Application

A short working week ahead – hooray! Only three days in work and then I am leave until March – hooray!

I finished my application form for the job yesterday and except for a few minor details (such as remembering what my current salary is), it is ready to go. I need to phone the recruitment people again today though because the form requires a signature and yet you are meant to e-mail it in, which therefore makes it a bit difficult.

I am actually not overly confident about getting this job. I think a lot of people will apply, some of whom will have more relevant experience than me. I am starting to come up with a list of questions to which I have to find out the answers, so that should I get an interview, even if they ask me something really stretching, I will have thought about it and hopefully have the answer (it’s a very long list of questions…). The problem with doing this is that it reminds me how much I would like to do this job and gets me even more interested in it, which therefore if I don’t get it will mean that the disappointment (and general lack of enjoyment of my current job) will be greatly magnified. But I need to do it in order to give myself the best possible shot at it. It does also cross my mind sometimes that A may well find out that I am applying for the job (the head of unit knows and is not terribly tactful for starters) and if I don’t get it, will probably be pleased. That makes me want to get the job all the more – not to be nasty, I just don’t like the idea of A getting pleasure out of my failing. I have very weird logic sometimes.

Anyway, if you were thinking of a change of job and had previously been imprisoned (a matter of months ago) for inappropriately naming a teddy bear, which of the following would you choose?

Option A: a nice local village in the UK, where the most offensive thing that is likely to happen is someone turning their nose up at the winner of the jam-making competition at the local village fete.

Option B: Perhaps a total change of career at the local Post Office. Maybe dealing with a few pensioners getting their Freedom Passes to travel on the tube at no charge to their hearts content. Plus perhaps an occasional robbery, but that’s why you’re grateful you’re behind a tough bit of glass (and they have signs up that say that aggression towards staff will not be tolerated, so they might give the person a good ticking off too)

Option C: You decide to go and teach in China*. A country that has one of the worst human rights records in the world and doesn’t allow freedom of speech or of the media.

I’ll leave you to work out which one Gillian Gibbons chose.



*Incidentally, I saw a headline on the BBC the other day that said “China expresses its regret at Spielberg withdrawing from the Olympics” and I just had this vision of the entire population of China (all 1.3 billion of them…) lined up like the Terracotta Army, looking very sad and saying in chorus “Mr Spielberg, we’re sorry you’re not coming to our Olympics any more”. It really is time I had some time off work.