Free The Other Side of Midnight by Mike Heffernan Page B

think when I first started, they’d deliver $50 worth of oil. That’ll tell you how long ago it was I worked there.
    I was at the university for a spell doing clerical work. I would have loved to stay there and grow old in a little office. Absolutely. It’s probably the healthiest environment I’ve ever worked in. Mentally, physically—everything. But it was just getting harder and harder to get contract jobs. That’s how I was working, on a contract, and they didn’t want to hire any more permanent positions. Nepotism, or whatever you call it, was getting more apparent, too.
    On paper, I should’ve gotten this one job. I had more seniority. At that point, I had Mom home, too, and she wasn’t healthy. I had Jimmy who I was trying to raise on my own. The importance of that job, and then not getting it, was absolutely devastating. I thought because you were supposed to get a job that you would get it. I guess somebody figured a girl living in a basement apartment on her own with no cares in the world deserved that job more than me. It was overwhelming, not getting that job, because it was so important to my future.
    Three days later, the union called: “We need to talk to you. We think you should file a grievance. We think you got a really good case.” But as grievances work, I didn’t understand the process whatsoever. About a year or eighteen months later, I’m tortured to death. Everyone at my work thought I didn’t want this young girl to have that job because I didn’t like her. Through it all, I was the most unstable person ever. All you had to do was look at me, and I would cry. It was due to the bureaucracy of it all and the stress I had at home with Mom being sick. She’d had a couple of heart attacks, a stroke and the two knees done.
    The last going off, the union said, “We have six really good grievance cases, but we’re only going with two of them. Unfortunately, yours isn’t one of them.”
    I was thinking, Okay. What now?
    I got a meeting with the head of human resources. The main person with the union was off sick, and I got a replacement. The human resources guy started asking me all these personal questions. Of course, I’m welling up, and I answer them the only way I know how: “This job is important to me because I’m the healthiest person in my household. I’ve got my mom who is really sick, and I got a teenage boy home who I’m raising on my own.”
    He looked at me and said, “Do you need counselling? By the looks of it you need counselling. You’re not very mentally healthy right now.”
    The whole meeting was an absolute nightmare.
    In the midst of it all, a friend of mine commented, “My babysitter’s father has got taxis. Why don’t you give him a call if you need a job?”
    I was just trying to find something temporary. I was looking at bars, and I didn’t really want to go back to the bars. My son was going on a trip to St. Pierre, or Quebec, and I didn’t have the money. He made a joke like a typical teenager: “You should get a job. You should drive a taxi.”
    In a matter of five days, I went from joking about it to being out in a taxi. I never had a clue how to taxi. The only thing the broker told me was that I couldn’t wear jeans. He didn’t give me a map book, he didn’t give me anything like that. I was sent out on a Saturday morning. He told me who the dispatcher was. He told me that when I push the button on the radio to say car whatever and tell him where I was to. He drew all the stands out on a piece of paper. He sat in the car and held onto my finger like you would a child and pushed the buttons on the meter, he let it go, and he said, “Now you do it.” Then he basically patted me on the arse and off I went.
    I was frightened to death.
    What surprised me was that I could never work another job and have the same level of money