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Re: What Made My Day Today? :-)

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On 9/2/2023 9:55 AM, Physfitfreak wrote:
> I was paid a dollar or so above the minimum wage back then


It happened that I didn't get to use the money that I'd earned in that 
store for several months. They could not issue a check for me because I 
didn't have a social security number. And right in the middle of that 
mess, the study in that school had taken a serious turn and I didn't 
have one minute extra, let alone half a day to drive downtown and apply 
for a social security number. Texas didn't have a requirement for 
permission to work in applying for SSN (either legally and deliberately 
according to their true plans, or illegally by looking the other way).

Right after last exams of that semester, we Iranians heard that next 
semester we had to pay the "foreign student" tuition and fees and began 
grappling for money to make it happen. So just the next day, I drove 
downtown and applied for SSN. When I received the card, I took it to the 
store I worked at and they immediately began processing what they owed 
to me, knowing how long I'd worked for them without pay.

Needless to say, I got a huge check (for those days anyway) from them 
which not only paid my new tuition and fees, it also made me able to buy 
a nice bicycle from Sears :-)

So I added riding that bicycle to the array of physical fitness measures 
I had arranged for myself. It was fun. Sometimes I rode it to school and 
back! That was quite a distance, Plano to UTD. Only the Mormon professor 
in physics dept did that all the time. Plus the road between was never 
windless. So one way riding was quite difficult and time consuming, and 
the opposite way easy and much faster. Detecting wind beforehand was a 
tricky business because from my window of the apartment, the trees I 
could see, none moved one bit by wind. They were so sturdy that it was 
like you were looking at a picture. And it was never a steady wind, so 
you couldn't just walk outside and detect it. It came for a few minutes 
then was gone for a few minutes, all the time. So I could not 
effectively decide whether I should use the bike or not on any 
particular day. So almost all the time paid for it the way I described. 
Wind is the number one factor for anybody who seriously rides bicycles.

Also, bikes could park within 10 yards of the physics building, so you 
didn't have to walk a mile to get there when you used your car.

I still have the stub of that first check in the attic :) It came 
extremely handy for me indeed, cause in 1985 I used that to _prove_ that 
I had worked illegally already back then in 1978, and that was more than 
the 5 years required by the new amnesty law. So I'd become legally 
illegal from 1978 and on. This is how I got my green card! You had to be 
residing in the USA "illegally" for at least 5 years to use that amnesty 
law.

The stub also indicates how much they subtracted from it for medical 
insurance (blue cross blue shield). A dollar and something per week :-))))

Today, you have to pay an arm and a leg each week to have that same 
insurance cover.

The memory of that stub alone has made my day, already :) So fuck you 
and your ilk both.







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Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-08-27 10:40 -0500
  Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-08-31 20:13 -0500
    Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-09-01 18:46 -0500
  Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-09-01 22:44 -0500
    Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-09-02 09:55 -0500
      Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-09-03 06:56 -0500
  Re: What Made My Day Today? :-) Physfitfreak <Physfitfreak@gmail.com> - 2023-09-03 12:14 -0500

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