It’s 7am, and the phone alarm has been screaming for 45 minutes. Finally, princess (and that’s what I call myself in the morning – yes I like referring to myself in the third person; it’s fashionable) wakes up from her slumber after nightmares featuring magazine listings and traumatic phone calls.
She realizes it is time for her to get dressed and head to the TOAD office to get the listings ready for the next issue. She sits up and a book falls on her head; and just like Newton was inspired by an apple falling from a tree, Princess Newton (me again) is similarly enlightened – the internship is over, and now it is time to find an actual job.
Wrestling with laziness, depression, nostalgia and a range of other symptoms of unemployment, she sits down on her comfortable plastic chair – no hang on, this isn’t nearly as comfortable as the one in the TOAD office; let me rephrase – she sits down on her hard, uncomfortable plastic chair and starts typing furiously at her resume. This has been going on for months, and she’s tried all the tricks: a friendly visit to her potential employer to mildly ask them if they’d received the resume; no? Well would they like another printout? Or maybe another email? Would they like it engraved on a stone tablet and shipped to the HR office? And when visits weren’t easy, she’s called and asked (mildly) the same questions; and her favourite part of the phone call is the ‘we’ll get back to you dear.’ God only knows how many desperate people hear that and actually believe it. But she always manages a smile, and puts the phone down, mildly.
And that’s how her day flies, job applications, phone calls, and waiting for calls from HR offices to confirm that her CV has been received. The calls often don’t come, and why should they? She’s just a fresher, competing with experienced pros for a limited number of slots in the big, bad world of journalism. Or public relations, or marketing, or anything really; lately she hasn’t been overly picky with her applications.
Her mother constantly reminds her that there’s no rush: ‘Why don’t you just relax at home for a while and stop stressing yourself?’ But alas, the workaholic inside her would never allow such a thing. She dreams of jobs, of pay checks; she dreams of Dhs6,000, Dhs12,000, and – dare she dream – Dhs20,000; and the dreams keep her going for another few days, another few weeks.
But the many months hunting haven’t been a complete waste, she’s taken a lot from it: she has become a saint, and a rock of patience upon which the tsunamis of frustration and disappointment crash. She has become a New Age philosopher, who has found comfort in the quest. She has become an eternal optimist, who expects to wake up every morning and find that a job offer has magically materialized in her pyjama pocket.
