Just Call Me

Do you ever feel as if you are the only woman who does anything to help people … and that everyone else’s needs come before your’s?

Yes?

Recently I worked from home. “Great”, you might say. “Good, if you can arrange it,” you might think.

No, you’re so wrong!

It blurred the domestic and professional spaces and everything got mixed up.

There I was focussing on work, having a wonderful time, working on my own computer, my music playing… It was all going well until the telephone rang.

A friend – for whom I am something of a cross between a health attorney and foster carer – said, “Centrelink are going to cut me off because I wouldn’t take a job in a bar”. He, of course, was hiding his addiction to alcohol from both Centrelink and his job network provider – hoping to slip quietly from New Start to the Old Age Pension before too long. Or perhaps he is waiting for a doctor and/or psychologist to recognise his Korsakoff's syndrome?

Well, that’s not likely! Doctors could not recognise that my hips were crumbling and needed replacing. That took 4 years of investigations until I said, “I want to see an orthopaedic surgeon!!!”… but I digress. My point is that doctors are not likely to diagnose a problem when the only way to really diagnose it is to know the person and ‘understand’ their level of dysfunction.

Off I ran to meet him at Centrelink and talk to them with him. This involved telling him to “be honest and tell them what was really happening”.

I got home feeling slightly angry at having to leave my work to, once again, rescue the hopeless. It might help if I mentioned that we used live together and he was always disturbing my work then…by being drunk, hopeless and needing rescuing. Now, I look at him and am repulsed. But, as I’m his health attorney, and somewhat, compelled to prevent homelessness, poverty, starvation… You know, those “nasties” into which the hopeless slide as they claw at the sides of the moss, fungal covered, drain before being subsumed by the oozing mess of society’s repositories.

The next day I thought, “Yeah, no interruptions: work, finish early, go and collect dog at the airport”.

I did say ‘thought’.

The phone, again.

“Hello, it’s your dog’s mother here. I didn’t get the money for your dog’s flight and I can’t send her without it. Can you go to the bank and deposit the money?”

Not like I was doing anything!

Off I go and get money from my account and put it into her’s. The dog has to fly that day.

What’s happening to the money my partner transferred for the dog’s flight?

“Last time it took awhile to show. If you give me your bank details, I’ll refund it as soon as I get it.”

Yes, and I’ll just continue leaving my work to fix up after other people.

After this week, I value being AT work. I hear myself saying, “Gee, I’m AT work, I can’t help”.

Next time there’s a crisis it might not be a good idea to call me, I might be at work!