Art Pact 116

It's a fairly damning indictment of the world today that having spent four years on my degree in biochemistry, another year on a master's, and two years working towards a doctorate (even if I did eventually drop out - supervisor trouble) that I was unable to find a job that even remotely related to my area of expertise.

Heavily in debt (I had the sort of doctoral grant that had to be paid back if you dropped out, and the sort of short-sighted attitude to spending that ensured that I had wasted three years of money in the time it took me to get one-and-a-half years into the research), I had neither time nor resources to spare waiting around for the perfect job. I'd expected that. But I was shocked (ok, perhaps not shocked - but disappointed) to discover that it wasn't just the perfect job I couldn't find. I couldn't find the roughly ideal job, nor the workable job, nor even the remotely tolerable job. I was finally reduced to begging an old school friend of mine to intercede with his father for the sake of a job in the warehouse at the back of a catalogue store. It was easy work, but I soon discovered why - the shop was failing at an alarming speed, with the result that two months later I was out of work again, along with a cohort of more qualified fellow workers, and further in debt (I'd spent the first month's wages on luxuries to console myself, and the second month's money had evaporated along with the shop. In theory I might have got it later on, but I knew in my heart of hearts that the moribund shop chain did not have enough in the way of assets to cover even the serious creditors.)

My first foray into retail being such a disaster did not faze me. Which is to say it fazed me utterly, but since there were no jobs going in any other sector and I was in severe danger of being thrown out of my flat-share, I got back on the horse anyway. I was in much the same position as before, but my CV did at least have one item on it now, however pathetic it might seem. I got a job in the stockroom of an actual shop next, which meant more work (retrieving something by number from a well-ordered set of shelves is considerably less taxing than walking around a store full of people filling up badly-ordered shelves from a pallet trolley with one wheel pointing at ninety degrees from the other three), but also more opportunity to get away from my fellow back-room workers and interact with the public, whom I love so dearly.

In case it wasn't obvious, that was sarcasm.

The general public aren't so bad - after all, I'm one of them outside of my 8-hours-a-day 5-days-a-week working life, and I'm pretty nice. But it's difficult working in a shop not to succumb to a simple us and them attitude in which you and your coworkers (those of them that aren't lazy sociopaths or your immediate superiors or both) become reasonable, rational people fighting tooth and nail to pacify or satisfy a mob of ravenous howler monkeys who upset your nicely-laid-out stock, switch price labels, demand that you sell them things that are either not available or clearly contraindicated for health reasons, argue comically over the correct change, and in extreme cases engage either you or each other in physical combat.

I'm told by former coworkers that this attitude usually develops over a course of a couple of months, although in extreme cases it's possible to watch someone transform directly from an American-service-industry-wet-dream helpful happy-go-lucky Pollyanna to the worst British Rail station employee in the space of a single encounter with a paying customer.

I don't know whether it's worse being over-qualified (you know what I mean) for a job or better. On the one hand, I did have some kind of back-up plan - even if my back-up plan was technically my Plan A. I knew that if things improved I /might/ be able to get a job somewhere else. My colleagues who had worked in shops their whole lives simply understood that this was going to be their career unless their band hit it big or their Avon rep business took off, or whatever. Those that understood it and accepted it were mostly happy - and why not? After all, someone has to work in shops, realistically there's no shame in it.

On the other hand, there's nothing so bitter as the idea that you're toiling below yourself. Perhaps if I was a better man I'd have been able to reason that if a job in the shop could make someone less academic (by which I of course egotistically meant "less clever", regardless of whether that was actually the fact) happy, then surely with my prodigious intellect and wisdom I could find a similar satisfaction, however seemingly menial the task. If it doesn't sound too weird, I should mention here that I have always been impressed by the description of Hannibal Lecter as a man who could not be bored because of his immense and disciplined intellect. Although perhaps the fact that he's also amply described in the novels as a cannibal suggests that there are perhaps limits to his ability to entertain himself mentally (if I can use that word in this context).

I am not a cannibal, nor am I (much to my chagrin) capable of entertaining myself through the power of thought and imagination. I suppose I could easily have been musing on the delicacies of photosynthesis as I restocked the stationery department, or trying to work out a shortcut to the protein folding problem, but I was not. I was fuming at the ridiculous way the world had been organised that had led me to this, a job that (in my opinion) would in a more properly ordered society be performed by robots, or alternatively by trained macaques. I even lost control of my sense of politeness enough to mention this theory aloud once or twice. If you have by now formed the opinion that I am an arsehole, congratulations. You worked it out a lot faster than I did.