I go out

In January or February, I will have my Canadian residency.  This will mean that I can work in the Canada, which is where I now live.

Work, as we know, is a necessary evil, but given the right 'mindset' (as I believe they call it in management circles), all should be well - allowing me to enjoy a balance of doing work I find interesting with people I like,  laugh every day (a new and excellent criteria added by our new friend John) and have enough money to buy sweets, crisps and hats.

The last "sortie" into full-time employment did not reap juicy fruit(s). I resigned because there was no point being there. "What have you learnt in the last eighteen months?", I was asked just before I left. "That the last eighteen months have been a total waste of time", I muttered, staring out of the window.   But it was not all a waste of time: despite my professional reputation being enhanced by a vague understanding amongst my colleagues that I was good at making biscuits, I made some good friends and met enough nutjobs to create a cast of characters sufficiently large to populate a trilogy of 800-page blockbuster novels.

But I digress. To get a job, you have to talk to people and/or have interviews. I am old now so interviews don't really happen in the same way that they did when I was 22 and wanted to be a Parliamentary lobbyist. (Interviewed by twelve people at once, I fell at the last post by mis-spelling "bureaucratic" in a quick-fire parliamentary lingo spelling bee.) As far as I can see you go along and have a chat with people and see if you get on with them or not, and see if the job you might be offered will be interesting or not.  Then you sort of go from there.

I have had a few chats recently.  They have been going OK.  Despite being asked for "down-to-earth, blue-sky thinking" and alarming conversations involving expressions like "vertical workstreams", it is all very pleasant and full of possible things to do in the future.

One did not go so well. The conversation was excellent. We were all (for there were six of us) laughing and laughing and being quite clever now and then.  Earlier that afternoon I had put a yoghurt in my computer-bag-rucksack knowing, as I stuffed it in, that it was bound to end in tears.  I was not disappointed.  "Nice bag!", said one of the men, showing me his; it was like mine, but brown.  "Yes!", I barked, pulling my own bag out from under my coat. "What is that?", said the man. "That, my friend, is yoghurt", I said, admiring how the yoghurt had jizzed across my coat. "What is that?" said the man, pointing at more colourful jizz exploding across the top, covering my computer, wallet and gloves with a sort of raspberry spew flecked with old porridge.  "That, my friend, is the delicious fruit compote that you are supposed to stir into the yoghurt."

Some time later, I am in the bathroom of the office I have visited scraping porridge out of my makeup bag.  A lady comes in. "Don't see that very often, do you?", I say. "What?", she says nervously, backing into the stall. "A yoghurt that explodes in a computer bag!!!".  She says nothing. The stall door closes, and she starts to wee.