employment
So I am supposedly starting my job on Monday. I got an email today confirming the start date, and then later another one saying “Oh by the way, please can you make arrangements to be at [50 miles away] on the first day”.
I am a little bit pissed off. In fact I am a lot pissed off so forgive me for writing so much (or don’t read it).
I’ll let you into a bit of background information I’ve been keeping quiet. The way I found out about the job was because my dad works for the same company (different department). He had no part in my being offered the job or anything like that, and the truth is I never wanted it anyway. I never wanted to apply but he pushed me into it. I never thought I’d get interviewed, but I did. I never thought I’d get offered it, but I did, and once you’ve been offered a job paying £25k as a graduate, you can’t really say no. Like most other things in my life I kind of stumbled into it without realising/trying/thinking too much about it.
But were it not for my dad I would still be waiting for a start date. I only had official confirmation today, and I only got it today because my dad hassled some people last week and got something moving. Before then, I was treated with “okay, I’ll chase that up for you”, followed by long periods of silence. I forget exactly how many times I have heard the phrase “I’ll chase that up for you”.
Literally, it has taken them three months to give me six days’ notice for when I start.
And now, a few hours after the first email, I get this email telling me I need to be 50 miles away Monday morning. To a driver, 50 miles isn’t a short distance. To a non-driver like me, it’s an absolutely epic distance unless it happens to neatly coincide with railway tracks, which naturally, it doesn’t (and to be honest, the train isn’t the biggest killer, it’s the 3.5 miles of walking to and from railway stations, TWICE, yes seven miles!)
So I have three options:
1) Tell them “I’m not doing that” and see where it gets me
2) Stay in a hotel nearby/Attempt to navigate trains (this isn’t going to happen)
3) Don’t work for them.
The first option might even be fine. It might be that they’d say “well actually it’s not really necessary anyway”.
I should add somewhere around here that the job was explicitly advertised as requiring no travel.
But I am wary of their travel requirements because they had my dad going there twice a week for months. They simply expected it of him and he had no real choice if he wanted to keep his job. The way he got out of it was to take another job within the company. Therefore I know I have to say no if they ever casually expect me to start doing anything unreasonable. But on my first day? That’s not ‘casual’, that’s taking the piss.
All things considered, do I want to work for this company?
NO.
I do not.
Unfortunately my dad doesn’t like this idea. It is a pain he works for them because he wants to be involved and to sort everything out. He wants to phone up the person who sent me the email and see if it’s all really necessary. I am finding his interference annoying and incredibly embarrassing, and I am also conscious that he has had to interfere every step of the way, which is not a good reflection on the state of things.
He sees that I have been unemployed a long time, and here is a decent offer of a job (well kind of) and I should be willing to put up with whatever hassle they throw my way. I don’t see it like this, I see it that this company is messing me around and being very unreasonable, and another few weeks/months of unemployment makes no difference in the long term anyway. He thinks I’ll find it very hard to find another job because I have had so few interviews, but the truth is I never really looked as hard as I should have because I never really knew what I wanted to do. But I have a better idea now.
employment and life and stuff
So I have a probable start date for my job and it is September. This is still a good 5 weeks away. Although I don’t have official confirmation of it yet. They might just be the slowest company in the world.
Part of me is happy with this, part of me is not. The part of me that wants to get up after 10 o clock every day and play Team Fortress 2 a lot is happy. The part of me that realises I am now 24 and it doesn’t seem like my life has progressed anywhere interesting since I was about 18 is not. I can sum up the interesting developments of the last six years in two sentences, and one of them doesn’t seem like a big deal any longer. Your interests shift. What you think is important shifts. I used to get engrossed in my own things and spend great amounts of time on them and they would be the only thing happening in my life, and I would be perfectly content with the situation. Now I still enjoy such things but less so and it feels like it should not be the most important thing in my life. It is the strange realisation that you are getting older and it would be nice to do something satisfying with your life.
The problem comes in identifying exactly what would be satisfying. I’m fucked if I know. Relationships, career, children? Probably not the last one (now). But the first two yes.
But right now it feels like I am in limbo. Which is frustrating.
I am big on stability in my life. Far too big in fact. I would be happy for the limbo to continue indefinitely because it is constant and represents no change to my life. This is my major failing. If you favour stability too much, nothing ever happens. Nothing changes. Except yourself. Gradually. Time goes on, you get older, and then you think “fuck”.
The one thing I do find solace in however is that after I finished at uni I seriously considered staying on and doing a PhD. In the end I decided against it because I suspected that another 3-4 years like my masters degree would kill me, but had I done it I’d probably still be stuck there for another two years yet and getting increasingly frustrated with having not moved on out of education.
As anyone who has closely observed this blog (especially the entries which magically disappear after a few hours) will know, my mental wellbeing for the last few months has been oscillating all over. It is the constant struggle to maintain some kind of meaning in your life. I think the only sure fire solutions are drugs and cats. No one ever warned me that doing nothing could be hard.
