After my arrest and nervous breakdown in 200X, I was in a bad way. Convinced that the cops were out to get me, I would freak out at the sound of every siren that went past, of which there were many at Christian’s house, which was close to a hospital. I concocted elaborate conspiracy theories in which Federal Agents would break into my home and seize my “Anti-Establishment” books to prove that I was a nefarious Domestic Terrorist, then send me away forever on trumped-up charges. I needed to go somewhere calm and safe, so I could recover. Naturally, Granny’s house in my small home town seemed the best bet. So that summer, I moved back in with her.
I took a job at a manufacturer of housewares, as an IT Technician making about what I was making when I left Erin’s Startup. Nowhere near a middle-class income, but more than enough for a single young man in rural Kentucky to prosper on. The job wasn’t so bad at first. They had a lot of computers that were in bad shape and needed to have their operating systems reloaded, so I spearheaded the operation of creating new Windows images and pulling them down from the network to the workstations. It was slow work with a lot of sitting in a chair watching various progress bars creep up to 100%, but at least it was something. However, after those tasks were over, the job became nightmarish.
There was literally nothing for me to do anymore. I was completely unnecessary. I would sit at my desk and browse Yahoo! News and other sites I considered to be inoffensive enough that they wouldn’t get me fired. I didn’t know enough about the AS/400 to be helpful programming it (even though I put that as one of my credentials on my resume), and I didn’t know enough about Windows 2000 servers to correct the frequent crashes it had. So I was just left to sit at my desk all day, doing nothing.
One thing I did do a lot of was smoke cigarettes. I would still go out to the factory floor every 20 minutes or so and have one, much to the chagrin of my co-workers in the office, and especially to the scorn of all the blue-collar workers breaking their backs on the line out there. There was one particular fellow who reminded me of Bill’s father. He looked at me with palpable hate in his eyes every time he saw me out there, idly smoking next to the giant scale they used to weigh product. I used the scale to weigh myself multiple times per day, and watched as I ballooned from an Effexor-induced 160 lbs. out to 270.
Eventually I was so bored I started falling asleep at my desk, and the Plant Manager came personally to my desk one day and caught me, and said “You better get your act together, boy, or you’ll be out of here on a rail.” But he never did anything about it. I think my relationship as second cousin to the IT manager protected me from being fired. It was after several weeks of falling asleep that my immediate boss, whose name I can’t remember, gently suggested that it might be best if I resigned. After a short time I started to agree with him.
Eventually, after I had spent a day in a hotel room so Granny wouldn’t know that I hadn’t gone to work, I realized I hated the job and I wasn’t doing any favors to anyone by keeping it. I went to my immediate boss and told him that I was going to quit, but he could mark it down that he fired me, because I so obviously deserved it. I don’t think anybody would have fired me otherwise, due to the aforementioned nepotism. I was kind of Grandfathered in to the position.
In the evenings when I was working for this factory, Bill would come over almost every day and we would watch movies or play Xbox. I had precious little time to enjoy myself, however, it seemed as though almost as soon as I got home it was time to go to bed in preparation for another day of work. Yet another reason I hated the job intensely: it took up almost all of my free time. I was very grateful for this level of companionship from Bill, it gave me something to look forward to during my terrible days.
Eventually I grew tired of living with Granny and wanted to move back to Lexington. So I worked it out with Erin that I could stay with her for awhile. That ended up being a rather bad move.