Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Well, yesterday was weird.

It kind of started and ended in a fluster, all my own doing, as always. First of all, in a flying panic, running late and not having slept in a week, while transferring my bits from ye olde battered work bag to a slightly less dinged handbag for interview purposes, I left my aging, over-heating Samsung piece of shite nestling in my ancient quilt of many stains (more blood than coffee, sad to say), so that was fun. Miraculously, it was perfectly fine and wondering what the deal was when I clutched it to my bossum some 19 hours later.

Mind you, this meant I showed up to my interview and my hair appointment at the wrongs times, because I’d left all that fiddly detail to my calendar. That’ll learn me. At least I was early, and folks thought me mostly…quaint. Yes, we’ll go with ‘quaint’.

The interview, well, I only started doing these for practice as I’ll be applying for my own job again, but another manager in another department submitted my name to a very good recruiting form, so, first, thanks for the respect and support, but what the hell do they know that I don’t? Then, yesterday, two more people got the chop, and one had been there longer than I have. So, you know, shit got real fast.

And I kind of fell backwards into that interview, showing up half an hour early, and being so tired I accidentally answered with the truth when they asked me how I’d deal with a curly problem I’d only dealt with last week. I actually admitted to a sneaky work around, and their eyes gleamed. So, I dunno. More money, I can’t say less security (it’s a very short-term contract but since I get turfed out of my ‘permanent’ roles every 18 months, that’s moot these days) and it’s not as interesting as some of the content I work with now is (though I fairly nearly nodded off over that 40 pager yesterday because policy regs). I dunno, but I’m gonna have to decide. Maybe. I dunno if I’ll get it. I may know how to run rings around immovable objects (aka IT departments) but I’m still ‘quaint’.

The hair? I so cannot afford it but it’s part of being interview ready, so it’s a work expense and therefore a necessary, not a luxury. They did slap on a free treatment though, because I was being quaint (and I’d earned the points and they thought yesterday was the day I should redeem them, because, quaint).

The good parts of the day was being able to drop some tidy tricks on some appreciative colleagues, who don’t, as yet, mind the ‘quaint’, sneaking off for a much needed sandwich. Trying not to eat but sometimes the concussion headache demands food, or rather if I starve myself I make it worse, so that’s why I’m trying to do more walking, when I can.

Alas, due to many meetings yesterday (hence the extreme pleasure of a covert sandwich), no lunchtime walkies as planned, but I did have to trot up to the interview and back. I only remembered where the interview was because I’d been looking it up the day before and had accidentally typed I Oxford Street, instead of one, and I thought that’d be the name of the self-indulgent one-hander play I was going to write and debut at the downstairs theatre at the Belvoir. As if. (I’d cut my own hands off before I ever wrote anything about inner city wankers – gimme starship captains any day).

Which brings me to the last surprise of the day. On the way up to my somewhat unscheduled hair appointment I dropped in on one of the last newsagents in the city and there it was, a magazine that had come out six months ago, that I’d wanted but despaired of ever getting a copy, just sitting there. Battered, sure, but it had to go in the interview bag anyway. And, at last, I had it, and it made me happy.

Sure it’s just a magazine, now cluttering up the top of the bookshelf, and it means nothing and I should care more about real things, and real problems, but it was pretty, and humans like pretty things. Hell, even Neanderthals were buried with a handful of their favourite pretty things. And it made me happy, just for a bit, to gaze upon the pretty, in proper print resolution.

So that was a brief respite, and, well, for me, it was like a peek of sunlight after a month of wet weekends (March, much?). I do like my pretty things.

Quaint? You bet. But at least I got through the day, with the grace of a flailing hippo, but I got through it. And I got a treat. Like I said, weird day.

Today promises tempests though, of every kind. I worry that quaint won’t cut it.

News from the Front: https://plus.google.com/u/0/113197665355692280218/posts