Life on Queen Street

For a long time the only Orwell I'd read was Down and Out in Paris and London, and the power of that book is the inside/outside view it gives on how the machinery of exploitation functions on the ground. The constant exhausting useless work of being poor was already familiar to me as a teen. All these time-wasting rigged games of survival serve to manufacture and control a desperate labor pool that demeans, crushes, and ultimately indifferently slaughters human beings. A system is what it does, after all.

The slog to find a job continues to grind my very goddamned soul. I feel like a filter trap for cognitive dissonance, crushingly frustrated by such conundrums as how to be charming and reassuringly competent while curbing vast amounts of anxiety and rage at the state of, well, everything being mismanaged to hell and back in a glory of destruction.

"Our interview in 20min is cancelled, as we're suddenly not funding this position after all."

"Can you show me your home office? No, I don't have any technical questions about your set-up, I just want to see it for reasons."

"My camera is 'glitchy' (so weird that this always happens!) so you'll be performing engaging humanity to a default blank pfp and your own strained countenance."

"Oh we're owned by a private equity firm, so we believe we're shielded from the 'current instability' in related fields. I will not take it well when you ask for the PE firm's name."

"I'm actually remote/contract HR, so I can't tell you anything about that location, team, work environment, or current challenges this position is meant to address. Please be specific about how you would contribute to our business."

"Sell yourself to us, why should we hire you?"
That one pissed me off, it totally came off as 'dance for us, monkey'. Real talk here, I give sommelier energy. I care way more for the craftsmanship and artistry of the product than the sale of it. I did well with luxury treats to middle class punters, and both are in short supply these days. So yeah, if you need a successful impromptu sales pitch about the thing we've already been discussing for forty minutes -- namely my interest and qualifications for a non-sales or even development-adjacent role at a nonprofit -- then we should both not waste our time.

But wasting time is partly what this is all about, isn't it?