And sometimes I wonder why I continue it at all.

Today’s featured cover is “Cut”.

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Official Transcript:

I’m recording this episode reluctantly right now in the interest of sticking to my schedule of having this first season, or first half of this season, wrapped up before Christmas.

In all honesty I’m not really interested in doing it and I can’t be bothered to really come up with a real topic to base it off of.

See I just got off the phone with someone who works for the government of Canada who had some more questions for me about my application for unemployment insurance.

This is the 3rd call I’ve had to take for what I’d otherwise expect to be a real simple application for some financial relief after being terminated from my job in October without cause.

It’s sort of funny to me, not really in a ha-ha way, but, funny, that this is causing me as much grief as it has.

I started working as soon as I was legally able to at 14 and I haven’t given myself much breathing room since, constantly juggling multiple jobs.

It’s one of those things that I’d always felt completely secure in – that I’d be able to find stable employment. It was never really challenging for me to get a job when I sought one and I’ve never had any issues with any employers until recently, so, it’s been a lot to take in.

It’s pretty crazy to think that had I not started this Jimmy Eat World project I probably wouldn’t be in this position at all today.

That’s not to put a blame on the band for it; it’s a long, complicated situation but it all started after I made what I now believe to be an incredible mistake in sharing my music projects with my former coworkers in 2020.

I’d started them as a way to keep my stress levels down amidst covid and my divorce and they were the only thing I was ever really proud of and excited to share with anyone.

And they were well received at first – most people were surprised I could actually play guitar because it wasn’t something I was openly doing prior to 2020, so, getting any sort of compliments on any of it was a big achievement.

But then things took a big turn and I found myself being thrown into meetings with my former manager and the human resource department who, while they were never clear about what was so wrong about me promoting these projects on the internet using my social media channels, quite literally made a point to question why I’d be publicly tweeting about Jimmy Eat World.

They were so specific about it. Of all the things I had said, that was one topic that made the cut in the meetings.

At the time I found it so ludicrous it was funny but as I sit here tonight hoping that in a couple days time I’ll get some positive news about my unemployment insurance, I’m having a hard time even still believing it happened to begin with at all.

The road since hasn’t been much better.

After growing so frustrated with the way my former coworkers were treating me, I up and quit in a huff in what would be the last of those HR meetings. I can’t express how stressful it is to be put in that type of position at the time I was, but clearly it became more than I could handle.

I’d never quit anything quite like that before.

And so I tried my hand at a simple job, applying and getting a job at my local coffee shop where, on the very first day the assistant manager felt it appropriate to question my size 6 pants and put her hand under my waistband to test the fit of what I wore to my on-the-spot interview.

Talk about a violation of your personal space.

So I quit that place because if that’s how it were to start I knew I’d never stay.

And then it would be a few months before I could get the energy to try to apply for more jobs and eventually I found myself working at a retail store that took and resold donated goods. I would’ve been fine staying there a little longer had I not then had to spend each day in the poorly ventilated warehouse listening to the management come down on my coworkers who weren’t meeting daily quotas. Daily quotas, by the way, which were absolute bullshit – I know because I was subject to them, too, and once I proved that I could hit the daily target which far exceeded what we’d sell every day, and learn that most of the donations received at these types of places are actually just thrown into the garbage and not passed on to third world impoverished countries as the company training manual would have you believe, they’d push you even harder into other departments and repeat the cycle.

Plus there was this whole thing where people would come in every single day and linger around my section, ask me personal questions and hold me up, making it wildly uncomfortable for me to even do my simple job of pricing and putting items out on the shelves.

And so I had to leave that job as well but, I was actively trying to get myself back into a technical role doing audio or events work and once spring was approaching it seemed more places were re-opening to events again, so things were looking up.

And then I was pleased to land a job doing just that at a company with a global reach which told me that my bigger goal of moving either across Canada or into the United States was finally, not so far off. I even had a number of positive and promising interviews for jobs in Vancouver and Seattle but, then those people just never reached out and then my manager at my location started making life a living hell for myself and everyone else I worked with.

And then people started losing their jobs in droves and before long, I lost mine, too.

And it’s really hard to look back at all of these things and understand with any sort of reasonable clarity where I personally went wrong because largely it’d seem each time I wasn’t doing anything wrong at all. I was thriving in all of them; despite myself not really caring for the jobs themselves I’ve always put my best effort into my work.

Needless to say it’s frustrating now, feeling like it doesn’t seem to matter at all what I do, how hard I work, if I pull over time, don’t pull overtime, speak up, don’t speak up…. Nothing seems to really want to align in any sort of way to bring me back to any kind of real security financially or otherwise these days and I’ve lost just about complete faith in every system I have reached out to for support.

It doesn’t really feel like there’s anyone left for me. That’s another thing I’d never have expected for myself to say in my lifetime.

I wonder how things would be different for me right now if I had never bothered to start this.