"We're letting you go..."
The polite way of saying "You're fired, now get the fuck out of here."
I've reached the last flimsy thread of a very long rope. And this morning, it was cut. With blunt scissors. I had to stay two hours late at work just so they could tell me to fuck off in person.
Of course, I knew it was coming. I could see it coming two years ago. As I've grown older, my various medical/psychiatric problems have grown bigger and stronger. I have such a hard time paying attention to anything at all that I'm amazed that they took this long to finally cut me loose. I've been in constant physical pain since June, and yet they complain about my reliability being suspect, even though they knew about it, because I told them; I emailed each of my bosses and told them the score of the game between my body and my work. Undeterred, they chose the absolute worst time to fire me, although I know deep down that it really is my fault. Deep down in that genetic, superconscious, unknown to science kind of deep down.
My pronounced lack of physical intimacy with anyone over the past year and change has not improved my frame of mind or anything else, much as I like to think that I'm OK on my own. Clearly that theory needs some revision.
I have no idea what I'm going to do. I have no friends here, really. I've kept myself cloistered away from society for the past two years at least. I suppose my first option would be to file for unemployment, although half of me wants to take ten of every type of pill I have and then go to bed and never wake up¹, at least not in this dimension.
Of course I know that it's completely my fault for the slow spiral down into nearly zero productivity. But for that, I can only blame my body and genetics. Thanks, mom and dad!
Work pays for my cellphone service, and I don't know how long it'll be before they realize this and cancel it. And since I'm now sans health insurance, I can't really persue a second opinion on what exactly is wrong with me (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, brain lesions, or just general incompetence). Over the course of the latter half of this year, I blacked out and broke three teeth, had the muscles from my shoulders to my knees stop functioning at full capacity, and had my psychiatric drug doses doubled and in some cases quadrupled (I don't know which is worse: the need or the quantity). Unless I can get on disability and/or unemployment, the drugs I have now are the last of them.
I still have a paycheck and a half coming, so I can stay where I am until at least late next month. Beyond that, I haven't got a clue.
Despite the enormity of this morning, I have not yet cried, but I strongly suspect that tears are in the post, probably appearing sooner rather than later. I mean, I worked there for over six years, and then one day it's *poof*, out the door, never to return. No severance package. No option to keep my health insurance for a monthly fee. The guy who "let me go" even had the audacity to come down to my office and watch me pack up my shit (Mac Mini, various peripherals, etc) and then walk me to the elevator. The coup de grace came when he asked if everything I was packing up was, in fact, mine. I calmly resisted the urge to take the elevator back up to the eleventh floor, which is the only one in the building that has a balcony, and throw myself off of it. I never really liked the building, though, and I didn't want my final moments to be spent in it or falling from it. So I drove home, carried all my office shit inside, didn't bother to unpack much except the laptop, then lit a cigarette and started writing this. No mass consumption of psychiatric drugs instead. No chugging the half-fifth of chartreuse in my liqour cabinet (the top of the fridge), either.
The first real, actual sign that I was soon to be canned came shortly after I arrived at work last night. I tried sshing into various servers, only to be met with a message which read "This account is no longer active." I inquired of the only person left in the office when I got in, and I could tell by the look in his eyes and the curtness of his response that my days at the job I've held for the longest were numbered. Days, hah. More like the twelve hours in between then and when one of my four bosses arrived at about 7:45am.
I have the number for a national suicide prevention call center on my phone's speed dial.
I don't know what happens now. Broken. Betrayed. Confused. Destroyed.
1: With apologies to TheDeadGuy.