Time to find work and give up being member of Endies
I have belonged to this demographic for about 15 years, but until I read about it, I didn’t know it had a name. (Prior to that I belonged to the Undies – Unemployed No Disposable Income or Savings. Actually, I just made up Undies, although not the bit about being unemployed and penniless all through the Nineties.) These days I am also a Mutt – Mortgaged Upto The Ti…. sorry, Teeth.
At least when you’re unemployed you expect to be skint, but if you’re a single parent of two expensive kids and work in print journalism, unless you are editing the New York Times, the chances of being one of the Endies is high.
Listening to wealthy author and journalist Tony Parsons on the radio recently talking about how every journalist he knows now having a second job, I have a lightbulb moment. Ting!
After all, how hard could it be? Never mind that I have not had a proper job in 20 years. Is there anything out there for an unemployable woman in her forties, who has been going to work in her pyjamas since 1999? I imagine my CV. Good at: reading. Work history: writing about myself. References: ask me about myself. Computer literacy: er, Twitter.
Hmmm. This definitely qualifies me as a journalist, but not much else. Anyway, I already have a second job – writing a novel, which is far more time consuming that I’d realised (foolishly imagining I might bash it out in three months, a year later am still only half way through). And unpaid until someone buys it. So a third, paid job is required. But what?
Walking past my local independent bookshop, I see a sign in the window. A sign! Wanted – Part Time Book Seller. I – and every other peri-menopausal bookaholic for miles, plus several thousand eager students keen to bolster their beer fund – apply for the job.
CVs pile up on the book shop counter, with covering letters telling the book shop owner how much we all love to read.
He doesn’t care that we are a booky bunch, that we know our Amis from our Eco. You wouldn’t apply for the job of chef by telling the restaurant owner that you are very good at eating, but that is exactly what everyone does with the book seller.
In the end it is an understanding of dogs which gets me the job. At my interview, the book seller’s dog – 12 weeks old, insane, and destroying a delivery of Hilary Mantel – howls so loudly. We cannot speak. Let’s walk the dog and talk at the same time, I suggest, because trying to convince someone to employ you over the yowls of a demented puppy when you have not been to a job interview in two decades is not something to put on your bucket list. We leave the shop, walk a bit, and the dog shuts up.
Reader, he hired me.
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