It's not my place in the 9 to 5 world

I was telling San the other day of the age-old problem for me in my life; the eternal question of what am I doing to make the world a better place?

Apparently not everyone feels this same way -- it should come as no surprise, considering the state of various things such as war, greed and global poverty. Most people focus first and often solely on themselves, what are they doing to make their own life better? But somehow that's not good enough for me. I come back to, how does what I do matter? In journalism I found there were various excuses you could make about keeping people informed and entertained, even educated, but really it was about profit. They call PR the dark side not without reason, because here there is really no excuses about educating or informing, it is marketing. Essentially, you work in advertising. It might be a particularly clever form of advertising, it might go hand-in-hand with journalism, but I have no illusions about it helping anyone.

It was brought home to me the other day when everyone recieved a mass email inviting us up to the roof terrace for a glass of champagne, for some announcement or another. I headed up there with various other colleagues, there were various glasses and bottles of champagne and bottles of beer. I went back down to my desk to find my bottle opener, and I'm glad I did as when I got back down there the scenario struck me as absurd and I just went back to work.

An hour or less later, I was called upon to go back up to the kitchen on the top floor and prepare food for a client meeting. It wasn't for an account I work on, I just work for someone who is in charge of the account, which sort of makes me their bitch. I'd already gone out earlier in the day to buy all the food for the meeting, because there hadn't been enough time to get hospitality to provide it. So I went back upstairs to chop fruit and cut sandwiches into quarters and all the drinks from earlier were still out on their trolley. The account exec -- or account manager or director or whoever -- asked hospitality to remove it all, so as not to give the clients the wrong impression.

As I stood slicing fruit and trying to arrange it "nicely" on a plate, I watched half-full bottles of champagne emptied down the sink.

In some parts of the world, people are right now starving to death. In our own city there are people every day struggling to feed their own familes. We, however, can afford to pour bottles of champagne down the drain, if they have been opened. Any food left after these meetings is thrown away -- whether it has been touched or not. San told me where she waitressed the venues were so reluctant to feed the staff, even after work, that entire platters of untouched food would just be thrown away.

So I ask, what am I doing with my life? I told San I have looked at doing aid work overseas, but I have no skills, no qualifications. Nobody needs a writer turned bartender turned PR-assistant. I should be building schools or hospitals, or digging wells, or as San put it "de-worming orphans in Rwanda". But volunteer projects are not only unpaid, but require you to pay them to take part -- to go Indonesia and build homes in devastated communities costs thousands of pounds I don't have. My ideas of working with sea turtles in Mexico again costs hundreds or thousands of pounds.

You could always compromise. You could work for a charity in an every day role, charities and aid organisations need public relations, they need writers, they need accountants and HR people. And maybe that's the way to go, to find the little way you can be making a difference.

Because right now, with my 12 hour days and feeling like I should be happy to come home and watch television for an hour or two before going to bed and getting up and doing it all again... It's not me. I need more in my life, I know, and I tell myself with a regular income I will be able to have things like surfing and snowboarding in my life on a semi-regular basis, I will be able to go out and meet new and interesting people. But I still feel like I should be doing something, something other than getting sportswear featured in consumer magazines.