What my work is like. (with a RANT!!)

I'm currently sitting at my desk for the first time in weeks. It's clean and tidy.

I realised today that I haven't really explained what I do since I started work. So here we go.

What I do at the office where I go to do work.

At the office where I go to do work the work could be described as a wee bit simples. I work for a construction recruitment firm as a 'database co-cordinator' in their offices in London Bridge.

"Finally," I hear you shout, "He's found a job where he can combine his love of construction with his love of data!", because as you all know, I know LOADS about construction. Yep...loooooooads.

I have NO IDEA what the company does or how they make money.

My particular role?

Well, people who are looking for jobs upload their CVs onto online job-boards (like Monster, Total Jobs, HookerListings etc) and type in key words that describe their skills (e.g. sales negotiating, business management, anilingus etc) and wait.

Then, I go through the boards looking for a certain job (eg, ass-licking sales negotiator) review the potential candidates CVs and then enter their details into the system. In other words I'm a professional copy-and-paste-er. Schweet.

There're some pretty cool characters in the place too. I mean 'cool' is a loose term as only a few of the people fit that CV description. 'People' might be a better word to use for the rest.

The People I Work With in the Office Where I Go to do Work (AKA) The Database Team (AKA) The Losers.

So there's my boss:

BigMan - he's, well a BIG man. A gargantuan man, a four-wheel man. He spends all his time talking about films, and we spent most of Wednesday quoting huge tracts of StarWars at each other. He's very Catholic, and has spent years dissecting spaghetti westerns to unravel the catholic thematic strands. He is a big guy with a big heart, and genuinely seems to care about his little loser minions.

CheekyGuy - He's a Cockney with a heart of gold, a real goldbrick with a disarmingly cheekiy demeanour. CG is one of my immediate colleagues, so he spends most of his time showing me the ropes. Think Michael Caine as Alfie. He's been with the office for about a year and will soon become a Consultant. This will Wraith him unfortunately.

Aspergers Guy - AG is the office junior and when he's not doing his odd wee involuntary things (thanks to his severe Aspergers) he likes to quote huge tracts of the films Heat, The Shawshank Redemption and Goodfellas. He also does the best impression of Peter Griffin I've ever seen. He spent five minutes on my first day doing a Morgan Freeman voice over Shawshank-style, making a joke about how the rest of the team would have me gang-raped "I wish I could tell you Conor put up a fight....". I'm sure you can imagine, I'm incredibly fond of him, he's a really great bloke.

Polish Tank Commander - PTC is one of the few girls in the office and we're all afraid of her. She has the same job title as me, but we all do what she says. I think I've managed to Blarney my way through her cold suspicion so that now only a vague distrust lingers. She's really nice though, just terrifying.

Prohibitively Mean Secretary - PMS is someone who I cannot like. She is a very pretty girl, and she spends all the time she can flirting, but she is very very mean. For example, she'll say things to lower your confidence when she can (ie, "so wow, you took a long time finding a job, didn't you?") and smile sweetly. However, when there's no-one to talk to she'll chat to anyone she can. She's VERY aware of how (meh) pretty she is, and backstabs everyone. She flirts with a guy til someone cooler comes along then completely ignores them. I don't like her much because she has no soul, she doesn't like me because I'm smarter than her (don't mean to sound arrogant, but she says some fucking stupid things) and I'm not attracted to her.

Lovely Secretary - LS is a wee tike of a thing with a wee mouse voice. She's a 21 ex-drama-student who is in charge of front-of-office stuff so we never see her apart from when we're going in and out, but she's nice, and gave me an orange on my first day. She's like Elmo.

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Most of the other people in the office are nice. Most of them are young guys, like me, but who work as recrutiment consultants. I can't fault them for the job they do because I know how hard it is for a 20-something young guy to find work and carve a place in the world. I like them individually because they are mostly very nice guys, and they made me feel really welcome. They are however, en masse, the biggest bunch of yuppies I've ever met.


They are...


The Consultants.

The phrase 'money motivated' is bandied around a lot, so are the words 'target' and 'success'. Some of them are unmitigated arseholes. They call each other 'son' and try to out-Alpha each other, like frat-boys drink Nattie Lite and thinking they're seasoned party monstes. When we go for drinks, they are mysoginistic and and leer at women. They attempt to chat-up girls by talking about 'earning potential' and the need to 'proactively kick-start your own success'.

They strut around the office, spouting off maxims like Gordon Gecko's aborted love-child about how business is a metaphor for life struggle, and how only a cut-throat high-power win-all strategy will conquer.

Most think They are Esquire man-of-the-year business players, an ubermensch evolution of some Nietzschean wet-dream about tall Aryan farmhands with bayonets for penises, fucking and stabbing the lesser ranks before crushing their skulls under a relentless Panzer-track of progress and capitalism.


PMS likes this, of course she does. The phoney power-trip that permeates their side of the office turns her on as these young guys walk around stoned from the fumes of Their own bullshit. I wince as They strut past on their Blackberrys, shouting abuse down the phone, and I wipe the frost-layer of cold sweat off my thank-fucking-Zeus that I am a shit-munching pleb.

They are the maggots that spawned in the bloated corpse of Thatcher's 1980's red-braced, brandy-drinking, Porsche-driving apocalypse of regeneration. They represent the very worst that humanity has to offer, not individually, but as a group.

They are what is wrong.




My team, the ones mentioned above (except PMS) are not like that. We are the Betas...thank fuck. We will never be cool, never be sexy and never get a promotion. We are the bottom of the barrel.

Phew.

So, if you're reading this blog and I ever start talking about how money is simply the be-all and end-all, please send me anthrax in the post and tell me it's cocaine. If I become a consultant I'll probably become a coke-addled wanker. So send me powder and let it kill me.

Now it's Sunday night, and I'm just about to go to bed. I'm going to get back into training tomorrow morning I think, so I'm going to go for a run when I get up, it should be fun. Tomorrow I'm gonna work hard, come home and write.

I can't wait.
x


(have a nice week)

Black-eyed Freeze - an anecdote within an anecdote within an anecdote...

So I’m currently sitting in Birmingham International Airport (BHX for you international airport designation fetishists) doing a wee bit of typing, because people keep staring at me. There’s a chance that I may be called away for my flight soon, but unless I say otherwise, assume I wrote this post here, also this post is going to be FUCKING MASSIVE)

-funny fact-ette, I’m at a Costa coffee adding to my future massive heart-attack and people keep staring at me. The place is packed with home-goers, all sharing tables, but I’m the fat girl at the party with icing on her chin that no-one wants to dance with. Awwww.

First of all, why am I in Birmingham when, cor blimey Mary Poppins, I live in London?
Good question reader! Well, yesterday (22nd) I left my little Uberflat in the wee hours, slipping and sliding with my luggage and Lassie as I tried to walk up my little street which was glazed with ice. I somehow made it to the train station, looking like a plum that someone had jizzed on, got the train and after a half-hour journey, found myself in Luton airport.

Now, I was a bit hungover yesterday. On Monday I went to the jobcentre and then found out that my dole application had been rejected. That’s right, I’m so awesome that I can’t even sign on properly. Anyway, I was walking back from the Dole office, feeling somewhat dejected about how the week had been when I passed a joke shop with ‘Help Wanted’ written on it. I bounded in, shaking myself like a dog (it was snowing ridiculously heavily) and met the manager. I gave him my CV, heavily implied I would give him oral sex, and went on my way, somewhat bouyed by how I may have just gotten a job, and choosing to ignore that it was in no way a Law job or that no-one else seemed to be interested in having it.

(Quick question out there: Who thinks I should work in a joke shop?)

I went to the pub to say goodbye to my barfly friends (the cool pub I drink at, not the shit hole I sometimes work at...) and had a few whiskeys (Yes ‘whiskey’ not ‘whisky’, based on the Irish word Uisce Bheatha – Water of Life. Thank god/Darwin for St. Jameson) by the fire. It was lovely, a perfect warm respite from the freezing evening outside.

I had to cancel a date with ‘the girl that I’m seeing’ (which was really annoying cos she’s great) because I was going to have to leave the house at four or five to get the train because of the snow. Therefore the evening became a bit of a nothing-to-do affair so I stayed by the fire and chatted to my friends.

When I say ‘a few whiskeys’, I can’t really quantify how many. I drink doubles, because singles seem lonely, and there were definitely a few. Then people heard the ‘Boom Boom Pow’ story of my black eye and grew to love my sparkling repartee, and a few kind souls started buying me Christmas drinks. At that point I may have gone next door to the shithole and chatted for a while, because I distinctly remember drinking Guinness with a few of the grrrrrr locals and there was definitely more boozing there. I had a pizza at some point, then went back to the cool bar.
Scene deleted (I just called my friend Beatriz who works in the Cool Bar to find out what happened, and she said she’ll find out for me. I was good though, didn’t do anything bad at least)
I woke up at about 4, feeling grand. The birds were singing, the trees were saying and I definitely was not hungover. Yes, there was a distinct taste of vomit, and at least six hours were missing, but I hadn’t been raped and was in my own house, ready to get ready to try and get ready to go home...

CUT TO:
I was in Luton airport with a hangover. The worst snowstorm for the last 15 years was still raging, and quelle fucking surprise, like the sword of Damocles hanging over our holiday ambitions, the world-weary Easyjet crone-in-chief announced the flight was cancelled.
-Rather miffed, as you might imagine, I approaced the desk and asked whether there was any chance of transferring to a later flight.

No.

-I asked was the any point in trying to wait to see if the status changed (cos I imagine airport announcements to be rather like Facebook updates- “Luton Airpost is: So psyched for the snowwwwww!!! lololololo xx <3”)

No.

-I asked could I pay cash-money to buy a ticket on a later flight

Yes, sir (she didn’t say sir)

-I asked when the next available flight was.

January 2nd.

Fuck sake. I waited for about four or five hours and when it was patently clear that NOTHING was gonna happen, I went home.

(N.B. There was ‘an American’ present. ‘An American’ in travel terms for people who live outside the US, is the one American customer who makes a fuss about service. Usually middle-aged women in mountain-climbing boots and clothes woven from hemp, drinking from an unnecessarily large nalgene, her hair streaked liberally with grey. The usual response to ‘There was an American on my flight’ is to say ‘Ugh’. This is not an insult to Americans btw, it’s an inconvenient truth. My ‘American’ jumped up on the counter and sat, shouting at Easyjet Staff about her rights. I didn’t bother pointing out the finer aspects of consumer rights law to her, I couldn’t betray the sisterhood.)

I went to the Uberflat again and freaked out, there may or may not have been a few tears. My parents sprung into action. There were three options.
1) Spend Christmas and New Year with my lovely family in Kent (with whom I spent most of the Summer)
2) Take a 13 journey by train to Scotland, get the ferry to Belfast and teh Bus home. I favoured this because of the clear ‘adventure’ aspect.
3) Get the train tomorrow to Birmingham and get a flight to Derry, my home.
My mum bought the ticket, and this morning I once again got on the train. It cost £66 from London to Birmingham. That is more that the original (cancelled return flight to Belfast) cost.

Anyway, I’m in Birmingham airport:

For some reason people seem to fundamentally change their personalities when they’re about to travel, and not for the better. First of all, they overdress, to the extreme. Dowdy middle-aged women slap enough powder to represent modern art masterpieces (or fake-tan homages to spider web collections) and men, clearly dressed by their wives, adorn themselves with stone-washed denim, brown leather brogues, and whichever middle aged cry-for-help Esquire magazine has tricked them into buying.
(That’s not a swipe at Esquire, but it IS bit offputting to see men as old as my Dad trying to dress trendier than I do...not that the bar is set extremely high)

Also, because they’re about to do the unthinkable and jump on a plane, they think they’re superior to everyone. It’s the same from Forks, Washington to Ulaan Bataar (Twilight AND Mongol Rally ref. Tasty) people leave their manners with their packed liquids at the security queue.

Example!
I was in the queue for security when a little kid tripped over and started crying, his parents were about a foot or so in front and had sorta missed him for a second, as clearly happens when you’re running through an airport with the whole family. I love kids, and stooped down and scooped the wee blighter up, gave him a sorta half smile/half giggle and walked him to his Dad who had noticed. The wee fella grabbed my hand and I walked him over to his dad and did that ‘oh he had a fall’ thing and the Dad smiled his thanks. Then, the Mum, basically shoved the husband aside and wrenched the boy to her, glaring at me.
(I’m sorry, mea culpa, I clearly didn’t get the memo saying that if you help a kid who’s tripped you’ve become a foaming-at-the-mouth paedophile. I’ll just step over him next time)

The dad was mortified and I walked on.

So now I sit, with 20 minutes until my gate opens and the effects of the coffee kicking in. The place has quietened down a little and a feeling like le petit mort has settled in. For one I am glad to be going home, even if the flight is a little delayed.

See y’all on the other side folks.
xx


ps - I'm in Ireland now, after many hours of travel. The flight was diverted, then on arrival at a different airport, the buses were delayed. I'm now finally home, drinking red wine by the fire and watching Bridget Jones 2- The Edge of Reason with my wee sis and mum. They're perturbed by how much of the dialogue I know. I'm gonna sleep for a fucking week (hadn't sworn enough) and then have a fan dabby dozy Christmas. I'm gonna forget the worst week ever
1) The Boom Boom Pow
2) The No Job
3) The dole rejection
4) The missed flight
5) The mammoth journey home.

all that is going to be offset by

AN AMAZING FUCKING CHRISTMAS WITH THE PEOPLE I LOVE.