The Power Went Out, So He Didn't Come to Work?

Help me understand this, because I keep turning it over in my head and it still doesn't make sense.

I hired a guy to work. He asked for a day off and said he'd work his usual day off instead. Fine. That's a schedule change. People make those every day without requiring a diagram.

Then the day he was supposed to work came, and he didn't show up. He didn't call, either. So now the schedule change has become a mystery with exactly one suspect and no witnesses.

After a message got back to him, he texted me. His phone had been shut off, he said, and his electricity had been shut off.

Those are serious problems. I get that. What I don't get is how the next step was not coming to work. If your phone and electricity have both been shut off, wouldn't earning money move pretty high up the list? Somewhere above sitting in a house that has apparently been downgraded to a storage unit?

And there is still the small matter of the text. I got a text telling me his phone had been shut off. Maybe it had been turned back on by then. I don't know, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But as explanations go, “my phone was shut off,” delivered to me by phone, is going to invite a follow-up question.

The electricity part raises another one. What did staying home accomplish? You can't pay a bill by being near it. I understand wanting to deal with a problem as soon as it happens. I don't understand skipping the workday you'd agreed to make up, then leaving me to find out you weren't coming.

That's the part that gets me. We had already worked out the day off. No argument. No drama. He asked, I agreed, and there was a day he was supposed to show up. I shouldn't have to track him down to learn that the plan has changed again. I hired someone to work, not to give me a logic puzzle with attendance records.

Maybe this is one of those moments where I say I don't understand the way young people think anymore. But age doesn't really enter into my main question. The phone is off. The power is off. Money would help with both. So why is work the thing that gets shut off next?

I've looked at that sequence from every angle. It's the first time I've seen two unpaid bills used as an argument against getting paid.