Looking Back

I have a feeling that this will be my last blog entry for the year. The new year is coming up fast so I'm going to do what all the old media does and take a look back at the old year.

Last New Year's eve I was at home making sure our cowardly middle fur child didn't freak out over the fireworks all our neighbors were setting off. If I recall correctly we watched some movie to "celebrate". You could say the event didn't leave a big impression in my mind.

If I were to try and sum up the last year in a word it would be "frustration". Frustration that I was just another cog in a big corporation, frustration with my own body as it fell apart more each day, and frustration that so much of my life was under the control of someone else.

All this frustration took its toll on me. I live with pain everyday, it's part of the price I paid to survive cancer. I also live with fear that the cancer could return. This pain and fear magnified every other problem I bumped into. Eventually my frustration with work hit a point where I had to do something. I believed (and still do believe) that my physical, and growing mental, limits caused my work management to treat me differently then they did my co-workers, in other words I was being discriminated against. A bit of advice for anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation, don't trust the internal company process for reporting discrimination, it is only there to protect the company, not the individual worker. Go straight to the (choke, gag, cough) government.

I'm sure you have heard the term "going postal". It's a way of saying that someone went bonkers and started to right perceived wrongs they experienced at work with the help of their favorite firearm. Once I started to realize I was growing ever closer to the "going postal" state of mind from the company's discrimination investigation and treatment of me, I talked to my Dr.. For the good of all involved, and my own physical and mental well being, he placed me on medical disability for a few months. Yep, this MAD mountain geek is truly certifiable.

If you have been reading the blog from the start you have a good idea what all has happened since then, so I won't recap all of that.

I'm still dealing with frustration but not as much as I was, and the majority of it is from dealing with the company's and the insurance provider's "policies". I hate the word policy, corporations sling it about as if it were law chiseled into stone when it is nothing but their idea of what is best for the company.

For now, I am still at the mercy of this corporate control over parts of my life, but I have discovered a new way of approaching life here in the backwoods. I no longer look at every person I see as another source of frustration that needs to be removed from the gene pool, that is as long as I stay out of the city.

Whoops, time to head into the city, breathe... breathe... breathe, I can do this.

Certified Geek of Treehaven