SIGNING ON:After further failed attempts to find work, our columnist finds solace in friendship
HE APPLIED for, but did not get, a job as a census enumerator: 21,000 applicants.
On the green with both children, and a double-buggy, he is approached by a charmless woman in a high-viz vest: what house does he live in? He shows her, she passes over a form. He fishes: “Do you mind me asking . . . how did you get the gig?” She reddens. “I applied, same as everyone else.”
“I didn’t mean offence. I thought perhaps you did it the previous time out?” She leaves. A parent beetles over: “Don’t mind that one! Her brother’s a garda.”
All unemployed are equal, but some are more equal than others.
***
There’s a scene in Kramer v Kramer where Hoffman’s character, rabid for work, inveigles his way into a new, though less well paid, position.
In real life, such determination, such desperation, remains anathema to most: After applying for a job, he is promised an interview. Decides to door-stop the company owner. Catches him in a car park. A terse conversation ensues. “The salary,” says the employer, “would be an insult. To someone of your standing.”
“I’m on the dole. Insult away.”
“Twenty-eight grand.”
“Give me 35: I’ll bring in new business.”
“Can’t. Sorry.”
“Thirty-two-fifty. Two per cent of any new business?”
“I’d be worried you’d leave after six months. With clients.”
“I’ll sign a contract, and a confidentiality clause.”
The employer will consider this. Will definitely get back to him.
Never does.
***
Why do people lie? Is it because they cannot comprehend the plight of another unless they have endured similar? He has always felt this to be the case; only a woman who has miscarried, a parent who has lost a child, can truly feel the sting. We nod, we pretend. Truth is, we lack basic empathy. And lie to suit ourselves.
Better if the employer had said, “I want someone young, with no kids, who’ll be married to the job, who’ll work weekends. Someone I can own.” (Irony is he’d have allowed all this. And more.)
***
Thank God for the dog beside him, the slow walk from Chapelizod, the river bending, the respite of Lutyens’s gardens. The National Gallery, Jack B, the porters wise-cracking. The Bull Island bird sanctuary.
Waves, retreating.
His children laughing. Her touch.
How do people manage this alone? No one to hold. No one to talk you down from false highs. Or up again from sloughs. When the phone sits silent. And e-mails fail to come.
***
A virus lays his family low. They eat nothing, or next to, for almost a week. And still fail to live within budget.
***
Watching TV with a good friend, a Romanian professor of history who toils as a security guard. His overtime – money dutifully sent home – has evaporated, though his Irish co-workers, in particular those related to or favoured by the family who effectively make up management, have seen no such diminution: this, says his friend, is the way of the world. (And definitely the way of the island).
The unemployed man envies his friend’s stoicism. Says so. His friend shrugs: “I grew up in the Ceausescu era. You got used to having nothing. Fact that people around you also had nothing facilitated this. Is hard for you Irish – you harbour too many unrealistic expectations. Know how much dole is in my country?”
“Yeah yeah. Poor communist me.”
“Know what I envy about you, Dole-Boy?”
“The fact I still have hair?”
“Your wife. Your motorbike. But not piece-of-shit car you drive.”
Feels good to slag, to be slagged: a subtle reminder of work. (And thank God for friends. Though he avoids, perhaps foolishly, the high-earners. The immune.)
***
Some fool on Vincent Browne fulminating about private debt becoming public, how it sets a new, dangerous precedent.
“Punitive provisions of Treaty of Versailles, and ’97 fiscal crisis in Thailand notwithstanding,” says the professor, “there exist numerous historical precedents: when they returned from Crusades, for example, titled families – essentially speculators – transferred private debt via increased taxation. My thesis: we live in post-feudal society. And are but over-educated serfs.”
They laugh. His friend becomes serious: “I lectured in Germany – I know the mindset. They’ll allow me guard their money, but never to own it. You, they see as a drain on system.
“They’ll not rest until they have whittled your ‘entitlements’ to nothing. Until you emigrate, or take up menial job, like mine, which grants just enough to survive, plus monthly cinema ticket to see Hollywood-bullshit like Pursuit of Happyness – hurrah! They’ll retrain you, in something they deem worthwhile. This is Merkel’s ‘vision’.”
Sometimes the unemployed man feels he’d be better off up in the mountains.
Practising. The most essential art of the unemployed: forgetting.