Michaela McGuire - Apply Within: Stories of Career Sabotage

STORIES OF CAREER SABOTAGE

MICHAELA MCGUIRE

We can lick gravity, but sometimes
the paperwork is overwhelming.
Wernher von Braun

It is my experience that job seeking very often involves large amounts of fabrication. Recruitment agents will lie about the roles they are trying to sell to their candidates, who will then lie about the satisfaction they see themselves experiencing once a position is matched to their exceptional qualifications.

My most recent recruitment agent annotated my rsum with a red pen while we spoke. COBURG, she wrote in large letters when I told her which suburb I lived in.

Then I told her that after Id graduated I had taken a few months off to try and write a book, but that it didnt go very well.

She nodded seriously and carefully wrote TERRIBLE BOOK. Then she looked up and beamed.

Employers will be pleased to hear this, she said. Because theyd see your creative writing degree and that would worry them. They might not think that you were really interested in these sorts of roles.

Yes, I said. I thought that might be the case.

Its really great that you had a crack at being a writer but then realised that your future is in admin!

Yes, I said.

Then she put the tip of her pen next to where my tertiary qualifications were listed and wrote NOT FOR MICHAELA in big letters.

This, of course, meant that I had to tell my current boss all about a pretend book during my interview. What sort of book were you writing? he asked.

Just terrible, terrible fiction, I said. Really horrible.

Yeah, I reckon itd be much easier to write non-fiction, he said. Stuff thats actually happened to you, I mean.

I told him I thought that he was probably right.

I first came to the crippling realisation that my job prospects were poor after spending two weeks hand-delivering glossy Liberal Party pamphlets, wearing a bright Liberal Party T-shirt, for a federal MP.

The singular appeal of that job had been that, at the very least, it had to be better than emptying ashtrays in the highrollers room of a casino, which I had been certain would be less terrible than door-bitching in an open-chested tuxedo at a strip club. Thats why I accepted the position, and its also why, after the 2007 election, I tried to sell renewable energy door-to-door, before becoming a legal secretary. Each new job, I hoped, would cancel out the small human indignities of the one before.

I also hoped each job would give me money for the things I enjoyed being able to afford, like rent and food. To have deliberately sought out such a terrible rsum would have required me to be both madder and cleverer than I am. I will, though, admit to a misplaced optimism in thinking that accepting a job with the Liberal Party was going to signify the end of my ridiculous employment history, not be the highlight.

This was a blog before it was ever a book, and although blog writing must be forgiven for a lot, it at least provides an immediacy and honesty that becomes invaluable when its time to write without the aid of emoticons.

I have recounted the events exactly as I recall them, although I have changed the names of everyone in this book.

It should also be said that, whatever the contributing factors to my brilliant career, foresight was not one of them. It all sort of just happened.

Moorooka is on the Southside of Brisbane. Not the Deep South, which is what we called places like Logan and Woodridge, grim neighbourhoods whose only discernible feature is the shopping centres, which were never called malls or arcades but always Hyperdomes. You find these in and around suburbs with names like Shailer Park, which is only two letters off a joke.

It is easier to think of Moorooka as being in Middle Brisbaneone of those outer suburbs shaped by the citys wide, flat, brown river, which twists and turns until Brisbane slowly forgets that it aspires to be metropolitan, and instead youre left with places like The Magic Mile.

Moorooka is famous for only one thing and that is its Magic Mile. The suburb is tormented by long arterial roads that trucks thunder down on their way to places like Beaudesert, and the longest of these is lined with car yards. Bargains are scrawled across the windscreens of cars in obnoxious colours, long strings of balloons float wearily above the whole scene, and the entire stretch smells of smouldering eggs because it is very close to the Weetbix factory. This is where the Magic happens, and my video store was just around the corner.

The manager of the video store lived on the citys Northside and was almost menacingly middle class. She seemed to have never recovered from finding out the hard way that somebody had pissed in the stores overnight returns slot, and subsequently harboured an ongoing resentment towards Moorooka and all its residents. Other items she had discovered mixed in with the new-release videos included melted ice-cream and, on more than a few occasions, half-eaten meat pies. One, she said, was half digested.

Most impressive, though, was the cane toad that had somehow survived being flattened and forced through the narrow returns slot, and then, having recovered from its ordeal, swelled up until it was as big as a kitten. Having regained its original constitution, the toad was still there at opening time, when it enthusiastically bid the Manager good morning. I found all this out within the first half-hour of my training shift.

Ferals, the Manager said when she had finished her story. She was telling me this while I was gingerly emptying the returns bin. Theyre just ferals. All of them. This whole suburb.

I thought it unwise to mention that I was a third-generation resident of Moorooka, and I could sense that she had more to say, so I remained silent.

Everyone thinks that all you do when you work in a video store is stand around watching movies and eating popcorn, she said.

I nodded grimly as if the idea had never occurred to me, and over the next six hours I reluctantly learned dozens of ways to keep myself busy. The Manager referred to the long stretches of time during which the store would be completely void of customers as quiet time. When youve got some quiet time, she said, its a great opportunity to tidy the shelves.

Tidying the shelves involved walking around the store very slowly, flicking your eyes carefully over the titles, and pulling out any movie that had made its way out of alphabetical order. You then nudged the videos around to make space for the errant titles. You would do this again and again until either a customer interrupted or your shift finished.

The Manager would often find herself with a bit of quiet time and so she would tidy the shelves with me. She was shorter than the stores shelves, so I never knew exactly where in the shop she was. But her various ongoing grievances reached me regardless and I quickly learned to regard them as a sort of sonar.

That man is the rudest individual I have she would begin after a customer had left the store, and I would negotiate my way down a few rows of shelves until I could no longer hear the mans ranking in the list of people who had done her great wrongs.

At the end of my second day, the Manager decided it was time for a quick performance review. Youre going really well, she said. I guess the only thing is that Id like to see you have more interaction with the customers. Talking to them about things beyond their movie choices, I mean.