Saturday, September 20, 2014

My prayers (7)

Whew!   I was not just tired, I was completely confused.  Strangely, a fellow I had briefly worked with for a few days called and wanted to see me.  We met and he astounded me with an offer that made sense, but did not really interest me, but he had an investor who was interested in financing my own company, but the hard cold facts were that I would be in debt to him if it did not go as well as my friend had assured him it would.

Then, the salesman who had hired me away from the plastics manufacturer came to ee me with the President of a new company they had founded and wanted me to open a branch office for them.  That sounded good a I knew I could do it and also, earn a salary as we got started.  My first friend loaned me a station wagon for as long as I needed it and so, I was back in business.

We rented a house near a school and found a dog for the kids.  My wife wanted to blame her "illness" on water pills she had been taking to lose weight, but I wanted us to see a psychiatrist to discuss the "real" problems we had as a family.  It never happened.  I buried my thoughts in the work I was taking on and we kept up the appearances.

The new job went well.  We had an office where we were able to recruit all the people we needed and our ales were strong enough to drive a Branch office of a major labor supplier out of the area.  Then, the "management" decided to open another two offices in areas that were very "iffy" to me and it troubled me as they were asking me to bring in sales for the others as well.  I had to be honest as I had come upon a plan that added more profit to the office I had started.  There was a female oriented  "gay" bar nearby and I learned that most of them were trainable as assemblers and there was such companies in the area.  To make a longer story shorter, our new customers were very pleased with their new workers, so much so that they were adding new shifts.  We had no problem meeting their requirements.  So much so, that we changed the office I started into a base of operations from which we were placing our assemblers in other areas as well.

I assumed we were becoming more profitable as a company and when they decided to buy out another supplier in the "skid row" area of the city, I became the Manager of that office.  I loved it as it gave us a chance to get many of the "winos" off the booze and provide them with a pay check so they were not dependent of the area's "rescue" missions.  The sheer numbers of the available workers made it even easier to solicit business.  So much so, the "management" started talking about going "public" and that should have meant huge bonuses for my efforts.  I was the one bringing in the sales and monitoring the dispatch of our workers.  I had assembled a very dependable crew and assumed it was time for me to get paid for all of the efforts I had put into the business.

Then, one day two "suits" walked into our office and asked to speak to me, privately.  They were from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and they had questions as to how we intended to pay for the employee deposits the main office had been failing to pay for several months.  I had no answers for them.  I was not a corporate officer and paid no attention to their procedures as long I received a pay check and reimbursement for costs I had paid out of my pocket.

I sat down with the officers and asked why this had happened.  They insisted they had had expenses they had not anticipated and promised they would take care of this discrepancy soon.  We were given 90 days to make the arrangements to pay what was owed and when they did not, the IRS closed our offices on the 91st day.  I was out of a job - again!

And I was tired, tired of dealing with people I could not trust, tired of trying to live off of promises, even tired of the way my wife had continued to lie to me and fail to understand our situation. 

But I had to move on - no one hires people whose only virtue was the fact they were tired.

And fortunately, I found a paycheck in the form of a retired USAF officer who had purchased a franchise in the temporary help business and knew very little about the dynamics of the industry.  I had this knowledge readily available and he offered a paycheck.  It was another, "new" start.

No comments:

Post a Comment