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Desperately looking into ways of reducing my daily expenses, I
relegated my car to an 'as needed' luxury. I would use it once
a week to visit Jeff, once a week to buy food, and then for any
medical visits. All other travel I did, I started to take the bus as
the temperatures warmed. I had discovered that the nearest bus stop
was only a quarter mile from my mother's mobile home and I could get
a discounted punch card to make it even more cost effective. But
while cost effective, the one thing taking the bus wasn't
was time effective. You include the walk to the bus stop, arriving
early to make sure you didn't miss the bus, waiting until the bus
arrived, riding the bus downtown before you could transfer to the
destination route you wanted, ride to a stop near but not at
your destination and walk the final distance, and you were looking at
a three hour round trip. Not including the time you spent at the
destination.
Still, the one thing I did have in my life was time. Being
without a job in the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Eight left me with
plenty of time to fill and taking the bus somewhere, even if it was
to a bookstore so I could browse at books I couldn't afford to buy,
was one way to fill my day. Another way was my volunteer work to run
The Doctor Who Report as well as head the local science fiction club.
These gave me a sense of accomplishment that was otherwise lacking
in my life. Originally I was in financial dire straits with both
clubs as the production costs at the copy store turned out to be far
higher than the estimate. This was because they were charging me a
'reduction fee' for each page copied from my fourteen & a
half by eleven inch masters down to the eleven by eight & a half
inch copies. This fee might have made sense at some time in the
past, but as the task only required the technician to punch in the
reduction rate once, then press the button to start the print run,
they were effectively charging a fee repeatedly for a task done once.
Imagine if you walked into the copy place and wanted ten copies but
then they charged you the same additional fee for entering in the
number of copies into the machine for each one of those copies. It
didn't make logical sense and no matter how much we discussed it, it
didn't matter as that was their pricing rules. What saved me was
figuring out that I could use the self-serve copiers, punch in the
reduction number myself for free, and spit out the reduced copies for
the same price as a basic copy. While this method allowed both club
publications to barely break even, it did mean I would spend much
more of my personal time sorting through and assembling the resulting
copies into booklets. But as I said, I had plenty of time.
The quality of the publications had skyrocketed as well. While
TDWR's first few issues were printed on my dot matrix printer and
then reduced to mask the dottiness of the resulting text, my computer
guru Jeff had been so inspired by my efforts that he picked up a copy
of some desktop publishing software for himself as well as one of the
very first laser printers designed for home use. He invited me over
to his home to assemble the 'zines using the publishing software and
then we printed near perfect master pages on his new printer. Once
these puppies were reduced at the copy place, they rivaled, if not
exceeded the quality of news print.
The Doctor Who Report had taken an exciting turn just itself. A
budding artist had come to me wanting to supply artwork for the
issues. Not satisfied with only providing generic Doctor drawings,
he wanted to create a comic serial for it. The problem was, he
wasn't confident in his writing skills and wondered if there was
someone who could help him out in that regard. I could.
I opened up my list of Doctor Who story ideas and mentioned
each one of them to him in turn that I was not already planning to
write up as a story for the newsletter. One after another, none of
them appealed to him and I was starting to have to delve into my
fanciful ideas which included season long arcs without any stories to
support them. One of those arc ideas blew his mind and next thing I
knew, I was having to scramble to figure out supporting mini-stories
to fill 'the season' upon which the overall story could take place.
This turned out to be both a blessing and a curse as it allowed me to
conceive little stories that would fit within the handful of pages he
could draw every two months, but to reach the end of a long story arc
also committed me to producing roughly four years worth of TDWR in
order for the long ranging story to be fully played out and reach the
end... Still, I
concluded, I had plenty of time in my life.
As I was about to be receiving unemployment payments to make up for
my lost state aid stipend, I would now have to start job hunting. As
I had been out of work for over eight months due to my health, I was
told I could go to our state's local branch of Vocational
Rehabilitation and they'd help me find a job. This was welcomed news
and I got their address and took the bus there. When I walked into
their office I went to the receptionist and stuttered while saying my
name. She burst out laughing!
Now I know I haven't mentioned my stuttering in a while and I don't
think I've shared this insight with you, but of the responses that
people can have when hearing me stutter: Laughing is a welcomed
choice. You see, it's honest; it lets me know where
I stand. The worst response I get when stuttering in front
of a stranger, let's say a store clerk, is the 'repressed' response.
These people hear the stuttering and immediately clamp down their
face into a taut intentionally expressionless mass. But in reality
their clamping down to not let out their natural reaction results in
the veins in their face and forehead to ever increasingly bulge out,
the muscles around their mouth and eyes tightening even more until
they're left with a grimacing face that looks somewhat angry, not
expressionless. On these times, I find myself wondering if these
people are holding back their anger because of something I've done,
or because they don't want to reveal their natural reaction to my
stuttering. Regardless, this taut face of tight muscles eventually
overwhelms whatever natural response they are hiding and they truly
fall into the anger their repressed face portrays. Laughter:
A nice loose face, after which they may later shamefully apologize to
me. I can graciously accept their apology and we're happy to see
each other at some future time. The repressed anger face stores that
feeling for all the subsequent times we meet, tense and uncomfortable
at the very least.
Once she was done laughing, she took my name and said an intake
counselor would see me shortly. A man came out a short time later
and motioned me through the 'employees only' door. He walked me to
his cubical and we sat. He asked me why I was here and I described
my getting back to work after an eight month break. He was sure they
could help me and scheduled a return time for me to come in and be
evaluated by their staff psychologist. In the meantime I was to let
the receptionist know that I would be a client and she would issue me
my free monthly bus pass. Free bus pass? Yes, the
city provided them with free bus passes for their clients. When I
went to the receptionist's desk, she sheepishly apologized for having
laughed at my stuttering, I told her it wasn't a problem and I in
fact appreciated the honesty. Not only did she give me the bus pass
for the remaining half of the month, but she had also just gotten in
the following month's ride pass and she gave me that as well. I
thanked her and left with a metaphorical skip in my step, looking
forward to the return appointment to be evaluated.
In the less rigid bus services, passengers were welcome to 'shoot the
breeze' with the bus drivers on the more solitary ends of their bus
route. I had first seen this when I had started to ride the bus and
one day, when the seat across from the driver was empty, I took it
and struck up a conversation of my own. Starting out with safe
topics like the weather, after a few times I was now a familiar face
and conversation topics would range from current television or movies
to sometimes philosophical ponderances. I loved these chats as they
helped pass the time riding on the bus and also gave me someone to
visit on a regular basis given my lack of coworkers to see each day.
Once the bus started to fill up, though, it was clear that the
conversation was over as the bus was in its home stretch into the
downtown area with its greater traffic and twisty streets it meant
the driver had to pay rapt attention to the road. Then on the
connecting bus out to your destination, about halfway home and more
than half empty, you could once again scoot to the seat across from
the new routes' driver and conversation again sparked to life.
When I arrived back at the Vocational Rehab office for the
psychological evaluation, starting out with an initial discussion
about myself, it then included an I.Q. test, then a large bubble test
based on true or false answers to vague questions. The I.Q. test was
fine as it was performed verbally, though the psychologist seemed to
be angry about something and I wondered if it was a case of
'repressed face' caused by my stuttering. But the huge bubble
test, dependent on filling endless bubbles by hand with a
pencil, was pure torture after the first few minutes as they turned
into hours. It had only been expected to take a little over an hour
but given that I'd have to give my hand frequent stretches and rests
this slowed me down greatly. Further, the vague, apparently
culturally based questions the test asked often confounded me and I
had to ponder many. There were quite a few questions that used terms
which I had no clue what they meant and I skipped them for now,
intending to get back to them once I finished responding to the more
clear questions. While out for most of the time I was filling in the
bubbles, after the first hour and a half the psychologist was angry
that I hadn't yet finished and periodically returned to the room to
berate me for still not being done. I asked if I should just stop
where I was and he told me I couldn't, that I had to complete the
whole test before I left. When closing time came my hand was in
horrific pain and I still hadn't finished, only being about three
quarters of the way through with a sprinkle of unanswered questions
in between, the psychologist came in and yelled at me one more time
before ordering me to leave the test as it was and go home. I was so
thrilled to be away from him and hoped I didn't need to see him
again.
When I returned for my follow-up visit with the counselor, he ushered
me into his office stoney faced and we sat down at his cubical. He
told me that they would not be working with me or helping me find a
job as I was not fit to be employed. When I asked why he told
me that the psychological evaluation had come back and definitively
showed that I was a person with a deep seething hatred of all other
people and couldn't stand being around them. When I tried to protest
he pointed out my protests as proof that the psychological evaluation
had been correct and I was to leave and never come back.
I left dismayed and silently sitting in the back of the bus as I
concluded that I would call back the office once I got home. I asked
if I could have an appointment to see the psychologist again to talk
to him about his results. It turned out I was the first one who had
ever asked and he was interested to find out why. When I arrived
back at Vocational Rehabilitation to see him I was ushered into his
office. I mentioned what I had been told by the counselor of his
results and it meant I wasn't going to be getting any help finding a
job and returning to work. What of it? I continued that I
couldn't imagine where he had gotten such a hugely negative
impression of me. He snorted at me and told me that he had 'caught
on to my little trick' of trying to invalidate the bubble test by not
answering enough questions, but he had spent enough time with me that
he went ahead and filled in enough of the remaining questions himself
based on his view of me. The results from the bubble test were
'objective' and couldn't be argued with and thus it proved what a
terrible, hate filled person I was ''who had never even thanked
anyone in their life for anything.''
This floored me as I knew I had thanked people often in my life. I
had even been made fun of by the science fiction club people at the
after meeting dinners for thanking the waitress too much, such as
when she brought me a refill for a soda. I told him so and he told
me I was lying. I mentioned how I ran two clubs and the people in
them seemed to like me and one club even voted to put me in charge.
All lies and delusion stemming from my firmly rooted pathology. I
asked if I could have a copy of his report and he said I could,
informing the receptionist to make it for me.
Once copied, she handed it to me and I thanked her and went home.
What more can I say?
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