The bad news is that I will continue to be burdened with employment; the good news is that I have a job.
So it's the evening of the day that I'm told I no longer have a job with The Firm, come September 12... I'm determined to make this into an opportunity, and so after gym, dinner, reading some blogs, discovering (to my horror) that I'd put the equivalent of £50 through the washing machine after Soho Pride, wasting an hour on Gaydar et al, and checking my downloads, I touched up my CV and posted it to four job sites around midnight.
The following morning, having woken from a necessarily zopiclone-induced slumber, my phone starts ringing around 8:30am. It was a recruiter. While speaking with him, I heard the call waiting announce two more calls. Within two minutes of hanging up, the phone rang again. Again, more calls on call waiting. As soon as I got out of the tube at Chancery Lane, I received a text message advising me I had three messages... and the phone rang again. And this is how the next 24 hours played out. Between Wednesday morning and Thursday lunchtime, my phone - almost literally - did not stop ringing. My voice mailbox filled; that's fifty messages. Somewhat wizened to the sharkpool of IT recruiting, I wasn't sure what to make of it all.
The most significant of these phone calls from recruiters was one guy who was desperate to send me CV to a private equity firm. He did so on Wednesday morning, and by 1pm he rang me back to arrange an interview at the client company... for the following morning. I figured this was all a load of bollocks at a shite firm, but was keen to go along with it. I couldn't have been more wrong. The job was a good one, at a large private equity firm in the heart of the West End. Now, I happen to think that private equity might well be the devil's work... but fortunately I've been whoring myself to big companies for years, so I'm hardened. This doesn't bother me anymore, provided they pay, and the price is right.
What is important is that the work sounds interesting, the offices are beautiful, the IT department is not in the basement, and there might be the possibility of travel to the other offices. So things look really good, on paper. How this all plays in the real world, I am yet to find out. But for the moment, I'm breathing a sigh of relief, as I might have dodged a bullet - and a bout of unemployment - just as the country tips into dark times.
