Friday is the end of Granpa's contract. We've been preparing for that by very carefully planning meals so as to end up with as little refrigerated food and as few non-perishable foods as possible. We've gotten pretty good at that. As I did laundry last week, rather than hang up the clothes I folded them for quick and easy packing. We began yesterday making a couple of "leave in Texas" totes because we do tend to accumulate things...
About 10 a.m., Granpa calls to say - shock! - that the hospital wants this day, Monday, to be his last day. Wow. Talk about good news, bad news! The ramifications of that jewel of information are pretty extensive. First and foremost, we don't work for the hospital. Granpa's contract is with the agency, and if Granpa doesn't get paid, the agency doesn't get paid. We need to call our recruiter.
While half my brain is dialing her, the other half is trashing all of our careful planning and drawing up a new battle plan: what to do with a week's worth of food we won't have time to eat, packing in one day what should have been easy over the next five days, telling our landlord we're going to short her a week's rent, oh, and there's that pair of new eyeglasses that's not due in until Thursday... Well, first things first. What's the agency going to think of this.
Our recruiter has been on vacation, and today is her first day back. I hate to ruin her first day back, but, hey, we're grownups. She surprises me by saying that we are the third travelers to call with basically the same information. It's been so long since a facility has wanted to end a contract early that she can't even remember how to accomplish the paperwork much less allow it to happen.
Now a third of my mind goes to wondering what politics create this anomaly. (My daddy was an inventor. He told me to never look at a problem for one angle. Walk around the problem, pick it up, turn it over, try to look at the inside and the outside, figure out the why's and wherefore's, look for what to do - and then look for the unintended consequences of doing each action.) Why politics? Because several facilities in several different states simultaneously want to cut costs. What else besides politics (Obamacare maybe?) could cause that?
The recruiter has to get her account manager to reach out to human resources at our facility who will call the department head who will tap Granpa's supervisor on the shoulder and ask what's up. Then information will reverse up that chain and back to us. In the meantime, I'm reassessing our household.
Within the hour Granpa calls to say they have realized breaking the contract isn't as easy as they might have supposed - so they're just gonna bend it a bit. Granpa is to stay home Tuesday and Wednesday (officially known as being "called off by facility"), but work Thursday and Friday. Bummer. No pay for two days. Ha! But Granpa gets to help me pack! There's always a sliver lining if one chooses to look for it!
Beyond Friday? Well, agencies have submitted Granpa's resume to facilities in New York, West Virginia, Kansas, and "the mid-west." Beyond that, our Disaster Relief team is headed to Colorado Springs to feed the firefighters battling a wildfire out there. If timing works out, we may deploy to Colorado Springs! Ya' just never know where we might turn up next, but "home" would be a really good place to start...
No comments:
Post a Comment