Bear With Me, This Will Be A Long One

I've been meaning to write about something work related for a while now, but the timing hasn't been right. It's time.

I need another job.

It's not that I don't like my job here at Test Equipment World Domination Headquarters, nor is it that Jon and I don't get along. It's just that there is hardly anything for me to do here anymore.

When this enterprise started up in March of '06, there was plenty to do. Jon and I had to do some remodeling work on the space being leased. We had to go out and purchase equipment, furniture, supplies etc. I had to learn how to use the accounting software for the business. All that was pretty fun for me, especially spending someone elses money on stuff I would be using. Early on after we started up, Jon placed a winning bid on a ton of test equipment from one of the big dealers. Actually, it was probably more than a ton. I do know it was 6 pallets worth of stuff. All of those units needed to be entered kept track of in some way shape or form on the computer. While doing that, I continued to figure out how to use our accounting software - entering in customers and vendors, trying to get a handle on how to do payroll accurately. I also started learning more about selling on eBay, preparing high value shipments for international delivery and getting my head wrapped around a little bit of accounting/bookkeeping. I was usually busy at work.

I suppose it was about a year ago that things started to slow down for me. Transactions became routine. Multiple listings on eBay? No problem. International shipment going to Australia needing a Commercial Invoice and Shipper's Export Declaration? I can do that in my sleep. Work around Quickbooks' stupid design that does not let us prepay for purchases without marking them as received before they physically arrive? Yawn. Things were getting quite easy for me and the amount of real work I was doing every day was gradually decreasing while my time spent reading (and writing) blogs was increasing. Jon's work, on the other hand, was not decreasing. He's in charge of buying, pricing, schmoozing dealers and customers, and fixing broken equipment. I'm here to record his activity.

As time wore on, it was becoming clear to me that I have absolutely no interest in learning the biz of test equipment. None. Zip. I still don't know what Vector Network Analyzers or S-Parameter Test Sets do, nor do I care frankly. Jon knows people who are successful dealers in test equipment who are just as clueless as me, but they know sales and how to work a deal, something else I'm not at all interested in. In the end, it's probably easier for Jon to keep all the wheeling and dealing in his head, rather than running into potential problems where two of us would promise different customers the same unit.

For a few months now I've been mulling over the idea of going down to part time here and picking up another job. I've gone so far as talking to Jamie at Sunrise Cyclery about working for him on a part time basis. Truthfully, I am an anchor on the company bottom line here. I get paid for full time work and the company pays half my health insurance costs. It's not a king's ransom by any stretch of the imagination, but it is certainly enough that I feel pretty guilty drawing this amount of pay and benefits for sitting on my arse. As I envisioned it, I would propose to Jon going down to part time when TOYH got a job with benefits. That way I could get paid for actual work done and not have the company shell out money for my health insurance.

Jon brought this same topic up in a conversation just this week, so we began talking about when and how this could take place. We do have one huge problem to deal with though. Jon has stage IV prostate cancer. He was diagnosed a little over a month ago. He's doing fine now, responding well to early therapy and is now weighing options for more radical treatments. Faced with his own mortality, Jon is re-evaluating what he wants to do with the business. Growing it is pretty much out of the question, not just because of the illness, but because after over 20 years of doing this, Jon is getting tired of it. Maintaining what we're doing now is an option, but it would be good to cut some overhead, namely get me down to part time. A third option would be to shrink it to the size where Jon could run it out of a much smaller space or maybe even his home. Option 3 appears to be unlikely. Here's why. Our company's health insurance plan with Health Partners is set up for small businesses with more than one employee. If the company goes down to one insured employee the policy would be cancelled because it is set up especially for two or more enrollees. What we don't know yet is whether there is portability for Jon to continue with the Health Partners, just under a different plan that he would pay for out of pocket. If Jon can keep getting insurance from HP, then we've got options. If he can't, then I need to keep working here until he hires someone else, or to put it delicately, Jon doesn't need insurance any more. Switching to another insurer would be impossible because of Jon's "pre-existing condition."

Are there really people saying that we still have the best health care in the world? If there are, they are full of shit. Full. Of. It. Not only are there, what, 53 million people without insurance in this country, there are people like me and Jon whose decisions about where they would work are dictated by health insurance. Not pay. Not interest or passion. Not ability. Not location. Fucking health insurance. And all the bastards who make policy decisions about a national health plan or those who decide who is insurable in our screwed up privatized system are never ever faced with these kinds of decisions on a personal level. They will always have plenty of health coverage. And please don't say anything about how awful "socialized medicine" is. If you think it's so horrific, don't you dare sign up for Medicare when you reach that age. Why would you want to stain your golden years by participating in a system that is so ruinous to the American way of life?

Merry Christmas