My Dad isn't helping with his weekly phone calls asking if I've found any work yet and his tone of pity oosing down the phone at me when I know all he's thinking is "when are you going to snap out of this pipe dream and find a proper job, one that pays you real money and gives you some sort of financial security? You can then save up for a house and pay into a pension scheme and get a dog and nobody will think any less of you for failing all your hopes and dreams because this is the real adult world where we all just bumble along and count down the days until we can retire and then play golf every day until you die...just think of that!" Whilst the house and the dog do sound appealing and it would be nice to have a pension scheme on the go (I am actually working on that one) the rest of it however sounds as boring in my mind as it does written down here.
I also don't think Les Mis coming out at the cinema when it did helped because it has just reaffirmed that the only way out of my current financial situation is by selling may hair and going on the game! nb. I'm not actually going to do that and in any case I don't have enough money to get my hair cut at the moment.
I was actually still very upbeat about immediate future prospects until a couple of days ago. Christmas with the family was lovely, Neighbours returned to my television screen after its month long Christmas break (it's always a difficult time of year for me) and mid way through January I started getting phone calls from potential employers who had been given my CV from HR (these are jobs that I didn't even specifically apply for) so it was all looking good. It felt like the long hard winter was finally over and and the grass was peeking up through the snow saying "eat me Bambi". All the deer were grazing happily, lulled into a false sense of thinking everything's going to be alright now that we've survived the snow before realising that some evil bastard is lurking in a bush waiting to shoot Bambi's mother. But then, like in Bambi, after his mother gets shot and the poor little fawn is left to fend for himself, it snows a hell of a lot more and it's bleaker than ever (look out the window right now). And yes I am comparing my life to a Disney film. It's not the first time I've done this and it certainly won't be the last.
So anyway, at one point I had three different jobs pencilled in for February, two of which phoned me out of the blue and the other one had been pushed back a month whilst they were waiting for dates to be confirmed before they let me know my start date. We had lots of email correspondence going on and I was lead to believe that I was the person they had whittled it down to. I also had another phone call last week from a production up in Leeds, their runner was moving on and they asked me if I'd completed the health and safety course (yes) and where I was based (oh our previous runner was from Manchester too and he went down during the weekends and he stayed in the hotel with the rest of the crew during the week) and all in all I had nothing but positive vibes from it. Then the guy phoned me again on the same day to ask the same questions (he hadn't made a note of some of my answers) and he told me that he'd get back to me by the end of the day.....that was last Wednesday and he hasn't been in contact since so reading between the lines I'm assuming I didn't get the job.
Now I understand that people are very busy and that they don't always have time to get in contact with everyone but seeing as I didn't even apply for the job and he made the first move and contacted me twice in one day I'm sure that he could have made time to quickly ring the people he'd phoned out of the blue and got excited at the prospect of a month's solid work who had probably be sitting by their phones all day in anticipation waiting for his call, even if it is just to say "sorry, we've given the job to someone else". I'm a big girl now, I can handle rejection and in any case, it's the polite thing to do surely?
Last night I found a relisting of the job I thought I had in the bag and was just waiting for them to get back to me with dates. It turns out they had sorted out the dates but didn't bother getting in touch with me. Instead I had to find via the comments box below the posting that the position had now been filled (again thanks for letting me know or getting in contact with me saying these are the dates, are you still available?)
So now I'm down to my last option. Granted that the job I'm still waiting to hear back from has always been the one I've been most excited about (I'm not just saying that because the other jobs fell through) and it's a lot closer to home than the others. Now I'm started to panic because I haven't heard from them since mid January and they start shooting on the 18th February and all I have is a first name and no contact number for the guy who phoned me initially (his number was withheld)...so not a great start! I don't want to find out in a few weeks that they are fully crewed up but most of all I just want to know either way so that if they have already filled the position I can then get onto my temping agency to find some other work to be getting on with before I get into the situation where I can't afford to pay my rent and I've completely maxed out my overdraft and other stuff that people in the real world have to worry about.
So if any of you reading this are in the habit of phoning people up with potential job offers and then saying that you'll be in touch at a later date once the time/date/venue/number of runners needed etc has been confirmed and then don't follow it up EVER, even if it's just to say "sorry we've got someone else", please spare a thought for the poor people who are eagerly awaiting your promised call that never happens. As Captain James Hook once said in the greatest Spielberg film of all time....bad form Peter!
No comments:
Post a Comment