In The Bitter Barn...

When someone is upset at work (usually the women) the owner of the place asks if we're in the bitter barn - well yeah I am. Does anyone want to know why? Oh, probably not but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm mad because....

• We don't have money to pay our vendors so they've stopped delivering the materials we need to make product for our customers. And we don't know when or where the money we need is going to come from.


• Many of our customers think they are the only ones we have and that we are just sitting around waiting for them to send work our way. They don't understand that sometimes we're busy taking care of other customers and can't drop what we're doing and move them to the front of the line all the time. Then they make it seem like we're providing bad customer service. WE CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH PEOPLE!!!!!


• We just had a vendor, who promised us completion of a project in two weeks - tell us they don't even have the coating compound we need and that it will be "a couple of weeks" before they get it - then it's another two weeks to actually coat our project. Our customer needs the items on August 15th and they are going to freak out when we call and tell them we can't deliver.


• Of male customers who don't like hearing what I have to say about their projects because I have a vagina so I have to get another man at my company to tell them the exact same thing I already said.


• We are in a severe paper towel and toilet paper shortage
• We don't have a working copier and I need to make copies on my home printer to keep doing my work.

I'm beginning to think my expectations are too high and that's another thing that makes me sad. I know it sucks a lot of places. Everytime I turn around someone is working longer hours then they should for the pay they are getting, and other people are being told that half of the people at their company will lose their jobs in two months.

I'm 35 years old and I worry how my family is going to survive the next 40 or 50 years. I worry about health insurance, life insurance, job security, the economy, the quality of our schools & education, how EJ will get into college, how to pay for college, everything. I wonder what we'll do when Matt is 50 years old and some company decides he makes too much money and that he's replaceable. You can only plan for so many contingencies. I feel like I don't have the luxury of missing even one step without it having profound ramifications that I can't even imagine yet. I'm just too tried for all this shit.