Waiting sucks. My first paycheck is supposed to be mailed out today. Eventually,
it will be directly deposited in my account and I'll get paid every Thursday, but
until that goes through, I have to depend on the vagaries of snail mail. The U.S.
Post Office is fairly efficient these days, except when it's not; this state
doesn't do direct deposit for unemployment checks and I always got those either
one or two days after they were mailed, except for the one that took over a month
to get to me. With luck, that won't happen to any of these checks in the short
time before they start getting directly deposited.
It was exciting to
get back to work, but frustrating to have to wait an extra two weeks for the first
installment of the paycheck which is, after all, my main reason for being here.
When the wait starts to get to me, though, I think of the situation of a friend of
mine. There is a distant possibility her husband will be asked to move to Ireland
for a year or two for his job. They'll be finding out in the next couple of weeks
if that will happen. I'd be thrilled at the opportunity if it were mine, but I
think they're ambivalent. She's got a couple of kids from a previous marriage and
they've got shared custody, so that might be difficult.
Ireland is
just a side issue, though, much as it would change their lives. The real crux for
them is waiting to find out if she's pregnant. They desperately want to have a
child, and have undergone IVF: shots every day for three months (and three months
more if she conceives) and a surgery painful enough to keep her out of work for a
couple of days. I don't know what the statistics are for the procedure (I'm sure
quite a lot of D-landers do), but it is definitely a toss of the dice, far from a
sure thing. They've only just recently married, and we're worried about how
they'll adapt if she hasn't conceived. They find out in the middle of next
week.
When I think of all that, it suddenly becomes much easier to
wait a few days more for a bit of money. I'm not starving, and I know it's
definitely coming, so all I have to do is decide what to do with it when it gets
here. Easy, by comparison.