What to do after you've been Sh*t-Canned Part 2

I hope you enjoyed our previous discussion about attempting to smear your former boss's good name, or bad name, as the case most assuredly is.

I spoke in the previous installment about getting to know your town. You will want to familiarize yourself with the following locations 1. Fast Food restaurants 2. Banks 3. Bars 4. Walmart 5. Seven-11 6. movie theaters.

Civil unrest begins with baby steps. Not that we're planning to go full-bore revolution anytime in the immediate future. But if you've taken the steps, as I have outlined them, to collect unemployment you've got some time on your hands. Certainly there are no jobs just now, not even in the highly-covetted fast-food service, "opportunity structure." So, you must fill your time with something. And if the spouse is hounding you to "get out there," by all means make that away-from-home time productive and healing.

You're angry at big business, not any one particular political party; let's face that fact. It's corporate America, giant non-feeling entities hiding behind laws designed to protect individuals, who have forked all of us, over and over, in the anus, and left us smarting as we woke up from the credit-bubble hangover, trying to find out who stole our economy?

Getting some "get back" as James Brown called it, need not entail violence, but it should entail snide disobedience. And while you're at it, why wouldn't you hunt down the great, white whale: the huge payday?!

As Robert Kennedy said, some people look at the impossible and ask why? I choose to ask, why not?

Einstein had an equation. Energy is related to mass using his simple formula, allowing you to covert one into the other. So too, dollars, and time share a similar, directly proportional relationship. They have taken away your dollars for no good reason, but, in money's stead, they have left you something perhaps of infinitely greater value: time.

Time to explore all sorts of things you've never dreamed of. Look at the world sideways with me now. Observe as the grand, cafe-colored delivery truck makes the same turn, every Tuesday into the shopping plaza at precisely the same time of day. That turn, often as not, is taken rather haphazardly isn't it? The driver, often as not, busily fielding an angry phone call from his wife, and not pleased at all. Pity the driver, but damn the company, I say.

Are we on the same page, now? Are we smiling to each other across the gap between the time these fingers hit the keys and you read the words? Yes we are. Here I go, I am smiling to you, are you smiling back?

You set your black coffee down now on the table, look at the busy restaurant, patrons coming and going, managers shoulder-riding the downtrodden fry cooks and cashiers. So wonderful that cup of coffee, in its double, re-inforced styro shell, isn't it? Why? Why so much care taken with the construction of a cup? Well Virginia, some unlucky patron poured flaming hot coffee on her lap, didn't she? Ten years ago, wasn't it? Well, you say to yourself, the company - that rips down more Brazilian rain forest every day, than a hurricane could in a month of sundays - had to protect itself, didn't it? Thus these lovely, strong cups. Strongest styrofoam produced by science!

But, has the faceless corporation missed something? Let's consult our allies, TIME, and OBSERVATION. You note that every day, down to the minute almost, an hourly wage slave takes a bucket and a mop outside and slathers that walkway with soapy water. Strange, that the employee is directed to do this just after 9 a.m. every, single, day.

Hmmmnnn, that coffee is goooooood, isn't it? Take another sip, why don't you, and allow yourself a reptilian smile of satisfaction.

Oh, go ahead. Mark it down in a little notebook. Just don't put it in an email or on a blog, like I am doing. Look how giving I am to you! And I don't even know you! That's love, people. Can you feel it? I'm with you. I'm there for you.

Take your measely unemployment check to Walmart and get it cashed. Oh, we'll come back to Walmart: yes we will. Now, take the cash over to your greed-head bank. Open an account with some of it, or all of it.

Do they have egregiously bad terms? Take the time, as they make you wait, to observe the lobby. Do you see little old ladies whining to the bank manager that they simply cannot understand the statement? And that somehow they were smacked with $45 in fees to checking and savings, they were unaware of? Do you see other patrons quibbling with customer service because the bank card was hacked?

Welcome home. Poor service bordering on outright theivery to you, a recently unemployed father of three down on his luck, sounds like the beginnings of an intriguing legal case, doesn't it? Here you sit waiting for them to deliver the poor service, which is now your future asset.

Please feel free to comment with vigor: more when we come back.

And in the meantime, see below. Why here's a bright young fellow in Ontario, Canada. After he was "administratively partitioned in a reductive capacity" from his job, he very nearly jumped from that bridge into those frigid waters. Now look at him.

His wife thinks he's "out there pounding the pavement," right now.