2003-10-17

You guys, I am freaking out. Somehow, somewhere, someone I used to work with got the idea that I’m a super-keen employee and they made a recommendation to someone, and the next thing I knew there was a flurry of phone calls and interviews and two days later I have a new job as a communications officer. In the fucking MINISTER’S OFFICE.

How did this happen? What’s going on? Why are people always giving me jobs? Seriously. I’m not ambitious. I’m hardly industrious. But people always seem to think I’m ten kinds of competent, which amuses me. I think they’re mistaking my air of pure, distilled apathy for supercilious self-confidence: this is wrong, people! It’s not that I am self-assured and above it all. It’s that I don’t care. I’m blissfully inured to the smallest concern about the outcome of any work-related happening. I’m Zen, but without all that ridiculous “enlightenment” stuff.

Somehow this gross misapprehension has led to me moving quite suddenly up in the world – literally so: I’ll be working on the top floor (that’s where the magic happens!). I might even have a window in my office – hopefully conveniently situated at appropriate throwing-oneself-out-of height. I’ll be taking calls from journalists, processing media lines, and doing about eight million things I have no idea how to do. Oh, and I may have given the impression that I’m a tad more fluently bilingual than I am.

I go through life with an overarching notion that everyone around me is somehow privy to information that I don’t have, and is generally more capable and more qualified to deal with jobs/relationships/life as a whole than am I. Right now that feeling is kicking into overdrive, and I’ve got that sinking “at school in my underwear” anticipatory dread of immanent exposure of my flaws and subsequent ridicule. I am obviously an interloper and have no right to this job, and it’s only a matter of time before that becomes painfully clear.

Another odd notion I have is that “work” is not “life”. Work is something that I do in order that my life not be plagued by irritating exigencies like homelessness and starvation. I’m not one to throw myself into my work (I’m not one to throw myself into anything, really, or at or out of anything either, for that matter, except the odd window: see above). This new job will entail working ten-hour days and longer, relegating my life to a mere pit stop in preparation for, and recovery from, work. My work will become my life. My whole world is topsy-turvy!

But, you know, inevitable misery and doom aside, this is a great opportunity and will be a huge benefit to my career plans (career? When did I get one of those?). So, to sum up, I am feeling very insecure about myself, and yet still somehow contemptuous towards humanity as a whole. The status quo prevails. Return to your homes, people: there is nothing to see here.