The Low-Pay, Shit-Covered, "take-it-in-the-ass" Bitches We Happen To Be

By Chase Langdon

The Job system in North Carolina is so fucked to be point blank. I have to live in government housing and use other government resources for income because I only make enough money to pay the bills and not even that since we get help from HUD for rental assistance. All this is great when you need it, but why do we need it?

Why do able bodies like myself have to go to extreme measures to live? It’s because of the economic travesty in America. North Carolina is a right to work state, which means an employer doesn't have to have a reason to fire you. They could just feel that having an even number of employees and that would be easier to count. I don't know but they don't have to have a reason.
I was fired from a company out of Waynesville called Haywood Vocational Opportunities. This company makes medical drapes for hospitals all over the world. They also own a small sign shop that also does metal engravings such as plaques. The sign shop is called HVO Signs and Engraving. I worked there from October to December of 2007. It was an okay job, I got good pay. I did have to deal with some bullshit from other employees though, which worsened the longer I worked there. I was required to have at least and Associates Degree in Graphic Design, but I was offered the job anyway. The funny part about this is I was the only one there with any education in graphic design at all. Every time I’d correct someone’s design flaws I would be ridiculed. I was told to forget everything I learned in design school because the real design world is not like that. Everything I learned was turned upside down by these no-designing sons-a-bitches. I know that the design world is exactly as brutal and thought provoking as design school makes it out to be and more. These people at HVO lived by the rules of symmetry and filling every space on the page with swoops and stars. Bigger is better in their book. I live by the rules of asymmetry and simply: less is more. Aside from our different views on design I was fired for another reason, so they say.

I used the Internet that they provided us to make a blog and portfolio called Chasography for my design work. I made my first post circa the 13th of December and was fired on the 19th. They found this site out to be a "personal business." They made it out like I actually made money from this and on their time. I was fired immediately and without any warning. After my firing I was denied unemployment benefits. I was offered to rebuke this but the hearing was called while I was working at my new job, which I didn't get until the end of February. Since I was fired in December and didn't get another job until February, we were kicked out of our apartment and lived with my fiancée’s parents until May. Is this justice?

Can this happen? Yes it can and there is nothing I could do about this; North Carolina is a right to work state. Plus how fucking hard it is to find a job that will pay the bills doesn‘t help. I do not have that job; I make around 300 dollars a month. I think it’s really shitty for the fact that the hardest most grueling and despicable jobs pay little and the more air conditioned desk based jobs like designing pays more. Further more you have to have money to go back to college which I don't have. You have to move to a bigger city for to-do design jobs which is out of the question right now. The common blue collar working-class boy is shit on day after day. I clean up after people who can't even shit in the toilet and make it in without getting it all over the walls. This is the employment system of North Carolina, and most likely the whole Goddamn country.