“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes”
Oscar Wilde
Job hunting…. A friend recently said after spending hours on his C.V…
“How can it be this hard to make myself look good?”
Now on paper, I may be short the necessity, but I’ve excelled in most jobs I have taken on.
I blame myself for when I was young, I think I wanted to be nothing more than the writer struggling to find work… falls in love with the girl he can give nothing too, the girl who could have anything… to be just one story away from success and a happy ending.
Minus the one story away from success and the happy ending… and you’ve got me… As the penguins from Madagascar say
We’ve carefully reviewed
your application and we’re grateful
for the time and effort you put into it.
Unfortunately, on this
occasion you have not met the criteria required
for the role.However, there are lots more opportunities,
so why not take a look and see if something else takes
your fancy?
Well to be honest… The job… The paid employment took my fancy, and in response to the question… To see if anything else took up my fancy…
Sad to say no. Even though i have worked for the company before… that’s another entry all together.
So really onward to new days and un complicated futures, moving towards a new lease of life I discover more about myself and rediscover memories of old days past. Smiles and flicks of hair, hands held under tables, laughter of old friends and stresses over plaster and the internal plumbing of a buildings that weren’t mine, thoughts that have moved on to be replaced with… What, well, new memories.
Returning to the pen, three stories complete, each with a personal part of my soul actually shredded out and on paper, I set to work, with what I know, more writing. Back to the secret project that is Emily, but I find my script smarter than me… How can my characters earn what their writer cannot?
Which brings me to another bit of prose… my Curriculum Vitae, my resume, my reason I want to work, all bundled up with a neat history of well not much, which all together leads me down a path where I reflect on my previous responsibilities
“Having worked for the past seven years with the public in an array of environments and situations, I have developed excellent customer skills and always provide a professional and friendly demeanor. I have gained managerial experience including monetary and key holder responsibilities over employments and consider myself to be computer literate, hard-working and reliable.”
A few to name. Jack of all trades and a master of none. I hate this saying.
I’ve assisted in the running of a busy pizzeria in a beautiful location on the Barbican, the restaurant/nightclub itself called View 2 the Barbican… It took me about a year of coming and going to this place to discover its real name… which then stunned me stupid. It was here I reflected more on where I was going, what I was doing, customer service is a brilliant, funny and a demanding thing; I mean, we all love to be the one waited on, rather than being the one running around waiting on s, but most business demand a high level of it and it and in every advert I see, “A high level of customer service is needed” leaves me with the presumption that the fat cats love to service customers.
My last three employments have been in the restaurant, bar, nightclub industry, where I feel I rather would have been suited in chemical warfare or cannon fodder, I suck at those call of duty games. Don’t get lost in the names, it was one venue, a lot of events and I found myself as I have always been in my employments one of the first points of contact for a lot enquiries and nonsense. A lot of good times but I told myself I would try to stay away from that trade.
In most employments I have also enjoyed cash handling responsibilities, which entails handling lots of cash. My favourite job as it helps me relate to high earning fat cats, sadly I do always carry out my monetary duties which on the plus side requires me playing with their cash, giving it to someone else I.e. The bank. Which already have their own, or actually just have everyone else’s money who then play around with that and inject it just like a virus all over the place.
I then earn my own cash when employment decides to pay you, and they get to choose how much too. This unfortunately really really rubs me up the wrong way, and im certain if i was a cat… Id bite them, but I realise in a respectful manner if they were paying me everything I ever wanted in life, then there wouldn’t be anything to write about. Who wants to enjoy life when you can survive it?
Anyway id’ probably just spend my money on sweets and colourful things.
Next- Call centres: Ethics and business and the fact I care too much.
Patrick Fennessey 
I hate that phrase too, lol. With you on the CV, it’s hard work and as with submitting writing, you never know the mood of the receiver/editor. So much depends on luck and timing, one wonders why we bother worrying about CV presentation. Best of luck 🙂
This was an old post & I hope very much you’ve found work now.
I absolutely hate being between jobs, I am held in anxiety until I get another placement. It’s never been too long for me, thank mercy, but ALWAYS I have done nothing inspiring, only what I was capable of: being a P/A, you know. Sigh. I’d rather write for a living too. Be great if we could write our own ending… though they say you can.
Cheers, Patrick.