The gorgeous gorgeous fanfic writers are being forced to work instead of write and it should be a crime

My last week

So it started two weeks ago. My company has always been a little too big for our building. We have about 75 employees, and over the last few years, we’ve moved around a ton of desks and workspaces to try and create as much room as we can out of nothing. We can’t revamp the building and add space or a second floor because it’s an old building and we’re grandfathered into a lot of sprinkler and fire codes and it would cost millions to fix that, in addition to then building more on. 

Since COVID-19, we’ve been working from home, it started right around St. Patrick’s Day. Our VPN got upgraded and everyone is on laptops to be able to do their work and tunnel into the network. We’d gotten more WFH friendly over the last few years as well. It used to be like, you needed to ask way in advance and make sure you were in a room by yourself and all these crazy rules. But now marketing apparently had a rule where you could work from home one day a week and it got a lot more lenient for everyone else. 

Our company does professional development for schools, and our biggest time of the year is summer when we hold conferences that school professionals and administrators come to. Obviously with COVID, that’s next to impossible to do and was gonna cost us big time. However, with these struggles, we started putting out more content about the virus and schools in the time of a pandemic, doing more webinars which are a huge hit, and also taking our summer workshops online via Zoom, and that’s been a huge success. So our company productivity hasn’t slowed at all and we’re maintaining profitability. 

So, our President announced last Friday that she was going to sell our building. We’d be looking into a temporary space for about a year while we look for a permanent location, and when we find it, it’ll be smaller, less workstations so that if you come in you can just plug in and work, and primarily, we’d work from home. It’s a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. My main goal was always to work from home. My buddy Rob from drumline works from home as a cybersecurity advisor for banks. He lives and works at home and then travels around and consults. It always seemed like a sweet gig, and I’m on a laptop anyways, does it matter where I am? I always wanted to work at the beach. Pipe dream is to work from the beach, live in a house with an ocean view. 

So now onto the good part. 

So I’ve been working from home since the start of pandemic, and just kind of finding places to go. I initially set myself up in our spare bedroom. We didn’t have a desk, but I was thinking this would be just a few weeks, maybe a month tops, I could deal. I worked on a little wireframe shelf that was barely enough room for my laptop, let alone a monitor, no room for a keyboard or anything. As it got hotter and there was no AC up there, I started working more in my room where I have a small window unit. But that meant I had to keep my door shut and isolate myself from my house. It was fine and it was a better spot but I can’t be shut away and not have my ear on everything for too long. I bopped around too, outside when the weather was nice, inside in the living room in my favorite chair. I didn’t want to set up shop in the dining room because I know my dad would have a coniption about me working there, or spin it like “Oh, I don’t want to disturb you or anything..” 

I’ve been worried about them feeling inconvenienced by me working anyways, and have gone out of my way to make it known that just because I’m working does not mean “do not disturb” or anything. If I have a meeting, I’ll go upstairs or find a spot and it won’t be a huge issue. 

So my dad, after me saying I’m gonna be working from home more permanently, he wanted to fix me up a spot. We have a back room on our porch which is really nice, but got kind of cluttered up by a lot of things. There’s a TV, a few bookshelves, my dad had a ton of camping and model-building stuff back there, a big case full of pictures, a fishtank, etc. My idea was literally to clear out a corner, put a chair there and a table and I’d be set. I don’t need anything complicated. I don’t need an office. My dad’s immediate thought was “I’ll give you two tables and then you could have two separate workstations and this and that” and I kept reiterating, I want a desk and a chair. “Well I want it to look nice for you out there! What if you decide to invite work buddies over to work on stuff together and you need some place to go, you can take someone out there now” We haven’t had company since I broke up with Sammie in 2017. I want a table and a chair. That’s it. I can deal. We could have been done the job in 2 hours. 

Instead, my dad insisted we have this French provincial desk out in the garage, buried under a mountain of shit. We would pull that out, clean that up, bring that in and it would be my desk. I told him I could buy one off of Amazon, I could find a table. I didn’t need anything super nice. I didn’t need it cleaned out there. I needed a table and a chair. He tried getting snippy with me, but I eventually just relented. 

So we spent two days last week cleaning the back room out, moving a ton of crap, turning everything upside down. Then emptying part of the garage which is filled with stuff. We threw out a lot but put a lot back too. All to dig out this desk which was also filled with crap and old and dirty. And then put all the stuff back in the garage. And it’s hot and it’s taking forever. Tuesday when we dug it out and cleaned it, we worked until 7pm. Keep in mind, these two days, I worked about a total of 3 hours. My dad wanted something specific for dinner that he can cook. So he fucking starts cooking and is screaming and yelling and freaking out, not taking into account the time or that he has to cook or anything before doing all this work. 

And then Wednesday is putting everything back. FINALLY Thursday and Friday we get some semblance of normalcy and I can get back to actually working. 3 days of craziness and running around and working in the heat and lugging stuff in and out of the house. All because I wanted A TABLE AND A CHAIR. 

OH and in the middle of going through everything, I also mowed the lawn because it needed to be done and I knew if I didn’t make time to do it, he’d catch me off guard and try and do it. And the one time I was gonna do it, he told me not to because it was too hot but I know if I said I wasn’t, he’d have done it not long after. 

Fast forward to yesterday. We have a window unit AC that has dripped water before. It keeps our entire downstairs level cool. When it dripped before, it got my dad’s recorder all messed up. We fixed that but then yesterday, because it’s been running so much cause we’re in a heat wave, it leaked and dripped right into the vent underneath of it and a small 2 square foot chunk of the ceiling fell out in the basement where all my dad’s stuff is. It didn’t damage anything too bad hopefully. But it was still a giant hole in the ceiling directly between the upstairs and downstairs. 

It happened around 2 and we got done and got everything put back with only the patch job left to do today. But god, the yelling, the screaming. And I’m not exaggerating, literally yelling “AAAAAAAAA,” the complaining. Not just like, this is a crisis, we have to calmly deal with this. Panic, freak out, yell, make everyone else upset. It’s crazy. We clean the area and put everything back, my dad cuts out a piece of drywall and wood to patch there, he’s gonna do it today. We fixed the AC so that the leak now is gonna definitely go outside the house and not drip down. But yesterday while he was taking a break to plan his course of action, I had a panic attack. I was sitting and waiting and I started shaking and I got really short of breath and I got dizzy and weak. It was crazy. 

I used to get panic attacks many years ago, and I had a full on nervous breakdown a year ago after my dad’s stroke. When Nancy left, that whole summer was yelling and screaming every day because we had 11 year old baby Rachel to take care of, no money, 9 dogs, a shitty pool, we basically revamped the whole house. I was having panic attacks all the time because it was like, from the moment I woke up to literally the moment I went to sleep, I had to deal with him. Fuck going to school, like now, fuck working. I couldn’t think about that or worry about that. 

Now with his stroke, it’s 10x worse because he has all of these limitations and he’s not taking care of himself and he’s stubborn. I barely know what I’m doing and he definitely will not listen to me, but then he hurts himself. He won’t eat and talk about how his blood sugar is so low and he feels like he’s fading and feels so awful and terrible, and I tell him he needs to make sure he eats something and gets something in his stomach besides an entire pot of coffee in the morning, and he won’t do it because he says his stomach doesn’t feel right. He’s losing muscle because he doesn’t eat. He doesn’t trust or like his doctor (that I don’t blame him for) but then he’s confrontational about his meds or about his healthcare. He’ll go and work outside in the sun and it kills him but he’ll do it anyways because “it needs to be done.” And since I quit band, I’ve tried giving all the time I can to helping him and I just don’t think he gets it because he’s worried about everything for so long, he can’t realize there’s someone else here. 

And personally, I think there’s a part of him that really doesn’t like me contributing. He tells me he appreciates it and likes it. But I think he almost gets jealous in a way, like when I cook or buy groceries, it’s not something he can hold over anyone, it’s not something he has to feel superior. He feels like he’s not providing, so he feels useless. I try to give him NOTHING to hold over my head. He has enough I guess built in by being my parent. So now I try not to let him give me money, or do things or buy things for me. And I don’t hold my stuff over his head. I buy things and do things because I want to see people happy. That’s all. I want to make people satisfied and content and that makes me happy. I’m constantly worried about everything and everyone. Running out of stuff, being out of stuff, someone not having something they need. I don’t cook dinner or buy groceries and go “I just bought groceries earlier!” and throw it up to people. If I ever do that, it’s because I’m defending myself from him either saying he does it all or that I do nothing. 

OH AND THEN TAX DAY. So, last week was the tax deadline and of course like responsible Americans, when given 3 EXTRA MONTHS to do taxes, we both waited until the last minute lmao. The day before (Tuesday when he was insane) he mentioned something and I had a free hour before I had to help him start working and cleaning shit, so I hopped on Turbotax and did my taxes. Took about an hour to dig up my Cab 1099, my 1040, my student loan thing. But once I found those, I did it in about an hour. He didn’t. He waited until the 15th. After dinner lmao. So he’s running around like crazy, and of course more yelling, more screaming, more complaining and bitching. He said he wouldn’t file taxes but he has to because Rachel is getting her Medicare because of him, because she has no income and isn’t going to school and is his dependent. So at the zero hour he goes on and files, and for some reason, don’t ask me why, he can’t e-file. He has to print and mail his taxes. So we have to run over to Staples with a flash drive and print the forms out, then go to the post office where the line is super long, to get post-marked postage and mail his taxes. The whole while he’s bitching, he’s insulting me. He’s not in an awful mood but he’s in a super cocky mood where he like, meanly jokes but is kind of relaxed. It’s hard to explain lol. And it so happens that day, once again after getting barely any work done, my job says “We need you to get us something by 11pm tonight” and I was gonna work on it after dinner but then had to be ready to help him, and by the time I got home again, it was 9:30 so rather than relax, I had to spent my time furiously working to try and finish this thing. It was crazy. Once again, I didn’t mind doing it, I gladly offered to help and it was fun going on a neat little adventure. But the fact that HE put off doing his taxes and he could have done them any other day, then waited till literally the last minute and then had to do all this running around and then I had to be the one to help him and help do it. Fucking insanity. 

This last week has just been insane. The amount of shit I’ve had to deal with, on top of COVID, him not being able to go away, ME not being able to go away. Fucking insanity. I’m really losing it.