CONTRASTS

I just ran across this email I sent to my sisters and some friends in February. Things are *incredibly* good right now, and I was struck by the contrast, so I'm going to post it again:

I just want to tell you guys all in one place about my last two weeks, so that if you see me falling apart a little bit, you know why. I'm going to tell you all about how humiliated I have felt, because you're the people I could tell. I'm sorry that this is incoherent rambling, but it's the best I can do right now. I'm also very sorry that it's long. You don't have to read the whole thing if you don't want.

By the way, it strikes me that I should say right up front that I am all right. I will be fine. Everything will be fine. I believe this. I am not just putting a good face on this. Everything will be fine. It will be fine.

I was scheduled to return to the US on last Thursday (the 6th), and as you know, I was only going to return if I didn't have a job. I was going to a second interview for a job I really wanted, and was supposed to hear back on the Wednesday before I was supposed to leave.

In the meantime, Paul had given me an eviction notice, for Saturday the 8th. So I had to go on the assumption that I would get the job, and look for a flat, just so that if it did happen, I would be prepared.

My friend, Michelle, was here during the same week. I didn't have any money. I'm going to ask you all not to ever mention any of this to anyone who might let it get back to Michelle, because I was trying very hard to hide it from her. I didn't want to ruin her vacation, and I do not want to ruin her vacation in retrospect either. I don't know whether or not that makes sense to you, but the people I'm sending this to are all people who I think will understand that.

So anyway, on the 4th, two days before I was scheduled to leave, I got a call from the people who had been flaky over Christmas, asking if I would be willing to work for them as a contractor. This made my decision difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing, if I were to decide to stay in the country based on a job offer from people who had already proven themselves to be really, really flaky, well, that's a kind of bad idea. Also, taking a job from them would mean swallowing a whole lot of pride. They kept asking me if I'd be available, and then kept saying that they really weren't sure they wanted to hire me, and it had gotten to the humiliating point. It had very much taken on the tone of "Do you like us enough to work with us? We're not sure if we like you that much yet."

At any rate, the hiring manager for the job I really wanted had, after the first interview, said that he wasn't sure whether or not I would be shortlisted for the job, but that he'd like to get together anyway, in a social as opposed to business setting. Please don't ask me why this felt humiliating, but it did. I can't explain it. I can tell you that it would be illegal in the US.

So...there I was, two days before my flight was supposed to leave. I called the people at the job I really wanted, and let them know that I was being offered a job. They told me they could let me know the next day-the 7th, the day before my flight was to leave.

In the meantime, I had to go to Paul and ask him if he would mind if I left some of my things in his attic. Because if all else failed, I could try to stay in a hostel in the city, but if I did that, I wouldn't be able to bring all of my suitcases with me, because of the space constraints. This was another humiliating thing-Paul had firstly given me an eviction notice in a pretty bad way, and now I was having to ask him for something. He was aware of this. I told him that I was looking at a new place to stay, and he asked where it was, and then got this kind of mean smile on his face and said, "Well, that's not going to be very convenient to the job in Brixton [the job with the flaky guys], is it?" This was because Brixton is quite close to Gipsy Hill, and Paul was happy about the fact that moving out of his house would make things more difficult for me.

He was probably happy about this because he had been hitting on me since I moved into his house, and when I got in an argument with him over Christmas, it was basically like I was turning him down. His attitude was basically the kind of "bet you wish you hadn't turned me down now" thing.

So...I'm sorry this isn't very coherent.

I had borrowed money from Michael to take Michelle around while she was here, because I didn't want her to know how bad things were for me, and I had promised her months ago that I'd show her around.

Just a short story about things being tough:

Natalie had sent me some groceries a while back. I saved some corned beef, an onion, and a potato out of this so that I could make Matthew dinner on his birthday. I really like to cook for people, and I know that this may sound dumb, but the idea that I wouldn't be able to make anything better than corned beef hash made me feel pretty bad. It's greasy, it's not exactly sophisticated food. It's white trash food. But it was the best I had. Matthew was incredibly nice about this. He really acted like he liked it. He was incredibly nice about it.

I also saved out an orange so that I could make a cake for him out of the flour and stuff I had in my cupboard.

In the week and a half prior to Matthew coming over for his birthday, I was down to basically mixing flour with spices and water and frying it on the stove. I knew that things were going to be fine, I just had to wait for a while. I wasn't too bothered by this. Believe it or not, I didn't feel sorry for myself over this.

I called Matthew to ask him if he would come over so that I could make him dinner sometime near his birthday. He said, "Well, my birthday's Sunday. I don't have anything planned for then, but I'm sure that something will come up. How about later in the week?" I know this may sound dumb, but this really hurt my feelings. I mean, it was basically saying that although nobody had asked him to do anything, he wanted to save Sunday for his real friends. The thing that is so stupid is that I assumed that he wouldn't be free on his birthday, which is why I had asked for time near his birthday. But being actually told that he didn't have any plans, but that he wanted to make sure not to make any with me still made me feel stupid.

Anyway, his birthday came, and it turned out that Colleen didn't do anything for his birthday. He had a bad day, and felt kind of badly about having nothing going on. And this made me feel like, well, he'd rather have a rubbish day alone than spend it with me. So then he came over on the next day, and I had to make him a rubbish dinner and I had given him rubbish presents, and the only reason I'm relating this story is because it's sort of background for how humiliated and awful I have ended up feeling all month.

Matthew was really, really nice about coming over to my house. He was also really nice about the presents I gave him, which were rubbish. And he was really really nice about dinner.

So anyway, when Michelle got here, I borrowed money to take her around. Of course, borrowing money from someone who has given me so much over the last year and has taken care of me so much, felt pretty bad. And borrowing it so that I could just play, you know, not for legitimate work-like purposes, felt even worse. Michael was so nice about it. He just kept giving me money to do things.

My ankle is still broken. While I was walking around with Michelle, it got worse and worse. By the time she left, I could barely walk. Toward the end, she kept bugging me about how slowly I was walking. I told her that I had a broken ankle, and she said, "Well, it was broken when I first got here, and you were walking on it faster then." I tried to explain that it was hurting, but then I felt kind of dumb about it. By this point, I'm feeling kind of dumb about everything.

Having Michelle here was really good, though.

So anyway, while she was here, she kept asking to meet Matthew, because I talked about him a lot back home. Matthew had said he'd be around, so I kept calling him and emailing him, trying to get together, but he kept not responding. After a while, Michelle told me that I was being pretty bad-pretty "girl." She said that if anyone was that bad about responding to calls, that I was pretty pathetic for continuing to try to call him. She said to stop calling, because she was too good for someone like that, even if I wasn't.

She was trying to be nice. I know if you think about this, you know it.

Anyway, Matthew finally called while Michelle and I were having coffee a few blocks from his house. He agreed to come to dinner the next night at my house. He said he wouldn't have coffee with us then because he was with Colleen and what we were doing didn't sound very interesting. My self-esteem at this point was skyrocketing.

At any rate, the next day I got a call back from the flaky people, saying that they were for sure offering me a job. It was a month contract.

So in the meantime, the guy from the job I really wanted said he would email me that afternoon, telling me whether or not I got the job. It was really hard to keep calling him back and asking him if they had made their decision, but I've had to do so many things that were humiliating at this point, and I really didn't have a choice.

While Michelle and Matthew were at my house, Michael called me from San Francisco, and I asked him to check my email and read it to me. He read it, and the guy told me I didn't get the job, but reiterated that he would like to get together socially. It just got worse and worse. Worse still because I was having someone else read this to me. Even worse still because I had friends over and couldn't fall apart, but had to act like everything was fine until they left.

So I decided to stay anyway, and take the flaky job, because Michael had told me he could lend me the money for a month's rent, and I felt like if there was any way at all of staying, that leaving would be like giving up. So I decided to stay.

The next day, after I had missed my flight, the recruiter for the flaky job called, and said that she couldn't get ahold of the flaky guys, and that if she didn't hear from them by the end of the day, she would write off the job. Which meant that I'd be in the country with no job.

In the meantime, I was still trying to find a place to live. Paul had written me a note that said if I wanted to, he could let me stay at his place for another month, but that it would be very inconvenient for him, and by the way, if I stayed, he would expect the rent on Saturday.

So I was looking at job ads, trying to find a place to stay. I had to use Michael's credit card to access the ads, and I felt really badly about this.

Incidentally, people are really rude when you're looking for a room.

I finally went on Thursday to this one place that was in a really bad neighborhood. I couldn't find the apartment. It was raining, and I don't have a warm jacket, and it was really cold. My ankle was to the point where I literally was dragging my foot. And I couldn't find a telephone nearby to call the people whose apartment I was going to see. So I stood in this bad neighborhood, crying, because I was in so much pain.

I finally went to a neighboring building, and it turned out that they had given me a faulty address, and so I found the flat. It was on the fourth floor, which is like the 5th floor US. I was hobbling at this point, and thinking about carrying all of my suitcases to the train station, then from the train station, then up all of these stairs. I was trying very hard not to panic, because I knew I had little choice.

At any rate, the apartment wasn't too terrible, so I asked about taking it. They said they'd call me back the next day. Long story short, they couldn't contact me, so they gave the flat to someone else.

In the meantime (again), the recruiter finally got in contact with the flaky job people. They said they would like me to start Monday. I contacted the work permit agency, and they said that it wouldn't be a problem, and then they gave me a list of things they would need to get the permit sorted. I said I would try to give them those things on Monday.

On Friday, I went to another flat, and I really liked the people I met. They told me I could move in the next day. Yay! I borrowed money from Michael for rent and for transportation. Michael is a saint.

So I told Paul that I would be moving on Saturday, but that it would take me a very long time to get all of my things out of the apartment and into my new flat. I made this out to be bad enough for him, that he offered to drive me up to the new flat. So I got my things moved in. It's a little rough because my flatmates are very fashionable sorts, and my shoes all have holes in them at this point, and I'm trying to pretend that my clothes aren't old and torn. It's just such a relief to be out of Paul's house, though, that you wouldn't believe it.

Anyway, I started work on Monday. They said, "Oh, we don't want you doing development, we want you to write documentation. I hope that's okay." This is bad because I basically had to accept it regardless. They make it obvious that they know this. I don't want to go into details here, but there is one person at this job who feels threatened by me and tries to make me look stupid at least twice a day.

I got the flu over the weekend, so I started by stopping off at the store on the way to work and getting tissues and flu medicine. I have tried to pretend that I'm not sick. I'm exhausted, but to be honest with you, my self-esteem and pride have taken such a beating lately that a little thing like poor physical health is completely inconsequential. Remind me also, if you're a girl, what it's like to start your period on the second day of work, especially if you're a hemophiliac who is going through a particularly bad patch. I need to see a doctor pretty soon.

At any rate, I had left my money at Paul's house, so he was going to deliver it to me at the tube station, because he has to stop at the same tube station I do on the way to work. He was late, so I had to rush to get to work on time. It's not a big deal, because I could start any time between 9 and 9:30, but I wanted to show up at 9 and ended up barely making it at 9:30. So I felt like I'd made it off to a bad start, showing up barely and then sneezing my way through the day.

I got an email from the work permit people that day, saying that in exchange for doing my permit, they were going to take 30% of my income. They had done no work for me, and I was understandably upset about this. They phoned my mobile twice that morning, knowing that I was on my first day of work. I turned off my phone after the first call. I had forgotten to turn it off. In case you're wondering, I had run out of pockets and put the telephone down my blouse. I was talking to my new boss when my breasts started ringing. I don't think I need to go further with this topic.

Anyway, the woman who rang said she left the office by 2 pm, so I had to call her the next morning. She rang again, but of course I had learned to turn my phone off, but had to ask my boss if I could take a break to make a personal call to work out work permit stuff. This looks really bad. He told me I could call from a conference room. I did. You could tell from outside that I was having a very tense conversation. Basically, I told the work permit people that I would not give them a percentage of my income until they could send me verification that they had actually been looking for work for me (their half of the contract I had with them.) Long story short, they refused, yelled at me, threatened me with deportation, told me to find someone else to do my paperwork, told me that if I didn't get a permit through them that being at work that day was illegal, and then hung up on me.

They then called the recruitment agency that got me this job, and tried to get me fired from it. They said that I had sworn at them on the telephone, and they had been forced to hang up on me. They said that working here was illegal, and that if I didn't work with them, that anyone who paid me was breaking the law.

The recruiter has been working with me since November. He has seen me dragged through hoops by the flaky people here, and he has seen me be polite and cheerful to everyone involved. His response to this woman was, "Simone. Swore at you. I find this very hard to believe." He then informed her that there were many options for getting a work permit, and that she would have a much more difficult time trying to scam a recruiter than she would trying to scam people like me. He was very polite and professional to her, but told her that she was involved in a fraudulent business. He said that her accent became less and less posh the longer he talked to her.

Meanwhile, of course, knowing that she would try to get me fired, I had to go to my new boss, on day two of the job, and inform him of what was going on, dragging him into day two melodrama. Lovely.

I met with some other work permit people the next day. They have not officially agreed to work with me yet, but have basically said that they probably will. They said that they don't usually work with people like me, but they are considering making an exception because I have been mistreated. They're nice, but the element of pity is kind of hard to take at the moment. I am going to call this afternoon and see if I can get them pinned down, because I gave them the last of the documents they needed this morning.

Anyway, I have been running around trying to get this sorted every moment that I have been not at work. I took my boss to a pub after work to get him drunk, basically because I figure if he has drunken bonding, he'll be less likely to fire me if the work permit people make things worse.

I can't remember the other things that have happened, up until yesterday. Two different people said kind of mean things to me at work, and I don't know whether or not they were joking. But I was having a really rough time, added to because the people I work with are not very nice. I don't want to really go into detail about it. But I was trying really hard not to cry on the train ride home, and just kept praying that things would be better when I got back to my flat.

When I got to my flat, my roommate came home and told me that her sister is moving to London next week, and so that after that the room [my room] "will no longer be available." So I have ten days to find a new flat. Please don't ask me why, but being kicked out of your flat is humiliating. All of this is just humiliating. I can't explain why, it just is. I have nothing, and I have to keep begging people to help me.

I called Matthew, by the way. I've been really trying to get things fixed with him because it is important to me. I don't know who is right and who is wrong any more. I don't know what is right or what is wrong. But I can tell you that my attempts to fix things aren't helping, and trying to fix things when I'm already dragged out and feeling generally trampled down is probably not terribly wise. I just feel like if I give up on this, then I give up on life. Please don't ask me why.

Anyway, if I'm not writing, it's just because I'm busy. Everything will be fine. It really will be. I'm okay.