Are you "Covidundant?" Unemployed from Corona? Jobless due to lockdown? Redundant from Furloughed? If so we are here for you. This article is written for you, my brothers, and sisters and for no one else.
Are you like me? Let us see. At 2.12pm today I got the email. I was looking because my employer said if they call us back (as they had started doing) it would be early part of the week. So Monday and Tuesdays I study the inbox fully, hoping for a notice of call-back.
I had been so impressed by my company (I only started in Jan) and the communication we had. It had gone quiet lately, so I was hoping any time soon, on a Monday or Tuesday, I would get the welcome sign of an e mail asking my return. No such chance. All previous correspondence was group titled with a friendly and generic title, like; "update on Coronavirus procedure" and was followed by a positive, if hyperbolic, missive aimed at all of us to assure that things would be okay.
Today was different. There was no chance of that this Monday. It was an email directed to me specifically. No need to open. It was titled: "Notice of Redundancy" Guess what it said?
This was my reaction...
So here I am. Nine hours later, eyes shrink-wrapped in tears. Self-confidence a memory, pride a fantasy, and forgiveness a concept of absurd distance.
Does that sound like you? Is this akin to your troubles? If so I am sorry for you, but I offer you my love and my shelter.
To those emails I say this: Fuck all the platitudes, the offers of references, the tales of how "hard a decision this was to make." Sorry but you still have a salary so stick your hard decisions somewhere where hard things get stuck, sideways.
Not that I am aiming this at employers. They are not the ones here. I am pissed off at certain things mine did, but that is my own deal, and this is not for me, this is for all of us.
So what am I here to say? I am here to stand with my fellow cast-offs and say this: We need a name. We want someone's head. I am here to tell my other hurt, scared, marginalised, and disenfranchised brothers and sisters that you MUST NOT be deterred in calling for someone to answer.
Anyone saying "It will be okay" or telling you to "keep your head up, good times will come around again" can fuck off. This is not for you. At the same time, if you find yourself out of work from Covid, but have wrangled yourself a six-month salary deal by volunteering to leave, I tell you as well, this is not for you, I also warn you not to pitch in with us. Boardroom-bumlicks and middle-management wetbacks are not welcome here. I am posting for those who got no settlement, or only maybe a paltry redundancy kick-out. Do not liken yourself to us like some Robin-Hood phoney. You are the fucking problem. It is your ludicrous bailouts that stop two or three other guys getting to keep jobs for 15 months and maybe ride this thing out for good. So stop telling us what you got. Do you go up to handicapped people and show them how your legs work too?
This post is here to tell those who want to shout and scream and tell the powers that be that it is not fucking okay, that they are not alone. It is here to give ballast to those that want to call for whatever shitpot sickpit that spawned this pernicious evil to answer for their fucking docile crimes of acquiesce. That you can have a box to stand on. This aims to inspire affected folk to demand an answer. This shit started somewhere, and it is not 1918 anymore, we have the know-how to attach blame and attach blame we must. Then, with extreme prejudice, enact our recompense. Some other continent has allowed you to be unable to feed your family. Guarantee if it was some arse-end village in Backwardsia that was affected by our overuse on postage stamps then Lady Gaga and Bono would be singing to stop it, but because the fault is not a soft-inward target its all of a sudden time to be altruistic. Fuck that.
Remember, wanting someone to blame does not make you a bad person. Cold methodical thinking is all very well and good when it is deciding to give someone the chop. Then it is "just business" while you wipe your chin and have a drink to remove the taste. Yet you ask for the source of Corona to be punished and you are a racist bully. Utter rot.
On that subject, I say to my aforementioned kin, I offer this as a place for one other defiance, but a massive one. This is against the fucking arseholes that will tell you to not be judgemental. The liberal wankers who will tolerate any evil done by overseas peasants regardless, but if a domestic or western source is causing an issue in some subterranean stinking grot-infested hellhole, then they are waving fucking placards and chanting like the world is on fire.
To those who say, "we must not look at who to blame" or chant how "what about mad cow disease and rabies?" to them I say:
"MAD COW DISEASE AND RABIES NEVER STOPPED THE FUCKING WORLD AND STOLE MY JOB!"
You will always get some pansy, pampered, whiny phlegm-pot say that we must "look at what we have done to the world" and all that shit. fuck off. This is a basic case of isolate and eradicate. This virus started somewhere. That is where the bombs must go. Be they literal ones, sanctions, embargos, or foreign-aid removal, whatever. I am not Kofi Annan.
To those puny vested clunge-stains telling us that I or we are being dangerously reactionary the question is this:
Have you lost your job and is your family in trouble and your home at risk from fallout due to the Corona virus? Having less clients, or some minor downturn does not count. I bet anything the answer is no, I bet you will say you have and then the explanation will show someone is confusing less visitors to the drop-in for a few months with the horror me and my kind are going through, and frankly we will thank you to go choke to death first.
Though let us say that you are right, that you have gone through this and still call me wrong and evil. Maybe it is you that is bust, broken, and inhuman. We are animals, of the animal kingdom. We demand accountability. To excuse it under feeble miasmas of faux-lefty neologisms is a sign of a broken breed to me.
On top of that I ask these incense-spattered granola-pukes this: Why are you always on the side of the other guys? Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria?
Why do you act like everyone from the enemy is always just harmless innocent peasant farmers and everyone from the west is a murderous fatcat? Apart from anything else, it always strikes me as super-naive. Did the Twin Towers fall over? Did Corona start itself? Did the Gilgit massacre happen for a good reason? Seems like some people cannot wait to fight against the folk of their kin.
We are in misery and maybe rather than griping about the rights of others who could not care less about you, you should worry about your own.
To anyone about to comment I ask one thing: Have you lost your official paid job/home/or a loved one (and a guy you vaguely knew in the office or your friends relative does not count) to Covid-19? If not then your response is not wanted.