A TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION

I joined the surly ranks of being an employed person at the beginning of the year 1988 after being given a qualification and then sitting around for eighteen months whilst the thing I trained for evolved in ways that made everything I had learned, apart from a particular way of seeing the world, all but useless. During that career “hiatus” I spent my time trying (and generally failing) to get a job in the thing that I still claimed to know a little about in a period of time when sixty percent of the available jobs in the industry mysteriously vanished and when many of my fellow students chose to take their careers down other roads instead.

At one point, after about a year of doing very little, and because the family situation really couldn’t support me through the place I had been offered to train to be a teacher, I set up a “small business”. This was due in no small part to this being the era of “youth enterprise” and “entrepreneurship”, and with the not at all considerable assistance of the “powers that be” I spent a few short months chasing around after people who never paid me, or thought I’d charged them far too much for the hundreds of hours I’d slaved for them, whilst simultaneously failing to earn enough to buy a sharp suit, a fancy sports car, or even some of those natty red braces that were once all the rage, before finally jacking in the obviously less-than “firmly held” belief that I would never take an office job, especially one that paid so poorly, because by then I really, really needed the work, and I’ve pretty much worked in an office ever since. Incidentally, I’ve never really regretted not becoming a teacher because I doubt that I would have been much good at it when I imagine a sea of scornful young faces all staring at me and deciding that I was a total wassock...

I was also absolutely rubbish at being a businessman, not that I ever really wanted to be one. Surprisingly enough, some people really aren’t likely to succeed at such a thing and I truly wasn’t cut out for it and, to be perfectly honest, it never really bothered me all that much that I wasn’t. For many years I have believed, probably quite naively, that people who are “good” at business are generally not “nice” people, and their mouthpieces, or “spokespersons” aren’t much better either. Although my mother seems to enjoy it, I’ve only ever seen trailers for “The Apprentice” and clips from it on things like “Harry Hill’s TV Burp” when that was still watchable, but those were more than enough to convince me that the ambitious, self-obsessed bunch of tossers that go on it are really not the sort of people that I would willingly choose to spend any time in the company of. One of them turned up on a show about celebrities baking that I watched a couple of weeks ago and remained massively irritating on that, too, so I think the point is made.

I’ve believed, rightly or wrongly, for a very, very long time that decisions made for the benefit of the shareholders, a legal obligation I accept that boards of directors do have, are seldom beneficial for the poor, loyal saps who make up the majority of the workforce, and that anyone whose first priority is to the value of their own share options and annual bonus is never going to even blink when they have to make decisions that might wreak havoc with the lives of their underpaid underlings if it means that they can buy a shiny new car or fix themselves an extra week in the Algarve.

Sadly, I suppose, this has destined me to always probably being someone who is likely to be an “employee” and possibly, from the point of view of having a developing career “path”, never a very “successful” one, depending upon, of course, quite how you calculate “success” and, should I need to, I suspect that my prospects of getting gainful employment in this cut-throat era of bullet-pointed “plus” points, where old-fashioned ideas like “loyalty” and “work-ethic” are superceded by how you look or what kind of party animal you are, are likely to be very, very remote.

So it was with some sorrow that I heard this week that another of the jobs that I once had has now vanished forever. I’m kind of trying to ignore the fact that there’s only one common factor I can think of in this admittedly short trail of desolation because that would be to put myself into the centre of a story that is not mine to tell, and I’m forever feeling dispirited when other people try to do that. Nevertheless, prior to the one I currently have, I’ve only ever had two jobs and over the course of the last eighteen months, both of the places I once worked have been subject to brutal dismemberment and destruction and, quite simply, no longer exist, leaving many people who I have regarded as friends (or as close to that as I can get) and colleagues kicked out onto the scrapheap of life to seek whatever employment they can in the big, wide, cold and unforgiving world.

Christ! I feel so much sympathy for them, even though they’ll probably never know it because I’m not generally someone with whom people like to keep in touch. The idea of having to “start again” terrifies me and I’m lucky enough to not even currently having to be thinking about that, so God only knows what they must be going through right now, although I like to think that they are starting out afresh with a certain amount of hopes and dreams in their hearts despite what I’ve written about what I think about the way of the world here today.

So why is this so much on my mind this morning? I don’t know, to be honest, other than because those people and their suffering are so very much in my thoughts as I try to remember to thank my lucky stars that I’m not in the same boat at the moment. Sometimes I’m very aware of the fact that I am very capable of droning on about how miserable I’m feeling, or about how bleak everything can seem, but, just for a while, I think that should maybe just concentrate on counting my blessings… and wish every one of them, whether or not they remember me from Adam, all the luck in the world.