No Thanks, No Giving

My last entry here was on Halloween. I was at the tail end of a week’s vacation, sitting at home eating Halloween candy and watching old Roger Corman movies on TCM. One of the movies, a weird 1967 chestnut titled The Shuttered Room, was broadcast in the wee hours of November 1st, and instantly brought me back to a time when I was twelve years old and watching “Creature Double Feature” on channel 56 out of Boston. It also brought to light the reasoning behind a certain fetish of mine (more about this in a later entry). So it was with that I entered into the month of November. I was well rested and riding a sugar high. I felt like myself again for the first time since the armed robbery last January. Then, as it usually does for me if I try to hold onto a good vibe for too long, things literally turned to shit.

I was still talking to Lynn about The Shuttered Room when we got back home from lunch on that Saturday. As is customary on the return home, we pulled the car up to the mailbox to see what bills were waiting for us, and that’s when I saw my 401k statements had arrived. I had been waiting anxiously for them ever since the stock market decided to take a nosedive, and I had expected to take a hit of maybe a grand or so between the two accounts. But I wasn’t prepared for a five grand loss. And that was from the first statement I opened. I lost another three hundred dollars from the second account. My vacation was officially over. Welcome to the real world.

For the last few years, I’ve had two different 401k accounts. The first one was from the days when I was employed by Osco Drugs. That account has been around since 1993 and had only lost money after the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after that, I switched the fund to the least risky of investments and the money continued to grow over time. Then we were sold off to CVS, where I opened a second 410k account. SuperValu took over the first account and slightly switched the various funds around. But, for the most part, the money sat there not losing or gaining a cent until July of this year. From there on out, it was a disaster. I’d only had about fifty grand in there to start with. That was all the money I was able to save in a fifteen year period. So to lose five grand of it just like that was shocking and it sent Lynn and I into a guilty panic. I kicked my ass for about two days, telling myself I should’ve just consolidated the two plans and rolled the Osco money into the CVS account. But at the time of the company conversion, we were warned against it because we were still waiting for the company match from Osco. So it was easy to just let the money sit there if nothing was going to happen to it. That was my fault and I knew it. So the plan was get online, take the money out, and roll it over into an IRA account at my local bank. Only, when I went to get online that night, I forgot my password to the account and had to have one mailed through the U.S. postal service. That was going to take at least three days, maybe even five. Meanwhile, I watched the news everyday and dreaded every drop of the stock market. The statement hadn’t even covered the month of October, the worst month of the recent crash. Things weren’t going to be pretty when that password arrived.

Eventually, I got into the account and that’s when I learned I had lost another eight grand in the month of October alone. At that point, panic left the building and was replaced with depression and fear. To this day, people are still predicting this recession to last another year or two. I couldn’t afford to let that money just sit there and disappear. So we set things up with our local bank and called SuperValu to roll the account over. I knew I wasn’t the only one fearing for his financial safety when the SuperValu phones answered with a recording that basically said, “If you are calling about the recent volatility in the stock market, please stay on the line to listen to some bullshit of how we’re going to try and polish this turd.” I wasn’t having any of it. I pressed “0” for the operator and had a real person walk me through the rollover process. When it was all said and done, they cut me the largest single check of my life and mailed it to me a few days later. Comparing the last statement I had printed from my computer and the actual check, I noticed I had lost about $500.00 inside of two days.

In the end, the fault is mine for not rolling that account over sooner. I should’ve done it right after Osco matched my pay. But, you know, everybody told me that a 401k, in general, was a pretty safe thing. Plus I thought the funds I had chosen were pretty solid, and not likely to be impacted by the fluctuations of the stock market. At least that’s how I had set it up when Osco was holding the reins. Somewhere along the line, SuperValu made enough changes (and I’m sure have the paperwork detailing all of this in the reams of stuff that was given to me when the store was changing hands) to really fuck the dog when the stock market crashed. The really sickening thing about all of this, though, is that the money I lost could’ve gone towards totally wiping out all of our credit card debt. We could’ve paid off the Mastercard, the Fry’s card, and the Sears card (which we used five years ago to replace our dying furnace). All of it. For years I had been trying to get Lynn to take a loan from the 401k to pay all of this stuff off. The interest on the loan would’ve only been six percent compared to the 11-19 percent we pay on some of these cards. It was a no-brainer for me. But she never wanted to do it. “That’s your future right there. I don’t want to mess with that.” But now a good chunk of it’s gone, never to return. And we’re thinking about taking a withdrawal in January to pay it all off, anyway. At this point, my future is pretty much fucked. I’d rather take that money now, take the hit on the fines and taxes, and get us in a better place in case the hard times stick around longer than planned. The money we’ll have on hand every month from not paying those minimum fees will be considerable and will keep us afloat. And right now, it seems like a pretty good plan. I’d rather use it to put us in better shape than to have it lying around waiting for somebody to lose it for me. At this point, my future is the furthest thing from my mind. All I want now, for myself, is enough money to buy a simple laptop to bang around with on day trips and enough money in the bank to afford emergency care for another cat should we decide to get one. Lynn can take out all the money she wants from that account to get the house in order. I just want those two things for myself.

With the money stuff all dealt with at the start of November, the rest of the month was nothing short of depressing because of everything else. I picked up eight more hours in the store by taking a shift in the pharmacy one night a week. In general, I didn’t want to do it. I had spent sixteen years avoiding the pharmacy, but I’ve been at thirty hours a week now for a year and we were starting to reach for the credit cards more and more to make up the difference. Unfortunately for me, I started this at a time when both the front of the store and the pharmacy are in desperate need of help. There are those who don’t understand that the money for my extra eight hours comes out of a whole different budget. So it looks like the front of the store is putting me on for extra time when in fact it’s the back of the store that’s paying my way, and the back of the store has now become 70% of our business. But the pharmacy is hurting, too. A new computer system is slowing them down and they’re having personnel issues of their own. So there’s a lot of people who are either jealous of me getting the hours or wanting me to become a pharmacy convert. When I’m in the front of the store, they want me in the back. When I’m in the back of the store, they want me in the front. And all through this bullshit, I’m having to learn a whole new set of skills just for these measly eight hours. I have to go to classes. I have to get certified for things. It’s not what I wanted to do at all, and yet it’s given me a good paycheck for the last four weeks. I’ve been able to finally get some breathing room after the last year. But it’s a fucking curse and once the dust settles I plan on trying to weasel my way back into the pharmacy full time. Because, as it stands, the front of the store has no goals anymore. The company yanked our fairly efficient Assistant Manager at the beginning of the month and left us with only the guy we all complained about last year. They’ve also added fourteen additional hours to our schedule in December (we will have to be open until midnight for the last ten days leading up to Christmas), but have not budgeted us for it. We have to make do with the hours we have. Which means only two or three people per shift through the next couple of weeks. Fuck. We were doing that back in summer during our normal course of business. I can’t imagine what kind of chaos the next two weeks are going to bring. The scammers and shoplifters are already out in force because they know how lean we are. Basically, there are only two or three of us at a time babysitting a store that has over a million dollars of drugs and merchandise in it. It’s only a matter of time before something goes bad again.

Which brings me to the only good news to come this way in a long time. Ironically, as we get nearer to these midnight shifts and my anxiety starts to shift into overdrive, there’s been a lot going on with the guy suspected of robbing me, my store, and a whole host of other local area CVS stores last winter. As it turned out, they caught the guy suspected in all the robberies last March as they were staking out a store that hadn’t been hit. They caught him in the act and he sat in jail for many months awaiting trial. When the case finally went to court, they found him guilty and he was facing up to seventy years in prison for the robbery and criminal confinement. On his way into the courtroom for sentencing, he wrestled the court deputy for his gun. The gun discharged into the floor and the deputy suffered minor bruises to his face before other officers were able to pin him down. But once the dust settled, our suspect confessed he wanted to kill the case’s investigating officer, his own parole officer, and the court judge. When I got wind of this news, I reacted to it with mixed feelings. I was sorry for the deputy who probably had the scare of his life. At the same time, though, this little stunt will probably keep Mr. Joshua P. Lindsey behind bars for a very long time. So it should be a win, right? But for me, it isn’t. At the time of my robbery, everybody told me, “Oh, you did the right thing. And he didn’t really seem like he wanted to hurt anybody.” Which was true for my case. Then again, I complied every step of the way. Later on, things seemed to escalate with each consecutive robbery. In one case, he used handcuffs to restrain a shift supervisor. When they arrested him, he had handcuffs and pepper spray clipped to his belt, and a police scanner tuned into local frequencies in his car. It was a matter of time until this guy went off and really hurt somebody. And this is what I have to think about while keeping a store open until midnight without any kind of customer traffic.

So, as a recap, 2008 really hasn’t been the best year for me. In January I was robbed at gunpoint. In February and March I suffered horrible back spasms. I lost Tigger The Wondercat in August. And in November I found out I lost about thirteen grand. I also had the worst Thanksgiving of my life. I worked eight hours and came home to eat two ham salad sandwiches. Lynn was asleep. We had decided to have our Thanksgiving meal at home on that Saturday instead. Only, that plan was changed to go to a restaurant that is never my first choice when I’m asked. All in all, it’s been a depressing month. And I’m not expecting much of a change for this month, either. I can’t afford much Christmas shopping for anybody since we’re waiting to do our withdrawal from the IRA in January. So there won’t be much gift giving. And knowing how bad off my family is, there probably won’t be much receiving. What can I say? If I don’t expect much from the holidays this year, I guess I won’t be disappointed. It’s a shitty outlook for the season, one that doesn’t sit well with Lynn. But it’s all I can muster at this point. Right now I just want to survive work and bring this year to a close. I’ll decide what to do next after that.

No thanks, no giving. Yeah, it must be winter, all right…

—

“Working Man”
by Bill Kirchen

Well, there’s hell to pay and no money down
They say what goes is supposed to come around
Now where’s it gone, when’s it coming back
It took a one-way trip down a one-way track
And now a working man can’t understand
How we can’t afford a ticket to the Promised Land…

Now, 9 to 5 won’t get it done
With your pension drained and a war to fund
They got your nose to the stone and your back to the wall
You’re a little bit less than nothing at all
Well, now a working man can’t understand
How we can’t afford a ticket to the Promised Land…

Well, now the wolf is grinning at the henhouse door
There’s a hand in your pocket and you know what for
Scrimping and saving won’t do no good
You got a Walmart check in the Gucci ‘hood
And now a working man won’t understand
How a company man became a hired hand
And now a working man can’t understand
How we can’t afford a ticket to the Promised Land
No, a working man can’t understand
How he can’t afford a ticket to the Promised Land
The Promised Land…