No. 737 – Human Beings

Performer: Seal

Songwriter: Seal

Original Release: Human Being

Year: 1998

Definitive Version: None

At the end of 1998, Debbie was shown the door from the Wexler Foundation over personnel issues. As I mentioned, the office manager hated Debbie because Debbie was viewed as competition. She couldn’t have that, so she essentially got Debbie fired.

That was fine with me. As someone who was in a similarly poisonous office environment, too, I had a lot of empathy for Debbie’s plight. I told her that there were better days ahead, and she agreed. The holidays were coming, and that would provide plenty of diversions—and besides, no one hires for full-time office work during that time of the year anyway.

After 1998 rolled into 1999, Debbie set about finding work. She said she could go back to being a legal secretary. She had done it for years, and she knew she could have another such job right away, but she didn’t want to go back to the old routine. Fine. I’ll hunker down at The Dispatch for the time being. I make enough to pay the bills, so we’re OK there. Do what you want.

The funny thing is, I remember little about the actual job search itself. On the one hand, I seem to recall that it took awhile for Debbie to land a job. The issue wasn’t that she had some black mark on her record because of her last job but that she had nearly 30 years on her secretarial career. Debbie wasn’t expecting to make as much as she just had, but she also had to get more than entry-level wages.

On the other hand, if that were the case, we would have spent a lot of time together during the day before I went to work in the afternoon, and I don’t remember anything significant along those lines happening either, so maybe she found her job right away. I seem to recall that she was down in the dumps over the prospect of not finding a job for a while because of her advancing age (and why I associate this song with that timeframe), but now I’m not sure.

Regardless, Debbie eventually landed her fish. It was at Lutheran Social Services, which did many of the same things that the Wexner Foundation did but for Lutheran students instead of Jewish students. She would have to take a slight cut in pay from what she had been making, but she was glad to have the job regardless.

There was one problem: She had almost no vacation privileges for the year, and because we didn’t take winter vacations, I had all of my time still coming—three weeks worth. Well, the National was in Atlanta that year, so that would be one, and I loved taking the week of the World Series off, so I could watch the games without having to work. That’s another.

And then the All-Star Game is in Boston, and I had a connection that could get me into the Fanfest … Solo baseball trips, here I come!