Cold

How frustrating! I’ve been working from home today and experienced the exact opposite of the slice of life described on the Dark Globe recently. Patrick Dykie wrote about the incessant flow of knocks on the door at inopportune moments. Whereas I was left waiting all day for a delivery that did not arrive. Then again, my work flow was churned three times by a cold call, putting me in Dykie’s camp again. Do you have any idea how many cold calls you miss when you are at work all day? They don’t even bother with real people anymore. They’re all prerecorded messages. Which is a shame because I quite enjoy to let cold callers do their spiel while I move on to something else, leaving the phone just close enough to hear their feigned enthusiasm turn into indignation when it dawns on them their audience has disappeared.

The soft side in me feels for the cold callers actually, it has got to be one of the lousiest jobs out there. I’ve done some awful jobs myself to survive, but I reckon none of them were as bad as that. I have blanked out the train station hot dog shack job because my mind cannot cope with the memory. Moving on, the bottom two jobs were sorting apples according to size in a cold store on an apple farm, and serving in a posh restaurant. You would think the apple sorting was the worst because of the sheer numbness of the task and discomfort of working in the cold, but for me the restaurant waitressing was infinitely worse. Many customers treated me like the gum splat on the sole of their shoe and the owner/chef was a more demeaning boss than Sir Alan could ever hope to be. In the apple job we would occasionally joke together, but most of the time your mind was left to wander while you acted on auto pilot. You could map out a whole novel in your head while you were earning your crust. I now understand how some people choose a routine job and are happy with it. They can leave at the set time stress-free and move on to something that really interests them. Writing, perhaps. Is there a career change in here, I wonder? Tough one. When would I have my stuff delivered then?