hats

I roll down to the gym in the dark for the 6:15 cycle class. My buttock hurts on the stationary bike when I sit up between tracks. My body’s aches mystify me.

After breakfast I work up a major sweat moving a rock border in my garden and revamping the bed under the side fence. The satisfaction is immense.  

I shower and settle into my office. Time to bite the bullet. I ring ‘Jim’s man’, a property manager and valuer, to ask questions about our owners corporation. He’s a hectoring bully like Jim. I have no expertise in subdivision or property values, so I’m powerless to challenge his unsubstantiated assertions. I don’t trust the man and go hunting an independent arbiter on the interweb.

A red car pulls up at the front door. Liz waits in the garden while I reply to a voicemail and confirm that I will attend an interview next Wednesday for a full-time, full-on state wide project officer position in mental health promotion in secondary schools. To me the salary is huge. I’m surprised and excited to get an interview in what must be a large and talented field.

Liz and I go over the SKIPS training we will present in Sydney next Monday and Tuesday: the travel arrangements, the running sheet, the on-screen presentation. She leaves and I hunt the interweb again, this time for background material for the big interview next week. Then I prepare for this afternoon’s interview.

My good woman rings and says she will come around with afternoon tea. I can think of nothing nicer but have to tell her I’m walking out the door right now to go to a sexuality educator interview.

Two women sit on cheap chairs in the middle of a long white back room in an old church in Camberwell. The first question throws me: it challenges my unconventional approach to the selection criteria. I defend myself by saying that I’ve always been unconventional. Later I think of five better responses. I emerge uncomfortable. The fit is not right.

I sit in the car—windows down, door open—eating chips from the bag in a side street. The first training session for AMES tutors begins soon. Five tables each seating five tutors squash into a community hall. Late middle-aged woman predominate; four in their 20s add some spice. In coming months we will share our experiences of teaching refugees English.

During the break, Robert, one of only three blokes training, approaches. “What do you do?”

Although my previous job is nearly two months gone, no one has asked this question, and I’ve not considered an answer. “I guess I’m either unemployed or retired.”

Sometimes it occurs to me that this jobless interlude might continue indefinitely. I don’t think of my business, Plain Talking, as consuming enough time or generating enough income to call it a job.  

So many hats I’ve worn on such a long day. Very late, on the phone, my good woman listens to my account of the job interview. “Nah,” she says in her strangely endearing way. “You don’t want this job.”

She’s unerring. I don’t want this job.

   

Rock on.