I write this after managing to convince my downstairs neighbor to let me use his Wifi. I don't even know why I am writing this or the point of it, but here I am. Over a year ago I found myself a job as a translator in a company. I did well and slowly went up to become the head of the translation team, a position I got in spite of having every other person on the team having at least 2 years ahead of me in the job.
I live in Iraq, so I am not quite naive to the effect of what we know as "Wasta", I can't find an exact translation for it in English other than "intermediary" but it is not exactly that. Basically I lived my life and my job stressing day in and day out that someone, somewhere, would pick up the phone and get me fired. Someone not in the company, someone who doesn't know me but just happens to have a cousin, who is a friend of a neighbor, whose son wants the job. And that is what happened.
I lost my job, as an English translator, to someone who if you put what he writes in English into grammarly, the app would probably break. Someone who literally when first messaged me I thought he was speaking Kurdish using English letters. I lost my job that paid me 900$ plus housing and transportation and got demoted to and made barely 450$ minus the latter benefits. But I figured "Hey, it is a job. Everyone has to pay their dues, right?"
Slowly I started watching all the works and instructions that made our department an envy. So much so that the company started getting calls from government and foreign embassy so we could live translation for their speakers. I literally got to translate for a British psychologist training Kurdish forces how to handle people with trauma. Anyway, I slowly watched our quality dissolve and the team I gathered and improved fired because the guy who got my job wouldn't admit responsibility and he had someone covering his back.
That is not an exaggeration, that is exactly how it happened. I got to keep my job because the management knew how good I was. However, few months ago, and due to the horrible quality of work submitted, we lost financing. We were working on a translation app (My idea) that would have the ability to translate Arabic tongues and not just regular Arabic into other languages starting from English.
Anyway, so I lost my job and went back to Baghdad to stay at a small apartment and spent the last few months looking for a job. I got over 34 interviews and no luck. I remember in one interview, the guy who was interviewing me for a job as a translator couldn't even speak proper English and decided that I was bad for the job. My favorite was when I interviewed and was deemed good, so good actually, that the interviewer offered me a deal that I would teach his cousin to do the job for half the salary and his cousin would get the job. I still took that and figured, fuck it, it is a job.
Now I am writing this at a literal fucking breaking point. My social security money somehow got reduced from the 1800$ I was supposed to get to 400$ dollars, and all I got from the "job" was a matching 400$. I didn't buy anything and would deliberately visit people during lunch and dinner so I would eat. And now, my internet went off 18 days away from the due rent money that I don't have.
I literally feel like I can't breathe. Not to be full of myself, but I deserve better than this shit. I literally put too much work into anything I do, I already know what I will be posting until the end of the month, I read books, spend hours on end researching. If you are reading then you probably follow me and know what I am talking about and how much quality there is in my work as I take so much pride in it. All this fucking hard work, and now I am writing this knowing that my laptop could go off at any second due to the heat while sitting about 60 kilometres away, the girl I was supposed to marry is getting her hair done before getting married to someone else tonight.
I literally don't know what to do. I have been in denial of it and now it is hitting me like a ton of bricks. I have been in denial because I was trying to avoid this moment where I don't know what to do at all. I begged and physically grovelled just for something, anything at all. I tried everything short of robbing a fucking bank.
Now I am just waiting day by day and preparing monologues so I could convince the landlord to let me stay until I figure something out. I don't know what to do for food as people I have been visiting have become aware of my scheme. I have nothing that I can do other than waiting.
I still have so much to say that I want to get off my chest, but I know in few minutes my laptop would go off and then my neighbor would leave the house and I might not have a chance to connect online for a while.
I just hope things were better that's all. I am just tired.