spacious skies - 33. obsolete

by american joe

part 33 of 40

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when mary lost her job at the insurance agency, she was not able to find another one. the type of job she had - basically filing and data entry - had become almost obsolete. paper files were mostly gone, and the younger women and men hired as sales reps by the agency did their own data entry on the laptops that they carried everywhere, and on their phones. mary registered at a couple of temp agencies. but they did not have a lot of work that she could do. it seemed that such jobs as the agencies got were always assigned to some regulars that had been with the agency for years. what the agencies wanted most of all was dependability - that you show up, rain or shine or snow or transit strike , and whether you were sick or well. mary was not that dependable. a lot of days she just couldn’t get her head together. she had always been that way. she fell in with a bad crowd. some of the same bad crowd she had run with before abby was born and she had taken the nine to five job at the insurance company. a lot of the old gang had disappeared, but there were always some young bums and slackers to take their place. sometimes mary felt bad about falling in with the bad crowd. she was not entirely comfortable with them. the old gang back in the good old days had had a sense of purpose, at least in the endless conversations they had when they were drinking or smoking. but these younger people… all they wanted was to get wasted. and she had to admit they were pretty good at it. once in a while they might bitch about “things” or “life” or even “they”, but if mary tried to bring the conversation around to something more specifically political, they tuned out or laughed at her… next