jamiehas @ wordpress

A week where there has been little to do but go to work, Be A Man About Things, and slip rather too easily into the familial habit of functional alcoholism; it’s Silly Season in my life, and just about any old crap is newsworthy. Two brief items which raised the pulse briefly from Cold and Stiffening Rapidly, to Merely Worryingly Moribund:

1 – I’ve started to shed my knee-jerk Arts-student distaste of cashmoney business dealings. This week in my temp job – best be vague to avoid a potential firing – I was unsettlingly pleased when I had the opportunity to work out that a company we were paying to get certain things done had been taking a few too many of our moneys, and rearrange our systems so that we’ve been able to hire a different, more sane outfit and save a staggering amount of cash. Worst of all, the part I enjoyed most was reading an unsettled mail from the above-mentioned scumballs, which was as disingenuous as possible in trying to persuade us to keep them on. This was not really an admirable display of the sort of character I want to develop, so it’s lucky that…

2 – I got my first decent career break. In a couple of weeks I’ll be starting a brief internship with a major publishing house in London. It’s unpaid and there’s no guarantee of anything but a reference at the end of it, but it’s a godsend in an industry where “no specific experience yet” essentially translates to “hilariously naive fuckstick who can stick his ‘transferable skills’ up his ass and go work in a call centre”. I feel pretty fortunate to have gotten it, and extremely grateful to the stars who hooked me up. If you need me, I’ll be out back training on the coffee machine and stretching my photocopy muscles.

So, job-hunting. The whole process is, of course, thoroughly distasteful and would ideally be unnecessary; but one thing I especially hate about it is writing the bah-zillions of self-aggrandising cover letters that one has to.

Whilst I am sporadically capable of one-off, Christmas-special flashes of staggering arrogance, I am in general a total, painful cripple as far as self-confidence goes. Thus, there is a certain psychic dissonance that arises when my average working day consists of composing between five and ten letters proclaiming just what a brilliant and motivated and team-playing and appropriately-experienced and priority-management-capable individual I am, when I know damn well that just about all I’ve been capable of in the past month has been sitting on my arse and tapping at my laptop, consuming four packs of Go Ahead! Apple And Sultana Slices at a sitting, and occasionally shouting at my parents or crying when they ask me to do the washing up.

In the last week or so, said psychic dissonance has been considerably reduced by consumption of moderate to large quantities of red wine – in other words, I discovered that it was much easier to write that kind of crap if you are pissed to high heaven and then some. The words flowed much easier, and my tendency to look back over what I had written, wince and write the whole thing over again was much reduced. A flawless plan.

Flawless until, rather obviously, I began to getting feedback on those emails which I had so merrily dispatched. As I looked rather crankily through my inbox this morning, I began to wonder if claiming “stupendous outlook skills” or “an unfathomable way with the English language” was really as charming as it had seemed at time of writing. No sooner had these doubts begun to arise than I received an email from one of my lucky, lucky potential future employers. Potential? A shoe-in! Anyway, this mail informed me that, as I was applying to work as a PA, demonstrating a tendency to forget attachments in important emails – such one to which I had forgotten to actually attach my CV – was probably not such a great idea. Furthermore, I should not worry unduly about contacting them in the future.

Perhaps not a great loss, given that their original advert had required someone with “excellent spelling and grammer”. But lesson learned, nonetheless. Sobriety whilst working FTW.