The Second Time I Quit

Back at work, we had a problem. Well, we had lots of problems - that’s trucking. But this problem threatened to derail us. The company was growing by leaps and bounds but we couldn’t find solid, reliable people to hire.

We began to ponder an interesting move. Back in Chesapeake, we knew plenty of people at church whom we knew would be reliable and available but they couldn’t move to Charlotte. So we began to think about moving the company to Chesapeake. I didn’t say anything to my family at first. I didn’t want to get their hopes up until it was a sure thing. When it was and I did, as you can imagine, they were ecstatic.

So a year after our new church friends helped move us in, they helped move us out. Before we moved, we had visited Chesapeake a couple of times to find a place to live but nothing had come of it. We had to put our stuff in storage to do the two moves thing. Our friends, the Hughes’s graciously let us stay with them until we found something. Rents were higher in Chesapeake than Charlotte, so it was going to be a bit of a challenge. We did still have some extra money from selling our house the year before but that was eventually going to get drained. 

Before long, we found a nice place in a neighborhood right next to the city park. I had looked at a house in that neighborhood when I was looking to buy our last house. It was a three-bedroom with a converted garage that we could use as a fourth bedroom. We put down a deposit to move at the beginning of the next month.

Another trucking company had built a space for us above their offices in the industrial section of Chesapeake, about a 20-minute commute. The air conditioning was not quite right so that made for some warm days through the summer. We had left a couple of employees in Charlotte who were doing the billing for us. By this time, I was pretty much running that department but they did a lot of the details.

One of the employees in Charlotte was a temp. She was an older woman who was rather peculiar. She had given us some issues but she helped us enough to put up with her antics, as we were still short-staffed. As soon as we hired some people in Chesapeake, we were going to let her go.

One day she did something that ticked George off and I heard him say over the phone,

            “Just clear out your stuff and get out.”

I was stunned. We were at a critical time in our billing month and there was no way to make payroll for the truckers without her. Once again, I decided I had to tell George that I had to quit. Without a job, we weren’t going to be able to move into the house and we were going to lose the deposit but I couldn’t see any way out. It was George’s turn to be stunned – again. Fortunately, he humbled himself and hired the lady back on and I got to be the hero in letting her know. We moved into the new house.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more