April 4th, Jobs and the future happiness of my daughters

It’s been a little while since the last time I wrote here. Life for Teri and I is a lot of the same. I go to work where I have developed a routine that varies very little. I’m in before 8AM, I wait for an owner, usually Chris, to open the door. I go to my desk, I read emails, and answer whatever needs to be and then I read until I feel it’s late enough to start calling customers. Around 11 AM or so I get sleepy and sometimes around well, I think you get it, it’s not a difficult job. I seem to be OK at it and everyone seems to like me.

Now Teri has reached the end point of frustration. She has put off applying for Social Security with the hope of going back to work. She has faced age discrimination, which is very difficult to prove. Just like at her last job she faced sex discrimination. The guy who took over her job down in Georgia, supposedly a cheaper place to work, was paid $10,000.00 more than she made and he didn’t last a year. She continues to sit at the dining room table applying for jobs, getting a phone interview, maybe a second interview in person, asked to sit in for an interview for another position, is willing to drive all the way to Poughkeepsie about an hour and a half away to interview for a job and nothing. I don’t know what it could be except for age discrimination. When I first got my current job and I was bored, Teri said I should look for another one. I felt lucky to have this one paying almost a decent salary. Since my move to another position, it’s a good salary. It’s still a third less than I made twenty years ago.

All of the above brings me to Sean and Nastia. Nastia works with kids, she gets a lot of time off and doesn’t make much money. Sean works with his father and his Uncle at Caliper Tire along with Elena. Caliper Tire does work on internal combustion engines as well as replace tires and all related items. The current state of the industry reminds me of what the milk business was in the early 1960’s in Rockland where there were around 60 milk companies chasing all of the new customers who built the new houses delivering milk to the milk boxes at almost everyone's front door. It also reminds me of the village black smith at the turn of the 20th century. Like the black smith and the milkman dropping milk at your door in the morning, repair shops may go the way of the dodo bird to add another extinct creature to the conversation. And the way I see it Sean will be at the same age as Teri and I were when we first started seeing career disturbing storms on the horizon. And like me he might just say,”ah, they won’t upset my business, I have lots of loyal customers and they won’t go anywhere. That is a statement that is so funny to me because that is what I felt when I owned a video store in West Nyack and Blockbuster opened in Nanuet. Overnight I lost 30% of my loyal business. Sean won’t lose his business, they will just be less of it from each customer. An electric car has less moving parts. (The UAW, United Auto Workers in Detroit understands this too, less parts, less jobs) An electric car has a motor like a motor in a fan, a battery to run it, something called regressive brakes which make the brakes last longer and tires, that’s it. Replacing batteries might be a niche. They won’t need the7-8 bays or however many they have, much less all the workers, my daughter, Elena that they currently have. Not a good future to look at for the three of them.