Homeless & Unemployed

I hadn't scheduled another time to go in to training at the bagel shop so I called them up and they said they'd get back to me. A few hours later the owner/manager (still don't know which he was) called back and told me that they didn't want to continue with me but that they would of course pay me for the hours in which I'd worked. I was too surprised to even ask why so I just agreed and hung up. I couldn't stop thinking about it for the next few days. I couldn't figure out what I'd done to warrant such an early dismissal. I couldn't imagine that I'd done anything so wrong during training that they had no choice but to fire me. All things considered, my only job had been to watch them. It's hard to go wrong doing that unless perhaps I'd fallen asleep on the salad bar. Which I hadn't. Plus if they were going to fire anyone for incompetence it would have been the other trainee who got confused and almost put the whole basket of bagels on the floor, not to mention taking 5 minutes to cut a piece of cheese into slices. He didn't even speak any Hebrew. It couldn't have been a professional reason. What else was there? I'd been getting along with everyone just fine and had certainly never been rude to a customer. For a while there I was convinced that they had found my blog somehow and were horrified by how I rag on everyone from the restaurant. But then I realized that my Facebook account is only open to “friends,” which the bagel guy certainly was not. I even googled myself to see if anyone by my name had been arrested recently for pedophilia or something. Nothing. So I was back to feeling rejected and confused.

I finally went in to pick up money on Sunday and when the boss came out to give it to me I asked him why he didn't want me to work there. He said that after doing the calculations he realized that it made more sense for him to keep looking for a worker with no other obligations, like school, who could commit to a whole year at least. Out of all the crazy reasons that had been running through my head this was one I hadn't even thought of. He had known before he hired me that I was going to be a student and had hired me anyway. I would rather have had him not hire me in the first place than hire me and 3 days later fire me. That's just not nice. But at least the mystery was solved and I could get on with my life.

Now on to the homeless part. Roommate number two has decided to get married. Roommate number one is leaving at the end of August to get married and number two is aiming for Thanksgiving. She asked me if it was ok if she could take over the lease in October and she and her soon-to-be husband would stay in the apartment. I thought about it for about two seconds and realized she was offering me a way out without having to break my lease or find a replacement. This apartment has given me nothing but trouble (a week without water, a month without electricity, two weeks without a fridge) and the landlady is largely unreachable. Hopefully I'll be gone before the washer explodes and floods the entire building, the roof collapses, or the apartment gets infested by a horde of ravaging locust. So yes I may be temporarily homeless but at least I'll be happily homeless.

If the students are still hanging out in tents in the center of town protesting the lack of affordable housing, I can always join them. I slept in a tent once. In the army. My tent mate and I built it on top of an anthill. But luckily she put her sleeping bag on top of it, not me. This was our “field night” where we were supposed to fend for ourselves in nature. We hiked for maybe half an hour, made camp in a cow field, turned around and realized we were about half a mile from the base. Dinner was schnitzel and salads driven over from the cafeteria. They made us go to the bathroom in the bushes. I was like, but I can see our building from here. They didn't care. I woke up in the middle of the night convinced that the tent had collapsed on us. Then I realized that I was just tangled up in my sleeping bag. Ok, so maybe sleeping in a tent isn't for me.

Honestly though, after dealing with the arnona office (even renters here have to pay property tax) I wouldn't mind so much not having an actual place of residence. I went yesterday but didn't have all the right documents. I had to come back today (turns out I still didn't have all the necessary documents). After yelling and crying out of frustration for half an hour, the computer system went down in the middle of my application and I got in a few pages of my book before it came back up and the guy could start all over again. He seemed more upset about it than I was. I was not particularly surprised. If the fire alarm had gone off and we'd all been evacuated I wouldn't have been surprised. The previous day I had arrived there at exactly opening time and it took them 7 minutes and 4 people to get the ticketing machine working. If everything had gone smoothly, then I would have been surprised.