I went for the job interview, it is in St Kilda Road. Already, that puts it in the “sus” basket, as they say. They are all a bit weird in St Kilda Road. The cbd’s poorer cousin, with chips on all of their shoulders.
I’m nervous before I go because I feel that Jack (my boss guy) has overplayed my weaknesses as strengths, to fill in his gap of a candidate for this particular role. I really feel that he has told the employer what amounts to lies because he wants to fill the assignment and get his commission no doubt.
This makes me super nervous before I leave. I start to pace. I can’t settle. I’m ready far too early and want to leave, but realise that would be stupid. So I am edgy. It makes me feel as though I have failed before I even get there. Stupid, really. Stupid me. Sure it is true that I am rusty with some of this stuff, but I can do it all, have done it all. I’m sure everybody else just says yes and then they wing it. I should learn to fake it more often and worry about the consequences after. But, I can’t be like that. I know I have to know that I am on top of my game.
Too careful. Too safe.
I’m sure Steve Jobs and Richard Branson and the like did the exact opposite.
It is raining and miserable travelling down there. It is raining on my head, pitter pat. I’m covered in a fine sprinkling of rain.
The receptionist speaks with an English accent. Laurel, the HR chick who interviewed me, was very corporate and spoke with an Irish. I’m feel like I have strayed into some sort of tear in the Anglo time continuum.
She is your typical HR type, uptight, twitchy, with clipped sentences and over pronounced vowels. The type who would knife you, anyone, rather than take the blame for a failure and not break a sweat. You can tell, as she is too rehearsed, too interested, too nice. Her office is analy clean, not a paper or pen out of place and there she is on the other side of the desk turning the pages of my CV with her spindly fingers. If she’d been any fake nicer, her face may well have cracked into a thousand smiling fragments falling onto the desk like so many jigsaw pieces.
I don’t really want the job once she starts talking about shared service units and the fact that nobody in the office really has any idea of what it is that I’d be doing. Certainly not her, she makes plainly clear – already moving blame off herself before I have even started the interview.
Jack calls me pretty soon after I get home to tell me that she was impressed with my experience (that perpetual positive corporate slant on everything) but she felt some of my experience was too long ago and she felt that I relied too much on my previous manager.
Oops. That was my fault. Of course, I had to talk about Beck to a certain extent in the interview, but it was when Laurel asked me how I stayed up to date with legislative changes, a question I hadn’t anticipated and a problem I haven’t quite found a solution for since returning to work, that I hear myself mentioned Beck once too often. I felt it as soon as I said it. It was one of those don’t-say-that moments which you want to take back but can’t once you have launched into it.
I don’t really care. I don’t want to travel to St Kilda Road anyway, I tell myself. But, I do care really.
Sam continues to massage his aching limbs still. He says it is his thighs that are hurting him. And his arm. And his hand. I feel the same way about myself, although not the thighs, I wasn’t squatting down like he was, if you understand what I mean.
It rains and rains.
I feel kind of depressed about the interview and not getting the job. It still feels like a failure, even if I didn’t want the job anyway. It is a job I should have got, it is work that I should have been able to do easily.
We went to the supermarket. I felt like I was dragging my sorry arse around the shop. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Of course, I could do that job. Fuck her and her rake thin arms and her self conscious laugh and her corporate speak and her produced enthusiasm; so presented, and so put on, giving the impression that she may well explode at any moment with orgasmic good intensions for the first time ever in her life. You can tell those things sometimes, just by the way her spindly fingers walked spider-like around the edges of the paper she was holding, like even they needed relief. Wouldn’t it be inspiring if they cut the shit just once and were honest and real and human. I wanted to see her let loose as she was masturbated doggy style with her useless Arts Degree right there on her anally clean corporate desk. I could just picture her wet snatch spraying white fluid all over her white pristine laminex surface.
Like the Carbonara sauce I was just about to make.
How dare she not give me the job, then in turn giving me the opportunity to turn her down?
I looked down at the button mushrooms in my hand.
All irrational thoughts, absolutely. Maybe it was not getting the job? Maybe it was me coming down? Who knows. I felt sad about the world.
I shook my head.
“How many mushrooms do you want in the sauce?”
“That looks like enough,” said Sam. “We need to get bacon from the deli.”
“Sure.”
“What are you thinking about, you seem lost in your thoughts?”
“Oh… nothing.” I tried not to return to Laurel screaming the house down.
The Spaghetti Carbonara, with mushrooms, was lovely. We left some for Shane, but he didn’t come home. I presume he had gone to Sydney, which pisses me off, as I don’t want to cook for him anyway and then to save some, which he didn’t eat.
I know, I know, he cooks for me. He does, it is true. But, I don’t particularly want to return the favour when he can’t eat gluten because it generally means we are cooking dishes specifically designed for him. I don’t want to make allowances for that, it makes it all too hard. It’s funny that people with some sort of food allergy always think it is perfectly okay to change everyone’s menu to suit them.
We watched Friends in bed until we were both falling asleep. It was the one about Ross cheating when he and Rachel were on a break. After which, I got the DVD out of the cupboard and we continued to watch the DVD.
