A gentle kick in the nards....

[friskers96]

Today I hit a low point. Maybe I'm just mentally at a low and my mind is making stuff appear that's not there. Whatever the case may be, today really sucked. I'm a blue collar worker, iron worker, welder, machinist, and pool dude.. I never went to college but I have always made a good wage since I work hard, do my job with the highest expectations of quality, and I have shown I'm a leader and I can think outside the box and run a good size crew. Last year I was let go from a job that I held for 7 years, another company took over our company and cut all but a handful of employees in the west coast office to save some money. This happened at thanks giving last year. Before Christmas I had found another job and life was looking good. Then something happened with my wife and she needed emergency back surgery. My new employer was sympathetic and bent the rules a bit and laid me off. So now we are on the road to recovery and running on unemployment. The welfare office was gracious enough to provide medical coverage for my two boys, but the wife and I are just S.O.L. That's fine, I can deal with that, they wife is covered through her VA benefits so I just need to be cautious and not get hurt. Over the last few months I had to tightly budget our money cause the banks damn near empty and there is 4 mouths to feed, so we are on the epic budget from hell.

Now that my pouty back story is out of the way, I'll get to what happened today. My oldest son today had an awards ceremony at school. He's seven and in the first grade, some know already that he has certain mood/emotional/attention disorders. He should not be able to do well in school, and he was almost placed in special Ed due to his issues. He achieved the highest test scores in his grade, has been A honor roll all year, and just all around rocked the very pillars of the first grade. He knocked back like 5 awards today, scholastic, citizenship, athletics, ect. A real renaissance man. I was so proud of him that I asked him what he wanted for his achievement. He surprised me, he just wanted a special dinner. He wanted me to grill up some steaks the way he likes with baked potatoes. So after the awards, I went on the holy quest of getting him what he wanted, he deserves it.. To save time I'll jump to the bad part, I ended up going to three albertsons stores to get what I needed. They do a BOGO deal on meat, preseasoned steaks, which are usually day old or the edge cuts off of finer cuts, it's not the best but its a cheap way of getting a nice tender cut at half the price. When I get to the second store they have one pack left and I needed an additional package, I was told by the butcher that he was going to get to it in about 20 - 30 min and that I should wait around because they go pretty fast. Ok, so I wait about 45 min and I see him tell other customers that asked about hamburger and stew meat that what was out was what they had, and minutes after they left more would be brought out. People got things from behind the counter with no issues and then the thing that really ticked me off happened. There was 4 London broils out on the shelf. A man came by and picked up all four and then went to the counter and asked if he was able to get 20lbs more... They all off a sudden was not busy in the back anymore and two people bent over backwards to make sure he got what he needed. In passing the butcher stopped and told me that he is extremely busy and that I'd be waiting about another hour for my BOGO pack, and that I would be better off grabbing what was available on the shelf. I looked on the shelf, and a six ounce steak was running $8+. Now the BOGO was 2- 8 oz seasoned steaks for 10 bucks and I'd get two more free. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I'm 34 yrs old and I walked out of a grocery store today almost in tears with my head down cause I felt like I was just told I'm to poor to be bothered with, people with fatter wallets were more important and waiting so I needed to get my butt outa the way. Then on top of that I walked out of the store without the steaks feeling like I just let my son down...

Sorry to carry on and vent, but I have really no other outlet to get this stuff out. From now on I'll post more about gaming, promise.