A high school had a theme day where the students would come dressed up as some career path each person wanted to pursue. Bob walked into the class dishevelled in shorts, sandals, and a plain white T with an obvious ketchup stain on it. As the students sat down, the teacher, clearly noticing the lack of effort by him, spoke up at the front of class and asked, “And what exactly are you, Bob?”
He replied, “I was a mid-level manager at a Fortune 500 company. But unfortunately I was laid off in the recession. Truth be told, I wasn’t really getting anywhere there anyway. Dare I say, getting laid off was more of an opportunity to grow than anything else. So I looked around for work here and there. This wasn’t the end of the world. Far from it, I was going to rise from the ashes and become a better person for it.”
A sudden darkness fell over his face, “But days turned to weeks and weeks into months and I still couldn’t find a job. It seemed no matter how hard I tried, there was never anything I could really close up on. And the time just passed unrelentingly, just like those head-hunters whom I knew could see straight through my fake smile into the depths of my broken spirit. I was desperate and desperate was not a character trait they were looking for. But I kept looking because, well, what else could I do?”
Regaining composure, he continued, “I knew I could last for a while but a while wasn’t supposed to last this long. My unemployment insurance ended a while ago and my savings had evaporated. Soon the bills started piling up and there was nothing I could do. Then one day, they came and took it. They took my car, my house, and my family. Oh my God, Stacy, she took the kids to live with her mother.”
Bob could no longer hold back and burst into tears, his voice was cracking from his tears and was tinged with despair, “Oh my God, my flesh and blood, I haven’t seen them in months. Why did this happen to me? I was a good man, wasn’t I? I went to church and volunteered on the weekends. I was going to send my kids to good schools and they were going to surpass me like I surpassed my own father. Mrs. Harris, I was a man but I am a man no longer.”
With that, Bob rested his head onto his desk. He was both overcome by his shame and was wallowing in the great pit of misery that his life had become, remembering that pleasant life he had left so long ago. A great silence filled the room. It was all an act but even teenagers could appreciate the anguish of a man who had been pushed to the edge, not through his own doing per se.
But Bob looked up and it was as if the entire class was resting on his next words.
“That or I make pizzas.”
