Ce no quiero librame

It's funny, isn't it?

You spend months redundant, out of work, a faithful member of the dole queue, and you dutifully apply for jobs. Lots of jobs.  Big ones, small ones, awesome jobs you aren't really qualified to do but that you try and talk your way into anyway, jobs in Starbucks even though you don't actually drink coffee, and after what seems like forever, you land a job.  You feel like a rock star in your dark suit and Tom Wolfe shoes.

Then a little more than a month into the job, the rot sets in.  The glow of having a job to do, knowing you are being paid and being taken out to lunch a couple of times in the first week, it all fades.  You look at yourself and think, am I really a salesman?  Quitting is not an option.  Jobs are too few and far between to just be given up, but you start thinking in terms of authenticity.   What is the real you, the authentic you?  Maybe it's too soon to know.  Maybe 3 months in, 6 months in, you'll be smiling to yourself as you rake in the commission and you'll say bollocks to "authenticity".  But maybe you won't.

You go to a job interview on the sly -- making up that you have a doctor's appointment, a believable enough story, since the day before when you were feeling particularly unsatisfied with the job people kept asking if you were feeling okay -- but before the interview feel disloyal, feel like you would be better off staying put.  Then the interview seems to go well, you are reminded why you wanted it, and you forget about feeling disloyal -- you don't owe anyone, anything. Other than the student loans company.

Your boss sits down next to you one day out of the blue and asks you how you are finding things, if you have any questions or anything you want.  You bring up training.  There was none for this job, a couple of days of learning how to use the software but that was all -- so you say how you would like training.  Not just in sales but in other things -- web design, marketing.  Your boss tells you as nicely as possible, that's not your job.  We have people to do those things, you are here to sell.  Don't remind me, you think.  So what?  That's what spare time is for.  There must be books you can teach yourself with.  If you have a "teach yourself" guide to Zen, there must be one for CSS out there.  Although it will probably not be any easier to get through.

But you're left with a choice just the same.  Stay put, stay as long as humanly possible -- which should really be more than a year, given your bad luck with work, hope that the focus shifts from sales to marketing, hope that with time you will be able to move sideways in the company, or at the very least you get good enough at your job to not care.  Or else look for better.  Look for the job you wanted to begin with, while keeping this one -- look to move as soon as possible to make it clear that this was only to get you back into work.

What's funny is how quickly being back at work turns into looking for something else.  Maybe what you seek is inside yourself, maybe you need Zen more than CSS and need to learn acceptance.

When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails

...Or so I'm told. But what does that mean, exactly? Right now, it feels a lot like my job hunt.

I had the opportunity to meet a renowned Marketing writer/blogger last week, grabbing the chance to meet him while he was in London for a couple of days. Unfortunately, however much I think he and his blog are awesome, I can't link to it in this post as if he followed the traffic back here I don't think he'd dig my tales of girls and boys and marsupials, nor the old Serial Killer Sunday posts.

Anyway, I'd filled him in on where I am professionally -- some good experience but now "between jobs" and asked for his advice on how better to market myself, and get that awesome job with it. As part of my ongoing personal development, I have also set some objectives for myself -- working towards them involves in part asking people I admire how they got to be where they are.

It seems that there are two ways I can approach looking for work. The marketer summarised my position quite well, when you're out of work for a while you start casting your net wider and applying for jobs you could do, and maybe even do well, but aren't necessarily what you really want. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. The other approach is to hold out for what you really want, and accept no compromise. He suggested volunteering to work without pay for somewhere awesome, so long as I would be doing real work and not stuffing envelopes.

He has also stressed that I should be writing -- by way of submitting guest posts to relevant blogs, or writing a blog of my own. I tried setting up a new blog the other day just for writings on the PR/marketing industry, but I fell at the first hurdle -- I couldn't come up with a good name for it that wasn't already taken.

This week I have two interviews coming up: a second interview for a job as a sales and marketing exec, that seems to have little marketing to it that isn't actually sales, and a communications role that would be a significant promotion from where I was before. I was informally interviewed on the phone the other day for another sales position -- although it was described as management trainee or something, I think that was just clever marketing on the part of the job ad. It seemed to go well, I was told some of my answers were good, and that I'd here more if I was to be invited for the two-day selection process this week. I didn't hear anything more.

The trouble is, sometimes it seems like applying for jobs that aren't what I really want but I could probably do is treating all problems as nails. Do I actually want to work in sales? Would I be any good at it? And come to that, when did what I do for a living become so damned all-important anyway? It does not define me as a person, and should not be what my life is about. But it's easy to say that when you actually have a job -- getting one first is key, the rest comes afterwards.

A couple of my friends have turned to teaching. One of them has had several other careers to date, including being a police officer, a lorry driver, a petrol station attendant and a media sales executive. Will teaching finally be what they are looking for? The other friend has been treading water for the last few years, not really knowing what they wanted. I can more readily see them staying in teaching. They have suggested it to me as a career path, too, but I'd only take them seriously if they had already been doing it for several years -- but like social work which has also been suggested, I really don't see it being for me.

Finally, a friend posted this video on my Facebook the other day. It made me laugh, but I'm not sure what they were trying to tell me...