Fucking Job

It's my last week at my godforesaken temp job in London, and endings always make me nostalgic, so I'm taking this opportunity to reflect on the relentless purgatory that is my job.

I'll start with an email I sent today to the new Head of Research (aka my permanent replacement):

Hey T,

Here's the spreadsheet for the [project I'm researching].
Sorry I've been so useless as of late, but give it another month and you'll abhor this job and (most of) the people who work here with the same blind passion that I do!

L

I guess I haven't fully explained my current situation and some clarification is in order. I’m obsessed with traveling. Not just traveling, but actually living in countries. Alas, the United States is not a commonwealth country and while the price for a U.S. passport on the black market keeps steady at $10,000-$15,000 (!!!), no one wants an American in their country, let alone earning money in their country. I did a semester in Dublin, Ireland, and fell madly in love with that city. Upon graduating, I decided I had to live abroad again. Ireland is even more tightass about giving a Yank a Visa than the U.K., so rather than do four months in Dublin, I decided to opt for the six-month visa to the U.K., figuring that London couldn’t be that much different from a city 40 minutes away (via RyanAir).

Yeah, if I had to describe London in relation to Dublin, I’d say it’s pretty much the same except it’s the exact opposite and everything costs a lot more.

So here I am, a researcher at a large financial publishing company. Doing a job that I detest with such a fervor that I openly arrive an hour late every day, shove my headphones into my ears and blast music so loudly that my boss needs to throw things at me to get my attention. They don't care enough to fire me because my paycheck is such a negligible sum that they wouldn't even be able to mail a package with it, and I'm useless whether or not I'm here anyway.

My job is very simple, really. I call representatives of financial corporations and ask them to fill out surveys. Some are nice but usually I can literally see their hand coming out of the telephone and swatting me away like a gnat that swarms persistently over their penne alla vodka. Sometimes they yell. These are my favorites as they add a dash of spice to an otherwise vanilla working day. The ones that yell are always from the biggest companies. The PAs who won’t let you speak to their bosses are always from the smallest.

I then compile the data into a spreadsheet, make it look pretty, and email it over to a journalist so they can write an uneven, awkward, sloppily-worded article about it and periodically take free trips to exotic locations to gather supplementary material for said horrible articles. A journalist once asked me to proofread an article, something that could have been written by a nine year-old if not for the references to the economy and finance. When I suggested, gently, that some sentence structures were a little awkward and would read better if he switched/omitted words, he rolled his eyes at me and told me he just wanted me to check for typos. After all, what does a lowly researcher with a degree in English literature and writing possibly know about good writing?

Despite this, I survived the last five months relatively unscathed, and in two weeks, will be returning to New York City where people don’t look at you like you have the Ebola virus when you try to strike up friendly conversation in a bar.

-L