Rancho Tarzanadu: "Unemployment"

   

     Miss Linda was the government’s worst nightmare. She had been “furloughed” from her job of seven years due to the pandemic, and about six weeks in she was starting to realize that getting paid twice what she had been making while working, plus the Federal government’s stimulus check of $1,200.00 on top of that for doing absolutely nothing was not such a bad deal .

     Overlord L’Orange had been droning on and on about “getting back to work”, while Miss Linda was wondering what the big rush was? After all, it was dangerous out there! She felt much safer at home, thank you very much!

     One of the states – Georgia was opening back up now, and Texas was set to open up in a couple of days. There were more than 60,000 deaths in the United States at this particular juncture, and opening back up seemed like a horrible idea! Everyone had their eyes on Georgia to see what was going to happen. The Overlord encouraged everyone to “get back to work!” as soon as humanly possible, to boost the economy and make him appear not so desperately rotten. Literally, the only thing he cared about were his “numbers” in the upcoming November election; he felt that opening up the country would inspire people to vote him in for a second term.

     The people most susceptible to the Coronavirus were people of color, poor people, the elderly, and people with pre-existing conditions, with random young and “healthy” people dying here and there to raise the stakes even higher, like a spinning Roulette-Wheel-of-Death to keep everyone on their toes. Overlord L’Orange wanted everyone in the “service” industry to get back out there and earn their living, God-damn-it!

     Miss Linda had been sleeping in until 10:00 AM, instead of racing to her job as a Swedish Massage Instructor at a mid-size school bright and early before she’d even had time for her morning coffee to teach an overcrowded classroom of forty-plus people in a room built to hold twenty, max. The air was clear now, due to all the people working from home, and she had time to breathe and reflect, and had created a new routine of wandering around her backyard, stretching and picking the ripest oranges off the trees, and taking her own sweet time. She stayed up until 3:00 AM, no longer from pandemic-related stress, but due to her bottled-up creative juices which were now flowing again – she was writing again (what she went to school for, for God(s)’s sake!) and making jewelry and art pieces and music. She applied for a Master’s program in Humanities. The high-stress world of massage therapy was falling away like a shed skin, behind her. She had the “Seven-year-job-itch”.

     Miss Linda was trying to devise ways to make this last forever; not the pandemic, of course, but this whole getting-paid-to-stay-at-home-and-be-creative thing. She wasn’t even adverse to working, just working for someone else had started to lose the tiny bit of luster it had remaining. The asking for raises once a year and being given $1.00 more per hour. The whole no-medical-benefits thing. The extra hours put in with no overtime pay offered, and barely even a thank you when coming to work with some sort of flu bug and working a ten-hour day at the last minute because no one else was available. The forty-five minute drive to get there. The forty-five minute drive to get back home. The twenty-minute “lunch break”. All of these things were making her reevaluate how she spent her valuable time.

     And she was not the only one feeling this way.

     The entire country was reevaluating.

     The Overlord had opened up a sticky can of worms, which were now squiggling and wriggling all over the place, feeding on the corpse of the United States.