About yesterday

Yesterday I was not happy because my husband basically got in the car and drove to an assignment in Oklahoma without enough money for a motel room and without even a full tank of gas.

The day before yesterday, I had to go and get a few things from the grocery store. While I wanted a whole lot of things, I had to restrict myself to really basic things. I bought a very few food items, some tissue paper, etc.... To get the best prices, I went to four different stores and bought two or three things on sale at each place. While all of these stores were in the same general area (two of them are at the same intersection), this still takes a bit of time, even if I didn't drive very far. I was gone more than an hour and came back with about a dozen items.

I barely had the money for what I bought. We used to have this huge jar of change. We've spent most of it now. We are overdrawn on one of our accounts, because I just can't seem to get through to my husband that except for big things like rent we should only use cash, and he needs to turn off the thing that automatically pays bills. We've been charged $140 in overdraft fees again, because we were short like fifty cents. If we were using cash we just would have bought fifty cents less gas or something one day, and none of that would have happened. But he just doesn't get it.

So, we are overdrawn in one account, have very little cash on us (most of which I spent yesterday getting really basic stuff that we needed). I really wanted to drive to Arlington to get a few things from the Asian Market, but I didn't because a.) we have so little money left and we have to do without a few things like that, and b.) driving to Arlington would have used gas and I shouldn't waste the gas if I'm not going to get that much. We have maybe ten dollars in one account, and about that much in another account, and then we have some change in jars, but we've mostly used up too. My husband has to go to Oklahoma on Friday, and the only reason he hasn't had to call and tell them he can't make it is because he gets paid on Friday.

While I am at one of the grocery stores, someone from work calls my husband and asks him to work in Oklahoma on Wednesday.

Sure.

I am really tired of this. You would think that they would know that he hasn't worked enough to have money for out of town assignments. And they don't have anything set up to advance money for motels and gas, you're just supposed to pay for that yourself and wait a week or two for reimbursement.

But even if they somehow don't know that the people they don't even have full schedules for can't possibly have the money for going out of town, the employees who don't have enough money to go out of town should certainly know that they don't have enough money. But my husband agrees to the extra day of work, even though I can't see that he has any way of getting to work.

So I come in, and he asks if I want to go to Oklahoma with him. And I'm like sure, when? And he says, tomorrow.

We don't have any money. You can't go tomorrow.

He doesn't immediately see the sense of this. I yell for a bit. I get tired of yelling. I don't want to waste anymore time on the subject. If he cannot borrow money from someone, he will just have to call and cancel.

Only, he doesn't borrow any money, and he doesn't call and cancel. He plays on the computer all day. I don't ask him if he's called to cancel. I'm tired of being his mommy.

So, he does nothing about the situation all day. I do some cooking and work on one of the videos. A bit before we go to bed I ask him if he managed to borrow some money or if he called to cancel.

Neither.

I do some more yelling.

I cannot believe that he really intends to get in the car and drive several hundred miles away when he has no money for a motel, and I doubt that he even has enough gas to get there and back. He's going to run out of gas and get stuck somewhere at one in the morning. It is really hard to believe that people are that stubborn that they would knowingly do something that risky, but he doesn't change his mind.

We go to bed.

The next morning, I convince him to wait an hour to see if he can get some money from one of those payday loan places. We go in, and we see a sign that says something about a hundred dollar fee.

I think, that's more than an overdraft fee. We're not paying a hundred dollars just to borrow a hundred dollars for three days. I was thinking the fee would be more like twenty dollars, not a hundred. We leave.

We we are halfway home, it occurs to me that we should have asked if that was the minimum fee. Maybe the hundred dollar fee was for a loan of five hundred dollars, and the fee for what we needed would be less. But he didn't want to go back and ask. He took me home.

We have have about ten dollars in one account, and about ten dollars in another account, and he tells me he has another ten dollars that I didn't know about. He thinks that he can buy enough gas for the trip with thirty dollars. I disagree, but he leaves anyway.

He finally calls seven hours later to tell me he's okay and that thirty dollars was enough to cover the gas.

He got home at about one-thirty in the morning.

I was mostly asleep, so I haven't really had a chance to talk to him. I know he said something about me probably being right and that the trip was mostly a waste of time. I'll have to get the rest of the details later.