Yeah Hawkeye, I know exactly how you feel...
OK, a couple of updates…
No, I haven’t heard anything from Goodwill about the Supervisor job and at this point I don’t think I’m going to. I don’t think I’ve made it to the second round of interviews so I am going to write them off and move on. It’s been more than two weeks since I went in to that interview and I figure that if I haven’t heard anything by now, then I’m not going to. Two weeks of silence is usually a sign that they don’t think I would be worth hiring.
Secondly, I have a better idea of why I haven’t been able to get a job – my credit rating sucks.
Now I know that a lot of us are in this position where we have lost a job, have no income and have no way to pay important bills that employers consider to be a measurement of how good or bad an employee you would be. Not being able to pay the power bill or the water bill is bad enough, but when you’re unable to make your mortgage payment then that is when the employers start writing you off as worthless and start tossing your resume into the shredder. I think I’ve figured it out though, I think I’ve figured out the threshold for being able to get a job these days. Think of it this way – if your credit score prevents you from getting a loan, then chances are you won’t be getting a job either. If your credit score is such that the banks won’t talk to you, then it is a pretty safe bet that Human Resources won’t talk to you either.
Come on people, we all know that these days companies use credit scores against us when making hiring decisions. It doesn’t matter that President Obama asked them not to do it or that it eliminates otherwise qualified applicants – they do it anyway!!! These days you have to have a credit score of at least 700 to qualify for a loan and probably a job, so my measly FICO score of 557 is just not going to cut it. Memo to HR Directors: in the future you should just put whatever the minimum FICO score you are looking for in your job ads from now on. That way you can save all of us “unpersons” a lot of time, aggravation, stress and heartache so that we will know not to send you our resume in the first place! It might be illegal to actually do that, but if you’re going to judge us by a three-digit number anyway, then you might as well be honest about it!
Having said that it’s time to get to the topic at hand…
I’ve had some really weird-ass dreams for a couple of days about a week ago and I’m just now getting to the point where I can write about them. I think my subconscious is trying to deal with our situation the best way it knows how – by generating nightmares.
Are any of you familiar with the BBC series “Doctor Who“?
Well recently I had a dream where I was actually a part of an episode of that show, and when I say part I mean I was actually a character. I could sense that I was somehow connected with the Doctor in a way that wasn’t made clear, but we clearly knew each other and we knew how the other man would think. I’m guessing that I was some sort of future incarnation of the Doctor, but that I wasn’t really him. I was with David Tennant’s Doctor on an alien planet which was home to a human colony. This colony was a little different however, in that there was something that the Doctor was there to try to prevent, but in the end was powerless to do so. The main part of this dream took place in what could be a log cabin in the center of the main town of the settlement. I was holed up in that cabin with the Doctor and several of the town’s citizens who were trying to escape some horrible event that was taking place outside.
What was happening was some sort of ritualized rioting in which the targets were not the figures of authority…but the settlements children! The children of the settlement were being attacked by their own elders! Their Parents, Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles were going after them with the intent of sacrificing them to some unseen force in what could only be described as some sort of religious fervor. We could hear the screams of the children as they were trying to run away as they were being chased out of town by adults carrying clubs, hatchets, machetes, swords, scythes, pitchforks – anything that could be used as a weapon. We were all trying to get away from the windows so that we wouldn’t be seen and possibly forced to join in the slaughter when I saw something out the window…
A boy of about 11 or 12 was trying to get away from this one bearded man who might have been his Father while he was begging for his life. Whoever the man was told him that this was meant to be and then cut the boys legs from underneath him with a fire ax. At that point I turned away from what came next but I could hear the thwacking of the ax hitting flesh as the boy was butchured to death.
Where was the Doctor during all of this? He was sitting at a table in the next room with a forlorn look on his face. I could see it in his eyes that he knew that he was powerless to stop it, and it saddened him immensely. He could fight enemies with all sorts of technologies – Daleks, Cybermen, Sontorans – but this was one weapon that even the Doctor knew he could not overcome.
Faith.
Then something really weird happened…
All of a sudden a large group of the settlers started pressing themselves against the house and started pressing Holy Water onto the house with their hands. Some of the Holy Water was even mixed with blood – their children’s blood. We couldn’t understand what was going on until the Doctor said it – they were blessing the house with the blood of their own children. We were inside the very icon that their children were being sacrificed too!!!
And that’s when I woke up!
It wasn’t until later that I figured out who I was in the dream – I was the Valeyard! I was the amalgamation of the darker side of the Doctor’s nature brought to life. However I didn’t feel like the same evil character that was first created – I had been changed, probably by the Time War. I surmised that I was now working with a re-built Torchwood, and that I was now taking this one trip through time and space to try to help The Doctor. After the dream I imagined sitting with The Doctor at that same table trying to absorb what had just happened with him telling me that some things just cannot be stopped – that they were meant to happen. I guess he was trying to help me come to grips with a problem that I had been having by bringing me here.
I’ve got a knot in my stomach just writing about it, I can only imagine what it must be like for all of you reading it. But that was only one dream I had recently…
…the next night I had another.
I was walking along Eagle Avenue here in Boise trying to meet my wife somewhere. I’m guessing that she had the car which was why I was trying to walk to this place in the middle of a Thunderstorm. While I was walking I noticed that the wind had picked up considerably in the past couple of minutes. It had almost gotten to the point where it was going to blow me over. I looked behind me and I could see that there was a tornado on the ground not 50 feet behind me, and it was approaching me fast. Just as I got ready to run…
…I woke up.
Now, if these two dreams don’t give you an idea of how I am feeling about my employment situation and our personal financial crisis, then nothing will. Like Wifey said after I told her of the dreams “it’s your sub-consious’ way of trying to deal with our situation.”
Yeah honey, I get that, but did it have to be “Doctor Who”, Stephen King and “Twister” all rolled into one?
I guess I should be lucky that the villagers were not all Baby-Boomer Republicans who don’t want anyone else to have access to health care while managing to keep their own “socialized medical coverage” known to the rest of us as Medicare.
Ooops, I didn’t say that out loud, did I?
issue to be continued…….
