, someone is making a lot of money and as usual it’s not any of the people who actually created profit for the company.
While all this was going on, the delusion switched to getting paid for all the vacation days we had owed to us. In fact, there are still people who believe the union will be able to make this happen. A few employees even filed a complaint and hit the company with a lawsuit claiming they are in violation of the WARN act. This was legislation that was passed making it illegal for companies with more than one hundred employees to displace all of their workers without a 60 day notice.
However, there are loopholes in the law and, if you’ve seen the way most of these things go down, you would know–as I already do–that the company has enough legal fire power to render the action toothless. All they need to do is prove that the shutdown happened too quickly for them to give ample warning.
The bottom line is that it’s over, the money will never be paid and people’s best bet is to file for unemployment and start looking for work elsewhere. It feels a bit disheartening, but that is the way these things go. And like I always say, tomorrow is never promised.
I grew up in a house where my father was driven out of business by the State of New York for not having paid the sales tax he collected for years. That part I only learned after I graduated college. My entire childhood I was led to believe that my father was the victim of ruthless government officials who had it out for him. None of that really matters. What does matter is that I watched him give up at approximately 35 years old and spend the next 15 years in the world’s waiting room, reading an old magazine and waiting to die.
If there was anything good to come out of that–and that’s an “If” the size of an A320 Aerobus– it’d be my learning exactly what not to do when adversity strikes. Like you, I’ve seen those memes that bemoan resilience. The ones that say “I don’t want to be resilient, I just want to have nothing bad happen to me.” Me too. But now let’s look at reality: bad things are absolutely going to happen, so resilience is the safest bet.
Bad things, horrible experiences and heartbreaks are like no other entities in our lives. They are really the only things we can be sure we are going to receive. No one gets to the age of 12 without experiencing a couple dozen, at least. A great predictor of how our lives turn out is how we absorb these things.
I was 33 years old when I was laying on a gurney in Port Jervis, NY, waking up from anesthesia from a colonoscopy and being told that my entire large intestine was going to be removed and I’d spend my remainder of time on the planet with a bag attached to me. The only way I was able to self soothe was to promise myself that I would wait to be discharged and take enough drugs to check out for good.
I got very lucky. There was a visiting surgeon from Italy that was very young and very talented and he did the sort of resection that no one in Port Jervis thought was possible or reasonable. It’s an interesting story, but it’s completely besides the point. The truth is, if you’ve been in situations like that, this recent experience is just a rotten apple in the fruit bowl of life.
So, toss it in the garbage and grab a peach.
You have a wonderful perspective in such a rough time Billy, that’ll keep you afloat for a long time. ❤️
Billy,
Try another profession. Trucking is not for you. These days it hard for the industry to survive. Price of fuel, taxes, insurance, wages and union etc.