I paid $2.76 for "The Precious JUICE" yesterday, and that will last me maybe a week.

I don't get a specific COLA. Traditionally, we get a 2% or so raise if we come in sober and don't get caught with our pee-pee's in an undergrad's mouth in our cubes. That's Management's version of "COLA".

Until the failed Dot-Commers took over the IT department 5 years ago, now "At Expectation" performance will get NO increase whatsoever. You're at expectation, well, that's what we pay you for. You need more money, re-invent fire and cure AIDS EVERY day and maybe we'll give you 3%...

The Middle Class is dead. I had a TASTE of what it could have been like to be Middle Class, then that rotten bastard Reagan got in office and his buds raped this country bloody, then we got a little respite from the Big Dawg and I was able to get off food stamps and stop having to scrounge butts out of public ashtrays like some homeless guy, then the Bush Family Crime Syndicate gets in and I get shoved back into the Working Poor. Everything I saw come my way during Clinton's era has been gobbled up by Bush's greedy fucking Pioneers and Rangers.

Every year, I have less money for fuel, food, and medicine, yet I'm supposed to "drive this economy" by signing my paycheck over to Wally-World and Ditech-Dot-Com.

I quit smoking, only to see the $30 a week savings get gobbled up by other things increasing in price.

This ain't "Middle Class", people, it's "Working POOR", just like the poor bastards who ruined their health 14 hours a day, 6 days a week for the likes of Ford and Carnegie and Vanderbilt.