Salamander
Fire Walking

There's a daily newslist for people who have the same cancer that I do. It's surprisingly active, considering how few of us there are. The discussions this week centered mostly around people getting rejected for life and disability insurance. Based on comments from participants plus the forum's moderator (a reputable foundation for this disease) having an "incurable cancer" is enough to be rejected by most insurance companies. It doesn't matter that odds are you'll die of something else in old age (at least, if you have no other problems). The moderator didn't believe what we were reporting at first, so she contacted a few major insurance companies and found out that if we could get life insurance at all, it would be prohibitively high.

I'd suspected that I'd be hard to insure because of the heart condition and liver transplant. I've already been denied long term care coverage years ago, before the transplant or the CTCL. But for some reason, this absolute knowledge that I can't ever get any further life insurance is depressing.

Work has been depressing as well. I actually thought things were improving earlier this week, but today was a reality check. Several things I've been trying to train people not to do collided with an unexpected event to create a very bad sitation. I worked through it as much as I could, but in the end I had to do something that will cost that department $500 or more to rectify their error. Afterward I went to the department supervisor and let loose. I gave him a blow-by-blow description of the instructions I'd given his floor managers and his staff over the past few weeks and what I had told them today just before they went and did what I'd told them not to do. I showed him the defective items that had just arrived today that made a bad situation worse. I told him what was going to happen to his department's score sheets in the future for these infractions His response was that I should change the way I do things to make it harder for his guys to screw up. This is something I've already done twice. To screw up now takes an act of active disobedience, coupled with a complete failure to communicate with other members of their own department.

I told him I'd take it under advisement. I went back to my office. And I broke down. I had a good long cry, then I looked for a box, packed the personal items that mean the most to me, and took them home.

I cannot teach these morons. I cannot teach people who will not pay attention to detail on a detail-oriented job. I cannot do more and more of their work for them until I assume their blame as well.

And I'm fucking unhireable because of my health background. So I'll crawl back to work with my tail between my legs on Monday and watch everybody pretend that Friday never happened. And I'll take a bigger box with me to clear out some more of my stuff, because that way I can pretend I'm doing something positive while sinking in quicksand.