Sometimes You Just Gotta Say WTF!

I moved to Georgia in October 2017. Prior to my move, I was living in Nashua, NH in a 3-bedroom apartment with two roommates and two cats. One roommate was my best friend. He was in his 70's and I had been taking care of him for 4 years. He had a stroke in 2016 and he had his 2nd stroke 5 days before I planned to leave for Georgia. I had to force his daughter, who lived only 10 miles away from us, to take him in when he got out of the hospital! That's a whole other story I won’t get into now. The other roommate was a loser that was not paying rent or working.

I was married at the time, but I had been separated from my husband since 2014 due to his extreme alcoholism. I had a 3 year, on and off, relationship with another man that ended very badly. Upon the demise of that relationship, my husband had informed me that he had been sober for over 9 months and was in a program that would culminate with his being sober for a year by the time he got out of it. So, I agreed to give our marriage one more chance if he were to move down south with me to help me realize my dream of having a beach house in Florida.

I did my research. I looked up the cost of rental homes in the area that I wanted to live in, I checked the job market, and the rates of pay for both of us. It all seemed like it would be a dream come true.

In NH, my car was about to get repossessed, I had to give up a job that I had just gotten because the car was getting repossessed and I had bills up the ying yang. Just then, an old flame contacted me on Facebook and invited me to come down to Georgia and rent a room from him so, I decided to go for it. On the day I was to leave, I got up around 4 a.m. to take a shower and start packing the car. By the time that I got out of the shower the tow truck had come and taken my car!

Ever the survivor, I asked my roommate to let me borrow some money from his Social Security, so that I could rent a car to get me to Georgia. I packed my two cats and whatever I could fit into the back of a rented Jeep and off I went on my 22-hour journey south.

Upon arriving in Georgia, I came to understand that the room that I would be staying in had no bed (thank goodness I brought my zero gravity lawn chair; which I ended up sleeping in for 2 months), the promise of having a vehicle to drive until I could buy a car turned out to be his girlfriend’s gas guzzling, falling apart mustang, AND I could only use it for two weeks until she came back from her vacation. So, getting to Jacksonville, 30 minutes away to work for a decent wage, was completely out of the question and I was forced to take minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, jobs in restaurants working on my feet 12 hours a day in order to earn enough money to buy myself a car. Worst 6 months of my life!

April rolled around. My husband arrived from NJ. We both got excellent paying jobs at the same company in Jacksonville. It all seemed like it was heading in the right direction. Then we both got sick with colds. I went into the office sick and was informed, by the woman that I was going to end up replacing, that she had taken it upon herself to go over my and my husband’s finances and that she had told the owner of the company that if we did move to Florida sooner than later, there was no sense in her continuing to train me because she didn’t see me staying with the company very long. I was appalled! Who did this woman think that she was to take such a step? Then, the owner came to me, and basically repeated her sentiments! So, I said see ya later and I was done. The next day, my husband got a call from his supervisor saying essentially the same thing so, he said see ya later too!

My husband got another job very quickly. I was taking my time trying to find the perfect position to avoid the same thing happening again. The Friday before Mother’s Day, my husband came home from work with that old, familiar attitude and mannerisms and my worst fears came true; he had started drinking again! After 12 hours of fighting it out with him, I had him and his belongings in the car driving him to his friend’s house 6 hours away in SC, On the way, he begged and pleaded and even went so far as to say “if you leave me here I will die” but, I was done and shattered that I had let him do this to me again.

I ended up getting what seemed like it would be my dream job with a General Contracting company, right near the beach in Jacksonville; Office Manager of the Accounting division. One month into the job I got a PM on Facebook from my husband’s nephew informing me that he had a heart attack the day before and had passed away. I was heartbroken. My relationship with him lasted longer than any other I had previously.

After I took a couple days to grieve, I went back to work and tried to move on with my life. I had a great job to dive into, so it should have been perfect, right? WRONG! The manager and owner were horrible people that treated their employees like crap. So, I quit, and I got hired by another General Contractor the next day in the same neighborhood doing Bookkeeping. Perfect, again, right? WRONG! The previous bookkeeper ran the business into the ground, and he had to file bankruptcy!

So, now I’m husbandless, jobless and collecting unemployment and food stamps, stuck in a room of a house I didn’t want to be in, in a state that I didn’t want to live in, with people I didn’t want to live with for 3 months.

In December, I finally got an interview for a job that seemed like a good fit; again in Jacksonville near the beach (still trying to pursue that dream). On my way to the interview, I blew the head gasket in my car! I called my old flame roommate to come help me (he worked in a garage mind you) and 7 HOURS LATER HE ARRIVED! I was sitting on the side of the road, in black clothes, in Jacksonville, FL in 90° heat for 7 hours; no food, no water; no money!

I was furious! I had had enough, and I wanted out of there in the worst way! Three weeks later, I found my next job; 1 exit away from where I lived. My elderly, female roommate agreed to giving me rides back and forth daily. She and I concocted a plan that, come March 1st, we were going to move into a trailer that her friend’s friend owned, and life would be good. I planned to buy a car from the old flame’s boss, and I was just waiting for my taxes to come in to make all of this happen.

True to the path of this journey, my taxes were late! The moving day and time to buy the car approached and I ended up having to borrow money from the female roommate to get the car and get into the trailer. After our being in the trailer for a few days, it quickly became clear that we had made a huge mistake moving in there! There was no heat and yes, it gets cold in GA in March; it was 25° every day for 3 weeks and all we were given were space heaters. The place was infested with roaches and fire ants. My eldest cat got a horrible case of contact dermatitis from something in the place and it cost me $170 at the vet to clear it up. Just awful!

I had taken the job that I had on the promise that by March I would be making $15 an hour. Three weeks after moving into the trailer, I had it out with the owners of the company and they ended up telling me that they never promised me that amount and I was never going to get it! So, once again I quit the job.

There was a Florist, a marine welding company and a furniture store that round off this story of equally horrible places to work that all brought me to the point that I am at now of finally saying WTF and ditching the 9 to 5 and jumping in with both feet to working from home while getting my agency off the ground once and for all. It has been a wild ride that I really could have missed, but I honestly believe that everything I went through had to happen to get me off my ass and take this leap!

So, buckle up and join me as I work my way back to NH and build this bitch from the ground up!