| Author | Message | ||
     Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.167.124.163 |
The job market is very surreal these days. Having attended a number of interviews these last couple of weeks I can say that some of the companies looking for staff are very weird. One company was out on the harbour at the edge of the city-- Old buildings engulfed by fog. When I got to the place the building was empty. A watchman in a booth looked blankly at me when I mentioned the company. (And the adr. was correct.) Another place looked like a grave- workers tugged into small gray booths- there was no oxygen in the air in the building. It was completly silent. A coffee machine purred and everyone looked suspiciously at me... I turned round and never went for the interview...Stuff like that... | ||
| Tom_alaerts (Tom_alaerts) Username: Tom_alaerts Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.78.35.170 |
Your experience could also have been straight from Mark Samuel's stories - he's quite adept at descibing this peculiar kind of suffocating work atmosphere. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.231.91 |
One of the more hallucinatory jobs I did (happily a long time ago) was standing in a deluge of strings beans, shoveling genuine hillocks of the vegetable in a giant smoking pit which was part of that particular factory's sewer system. Imagine having to brave a veritable torrent of foul-smelling green stuff for the best part of eight hours, day after day. Every once in a while a pale face would drift out of the fumes or from behind a piece of unspeakably noisy and noisome machinery to check on how I was getting along. That invariably scared the **** out of me. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.70.111.148 |
Just after university I went from door to door selling photocopiers. One day on Stockport Road I looked at a funeral parlour and thought to myself well, why not....went in and up to a counter, rang a bell and this person appeared. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurch_%28The_Addams_Family%29 I ran out the door as fast as I could. I kid you not. Things like that happen to me all the time. | ||
| Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin) Username: Richard_gavin Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 65.110.174.71 |
My Ligottian job: One summer I worked for a library cataloguing company. "Library?" you say, "why, that sounds ideal." My thinking exactly...until I discovered what the job actually entailed: several rows of rickety desks atop which sat computers so old they were practically prototypes. Next to each archaic computer were boxes containing library card catalogues. It was the job of each clerk to take one card at a time and type in the ISBN, Dewey code, book title, and author into the screen. But it gets worse. The company had developed their own software specifically for this task, meaning that the above information had to be inputted using the company's special coding. (The letter 'A' would be entered as '%', the letter 'B' as '$', etc.) It was the most inane, illogical code I'd ever seen. And no matter how productive you were, you'd return the next monring to yet another tower of cards to be entered. No one spoke. There were no phones in the clerk area. The tapping of keys was all one heard. During my first week there the owner told me "You're going to feel like Sisyphus here. No matter how hard you push, the boulder will roll down the other side of the hill. You'll never be finished." I quit after only a few weeks. Oddly enough, I remember reading Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine, Roland Topor's The Tenant, and The Essential Kafka around that time, so my paranoia knew no bounds that summer. | ||
| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.165.182 |
I suspect I might have enjoyed that actually... the kind of no-brainer job that enables the mind to wander. My last job was basically a typing one and I was able to get a lot of work done in my head when it came to writing. Day-dreaming while I typed. Now I'm working in a call centre, so I can't really do that...  | ||
| Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin) Username: Richard_gavin Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 65.110.174.71 |
Simon: I like no-brainer jobs too. Unfortunately, the code system was so alien that it required full attention, otherwise the book couldn't be properly catalogued. I suppose if I'd stayed on long enough the code would've become old hat and I could have started daydreaming, but I was so miserable there that I used to silently pray for death about forty times a shift. There were women who'd worked there for twenty years. They'd become like living Ligotti characters, the poor fools. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.167.124.163 |
While maybe not a Ligottian job,(maybe more something out a David Schow story) a friend of mine in Maine had a job at a garbage processing plant one summer when he was in high school. He told me he had to wade, almost up to his chest in sewage water and unclog these large industrial drains. He had to wear these huge plastic galoshes that went right up to the neck- hows that for a job then. HA! I worked in Holberg's closed school library for a year in high school and that was amazing. At one point, I tried holding Holberg's plays- 4 slim volumes if I remember correctly- they were worth almost 200,000 Pounds. |