My dad was a salesman for a smaller locally owned wholesale liquor distributor AKA he was the guy that took orders from the local liquor stores on what stock to ship them. My dad LOVED his job and he was good at it. Easily one of the top salesman. He called on the same stores for years and built a personal relationship with each store owner. These stores were a mix of upscale fancy liquor stores to the kinds that slide the bottle from behind bulletproof glass and was an expert on which brands would sell best depending on the area making the stores, the company, and himself lots of money.
Most of the company were friends of his as well, going all the way back to college. They played golf on Sundays, went on work fishing trips, and had corporate tickets to local teams. It was a close-knit group. Every Christmas my Dad's boss would hand each salesman $2000 in cash. CASH! Again, my Dad loved his job….
….Until the late 00's.
Can't remember the exact year but toward the end of that decade, my Dad's boss called everyone into a meeting and announced unexpectedly that he was selling the company to a much larger wholesaler based out of Atlanta. No one was losing their jobs but a lot of new guys were coming in and it was no longer going to be run as a “small business” but now as a corporate company. Most of my Dad's co-workers saw the writing on the wall and retired, but my Dad decided to keep working for at least a few more years. Before too long, he didn't recognize anyone who worked there.
What followed was a complete destruction of everything he worked toward. They began to have him push new products to the store owners that they did not want or need hurting his trustworthy relationship with them. When he wasn't making these quotas, guys who did not even have 1/4 of his experience berated him for not doing his job right. Eventually, they took these stores away from him and would assign him new stores and give his old stores to younger salesman whom they could pay a 1/3 of his salary. The former store owners would actually call my Dad personally anyway to take orders and complain how shit these younger guys were at their jobs.
Those fishing trips? Nope
Tickets? Gone
Christmas bonus? A $25 gift card to Kroger. A TWENTY-FIVE-DOLLAR GIFT CARD TO KROGER!
Now the part everyone is probably wondering about.
During all this, my Dad started drinking, heavily. Now I have to mention here that for the 20 years of my life til this point, I never, NEVER saw my Dad drunk. Not once. He would have a small cocktail every night but never excessive. Now though, he was drinking constantly. I was in my early 20s at this point and had moved away but whenever I would visit, he was usually pretty intoxicated. He now HATED his job and since he really couldn't quit (he was in his late fifties with no college degree and really no other job experience) this was his way of coping.
One morning he called me in a panic, that he had woken up and his feet were completely swollen. Any nurses in here know where this is going. His liver was beyond repair and he needed a transplant ASAP, which can be a pretty long waitlist. He was also a smoker, so there was a frequent argument of “why give someone a new liver if they are just going to die of lung cancer in a year?” Also, he was still trying to work and therefore still drinking. My Mom caught him and basically threatened him with divorce unless he stopped cold, which he finally did. He would eventually become too weak to work and put in his resignation. The company didn't give him a “thank you for all the years of hard work” or a “get well soon”. They just accepted it and moved on. After 20 years and making A LOT of money for both the former and new companies, just a big fat middle finger.
He was finally able to get a transplant and when they give you a transplant, the doctors prescribe medication to suppress your white blood cells to not fight off the new organ. A few months after the transplant, he went to the last place that made him happy, the beach. While there, he had apparently cut his foot on something. This caused the wound to get infected and without white blood cells, there was nothing to fight off the infection.
A week later, my Dad was dead. The infection eventually caused sepsis, giving him cardiac arrest.
I also want to mention that during all this, before and after his liver cirrhosis, he became a completely different person. Extremely irritable and a bit of an asshole causing me to avoid talking to him. I didn't make it to his death bed and I don't remember the last conversation I had with him.
Some folks reading this may interpret this as the heart attack killed him, or the alcohol killed him.
For me though, that job, which he used to love so much but became a personal hell. That shitty fucking job, that's what killed him.
His birthday was this past Friday. He would have been 63.
I love you Dad, and I miss you.
TL:DR – My dad's once great job got bought out and became a shitty job. He started drinking to cope and got liver disease, which killed him.