When I say I don’t work I only mean that I ended regular full time employment at age 40. Since those like me who are on disability do not seem to need it, I will explain: Though highly intelligent, I was born with physical problems, and severe learning disability that got progressively got worse. I could only graduate High School via a special program for problem students. I did not go to college since no college could accommodate my needs. From there I worked many jobs, but could only secure very low paying jobs. Half the time I could not even find work until my father stepped in for me. For example, one time my father gave my manager money for Christmas. Another company hired me because my father’s company was funding theirs.
A boss from yet another company hired me because his child was enrolled at my father’s day care center. After my dad retired from full time work he told some security companies that if they hired me he would work for them part time in addition. After he would quit, they would find an excuse to fire me. Then there were cases of mistreatment and discrimination. For instance, I was fired for supposedly attaching and raising the American flag upside down on a flagpole, which I would never do, while a recent Muslim immigrant from another shift had the same job and was likely to have done it. In another company, while standing on a very high ladder, another employee shook the ladder to scare me into thinking I might fall.
And I had an especially hard time understanding foreign accents, making it hard to communicate with Mexican and Indian employees, which made them angry at me. At a company I worked for the longest, fellow employees kept blowing big farts, which I had to smell and breathe. Office people mixed their garbage with the discarded paper I was to feed into the shredder. It had lots of boogered Kleenex and old food which small flies circled around. Once here was even a dead mouse. They would not stop even after they were told repeatedly. In a number of companies employees would go out of their way to get me in trouble for minor rule violations, while rule violations of others were ignored.
Then there were safety issues. Once before even getting to work, my car was crushed by a bus due to my driving error. Although the bus driver lacked the sense to slow down, seeing I was slightly over the median, only I got a ticket. And no damage to the bus. There was an incident where I was responsible for opening and closing big shop doors. I came within a fraction of a second of smashing the top of a truck with a door. At that company, for different incidents, I got two warning notices at once. One for accidentally putting a 460 gauge rod into a 320 gauge compressor. The supervisor complained that the compressor could have spit out metal pieces like deadly bullets. Yet the company did not care enough to make sure the machine had its proper 320 gauge head, to make it impossible to insert a bigger rod.
Instead they substituted a bigger bore for the missing on, creating the likelihood of eventual error. My other warning was for correcting my mistake of putting the wrong rods in the furnace when it was set on a different temperature to heat treat different rods. The supervisor said that after I removed the hot rods, they came close to an electrical box, which if struck would have caused an explosion and destroyed part of the company. Yet I never removed rods until I was taught that by a fellow employee. He would also tease me by pulling out a 2,000 degree hot rod and chasing me with it. He was never caught or reprimanded. Years later in a different department, I was taking caffeine pills to help cope with my twelve hour days of hard physical labor and no air conditioning.
I accidentally overdosed, became extremely ill, and could not go to work the next day. This stressed others in my department. In his haste under the heavier workload, an employee was wrestling with a heavy machine, which fell on him, scalped him, and put him into a coma. While working security at another job, I found much blood smeared about. It was a freak accident where somebody collapsed right in the middle of a tiny staircase which I failed to find in a timely fashion. Though I called it on they practically tried to blame me for murder, then fired me. At yet another company I got the ends of two fingers crushed to a bloody pulp in a punch press. It was due to my mind wandering, and also because the man who set up the machine did not screw the guards down low enough.
After I went to the hospital, they thought to blame me for lowering the guards to where they should be in order to avoid blame for the accident, although they realized that it would be impossible since I had to hold my crushed fingers together with my other hand to avoid having my fingers falling off and bleeding to death. They finally witnessed the set up man tampering with another machine and fired him. At yet another company still I was simply sorting metal washers. But I was reprimanded because I mixed two different washers together, which looked identical, yet one had a different tolerance. A supervisor told me that I could have caused people’s deaths if the washers with lower internal strength were used to hold a trailer together.
Then there was the ongoing aggravation that my learning disability caused others. Listing all the troubling incidents could make this post ten times longer. Then I was occasionally harassed by married people, both men and women, because I had nothing to do with relationships with women. That’s even though no single woman at any company had any interest in me. Then there were conflicts simply due to my unusual personality. Finally I developed a permanent and serious nerve disorder, likely in part due to heart damage from the caffeine pill overdose. I get panic attacks which are debilitating without emergency medication, and my sleep is regularly disturbed.
So for those who complain that I’m cheating the government, SHUT UP. You likely wouldn’t even want me to work if you had to work with me. So instead of adding even more scorn on those whom wicked society refuses to accommodate and treats like inferior beings, stop treating people who are different as scapegoats. In fact, do your part to reverse the situation. And concern yourself with the tens of thousands who are clearly welfare cheats, don’t be one of them, and try doing something about it.
K C Sunbeam 