I’ve enjoyed a small variety of jobs in my working lifetime. I’ve been a liquor store cashier, a candy store attendant, a file clerk for a tuna company, a psychiatric attendant in a mental hospital, an assistant stage manager for a summer musical theatre company, a union election monitor, a customer service rep for the water department, an actor, artistic director, sandwich shop minion, waitress, employment counselor, performing arts center director and then employment counselor again – my current job.

Of course, the most satisfying and longest periods of employment were as an actor and then artistic director of the small acting company I’d help to create. Second to that was my ten years as director of the performing arts facility.

But as satisfying as those jobs were, well, this is Oklahoma – a career in the arts will barely keep your cupboards stocked with Ramen noodles, to say nothing of paying the bills. My roots are deep here and, rather than heading for more verdant artistic real estate, I opted to stay and entered the eight to five world of a steady paycheck and health insurance.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last eight and a half years. Collecting that steady paycheck and setting sights for a longed for retirement. It’s what you do when you’re my age – and those who don’t are just work-a-holic nuts. Or just plain nuts.

I figured I had about three years before even considering jumping out of the airplane (figuratively and literally – I’m planning the sky dive for number sixty). Funny how fast the worm can turn – hell, it can break the sound barrier in it’s speed. I’m standing at the hatch and about to be pushed into the great beyond like it or not.

As a Philly friend said this week – I hope my parachute will open. Strike that – I just hope I have a parachute.

So, what happened?

I work for an agency that is funded with federal money (administered by the State) to do what we do. The Feds, as we affectionately call them, decided that the States weren’t spending the money given them, which is in turn allocated to entities and agencies – like the one that employs me – to do what they do within their respective state.

Ten million dollars was rescinded from my state. Three million of that was due to an error in a report our state submitted to the Feds. That translates to a deficit of over a hundred thousand dollars in the budget of the agency which employs me. Which leaves us enough green to stay in business until about, oh, December.

There it is – I’m losing my job and the incompetent jackass state official incompetent jackass who sent in the erroneous report gets to keep his. And don’t even get me started on our theory of the real reason the Feds took the money back. Can you spell I-r-a-q?

I expect extreme apprehension and maybe a little panic to set in in a couple of weeks or so. Right now, though, I’m fairly calm and resigned. Kubler-Ross’s first stage is denial, isn’t it?

I will be doing my best to see this as an opportunity – but, truthfully, right now I haven’t the foggiest of what I’m going to do.

Do I want to pursue another eight to five? Do I want to strike out on my own? Do I want my lottery tickets to hit?

Well, yeah on that last one.

Oddly coincidental, I’m an employment counselor (for a few minutes longer) working in an agency which is housed in the former veteran’s ward of the mental hospital where I worked as a psychiatric attendant – my first job upon returning to Oklahoma. There’s some irony in there somewhere….

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