strung along

Wait just a little longer, the boss says. I had sent an email to our HR department, late Thursday morning, to ask about the procedure for obtaining an apartment-rental contract. Hours later, there'd been no answer. HR might not even be aware my contract has technically ended (December 31 was my last day). I went through this same line of questioning before a couple years back, and it seems the same situation is repeating itself again: the boss wants me to wait a bit longer, to avoid talking with HR, because he thinks the CEO might actually answer him, and if the CEO fails to answer him, the boss says he knows someone with legal experience who can advise him. I don't think I can say any more than that, so I'll leave the rest to your imagination. For myself, though, I think this isn't a repeat of recent history: this feels like the end, and I have no doubt that our CEO has a much bigger legal team of his own for just such contingencies—i.e., for disgruntled employees. Mentally, I'm already out the door, but I did humor the boss by sending HR a "belay that" email later in the day.

The frustration for me is that, if the boss really wants me to sit tight and to spend January working for the company—despite the fact that I might not get paid in February for January work—I'm not going to have time to make a SquareSpace blog, take SkillShare classes, learn InDesign, and enroll in Master Class (a platform suggested by my brother David when I emailed him about video-making). And what does that mean, exactly? It means pushing my self-education back by half a year at least. The boss really seems to think he can get us another six months, after which we disband and eventually re-form as our own company. But I'm starting to think the boss hasn't made much effort, over the past two years, to gather the resources for a new company—new investors, potential contracts, etc.—and he'd rather stick with the Golden Goose as long as possible. It's the easier route. I'd been under the impression that we'd be transferring over to our own company at the start of this year, but that's obviously not happening. So I may have to take matters into my own hands and just walk, at least temporarily, while the boss settles his own affairs. Unfortunately, it's not that simple: the reason the boss is fighting to keep the team together for another six months is that that's enough time to complete the current book series and, we hope, to see it get used. Which means that, if he does somehow improbably succeed at buying us another six months, I can't afford to step away from the company. How can he complete the series without me?

The whole situation gives me the vibe of a toxic, abusive relationship. Not that I'm being abused like a Dickensian kid in a factory: my job is relatively low-stress and not very mentally demanding. But there are elements of toxicity there: "Just wait a little longer" sounds a lot like "Just give me one more chance, and I promise things'll be better." So it becomes a matter of my own self-respect, and as I've done with so many Korean jobs in the past, I may have to grab the initiative, pick up, and move on instead of throwing my lot in with a venture that the boss apparently hasn't even begun working on. The lazy, passive, easy thing to do would be to stick around, risk doing unpaid work while I wait for the boss to get in contact with the CEO, then hope for another six months with the company (insert toneless yay here).

What to do? Decisions, decisions. I guess surviving a stroke and a heart attack doesn't lead to some vague "happily ever after." Life, in all its difficulty, rolls on.