Unemployment: The Farewell Tour

Sure finding a job is a challenge, picking the right interview outfit is a chore and selecting your referees is as tense as entrusting a phone-a-friend lifeline to your ingenious narcoleptic, perpetually drunk uncle who thinks mobile phones are a fad. But no one ever warns you about the pure trauma of having to actually attend the workplace on a daily basis.

No more sleep-ins, no more late brunches, no more “I’m free all day” boozy lunches. Farewell matinee movie marathons, goodbye “I’ve got some spare time, I think I’ll get fit”. Adieu revisiting old faithful television shows a season at a time, sayonara peer pressuring other people into chucking sickies so they can keep me company.

And casually reading the newspaper cover to cover – I’ll miss you most of all.

I gave it one good final whirl these past few days. I slept in till 11am each day, toured my favourite take-out haunts, watched the highlights of season 6 of Gilmore Girls and gadded about in ugg boots and jeans (wait, maybe I’ll miss my jeans most of all). I gave the petulant teen who lives in my building one final smug ‘yes, I really might have a sugar-daddy’ glance as he got home at 3pm last Friday. I received one last quizzical sneer as I checked the mail and waved to the construction workers across the road while sporting flirty bed hair and bright red pajamas (no, actually, I’ll miss using pajamas as leisure suit day-wear most of all).

I know work is coming, because it’s already invaded my dreams. I have woken up the last three mornings certain I had missed a deadline or already been fired. It’s like changing schools – new faces, new systems, new desks. I’ll have to do up a cheat sheet name chart and pretend to be coolly uninterested, yet pithy and casual, all the while a contributing team player who is taking any available bull by it’s horns. Dear god, the whole thing sounds so exhausting I need a nap already. Work does allow naps right?

But first I have to deal with that shadowy figure in my life – my alarm. We’ve been growing increasingly estranged over the past 5 months, and recently I’ve been screening its calls altogether. I know, it needs me, I need it, but is such avid co-dependency really that healthy in this day and age? I better set two, just in case.


Painefull Out