Trying to Go Back to Work Again

So this is the first part of what’s become my sor­ta-week­ly update. 

I went to meet a new team leader for the same com­pa­ny I worked for last fall. I thought they’d out­sourced every­thing to India by now. One of their big clients vetoed that, though, so they kept some sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the work for them here. The job has changed, though, and part of it involves get­ting stuff ready for the Indians.

Yes, work­ing will prob­a­bly will screw up my dis­abil­i­ty claim, though I’m not feel­ing ter­ri­bly opti­mistic about that any­way at the moment. “Failed work attempts” are any­thing less than 3 months, and they do show that I’m TRYING to get back to work. This job won’t last 3 months no mat­ter what—it’s seasonal.

So we’ll see how it goes. They had to do the full round of paper­work and back­ground checks again, which I find ridicu­lous. Then they refused to accept my expired pass­port for the I‑9 form.

No, it isn’t that the INS has a prob­lem with the expired pass­port. It’s “cor­po­rate” that won’t accept it. The INS is not only fine with it, but they don’t require a new I‑9 when re-hir­ing some­one who worked for the com­pa­ny with­in the last three years!

I can­not tell you how much it annoys me to hear peo­ple say­ing some­thing like “cor­po­rate said” with the same unques­tion­ing rev­er­ence that one might expect regard­ing pro­nounce­ments from a deity. 

Anyway—I did final­ly find my Social Secu­ri­ty card. The sil­ly thing was filed away where it should have been. I just did­n’t see it the first three times I looked there. So the I‑9 stuff is all done.

And now I’m so annoyed with them that I don’t know that I want to have any­thing to do with them. They’ve already sucked up sev­er­al hours of my time, unpaid, and much of my (in very short sup­ply) patience.

I cer­tain­ly have plen­ty of oth­er things to do with my time. The mon­ey would be very help­ful, though, espe­cial­ly with shad­owkatt’s birth­day com­ing up, fol­lowed by Yule. 

I’ll need to get an exter­nal key­board for my lap­top (had one, it stopped work­ing this past week)—or, at the very least, a USB 10-key pad.

Last year, the pay­checks took for­ev­er to arrive, and they were nev­er as much as I fig­ured they should have been. Piece­work is a pain in the ass, in terms of fig­ur­ing out what you’re being paid—especially when you don’t get any feed­back on qual­i­ty. Would it be so hard to say, “x of the y records you entered required cor­rec­tion, so you weren’t paid for them” each time?

On the oth­er hand, it is work that I can do from home. And last year, I did man­age to do it for a month or so. It did con­tribute to my inabil­i­ty to com­plete my course­work, though—yeah, those incom­pletes I’m still fin­ish­ing. The work did lead to a seri­ous flare.

I don’t know if being able to sit wher­ev­er I need/want to sit with the lap­top will make enough of a dif­fer­ence to let me do the work and stay health­i­er this time. 

No mag­ic 8‑balls at hand, either.