I might spin this out a little further, like the reason he got fired from his last job is he let his work suffer when Tiny Tim first got sick, and his last boss didn't take that very well So now he's terrified of that happening again
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Which is why he's never even mentioned his family at work - and, in the original book as opposed to the adaptations, he doesn't even broach the subject of getting Christmas off (the OG Scrooge, to his credit, gives it to him without being asked, however grudgingly)
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As far as why Cratchit goes out of his way to defend him, I figure he is obviously a genuinely nice guy but it's also his defense mechanism to make it through the day He deals with Scrooge treating him like shit all the time by seeing that Scrooge is himself a miserable bastard
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"At least I get to go home at the end of the day For all his money, this asshole has to live with an asshole 24/7" Resentment giving way to pity
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(I think most of us who've had to deal with a pointlessly abusive jerk with power over us have at least tried to deal with it this way)
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For Scrooge's part, he seems very unlikely to ever actually fire Bob, for exactly the reason that he'd have such a hard time finding a new employee willing to put up with his shit Remembering he actively has a reputation for being the biggest dick in the London business world
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That's the saddest thing about the story, that this is the most significant relationship Scrooge has with any other human being His household servants don't give a shit (they instantly rob his house when he dies) He barely ever speaks to his only blood relation, Fred
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The closest thing he has to a friendship is this wildly codependent thing he's got going with his employee based on economic desperation and Stockholm syndrome The one human being he spends like 60 hours a week with, the only person he says "Hi" to every morning, is Bob
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That's something Dickens knew and thought a lot about, from experience You can't just reduce a job to X amount of labor / Y money Those hours out of your day *are your life*, your job is *who you are* for all that time You can't just switch it off at the end of the day
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Bob knows what a piece of shit Scrooge is, he's the one who absorbs the brunt of it every day, but he can't do anything about it and he'd rather not bring any of that energy home with him if he can So he tries, as best he can, to treat Scrooge as though he were a friend
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This is the whole thing with the Ghost of Christmas Future seeming to "change the subject", when Scrooge demands to see someone genuinely mourning the future dead man (who is obviously himself but he's in denial) Where instead he brings him back to the Cratchits mourning Tim
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Scrooge's death isn't even mentioned directly in this scene, and yet it's NOT changing the subject This IS the closest anyone in the world comes to actually mourning Scrooge Bob Cratchit was the only human being who even tried to care about him on a day to day basis at the end
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The only one in a position to actually be hurt by his death in any capacity - Scrooge dying intestate means the business is being shuttered and he's out of a job again But there's no actual grief, only numbness
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He put up with the freezing cold office and the piles and piles of papers and the 15 shillings a week and the casual insults half the time and the old man looking through him like a piece of furniture the other half of the time for Tim
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It might've been worth the risk to quit otherwise, but not with a sick kid at home who needed every penny of financial cushion But now, though... The good Lord saw fit to take the old man and his son in the same year It's all moot, it all adds up to zero I guess... that's it
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That sense of cold indifference is so much harsher than if Bob had been angry and cursing his memory That the one person who's been the biggest part of your life for the past ten years now thinks of all that time as something he'd just never think or speak about again
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That's the thing with Fred, we don't even actually see Fred in the Future sequence Fred doesn't really mourn Scrooge either How can he, you can't mourn someone you never knew He was just trying to uphold an obligation to his own dead mom by extending an olive branch
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The harshest indictment of Scrooge in this scene is that Fred's reaction to Scrooge's death is to *apologize on his behalf* It's to try to make right the harm he did The only legacy Scrooge left his blood family is being a mess they shamefully try to clean up
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Bob telling his wife that Fred came by unannounced when they were closing up the office, just to ask how he was holding up and drop off his business card
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Delicately, without prying, giving his condolences and saying if his oldest son Peter is still looking for work his office is hiring right now and he'll put in a good word
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That understanding passing between them among people who've had a certain relationship with shitty people they couldn't cut out of their lives, that openly venting about how shitty he was will only reopen the wound
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End of conversation
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