Well my unemployment came and went within two weeks. I took the first week off, worked on the house, went fishing and even once slept in until 9:30am, drank coffee until noon and then switched to beer. I couldn't do that one often but that was a nice change of pace after getting up at 4:00am for years. After one week I couldn't put my friend/old foreman off any longer and I had to go to work for him doing non-union insurance jobs. I worked for a whopping two days before my union superintendent called me back to the job I got laid off from. As Vonnegut said, "so it goes"...
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* The only thing I've ever seen that's been more ironic than this post was a myspace posting by a friend who posted a fake piece on being pregnant only to actually get prenant shortly thereafter. I started this post last night and was laid off today after only being back to work for three weeks. The super was decent about and at least was honest. He explained that my work and attitude were great but that other guys had seniority and they had to take care of them first. What happened was that another job had been postponed for a redesign. Now they had fifteen or so foremen and badass carpenters hanging on by a thread and pushing brooms across decks that had been cleaned multiple times before just waiting for the other building to start. When this didn't happen they laid off some really good hands and transferred others over to our job. So my old foreman got my job and my new foreman apologized and was genuinely a decent fella about it all. It helped him that I saw it coming and took it all in stride. Such is life right now. I see this period of "unemployment" lasting a little longer than the last one. I'm comforting myself with some country music and Budweiser, but mainly consoling myself with the fact that I got laid off with some guys who truly were great concrete hands and who to be honest could smoke me doing this shit.
I suppose I'll split my time between finishing some things around the house (believe me when I say that there's years of work here), maybe go back to school and build some militant anti-capitalist unionism while I'm at it. Perhaps I'll post some more on that at some point in the near future but for now we'll leave well enough alone with a decent country song.
