Here is irony in its most despicable form, the saga of a lowly store worker, the support of three (3) young dependents and an aged retired mother near blinded by glaucoma; living day to day desperately dependent upon a minimum weekly wage to make ends meet. For two (2) years she awoke in the early hours of the morning seeing to it that her children got ready for school regardless if they had any breakfast to start the day; it was a must, for her, that they maintain a good education and was, each day, in attendance at school on time and in order before she herbed of to work.
Through sickness, sunshine and rain; this single mother of three arrived for a hard day’s work prompt and in good form despite the toils and hardship endured. Each day management would try their utmost best to keep the cost of operation to its bare minimum by trumping charges of insubordination and theft upon newly and unsuspecting employee in effort to withhold the wages which were honestly earned.
For two seemingly long years; this did not deterred her until one day; when she could no longer withhold her silence and allow management to destroy the reputation of a coworker accused on unfounded charges of employee theft. Management, seizing an opportunity, accused both of conspiracy to defraud the company by reasons of employment, and, without any support given from union representation, no funds to garnish the leverage of an attorney; she and her accused coworkers services were soon terminated without pay.
A few months later, still unemployed and without any steady form of income and despite helping out a friend a few day a week in the straw market; the single mother of three (3), near at the point of hopelessness, applied for governmental assistance when a national unemployment benefit scheme had be implemented. After providing the appropriate documentations and filling out the necessary applications, she was told to wait two week and so she did.
On the day our single mother was about to collect her national insurance benefits, she was told, by one of the clerks; it was not possible because N.I. contributions were not made on her behave by her recently former employers, which needless to say came as a shock; leaving her in total astonishment and disbelief. How could something like this happen to her; she ask herself, indeed, how can something like this ever happen to a Bahamian in The Bahamas.
Determined to pull herself up by her boot straps and make a new start to support her family, the mother of three (3) went to work helping her friend serving tourist in the straw market when a text message came across her cell phone, the message was by the coworker with recent information on their former employer which, in closing, read: “by the way, Mr. Schaffer got both his legs cut off…”
Apparently god does have a rather bizarre sense of humor.
