A Crisis

Kurt got fired. I might as well have said Kurt grew another arm, that’s how unbelievable it is. Especially because it wasn’t due to the economy. And certainly not because of Kurt’s performance. Turns out the boss was using him to get his store up and running and then when he thought it was stable, he fired Kurt and hired some hayseed who doesn’t know half what Kurt knows for half the pay. We put our all into that store. I even worked there for free. Who does that?

We all worked there--Kelly came into the store to help me clean

It was a major shock. Kurt has never gotten fired in his life. There was no warning. We had no idea. If anything, we were getting pats on the back. So we weren’t prepared. And we were hurt. How could this guy do this to us after how hard we worked? How could he do this to us after we did exactly what we said we were going to do and ran that store like it was our own? Knowing, knowing his store was our only income (don’t forget, I worked there for free) and we had a child to take care of? He didn’t even have the decency to give us any notice, not a single day’s notice, causing us to be in dire straits. In fact, the day before this happened, we spent Kurt’s entire paycheck, part on work clothes for that place. And I couldn’t even return them because I removed all the tags and washed them.

Everybody got sick from it—there was so much stress. This happened right around the time my mother took a turn for the worse so if you want to look on the bright side, if this hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been able to go up there for as long as I did because I was working at the store.

Even so, bright side, dark side, I couldn’t even talk about it on here until now.

The Chinese character for “crisis,” when translated into English, means “opportunity.” Maybe this was the kick in the pants we needed. In Jersey, we had our own company. But when we moved here, Kurt got wooed by a flooring store who heard abut his background and experience. A company van was dangled in front of our faces. There was a 401K plan, health insurance, vacations, raises. Still, we had to really think about it. We’d always been our own boss. But we were scared. Virginia is not New Jersey. Maybe we wouldn’t be successful around here? There just aren’t as many people down here to even buy flooring. And there’s that Yankee thing going on—will they trust me to do a good job for them? It sure would be nice to have a steady paycheck and not always have to worry and maybe even take a vacation like normal people do… And so we took the job.

Does anyone see the irony here? Couple works for themselves and does fine. Couple moves to a new area, feels insecure, and so works for someone else for the security. Ha! The first guy, though not intentionally bad, ended up giving us bounced paychecks because he was a poor businessman. He didn’t mean it. He was actually very good to us. But he put us in a hole. The second guy, who bought out the first guy’s store, had it all planned. He was the bad one. But that’s okay. If there’s one thing I believe in, it’s what goes around comes around. Anyone who has ever hurt me over the years has always gotten bad luck of some kind. I’ve sat back and waited and watched and something bad always happens to them. I don’t have to lift a finger. It’s nature. It’s karma. It’s even in the Bible. Whatever. The point being is if you are a bad person and you hurt people, your time will come. I’m sorry but somehow that makes me feel a little better.

My other consolation is that I know we are now going to be successful doing what we should have done from the get-go—being in our own flooring business—and the guy who screwed us is going to be crying when our company kicks his company’s ass and he realizes he blew it because he had two of the best people in the industry putting their hearts and their souls into his business.

Now we are putting our hearts and souls into our own business. It’s called Shop-At-Home Floors. I admit, it’s going to be tricky. We’re doing this on a shoestring because we’ve had no time to prepare and the economy is really bad, but that’s okay—if anybody can do it, we can.

And so now comes an exciting journey in our lives. The opportunity.