So a creditor has put their hand directly into my bank account without permission or authorization of any kind. True I owe them money, but resorting to illegal acts like that isn’t exactly fair, either. I’m almost surprised they didn’t send thugs to beat me up, break my legs and burn down my apartment building with me and all my neighbours trapped inside or something like that, as they do in the movies. The fact that they stole the money I was saving to pay rent was both bad timing and genuinely evil. At least the telephonic campaign of daily harassment over the payments I’m too strapped to make seems to have stopped for a while.
They also raised the interest rate without any prior consultation. They are on the “right” side of the law, but only because they buy politicians. What the credit card companies are doing is outright extortion as well as theft. So as if being poor isn’t punishment enough, they have to punish me for being punished. (If Jack Layton doesn’t keep his campaign promise to lower all credit card interest rates to a 5% maximum when he becomes Prime Minister in four years, I’m never voting NDP again).
Now I fear that I must be afraid to trust my bank account, because Big Brother is always watching me, with his hand in my pocket, waiting for a slip-up, and paranoid that someone is always going to be coming after me for a large sum of money that I don’t have.
I wish I was never so down on my luck as to need to borrow anything in the first place. I wish I wasn’t forced to get the card for a job, only to get laid off and left with the bill for many of my working expenses. I wish I’d been given a fair deal at the outset and better support when I needed it. I wish I’d had my opportunities when I was younger and would’ve known what to do with them.
Of course, I wasn’t necessarily given the opportunities I needed, and if I was, I certainly didn’t know what to do, and therefore I severely botched that one up. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the governmental regime changes in the ‘90’s which cheated me out of a DEC and got me kicked out of university didn’t exactly help my bottom line. The fact that I chose to study in the Fine Arts department, majoring in Art History, likely didn’t help me find decent or even remotely suitable employment. It led to unstable, very low paying jobs, such as unloading trucks.
Unfortunately there is absolutely nothing I can do now to change the past. I’m 35 years old, but I have no wife, no children, and I’m living with roommates in a cheap apartment that I can barely afford my part of, instead of a large family home of my own in the suburbs. Having to constantly struggle for everything, and work far too hard for what I earn, when I have work at all. Life sucks. Sucks to be me, I guess.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that there are many people who have it a lot worse than I do. But then there are also a heck of a lot of people out there who have it a lot better than I do and still, they constantly complain and rant about absolutely everything.
It’s the people who are better off than me who I constantly see, rubbing it in my face, that often bug me. I do however realize that it’s usually unintentional.
