I said "no" to going in early to work.

They called me to come in to work earlier than I was scheduled today. I heard the phone ring; I heard on the answering machine Christina asking me to come in early.

I remember some things from the assertiveness book that I read when I was a young teenager, "When I Say No I Feel Guilty."

Arguing logically isn't part of the assertiveness training. It's more about boundaries, feelings, and what you want or don't want. You don't have to argue the logical mistakes or implications in what anyone is saying.

I wanted to say no to coming in early. I was expecting to go in at 3:00, and they wanted me to go in at 12:30. It wouldn't have been so bad, but they called me on the morning of the very day in question. If they had asked me yesterday, I might have said yes.

What did I feel? Angry. Disappointed that all of a sudden, my whole day had been changed. I really had been hoping to do a couple of things. I felt weak. I felt like my wants and needs didn't matter.

Coudn't my activities be postponed? But arguing logically isn't part of this technique. True, they could be postponed. They weren't life or death.

But that is a weakness. Almost anything can be postponed. I can demonstrate this. Peter's wife Tammy knew a co-worker for several decades. It was an older woman, a mother of one of the other employees. Recently, she died. There was a viewing. But it was on a day when Tammy was scheduled to work. Something was going on at work that day and they were having parties or something, and scheduling various managers to cover the shifts of other managers while they were at the party, and then cycling through it until everybody had gotten to go. It would have been inconvenient to them if Tammy had left and hadn't covered her shift on that day. Tammy would have wanted to leave work and go to the viewing. There was another manager, a "higher-up," who DID go to the viewing. But Tammy herself didn't ask, didn't try. Nobody had ever given her any assertiveness training.

To anyone else, this IS an obvious life-or-death situation. You will never see that person's body again. That person was your friend. They will go down in the ground and decay, and their body will become unrecognizable. You will never see them ever, ever again, forever.

But if you leave work, the store will collapse, the universe will collapse, a disaster so inconceivable will happen, that you must absolutely under no circumstances leave work. She is afraid to do the slightest thing because she has Peter's medical care to worry about, and if she gets fired, she won't have insurance. So her choice looked like that. But I think it didn't have to.

So, as I was saying, almost anything can be postponed. Almost any appointment can be skipped. Arguing about whether or not your appointment can be postponed or skipped is ALWAYS a weakness in your side of the argument.

I worry about being fired, too. But I don't have anyone to take care of. No kids, no sick husband who needs medical care. And on top of that, I have parents who used to be wealthy back in the days when pieces of paper really represented some kind of money. (Some of that wealth is being lost right this very minute. I've tried a couple times telling Dad to buy gold and silver coins, and take physical possession of them. He says that in an economic collapse, gold and silver won't be worth anything. There is so much I would have to explain on that subject.) My parents are paying my rent during this time of my underemployment. So if I get fired, it's easier for me than it is for other people.

Therefore, because my parents are wealthy enough to help me out financially, I don't have any boundaries? My wants don't matter? This has happened to me again and again. Because I was lucky enough to have wealthy parents, I should actually be LOWER than all the other people in the world who have to actually WORK HARD for their money. My wants and needs should matter LESS than those of all the hard-working people out there, because I'm so lazy.

And it's like nobody else on earth has ever felt this way, like I'm all alone in feeling angry because they wanted me to show up earlier than I was scheduled to. Like there's something wrong with me for feeling that way, for having a few ideas of what I'd like to do today before going to work.

I finally called back. I have used my sjw once in the past two days or so, so it's possible my behavior is still slightly altered by that. I spoke to Christina herself, which might have made it easier, since she's not my manager. I massaged the collarbone point and the self-acceptance point which I remembered from the Callahan's Thought Field Therapy videos that I bought years ago, and from Emotional Freedom Techniques. So I was slightly soothed as I talked to her on the phone and told her that I couldn't come in early and that I had been planning to do some things.

And it WAS a 'bad case scenario.' No one would be there, she said. Those couple of hours would be uncovered. It wasn't merely that they needed extra help. She herself had to leave and apparently the other person did too. But you know what I feel about that? I DON'T CARE. That department is so slow, I often wonder if I'm going to get laid off just because I'm not needed and we never sell anything, and we throw all the food away, and the shrink is really expensive. We're probably BETTER OFF not having anyone there for a couple hours in the afternoon, if they've already prepared the refrigerated sandwiches and other long-lasting foods.

And so, even though it was a 'bad case scenario,' I still said no.

Role-playing will be an important part of the education that I create for my children and my community, whoever they will be. Role-playing of social skills and conversation skills. And some form of assertiveness training will be part of that. It might not be identical to the book I read years ago, but it will have been inspired by it.

Why is this going to my anonymous blog? I don't know. I don't want to complain about work on a page that my employers might be reading, I guess. And I am feeling more and more connected to this blog instead of my other one. I was thinking that somewhere on my profile or the "About" page, I would say that it's not really anonymous and that if anyone local ever wanted to meet me, they could ask. But it's anonymous to the search engines and to my future employers.