dislocated, suffocated

So, homeless again for a bit. It won't last, it's just a matter of searching for or freelancing for enough Lindens, and spending time searching for a new home base, but...it's always a sad thing. What makes me saddest about this is not actually the having to leave. It was the why.

For several months now--since my income seems to be oddly variable--I've had an agreement with a love. She exchanges her work at an estate--and no, not identifying which one--for the plot that she uses, and the plot that I use. (I moved to a smaller place when we struck this arrangement, and when I was flush, I paid her rent, so it wasn't entirely one-sided.)

Over the run of everyday life on SL, they had to downside, so she went from being an estate manager to being a land office clerk--a significant downgrade in both income and responsibility. Still, she understood, and life went on. At least, until they stopped paying her.

In general--and both in RL and SL--my love takes a particular approach to employment, one echoed by Captain Mal Reynolds: she works in exchange for Lindens, the key point being exchange. That's the transaction, that's what she signs up to do. She's a very loyal worker, and she works hard, but she insists on the formalities: she does the job. And then she gets paid.

And three weeks ago, this estate stopped paying her.

At first--the first week--she sent friendly IMs, asking her employers to resolve the situation. Obviously it slipped their minds, it happens. No hard feelings. But then she hit week two, and what was worse, they'd stopped talking at that point--and not just to her, but to their other estate managers, and to their customers.

We still don't know what's going on with this formerly functional estate, but she's now at week three. And over the course of one day of talking, we went from "you need to try and ask them what's going on" to "maybe you need to leave". Because they're not paying her; they're not talking to her; they're not updating their webpage listings (for example, four listings today she found that were open and available on the website, that had been rented in world--some for months) for their estate. So...why is she staying? It was a damned good question.

So she made the decision to leave. And then everything happened very quickly, for the first time. In the space of three hours, she'd informed her employers, I'd taken back what was mine in my skybox, she'd taken back what was hers in hers...and both of us suddenly had no homes.

Well. That was abrupt.

Okay. Tomorrow, back to work, and we see where I go from here.