“I'm working.”

Right? You can't just leave because you want to hang out or because your friend’s having a meltdown or because someone you're sleeping with sent you a weird text and now you want to drive across town and investigate.

Being able to “be spontaneous” is a class privilege. I'd love to be spontaneous, but I'm working.

I bet “I'm working” is one of the most common sentences in America. But nobody on television ever says it. Why would they? These people are always fucking available.

Most of us don't even have time to watch TV. And when we do have some time, we can't always do whatever we want with it.

Unlike working people who have to sell their time, rich people own most of theirs. Television loves to give characters working people's jobs while giving them rich people's control over their time. She's a waitress but never goes to work. How does that work? And if she does go to work, she somehow still has control over her time. She can wander off, close early, hand the rest of the shift to someone else, or just bounce because something came up. Who has a job like that?

Good television can let jobs and money interfere with people’s lives without making the whole show about being broke. Married... with Children wasn’t trying to make a social statement about working-class America and all that. It’s Married... with fucking Children. Al’s job fucks up his life. He has to be at the shoe store.

Same with Roseanne. She has to go to Wellman Plastics. The family has a ton of drama with the kids, their relationships, and everything else, but their money problems don't just go away because the episode is focused on something else. Roseanne still needs money. So does Al.

That’s why, a million episodes later, they’re still there. They couldn’t just quit. Being able to say fuck it and walk away from a job is a class privilege too.

I was a Medical Support Assistant/MSA in a call queue. There were programs on my computer that could tell my supervisors everything I was doing. They could see if I’m actively talking. They could see my time between calls. If I stopped taking calls for even TWO minutes, they’d Teams me like, “everything okay?”

Everybody assumes working from home is freedom. I was being managed like crazy, answering 120 calls a day, having no real power to really help people, burning out, wondering how anybody could do this for twenty years. I was going to school for social work and telling myself this is temporary. The job was depressing. The only good thing about it was that I didn’t have to be in an office.

Then in January 2025, on his first day back in office, Trump signed an order ending remote work for federal employees. OPM told agencies they had until 5pm EST on Jan 22 to notify employees. The VA told us we’d be on site in April.

So I needed to be physically sitting in a federal building to do my job now, but they didn’t have room for us. The VA’s own “implementation guidance” said there might not be anywhere to put people. The federal government was ordering all these workers back in before having physical space for all of them.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own administration was terminating office leases. DOGE was bragging on social media about chainsawing a ton of “mostly empty” office space to save money, while all these agencies were being told to come up with desk space for every employee they’d just ordered back in.

So workers ended up getting crammed into wherever there was floor space. Two of my friends from Mental Health were put in a storage closet together. One of my friends from Primary Care got an old pharmacy window. Some MSAs were lucky enough to get a cubicle at the training center. I had a friend who lived in Stockton and the nearest VA that could take her was Palo Alto. So now she’s waking up at 2 in the morning for a 2 and 1/2 hour commute to be at Palo Alto by 6am to work the same job she's been doing from home for years. And then commuting back home. That’s so fucked up.

All because a billionaire in Washington who doesn’t even know what we do every day believes federal workers are just lazy and realized he has the power to make our lives miserable. If you seriously believe Donald Trump gives a shit about ordinary working people and is doing this to make the government more efficient, then he’s utterly incompetent and never gave a thought to how a “return-to-office policy” translates into an actual human life.

In no way did this new arrangement make the government more efficient or improve care for a single veteran. All it did was move a bunch of people doing the same job onto different computers. The only thing that changed was that their day got longer and more expensive.

As a healthcare worker, I work with a lot of women. I cannot tell you how many moms had arranged their childcare, transportation, meals and family life around the conditions under which the government hired them. Then Trump comes along and changes one sentence on a piece of paper and their entire lives are turned upside down. Even sadder, a lot of them voted for Trump.

Then, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who nobody elected and who held no formal authority over the civil service, posted on X saying “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Two hours later, this email came in:

My mom also works for the VA. She’s a nurse. She was out of the country and didn’t have her federal laptop and PIV card with her to sign in and respond. Shows how careless and cruel the whole thing was. Scaring a hard-working 70-year-old nurse while she’s on vacation like that. Piece of shit.

OPM eventually said responding was “voluntary” after the threat already hit two million inboxes. Trump later told reporters there was “a lot of genius” in the email, that it was about finding people who might not actually exist.

Of course, they didn’t find a single fake employee who didn’t exist, in any agency, anywhere. But I'm glad we were able to prove, in five bullet points, to a billionaire with no legal standing over our jobs, that our little lives existed.

I keep reminding you these are billionaires because there’s a larger class issue here that really pisses me off. The billionaire’s time is treated as precious, while a federal worker’s time is treated as free. You've got the billionaire who thinks the federal employee working from home has got it too good, so he orders the employee back to an office. But what about everything that gets lost in that calculation? There are things that are important to ordinary people who aren't rich and famous, like gas money, family dinners, the extra hour with your kid, or the three hours spent on a bus or a train going from Stockton to Palo Alto when it’s still dark outside and not getting home until it’s dark again. These things aren't recognized as costs because it’s your time.

But when it comes to the billionaire’s time, everyone needs to accommodate him. People fly to him. Meetings need to fit into his schedule. An assistant or somebody else organizes his day because that would take time away from him. Other people are literally providing labor specifically to prevent him from wasting fifteen minutes of his precious life.

And then that guy decides someone making $55K a year working 120 calls with quotas, metrics, productivity and performance evaluations, with every minute accounted for, has too much control over their time?

Owners and management have always wanted to own the worker’s time. Remote work gives you a little piece of it back.

How dare these ordinary workers get a remote arrangement that makes their lives a little easier.

So then, they came for the union. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for federal workers. It got tied up in the courts for a while, but by August the administration was able to enforce it at the VA and our union contracts were terminated almost overnight.

Anyone who still thinks this is a veterans-first administration should remember that one out of every three federal employees is a veteran. Veterans working at the VA is a thing, the same way a lot of people get sober and end up working in recovery. So when the administration attacks the federal workforce as lazy, overprivileged dead weight, some of the people caught in that attack are the same veterans it claims to prioritize.

I don't work for the VA anymore. But AFGE never stopped fighting, and the courts keep ruling in their favor. The VA's response has been to lose, ignore the ruling, and try again. Three times now. And the fight is still going on as I write this.

As for Trump, he still talks about the “deep state,” and if there’s anything he believes in, it’s revenge. He thinks some parts of the federal government went after him. And maybe some of them did. But I don’t think he sees the entire federal workforce as millions of people who are personally against him. I don’t think he thinks about most of them as individuals at all. When I look at the five-bullet email, people in storage closets, and a new mother being denied parental leave even after a court ordered the union contract restored, what I see is contempt for ordinary people—contempt for them as a class.

I was still so paranoid and hallucinatory that they diagnosed me with “delusional disorder” at first.

Getting that fixed isn’t easy, by the way. Try convincing somebody you’re not delusional. “That’s exactly what a delusional person thinks.”

On top of that, I had psoriasis on my scalp so bad I had to sleep with tube socks over my hands so that I wouldn’t scratch and bleed in my sleep. The bottoms of my feet were hamburger from walking too much, and I still wasn’t wearing socks because I only had one pair and needed them for my hands at night.

The worker doing my intake gave me a pair of hospital slippers with the grippers and told me to sit down, try to relax.

The facility was technically an “emergency shelter.” But it was also a dual-diagnosis program, treating mental illness and addiction as co-occurring disorders that have to be worked on at the same time. So, everybody was a mental health patient, everybody was homeless, and everybody was trying to stay sober. Give me five minutes with a reality TV producer and we’d have twelve seasons.

The intake took two hours. The questionnaire. The rules. The signatures. The search. The confiscations. The inventory sheet. The blood work. The “pee in this cup and don’t flush.” And the green gown. They put you in a green hospital gown for the first 24 hours while washing everything you came in with. The protocol is supposed to prevent bedbugs. They call it Code Green.

There’s a name for all of this. Harold Garfinkel called it a degradation ceremony. It’s basically an initiation ritual designed to strip you of your past self. Staff treats the process as routine while it’s the worst day of your life. But let’s face it, if the identity you brought in with you was adapted to a war zone, then maybe it needs to be torn down. Sometimes you have to break with your old identity before you can build anything else. In some places, they signal that break by shaving your head or giving you a number. In this place, they gave me a sobriety date.

You don’t realize how big a deal dates are in institutions until you end up in one. Intake dates can become sobriety dates. And sobriety dates are when the counting starts.

When you’re homeless for a serious amount of time, you lose your grip on time. You don’t look at the time. You certainly don’t worry about it. You don’t do due dates, work shifts, school years, appointments, birthdays, elections, any of it. The rest of the world keeps moving while you’re just floating in a vacuum. The days go by, but they don’t add up.

Then you go into treatment and suddenly, thirty days clean, you get a sobriety chip. Ninety days, another chip. Six months, another. A year, and you’re celebrating an anniversary—with other people. You start to see time again.

Eventually, when you look back at the time you spent on the street, you can’t really place yourself on a timeline. Unless you got hurt badly enough to remember everything around it, or arrested badly enough to leave a record, there aren’t many anchors. It's hard to say, “oh yeah, that thing happened around such-and-such time.” The whole stretch is just one big nothing.

So while the chips and anniversaries are good for keeping track of how long you’ve stayed clean, they also put time back together.

The counting can also be therapeutic if you’re sick enough.

Sick enough would be entering a treatment facility with your socks on your hands.

Now, going to NA meetings, getting chips and a sponsor is one thing. The total institution, where you’re cut off from the outside world and reshaped by the people in charge, is a different universe. One of the things the total institution does is act like a time factory. It manufactures a relationship between present and future until one day you wake up and boom, you have it again. Traditionally we’d expect family, community, work, or church to give people a place in time. But for a lot of people in this country, those structures aren’t doing so well either. You can’t lean on a single parent who’s fifty-nine and living paycheck to paycheck. And you can’t depend on a community that barely exists anymore, whether that’s a neighborhood where everybody just waves or a social circle that disappears the second they find out you’re a meth addict. Ordinary society has become so unmoored that if your life falls apart, a bureaucratic repair institution might be the only place left with enough structural authority to disrupt the cycle of self-destruction long enough for your life to start adding up again.

People can’t stand hearing that. Even the people who are supposed to get it hate hearing it. Some of my social work classmates at the community college—most of them twenty years younger than me—thought I was secretly pro-authoritarian because I said an institution saved my life.

Granted, people going into social work should be skeptical of institutions. But not every exercise of authority is oppression. If that’s really what you think, your framework for understanding power is weak. There are circumstances where institutional authority is stabilizing or protective. Institutions can do things that almost nothing else can do. The facility that took me in on 02/22 restored my relationship to time, place, routine, and people. It did something important for me, and I’m not going to deny that.

But in a classroom full of 20-year-olds who’d never been in a group home, never been homeless, never been psychotic, never been suicidal, never entered a treatment facility hallucinating, never had to rebuild a life from scratch, I don’t think they realized they were writing their final papers on people like me.

Don’t get me wrong, the program humiliated me. They watched me, listened to my phone calls, monitored my blood and piss, paraded me around town in a big white van with a bunch of other psych patients. I had to carry a mental health diagnosis just to qualify for the program, which meant staying medicated the entire time I was there. It took me years after I left to get off those medications. When I went from inpatient to outpatient, there were still cameras in the apartment. When I finally got a car, they investigated my finances. The power imbalance was total, and it was coercive—and yes, it cared for me by controlling me. That's the price of admission for treatment, and I’m willing to admit that. But what does it say about the outside world that it takes something this extreme to get a person moving in the right direction again?

In Vegas, walking into an emergency room hoping to get a referral for a long-term addiction program is like walking into a casino and hitting a ten-spot on Keno. One in a million.

A lot of doctors assume you’re just another homeless guy gaming the system for three hots and a cot because it’s cold outside. Which happens. It’s Vegas.

After my “little sheet stunt,” as one of the nurses put it, I was tied to a Hannibal Lecter bed in five-point restraints with a spit hood over my face. The nurse stood over me and said, “You can stay overnight now. And you can stay just like that.”

The next day, I was transported to WestCare for a 3-day medically supervised detox. Three days later, they discharged me back into the street.

This went on for another whole year. The overcrowded hospitals, doctors not listening, detox centers dumping me on the sidewalk like a piece of trash, legitimate medical problems getting brushed off because staff assumed I was back for the same thing again. By that point, security usually knew I was on property before I even made it to check-in. I had doctors who never actually made eye contact with me; doctors who didn’t ask all the questions on the Mental Health Crisis Packet. I know this because I work in mental health now. I know the packet.

The system is horrifying. And when people see you as a manipulative mentally ill drug addict who smells so bad they have to fumigate the room after you, they don’t even want to look at you. Getting help means getting someone to look at you first.

I didn’t even know treatment facilities existed until I walked into Adult Mental Health and an amazing social worker helped place me at the Las Vegas Recovery Center. For the first time in my life, I had a team of doctors, therapists, social workers, and care coordinators in my corner. I had shelter and food so I could focus on recovery instead of figuring out where I could safely sleep every night. Over the next 21 months, I spent more than 1,000 hours in therapy. Medicaid covered every minute of it.

Medicaid also paid for the antidepressants and all the doctors’ appointments needed to stay on the medication.

After two years of sobriety, I got a job as a behavioral tech at the same treatment facility where I’d been a patient.

You could say, “You should just be grateful that Medicaid was there.” But survival is a pretty low bar. If anything, my story actually proves the system barely worked. I tried to fucking kill myself, got restrained, discharged into the street over and over, and only eventually got the help I needed after years of being seriously dehumanized. How is this evidence for the system rather than against it? Because I’m alive and recovered? What a brutal standard that is.