Growing up and the Monster within

Jobs. Actual permanent, proper jobs. Because someone somewhere in a galaxy far, far away has invented the concept of money, it would appear that most people need one. There’s the jobs people want to do, and then there’s the jobs people never set out to do, or didn’t even know existed before they were planted in them by a temping agency.

Once you have a job, it’s hard to let go. Other jobs could be even worse. After a while, you assume some kind of bizarre dual identity. The one that’s You, and the one that’s the ‘Work-You’. The You wants to tell the Work-You exactly where to stick it, the You says ‘what the fuck am I doing here? And how do I get out of here quickly, without anyone noticing?’.

But fret not, the Work-You will win between the hours of nine to five. Eventually. Before you know it, you will be hearing the Work-You doing all the talking. You say ‘yes!’ more often than you had in mind, you come out with utter nonsense like ‘efficiency’, ‘handled professionally’ and ‘going forward’. Worst of all, the Work-You is addicted to doing things ‘the right way’. As opposed to throwing a million PostIts around the room, snapping Bic pens in half and kicking the photocopier with all your might. The Work-You will ensure that you suddenly have a filing system that only you understand, that you follow procedure and ring the-guy-who-fixed-photocopiers, that you throw PostIts in the recycling bin and that you’re overall oozing sweetness and light. YIKES.

The Work-You also ensures that you soon have the urge to exterminate anyone who holds things up, who’s too slow and whoever randomly irritates the Work-You. The Work-You wants to get things done. It wants to meet that deadline. It wants to make that informative suggestion in a meeting. It wants to train that temp properly and write that manual on handling telephone calls in a professional fashion. Before You know it, the Work-You has done it for you and you sit on the train home worrying that you are turning into a complete prick. And you know that if you follow the haphazard advice to ‘just be yourself’ at work, you’d have yourself sacked in under an hour, because you’d suddenly be your very un-co-operative, stubborn self, yell at people and flood the staff kitchen with the help of a drip tray. On purpose.

On the rare occasion you let something slip about the real You, questions will emerge. Like, ‘so what are you doing here?’ and ‘why didn’t you work in …’. Because life isn’t fair. Because you’re clumsy and rubbish at networking. Because your Work-You wasn’t there when you actually needed it. Because you uttered ‘screw you!’ to too many people too many times, thinking you didn’t want their stinking dream job of yours, anyway, because they are shits. Then you ran out of money. Of course that makes for a very dull answer to the question, so you spend some time uhming and ahing in a professional manner and end the sentence with ‘hey, at least we get 30 days holidays. And flexi time! Not that bad, is it?’.

And you wonder if everyone else at work is permanently possessed by their Work-You, so you avoid those evenings down the pub like the plague and be very careful who you lunch with, because you’d rather You and Work-You don’t get confused and you do not return from lunch trying to run amok.

And what about ‘do I work to live or live to work?’. Hopefully you ‘work to live’, otherwise you’re a great big saddo with no life who spends the weekend on Facebook poking work colleagues. Urgh.