This is EXACTLY what I was afraid of after Trump’s election. He wants to stick it to those who didn’t vote for him. The United States of America just lost its moral ground on lecturing other countries about human rights. Of all developed Western industrialized democracies, the U.S. has the worst human rights record. In fact, I don’t dare to even call the U.S. a democracy.
This may be a long story, but I’ll tell you why I can’t go back to work.
Over within the last several years, my psychiatrist has diagnosed me as having Asperger’s. It is a form of autism that causes me to be awkward in both my interpersonal and social skills. It is something that I apparently had all my life but going back to childhood when my second grade teachers told my parents that I was a problem child and needed to go to a special school, I have been misdiagnosed by many psychiatrists and psychologists about my mental condition. The complaints about me was that I drift off, I don’t pay attention, I don’t listen and I don’t learn things as fast as most kids my age. Another complaint was that I tended to overreact into anger anytime I was mildly teased. Basically not only was I not a good learner, I didn’t get along with anybody. I was also diagnosed by my current psychiatrist as suffering from panic disorders and attention deficit disorder.
So for the next seven years, I was a student at The Kaliski School in New York, a school for children with learning disabilities and personality disorders. At the time I attended, they used to be on W. 79th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Even though the teaching was at my pace, I don’t feel I learned anything from it and toward the end of my stay there, my parents felt the school was holding me back and just wanted their money. After some school shopping, a private school in Manhattan reluctantly decided to take a chance on me and admit me as a high school freshman, despite the fact that I would turn 16 within the next few months. As for the Kaliski School, they have since relocated to Riverdale.
The rest of my four years in high school was challenging. Both my parents had to tutor me. My freshman year in high school was the worst as far as my social skills went. I was the target of bullies. I was among four students in my entire high school class that was relegated as being part of the “retard class.” When word got out that I had just left “retard school,” my obviously Republican classmates did everything they could to make me leave that school. I was not welcome. I was an outcast. I was also referred to as “Orville Redenbacher,” because I wore glasses and looked like the nerdy bespectacled old man who promoted his gourmet popcorn. Fortunately, most of the torture was concentrated in my freshman year. The remaining three years, although not ideal, were an improvement from my freshman year as we all got older and relatively more mature. The learning issues still plagued me, although not as seriously as my freshman year. Unfortunately, my grades were not good enough for me to go to the leading universities, so I had to settle to go to community college after high school.
After failing in my first two majors, accounting and data processing, I eventually settled on business administration. After three and a half years, I got my two-year Associate’s Degree in my major. During college, I worked part-time at Gucci’s on Fifth Avenue in New York in the Catalog/phone order department. My job was to process payments of catalogs, mail them out to prospective customers and deliver merchandise to people in Manhattan. I won’t go into specific details, but on the job, there were some occasions when my learning disabilities interfered with me performing my duties. After working there for three years and finishing my degree at community college, I decided to leave at least partly because the manager of Gucci’s Corporate Accounts division was harassing and bullying me.
After I left (following advice from my community college’s second-rate career advisor), I got a full-time job at the now-defunct Shearson Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street brokerage firm in New York. I stayed at that job for four years. I worked with two desk supervisors there, the first one for the first two years and the second one for the second two years. I had at least some degree of problems with both, although the second one was worse than the first one. Some of the issues were I didn’t work fast enough, made mistakes and forgot to do simple tasks that delayed getting customers’ portfolio reports out. During my four years there, my department consisted of my desk supervisor, her boss, me and another coworker. All throughout this time, my coworker under both supervisors never got yelled at for anything, but on occasion I got yelled at more than she did. It became pretty clear to me that I didn’t get as much respect as my coworker did. My second supervisor was a backstabber and also, I believe, a racist and a sexist who has a problem with white males. My supervisor’s boss, also a person of color and a black Muslim, is also a racist I believe because he always takes my supervisor’s side whenever I have a dispute with her. My coworker, who gets along so fine with both supervisors, is a religious ass-kisser transplanted from Tuskeegee, Alabama. After four years of this nonsense, I quit abruptly giving my two-week notice after my second supervisor blew up at me in front of other people over a mistake she made, but made it look like it was my fault. I told her boss I was quitting because of her, but he made it clear he wasn’t going to take any action against her.
So I decide to return to college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system to finish my bachelors. I won’t bother to tell you what I majored in because the major I picked was not very marketable or employable. I picked a major I wanted to do instead of a major that had plenty of jobs. I did minor in business though. My first part-time job was a disaster that only lasted two months. It was in the mailroom of a small independent company in lower Manhattan that specializes in travel and hotel reservations. I was harassed and bullied by my supervisor and a coworker he was close to because both of them are racists who have a problem with white people. On my last day there, it got so bad I almost got into fisticuffs with my coworker. The following Monday, I called my boss and told her I wasn’t coming back and told her what happened. She called me later in the day asking if I still wanted to come back because they had just fired him. I decided not to because the equally racist supervisor was still there. During my last year, I went to see a career counselor in the Student Affairs Department and he turned out to be a real abrasive asshole and a jerkoff. He even admitted to me that he hates his job and wishes he was doing something else and it showed in his interactions with me. He was clearly not interested in helping me and instead made rude remarks about my shyness and my wanting to work in fields he thinks I have no experience in or not qualified in. He bragged that he was interviewed on WNYW Fox 5 in New York about the job situation for college graduates, like I give a shit.
Shortly after graduation, I ran into a classmate in the New York subway on the uptown #1 Broadway local in lower Manhattan and initially we chatted amicably when I noticed a person sitting next to her was staring at me strangely with a goofy smile on his face. I assumed wrongly that he was a friend of hers. He asked me why I didn’t say “hi” to him. I asked him are you with her. He told me no. I told him “because I don’t know you sir.” Then for the next ten minutes, he gets up and goes into a loud verbal tirade against me in front of my classmate and everybody on the crowded train over my “rudeness” of “excluding” him and not saying “hi” to him. He even made it racial saying I deliberately slighted him because he was black. Finally, he says “hi” to the person standing next to him and he, having wised up after witnessing what happened with me, says “hi” back to him and they even shook hands, with the bully telling me “See? That’s how you do it,” and he got off at the next stop. My classmate has now taken a dim view of me over how I handled myself telling me “you should have said ‘hi’ to him and you wouldn’t have to have gone through all this.” She refused to talk to me throughout my ride home. She immigrated to this country from Peru as a child, so she very likely has an anti-American attitude. Plus she’s into the hip-hop scene, so I guess she grew up in the ghetto and, unlike me, has the street smarts in dealing with strange people on the subway. That incident happened almost two months after the Rodney King verdict and the riots in Los Angeles so I guess there were still a lot of hard feelings by minorities against white people.
I decided to leave New York shortly afterwards because of the nonsense I had with my psycho coworker from the travel/hotel mailroom job (who by the way lived only a few blocks from where I lived and I had two unpleasant encounters with him in the subway) and my experience with my classmate and the stranger in the subway. I felt like a hapless foreigner in my own birth city.
So I moved to San Francisco hoping for greener pastures socially and employment-wise. I would be disappointed. I got a temp job at Zenith National Insurance company working as a file clerk. The job was supposed to last several months. It’s a private company that examines worker comp claims in California. I had difficulties getting along with everybody from my mailroom coworkers to the comp claims examiners. Everybody complained that I was too slow and kept constantly pulling the wrong files. Hey, I can’t help it if a file folder with the number 700010 looks no different from 700100. I was fired after three weeks. This was the first job I ever been fired from. I then had two other temp jobs in which even though I worked with a group of people, I was always the only one being let go prematurely because I didn’t work fast enough. After a few months of finding no work and not scoring socially after running into nativist California bullies who have a problem with out-of-towners moving to “their” city in addition to their bigotry against immigrants, I voluntarily took myself to San Francisco General Hospital after I made a threat to a psychiatric counselor that I was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. After my stay, I was paired up with another psychiatric counselor who encouraged me to apply for food stamps and try to get assistance from a food bank. A few months later, I did get a full-time job as a purchasing assistant for a small-business ergonomic store in nearby Berkeley. Despite the low pay, the job was too detail-oriented. Plus I had to answer to a boss who was clearly impatient with me and gave me too many details to follow, including how to insert paper into the printer. She claimed that there was only one side of the letter-sized paper that gives the best results, which you and I know is bullshit, but she’s my boss and I can’t argue with her. I also believed she hated me because she’s a Chinese immigrant and I’m half-Vietnamese, so I believe there was some of that stupid Chinese-Vietnamese rivalry that the Chinese always like to start with us Vietnamese. I was fired after a few months. I did find work shortly afterwards at the now-defunct Lombard Institutional Brokerage, a small brokerage company. I would work in customer service answering the phone. The job was initially challenging as I had to field questions I initially didn’t know the answer to, but I believe I got better over time. Then my boss called me into her office and complained that I wasn’t stuffing envelopes fast enough and that she wanted me to work faster. I said I’ll try. Finally after three weeks, she called me into her office one last time and felt I still wasn’t stuffing envelopes fast enough and she terminated me on the spot. I told her flat out that she was unrealistic in expecting me to be a crackerjack worker after only three weeks to which she replied “I don’t want to argue with you.” So I left.
I then went to the California Department of Rehabilitation to seek employment help. One person gave me the business card of a temp agency. I gave them a call and they got me a temp job at another company of which I cannot identify (more on that later). I was told this assignment would be indefinite. It turned out to be the best paying job as it was the first job with double-digit hourly wages and I was happy there. I was a good worker and made new friends with my coworkers. Even my bosses liked me. Fourteen months later, my boss called me into her office and she told me a decision was made to make my temp position permanent to which I happily accepted.
A month later, a decision was made by senior management to relocate my entire unit to another state. All of us had the option of either moving to the new state or look for work elsewhere with the company in San Francisco. I was one of the workers who agreed to move to the new state. A few months after relocation, there was a shake-up in senior management of which my boss would get a new boss and my boss would have to hire a new manager. Both the new manager and my boss’ new boss were anti-male and both didn’t like me. I was harassed and bullied to the point that my boss, who used to be my ally, was now just as much my enemy as she needed to impress her new boss. After they threatened to fire me, they also agreed to give me severance provided I sign a confidential non-disparage/non-disclosure agreement with them. Altogether I lasted three years there, both as a temp worker and as a full-time worker.
So I was stuck in a low-wage right-to-work state with no job. I did get a temp job but in the meantime I was also looking for permanent work. I did get an interview for a civilian position with the city police. Unfortunately I failed the polygraph test because I tried to conceal that I left my last job under negative circumstances. I got depressed and checked myself into the hospital again for the second time. After I got out, I returned to my temp job and decided to get an additional part-time job to make up for the low salary I was making in my daytime temp job. I did find permanent work with the city taking graffiti complaints. I also joined the AFSCME union hoping they would help me should I have any problems with my bosses. As luck would have it, I did have problem with my bosses because they complained I wasn’t fast enough entering graffiti complaints in the database and that I worked too many overtime hours trying to finish up work. My union would not help me because I was on probation and they told me “when you’re on probation, you’re walking on eggshells,” meaning I am not afforded the civil service protection municipal workers get. I felt like I was throwing my money away on union dues. I was fired after nine months.
I did get a job working at one of the major state-run universities in property control. My immediate boss, unfortunately was not only a man-hater, she was also a bully and a micro-manager. One time she bragged to me many male workers have referred to her as a “dyke” and she didn’t care. In fact, she wore that title with pride. Finally I try to seek help with that state’s rehab department and after taking some tests, it was determined that my stress level was “through the roof” and “off the charts” and that there was no way I can hold any job in my condition. I then announce to my boss I’m going to apply for long-term disability but she decided to fire me anyway. Nice, huh? My stay there was two years. I should add during my employment with the state university, I did try to study for a Master’s in Public Administration and a certificate in Cisco network training. I failed both miserably.
So, for the last 15 years since 2002, I have been collecting Social Security disability and long-term disability from my last job. During that time, I went to film school, got my Associates in that field and have volunteered for film festivals. I’m also working on a short documentary. I also relocated to another state, this time a state that has a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature, so I don’t know how this is going to affect me should Trump try to kick me off disability. He says he wants to make sure all able-bodied people get off disability and work. Except I don’t know what his personal definition of “able-bodied” is. Plus he’s not going to take into consideration the disabled person’s age, health, cognitive abilities and what the employment prospects are for the disabled person. I think he wants to kick ALL of us off disability.
If I go back to work, the issues with my permanent disability will come up again, I’ll be fired again and this time I will have NO safety net to fall back on. Besides, I haven’t had a paid job in 15 years. Who’s going to hire me now? I should add when I applied for Social Security disability, I was approved in only four months on the first try. I didn’t need to appeal.