We Are Family Here

Writing prompt: Every company you’d ever worked for had claimed to consider their employees family. With your new job, you figured it was just more empty words, until the crap hit the fan ... and your “family” showed up in force.

I wasn’t looking for much more than a job where I could clock in at 8am and then clock out at 4pm and get a reasonably decent wage for my effort.

I got this job as a data entry operator at Wilson’s factory where they made wooden furniture of quite good quality at reasonable prices. It was just a job that could allow me to keep my mother comfortable and made sure her doctor’s bills were being paid.

They told us all that we were family and I have heard that before at previous jobs, so I dismissed it as just part of the management ideas to keep the workers happy.

Things were going fine and mom was slowly getting better until some idiots thought that the house I bought would be a great place to build a new home for their family and started harassing me to sell to them.

No matter how many times I told them I didn’t want to sell, they kept coming back and telling me that I should sell up and they would buy it from me.

Now if they had offered a price that would be reasonable, I might possibly have been interested but these idiots were offering me less than 1/3 of what the house was worth and less than half what I still owed on it.

So of course I wasn’t at all interested in selling. No one would sell in that situation.

They eventually went away after I went off at them and used so very harsh language to tell them where to go with their insulting offer. I thought maybe that would be the end of it but no. The harassment just turned into vandalism and constant attempts to drive us out of our home.

Insults and attacks on us were painted on our walls, our small garden was ripped up, rubbish was dumped in our yard. Hell if I still had a car I am sure that it would have been damaged. It was constant.

And then one day, my mother had been going shopping for a nice dress to cheer herself up for a planned night out I was taking her on and she was harassed by a group of thugs as she was returning home. Her shopping bags were yanked out of her hands and the dress and shoes were dumped on the ground and ruined.

When I got home that night I was horrified to see her in tears holding the remains of the dress and shoes I had saved up for her to buy. She wasn’t seriously injured but bruising for a woman who was recovering from cancer is still no joke.

I was so angry and frustrated at the people who had done that. I knew who it was behind it all but I couldn’t do anything. If I was injured while trying to get justice, who would be able to look after mom?

At work the next day I was a mess. Everyone could see that I was upset and angry and I tried not to let things get to me but I was worried for mom alone at home and I was dreading a phone call saying the thugs had come back.

George my manager came up to me during my lunch break and sat down across from me at the table.

“John, you are upset. What has happened? How can we help? Is it something here at work or is it at home?”

I tried to dismiss things and told George that it wasn’t anything but he kept talking to me and he seemed to genuinely be concerned about me and I was just so worried, angry and frustrated that I blurted it out.

“I’m sorry George, Mom had an altercation yesterday and I am just worried for her. She went shopping for a nice dress and shoes so I could take her out to celebrate her recovery from cancer and some thugs assaulted her and ruined her dress. She’s sort of okay, a few bruises but she’s scared they will come back and I can’t be there to protect her and I am just so angry at them.”

I saw George’s face harden as I talked. “Do you know who they were?” he asked with a rumble in his voice.

“Yeah, they are part of a group that wanted to buy my house for a pittance and then build a house for their family. They offered a joke of a buyout price so I told them where to go but they started harassing us later on.”

At this George stood up and told me that this couldn’t go on. “No one does something to our family. No one.” he said and then told me to stay here as a couple people would want to talk to me about some details and that he was going to talk to a couple others.