Disaster!

I guess I’m not sure where to start about the events of today. A summary is probably in due order. Two days ago, I was standing around with two of my co-workers and what was once an innocent dare, “I’ll bet you I can throw this orange over our manager’s house,” became a complete and utter meltdown for the entire staff of this camp.

The first orange was lofted with grace and dignity and cleared the house that was maybe 50 yards away. The second orange fell short and hit the front of the house with a resounding thud, the magnitude of which would change our lives completely. Did that sound melodramatic? I hope so, everyone reading this knows that there’s nothing I love more than melodrama. NOTHING.

Melodrama aside, shit went down today hard. That mis-placed orange was never cleaned up and when our boss returned from her weekend trip, she called her boss back in the city and brought him out here to get our co-worker fired. And fired he was. He was fired under the guise of “insubordination” and “making her feel disrespected and uncomfortable”.

To have this situation make sense, you need to understand the living situation that we are a part of. Work = our lives. In most professional situations, you have a day of work and then you come home and are NOT at work. We live 30 miles from the closest city of over 30 people. The closest city of 10,000 is about 80 miles away. We cannot go anywhere. We have to get along with each other. There is no other option.

Everyone has hated our boss since way before I started work here 41/2 months ago. Everyone except her husband and her best friend, the cook. I haven’t developed a reason to be particularly upset with her personally aside from the fact that on numerous occasions, she has been so abrasively condescending and rude to my co-workers that I was rendered speechless wondering if I was imagining the conversation. She is awful to people that I respect and love and that is absolutely a reason to be upset with someone.

My coworker that got fired may be the most honest-to-goodness, kind, happy person I’ve known in a long time and she fired him for throwing an orange at her house and citing feeling uncomfortable. It’s like one of those underdog stories where there’s a tyrannical government and the blue-collar workers have to rise up to overthrow the government once one of theirs has fallen.

Four people are quitting by the end of the week, leaving five of us to clean camp for the final three days of my time here next week. It’s going to be miserable. Camp is divided into two teams and it seems like no one is going to end up winning. All of the employees are hell-bent on getting my boss fired for a lack of professionalism, rightfully stating that if the orange incident was enough to get someone canned, then we should be able to get her canned every time we feel uncomfortable or disrespected. The nature of living with your co-workers is that you see people at their best and at their worst. You can’t be your best 24 hours a day. Even I can’t.

He will be missed and now the group is working on making this camp more beautiful by having our manager removed. Hopefully she won’t be able to run this camp into the ground as quickly as she is going at the moment.

Always fight the man. Always!