Pay Day

It is the end of the month again and for some is their pay day. I don't know what that is like anymore because for the past five years I have not been part of the work force and sometimes I miss that. The fact that I got to be productive doing something for monetary exchange felt great. I do a lot of service here in the DR that gives me satisfaction but getting a pay check used to feel wonderful.


 It was that extra little cash I received each month to do whatever with. It was my own spending money I used to travel with. My first job was working as a cashier for Deseret Book downtown Salt Lake. I loved it because I got to meet new people every day and they would let us read as many books as we wanted like the library but you never had a deadline to return those books. You would take them home to read at your own pace. Never had to pay an overdue fee!


 My next job was working for Bonnevile Communications in their Spanish campaigns. I could have worked there forever but I had Cristi at the time and couldn't bear to live her with a sitter. When she turned six month old, that was it for me, I needed to be with my baby. The people there were wonderful to work for, My boss was Doug Borba, from Brazil and I became good friends with his secretary, Eva Diaz now Eva Doolin.


 My next job was working for Travelers Insurance as a claim processor. That job helped me learned all about the different health benefits some people had working for the railroad and made me appreciate those benefits some employers offered their employees because not all benefits are created equal very complex to understand and that is why they have experts like our son Andres I discovered that not all employers offered them. At this time I got more involved with helping at the Shop with special projects gluing folders for them so I quit that job and started to help out with our own business plus I also had child number two and it was tricky to leave the house.


 I became the gluing queen for Trade Engraving. We had NU SKIN as one of our great customers and produced a massive amount of work for them at the time. A few of our customers about 20% were great like them but the majority about 80% were little companies who would not be loyal to us and were hard to work with. We decided at this point to move to Tucson Arizona to start our own small  business and were there for three years. In 1991, my third baby was born but had to return back to Salt Lake because from our departure the business in Utah was not supporting itself. As a matter of fact it was the little business in Tucson supporting the big one in Salt Lake.


Back in Salt Lake I decided to work for free. Yes I got to Trade engraving every morning to work on collections because for some reason we were producing jobs and were busy but our customers got away with past due credit and every month we would sent statements to them of 30, 60  90 and over years of bad credit for jobs not paid. I don't know how that happened but it was the way that department managed accounts receivables. It was hard for me to imagine that those nice people were so dishonest when it came to paying their bills and had every excuse in the book why they weren't paying on time. The person in charge of that department was another family member who was a nice guy but had no spine. I came in to work for free to try to get those disgusting customers to pay their bills but it was too late. Many of them simply went out of business and others just went somewhere else and simply never paid. I understood how awful it was to be in a business you had to extend credit to be able to operate. But how ironic it was that when I ordered my wedding invitations, I had to pay before I took the job home. They had me pay COD when they never did that with anyone else I knew. back in those days not getting a pay check from Trade for doing their collections I decided to teach Spanish on the side at Read School in the afternoons and became good friends with Dr. Reid and their family. The school is also a family business but they knew how to run it well. I am sure they don't put up with bad debts the way we did.


At this time I also became the Honorary Consul of El Salvador in Utah, got super busy with the Salvadoran community and also worked as a parent advocate for the Family Support Center.  I remember that in he year 2000 I was doing all that plus I became a numerator for the 2000 Census. In 2002 I even became a Vista volunteer for AmeriCorps working for Bringing Hope to single moms.


Now, why did I do all that, I don't know but all those jobs taught me something and I got to meet tons of people, too many to count. I learned so much working for the single moms foundation considering that I was happily married and never in my wildest dreams would have thought that one day I would be part of that group of women. I do know that unconsciously, I was following my mother's foot steps who was always super busy and was never home but she had no choice. She chose to be a single mother. I had a good husband at the time. Now 14 years later that is my only regret. You can do it all but not all at the same time.


Today it would not matter if I worked that much because I don't have little children at home like I did back then. I had no business working so much for so little pay and no pay at all only because I loved being busy all the time. It was like a drug and I paid the price big time. How different it would be today if I had a job. This is when I should have one and how ironic it is that I don't!