Sinking ships

So, here I am. I didn't have to actually burn the art related tools and products, but I have put them away. After the initial violent adjustment, I feel good about it. I'm free to find another path. I am still me.

And, I did give notice at work because I can't go on there. I am very depressed and I need to take steps to get back to feeling like there is hope. Leaving this job, surprisingly, gives me a glimmer of hope, even though it's financial suicide. Poverty and misery do tend to go hand in hand but I've lived poor for a long long time and I can continue, so long as I have a home and food to eat. The rest is just extras and my mental health is more important. Quitting gives me hope that I don't have to be stuck. Hope that I can find, if not better work, something new at the very least. It also gives me hope that I will have some time to physically recover and stop looking and feeling like death warmed over.

As it turns out, it's probably quite timely. I work for a European bank that is in the news these days (especially in Scotland) for sucking the big one, as it were, financially. The government has bailed my employer out. Once the second biggest bank in Europe, now 60% owned by Gordon Brown. Talk about a sinking ship. This was a Dutch bank that was very recently acquired by this monolith of Scotland so before you could even say hoots man, it will probably be sold by the government to a brand new bank. That should make it real easy to get a raise or a permanent contract or anything like that...pfft.

As a contract worker, the new bank has really been working hard to isolate me and make me feel left out. This is all coming from people in Scotland who have no idea what's going on here in our little office of 9 people. They sent everyone welcome gifts of ugly knapsacks and mugs and stuff. Except me. I'm not a real employee somehow. They sent me an email asking me who I worked for. You, I replied. They had everyone go get photos taken to make identification cards. Except me. They sent me the same plastic card but in the place where a photo would have been, I have a big blue capital T. Temporary. Branded, don't you know.

Anyway.

Forget them. I am not a complete fool. Surely I can be employed elsewhere. Maybe Ikea will hire me to drive Flurgen Flooven around on a forklift. I could wear a hard hat like a Dozer and eat lignonberry and peanut butter sandwiches during my lunch break...

We shall see.