Dear Clueless Employer:
This is the second time now that you have accused me (–but only to other people. Never to my face, so that I could respond, when I finished being gobsmacked.) – of stealing a large check from you. The first one you lost – for six months! – in a stack of personal papers next to your desk. Had you included me in the half-dozen or so people who were told that I stole the check, I would have found it for you, probably within an hour or so. It’s not rocket science.
The second one was for 34,000 dollars. (The first one was probably the one that was for 20 times as much. But I don’t know for sure, because you never did say anything to me, even after you found it. I wonder if you at least told the others that you did finally find it?)
Because part of my job is opening your mail for you, paying bills, etc. (I don’t sign checks, though.), when I opened a letter from a financial institution saying that they had $38,000 for you (before taxes), I immediately brought it to your attention.
"It’s a mistake. My lawyers already took care of everything like that. Throw it in the garbage!!" you said.
Well, I knew the situation that you were referring to, and I knew that this was a new, separate, legitimate thing. I expressed as much, and you growled something further at me implying that I am a dumbshit, and you again said to** throw it in the garbage.**
I didn’t. I put it in a file, and I showed it to your daughter when she came to visit next. Sure enough, they had thirty-four thousand dollars for you. (on top of the half-million you inherited a year or so ago; and the almost certainly even larger amount you are due to inherit in the next quarter.) Your daughter said she thought you should give me a finder’s fee. She said she would talk to you about it. It honestly would not have occurred to me to ask for anything like that; but once she brought it up, it became a shining beacon of hope for me. Caring for the elderly doesn’t pay super well, but it is often rewarding, and it feeds my family okay. But there’s so many things I’ve been doing without.
I could fix my teeth!! I could get my only son something really nice for Christmas!! I could buy a bed! (I’ve been sleeping on a futon or mattress on the floor for a long time now.)
I should have known that it was too good to be true. After 2 or 3 months of happy anticipation, secret plans for wonderful surprises for my family and friends, and all the stuff like that that you do when you think you’re finally going to get a little money —
You found a way to deny it to me. You convinced yourself that the $30 check for your doctor’s co-pay which I brought you to sign was instead the check from the financial institution. That I had had you sign it over to me. ** You didn’t tell me about that, though.** You just refused to give me the money we had agreed on as a finder’s fee one day before. You told everyone (some of them are MY friends too) that I stole your check. Even the one guy who’s a very good friend of mine told me that he was wondering if I really did do it. Why? Because if you keep accusing someone of stuff, others start to mistrust them.
And why is it that I’m your #1 suspect for all nefarious deeds? Because you think I’m “lower class.” Huh, that’s right. I do live in what you probably think of as “the ghetto.” I do have bad teeth, and I don’t walk around with a stick up my ass acting all detached and removed and insincere, like many people who think they are “upper class” do.
But let me tell you something, you clueless asshat: my grandfather was listed in “Who’s Who In California.” (a foofoo social registry that nevertheless is an indicator of eminence.) He was a Master Mason, secretary of the Commonwealth Club for several decades, and had a long-running radio show in San Francisco. My brother has a PhD from Cal at Berkeley, and is a CGI expert and inventor with dozens of patents and his own Wikipedia page. I myself have a poem in a book in the Library of Congess.
Not that any of that means shit about MY integrity, intelligence, and character — but when I found out tonight that you don’t even have a college degree (well, you have an A&E for some kind of mechanic thing) — I just about fell over! And here all this time you’ve been such an insufferable snob about:
A) your “intellect,” and
B) your being somehow far, far above me in social class.
GENUINE people of good breeding are gracious to everyone. They do not flaunt their money, and they definitely don’t throw other peoples’ “social class” in their faces. No matter what your wannabe-patrician, bad-spelling-having, equally clueless snobby bitch paid mistress tells you — after I have given you more than FIVE YEARS of loyal, competent and affectionate service, there is NO NEED to hide the fucking silverware!
I do not steal because I could not live with myself afterwards. Or even during. “Social Class” is a human construct, an abstraction; it is not a real thing.
I don’t know why it even makes me mad, coming as it does from someone who once told me that gravity emanates out of the North and South Poles, and disperses over ground around the earth.
