Worries and Risks

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I don't know the correct answer to that question but I've been thinking of a lot of things around here lately -okay, I've been worrying and much of it has been about things over which I have absolutely no control either -which means it's the bad kind of worry, if you know what I mean.

My son and his employment problems are weighing heavily on my mind, to be sure!

He's been unemployed now for close to 2 months and that alone is bad. He hasn't been able to file for unemployment compensation to ease the lack of income due to an error on his claim last winter, that apparently was made by her previous employer. I don't know the full details there, just something about an error that was made by the employer and so, his unemployment was then discontinued after he'd been receiving the compensation for about 10 weeks and apparently, before he can sign up again, he has to repay the unemployment office for those 10 weeks of unemployment or wait 10 weeks or some such -yes, I'm totally confused over that mess -before he can sign up again. Go figure!

Add to that and the current state of the general economy, plus the state of his own financial status, and looking for a job with very few places doing any hiring, wouldn't you just know it, but his poor little old pickup truck, which is basically a beater but it usually got him to where he needed to go and didn't have a big payment to go with it, well the truck died on him about 3-4 weeks ago now too and of course, he has no money with which to pay to get the poor thing fixed -unless, of course, he finds a job.

But how the heck is he supposed to go job hunting with no vehicle? Pretty hard to do that so Mom loaned him the usage of my old jeep -which is no spring chicken either and a big old gas hog to boot so guess who also is footing the gas bills for him to look for work? Yeah, you guessed right if you guessed good old Mom is doing that too!

Well, around Christmas, several places where he inquired about work told him they weren't hiring then but would be after the New Year so this past Monday, he was out, running from one place to the next, talking to the personnel reps and such. And lucky -or so we thought -for him, one place was willing to hire him even though he has that stinking DUI on his driving record, ya know. (Remember it was that lovely DUI that set all this other stuff in motion then for the past year.)

The guy had him go for the obligatory drug test and told him that he would start him then this past Wednesday. Sounds good, huh? This would be a job running mainly tractor trailer dump trucks and most of it would be work that would have him home every day -which is a switch from his old job which was over-the-road long hauls in a team, with a sleeper cab.

That same day he also interviewed with a guy representing one of the many gas companies that have infiltrated this area due to the big gas drilling of the Marcellus Shale stuff. Now that guy said he couldn't hire him as a driver because he would have to go one more year before they would look at him in that capacity due to the DUI, but they were forming up teams for manual labor in the gas fields around here -kind of like the work he did back in September through November for another gas company that was in these parts. This job wouldn't pay as much as the trucking job -or so he thinks -but it would pay more than the previous job with the other gas company and that would be a definite bonus.

So what's there to worry about? Well, no matter if he does eventually start with the trucking job (which has been delayed two days now because the employer hasn't yet received the results from his mandatory drug test) or if he were to get hired by that gas company and go to work for them, it would still mean at least four more weeks before the kid will have any income whatsoever! Which of course means, another four weeks of his using my jeep and another four weeks of Mom funding his gas expenses too!

I'm kind of hoping though that he gets an offer from this gas company and takes it because that would relieve me of one small worry -him driving on the roads with a big rig and being winter, that means snow, sleet, ice and all that nasty driving condition stuff.

But one thing I wouldn't have to worry about if he goes to work for the gas company is that it isn't work on a rig in the ocean or something dangerous like that so I'd at least not have to worry too about figuring out where to find a Maritime Lawyer in the case of a major emergency, would I?

Now there, just by writing about my worries and his risk factors and concerns, I've now eliminated one little thing that I won't have to contend with when I start becoming the typical Mother Worrywort, ya know!