Perspective

My job has been a nightmare virtually from the beginning. Joining the TPC warehouse as they adjusted to the corporate mandates of their buyout, I've run into more laziness than adaptibility.
In a period of major change, that lack of adaptibility has created a constant unease amongst the employees, and while the majority of TPC's workers have over 15 years of experience (and union ties), newbies like myself are on the bottom of the food chain; we'll be the message kills, the ones that say "We mean business."

At just about any other time in my life, it would be easy to suck it up and accept the ineptitude of my superiors, but with my brother in Iraq it all seems so ... I just don't give a shit. And I have no patience for it. They say life's too short, and it's impossible not to feel that platitudes real weight with Andrew gone. So, when my manager tells me that instead of working four days a week (I'm part-time), I'll now be working five, and when he tells me that instead of coming in at 7AM, I must now come in at 5AM, it's very hard for me not to just say "Fuck it" and walk out the door.

Is this my life? That is what I keep asking myself. I'm not one of those people who can say that I feel my brother is fighting in Iraq to preserve my own life, but just knowing that his life is on the line every hour of every day, I can't help but feel that I am wasting mine. Everything feels immediate. There's been an urgency to every second of my life since my brother left. That's really the crux of it. I have no patience for this. The money I spent in Florida really hurts now. My finances are not dire, per se, but it wouldn't take much to push them that way. So leaving this job wouldn't be prudent at this time.

I hate feeling like I'm using my brother's situation as an excuse for leaving this job behind, but there has to be something better out there for me. It bothers me that when I get to talk to my brother, who has all the faith in the world in me, I'll have to admit that I'm not living up to his sacrifice. Should things go wrong for him, nothing would make me feel worse than knowing that had he had my time he would have made much greater use of it.