Recently, I had a job interview for a position in Redfern. It was scheduled at the hour of 9am.
I have a hint for all recruiters: if you find someone willing and, in some isolated rare cases, eager to attend a job interview at 9am – employ said candidate without further investigation. Willingness to awake at such an hour means breaking a habit of long, late nights of doing nothing in particular.
To further test the strength of your potential employ, schedule a meeting at 1.30pm. This is sneakily in the dead middle of the unemployed’s afternoon trifecta (Jerry Springer, Beauty and the Beast, Ricki Lake). More than 30% of employees who leave a position within a fortnight of taking up a job cite an unbreakable habit of daytime TV as their reason for leaving.
Of course, the potential employee could always act as I do, and stay up late anyway, only to have to survive on three hours sleep and stumble into the interview with a splitting bourbon headache.
Attending interviews on a low reserve of sleep is not something I recommend. Your vocabulary seems to directly correlate with the level of rest achieved, so when you’re asked questions such as ‘Tell me about a time when you’ve been in a difficult position that you succesfully worked out of,’ your brain can’t recall simple phrases such as ‘medicinal purposes’.
I’d attended the interview and answered the questions thrown my way somewhat satisfactorily, especially considering my questionable state. I stumbled onto the train platform at Redfern station – thankfully, most people at Redfern station are in a questionable state, so I blended in easily.
As I stood waiting for my train, I was pondering the issue of my career direction. I was still going for customer service jobs, but they didn’t seem to pay as much as I needed. Personal assistant jobs were starting to have some appeal, but I still didn’t feel it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
A large, apeish female lumbered out of the train platform’s control room, and changed the indicators for the next train. The indicators which detail what stations the next train is stopping at still operate on a manual basis at Redfern station. Instead of computerised screens, a person will pull down a large sign with a lengthy metal rod, hooked at the end.
The woman was quite intimidating – in fact, I could hear her snorting in leiu of breathing even from a good twenty metres away. She strode towards me as if she had a serious problem with the way my face looked, perhaps sensing apprehension of some sort (quite a common occurance between complete strangers in Redfern). After cocking her head at me, slitting her eyes and emitting a hissing noise from her left nostril, she concluded I was no threat. She roared back into the cocoon of her control room.
As a trickle of rain started leaking from the sky, I moved closer under the covered area of the platform for shelter. The position I took happened to be right next to the apewoman’s control room, however; and she nearly trod me underfoot as she rumbled out to change the signage for the next train.
She glanced at me sideways, still unsure; when two youths who looked like they took the words of Fred Durst as gospel yelled out to the lady.
‘G’day, LUV!’ they shouted in an extremely derogatory tone. Presuming they weren’t truly admiring the woman’s shaved head and pierced nose, I guessed this was to be taken as some sort of insult.
The lady seemed quite taken aback and stopped in her tracks. For all her apparent ferociousness, she didn’t seem to bite so much as bark.
I turned to her. ‘Why don’t you say something back?’ I suggested.
‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘YA FUGGEN COCKSUCKERS,’ she then bellowed.
The duo turned on their heels, schoolbags flung aside. ‘Aw yeah?’ one of them challenged.
‘Yo mama!’ the other declared.
The woman then took a predatory step forward and raised her hooked rod above her head like a weapon of war. It wouldn’t have surprised me to here a dinosaur-esque roar emit from her mouth.
The two hoodlums sniggered and gave her the finger. ‘Sure, LUV!’ one of them called. That was as good as showing a red flag to a bull, and the woman put her head down and thundered forward like a battering ram, flailing her hooked weapon around.
‘This hook will be in ya NECK!’ she screamed.
However, the forthcoming injuries weren’t to be in vain at all. After standing at witnessing the events that had just passed, I’d solved a major obstacle.
All along, I’d just needed a customer service job with spice. Suddenly, I’d found it. I now have an equation for my new career.
Customer Service + Warranted Violence Towards Patrons = Job Satisfaction.