Two episodes from 1983 that make me bitter

Thinking back on a gray day, where I am in no good mood due to pain from my teeth, my thoughts fall on some of the saddest days in my life.

There are some episodes from my life which make me bitter. Here is a description of some of them which I think back on many years later. Episodes which continue to make me bitter every single time, I think about them. They have shaped my life so to say.

1983

Two episodes from this year makes me bitter. My family knows that if I talk about the year 1983, they shall leave me alone until I have used half a day alone so I can rejoin others.

A family business is not an accepted way to earn money

The first episode is about an outing to a workshop out of town which the school planned at a short notice. After 9 years the school suddenly wanted to make the students who remained in the school for the 10th form work together more closely.

There was nothing wrong with that but the announcement of the outing came out of the blue. A lot of our students had jobs. Who can you go to your boss who gracefully allowed you to serve in his firm and tell him that you cannot come to work because the school had ordered you to participate in an outing outside the city? You cannot not, so the other students were given the opportunity to leave the workshop so they could use their bicycle back to work and honor their duties and return to the workshop once it was over.

I was not granted this option. Why? Because I only worked for my family. Back in the day firms that fed an entire family were not observed as very prestigious. Even today Danish law tends to help larger corporations and during the last pandemic the supermarkets were the only shops that were allowed to remain open while the smaller shops had to be closed. As a result some of the supermarkets extended their product range. Later many of them had to file for bankruptcy.

I feel angry because I had to let my family down. My father was a manager of a gas station which first operated under the label of British Petroleum and later Q8. The gas station which all our income as a family came from. And that was something which the society represented by my school saw as wrong!

But we didn't steal money or conduct another kind of crime. It was a straight and ordinary business. The only difference between the jobs the other students did and the job I did was that my boss shared the same family name. I cannot see anything wrong with it. Who can?

Are studies important?

Today all children in Denmark know that the final exam after form 9 decides the path you can choose in life.

Basically you can attend the gymnasium if you have the grades or fight for your life doing jobs in constant competition from illegal immigrants or workers from other countries inside the European union who can work for basically nothing due to lower costs of living where they come from.

When I was about to leave the school, I was not given all the hours to prepare. Suddenly the school wanted us to learn some kind of traditional Danish dance instead of reading books and focus on math!

Why were our academics not important? What if I had a dream about the gymnasium or even the university?

They basically told me not to aim at my potential. Today, having children of my own, I have never blocked them if they needed private tutors or anything else. My son is studying at a university and I kind of envy him.

What I did not know back then, was how Denmark has changed so the gap between people who attended the universities are in front when it comes to jobs and us who took another path studying part time and earning degrees like Merconom have no chance if we apply for jobs.

I am well aware that my life at that time kind of became derailed. Today it is too late to achieve more. My lifespan is slowly running out. One of my uncles died aged 59, another aged 60 and my father aged 63. Today I am 58 years of age and there are signs that my health could fail any day.

So I am bitter when I look back at the year 1983. While I managed to go to business school and get a degree it was not a degree that really meant something when it is about becoming a valuable candidate for any kind of job in the line of business, I do today.

My mood is taking a turn for the worse, so I will write about some of the other episodes that make me bitter in another blog entry.