Some time in the next three
months my employer will decide if I am ‘the right fit’ for the job. If not,
I’ll be given the heave-ho. Three weeks ago this prospect terrified me. It
still turns the stomach, especially now I have commitments never dreamed of at
the start of the year: two home loans, one as long as long gets.
Of course, I might just decide to
give myself the flick. Where that would leave me and my loans I shudder to
think. As if anticipating the worst I open the careers section of today’s big
paper. I don’t know what I’m looking for: counselling at a secondary college
near home, or near my future home.
I keep coming back to the same
headings—Community and Education—because they’re all I know, yet they are the
last places I want a job.
On the last page under Retail
is a three-line ad for a newsagency in Carnegie, three days a week. It says
nothing of the duties, tells me experience is preferred but not essential. Two
of my football heroes ran newsagencies: Ian Robertson, last Carlton exponent of
the raking drop-kick from the centre square to the goal square had a newsagency
in Canterbury Road, Surrey Hills, and the silent assassin of the half-back
line, Bruce Doull, had a paper shop in Rosanna.
I picture myself mindlessly unbundling
papers at five in the morning, dropping grimy coins in the till, stacking biros
and paper clips on fiddly shelves, chatting the customers, the boss praising my
adherence to routine, my mechanical reliability, measured in Doulls, the unit
reliability comes in.
I have no useful CV for a job
in a newsagency. My people skills are for herding professionals—teachers,
principals, health workers, psychologists—not ordinary folk wanting Tatts
tickets. I have no people skills for communicating with folk who buy Who magazine, or New Idea.
Newsagency, eh? Yeah, right.
Rock on.
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