Unemployable

It has been a much busier day.

Mark spent the morning logging, there is a tree down in the park and it has been sawn up into big chunks by the council and left for the peasants to help themselves, which we did.

Actually, Mark did, not me. He sharpened his chainsaw and put a new handle in his log splitter and put his boiler suit on and got on with hard manual labour.

I had a long and tediously detailed form to fill in and so had to spend most of the morning doing that, which was fortuitous, as it was indescribably preferable to splitting and hauling great lumps of chestnut about.

I have done a lot of this in the course of my lifetime and can say from experience that it is a wearisome business. I tried to encourage the job along a bit by popping outside occasionally and telling Mark how strong and clever and brave he was, etc., and how much I admired his masculine abilities, which was a lot less effort than helping.

After the form, and the rest of the morning chores I left him grumbling about backache and went to work. I was sitting on the taxi rank listening to Paul’s stories of satisfactory sounding excess at the funeral he attended on Friday, when my telephone rang.

It doesn’t do this usually, unless it is Mark wanting to know what I have done with something, or Lucy wanting some money, or my parents because there is nothing interesting on the telly, or Elspeth because her children have done something either very irritating or requiring my admiration, and so I was very surprised.

It said that it was an Unknown Number and so obviously it wasn’t going to be any of the above, but probably somebody wanting to talk about the accident that I had had that I could claim lots of money for, or about the Payment Protection Insurance money that was just waiting with my name on it, or possibly the Electricity Board wanting to train a new member of staff in how to deal with angry and difficult customers: so of course I answered it with an impatient don’t-mess-with-me snarl, just to get the relationship off on the right footing.

It wasn’t any of those.

It was a funeral service company.

I had applied for a job with them back in January. You won’t know about this because it was before the days of writing an online diary, however the long and the short of it is that I have always liked the idea of doing funerals, and I saw the job advertised in the local paper and it was January and I wasn’t very busy, so I thought that I would have a go at it.

So I sent them my CV and a letter explaining that I would be a jolly good person to help with funeral organising, obviously I would be a perfect choice, because everybody knows that driving a taxi for twenty years is a marvellous route in to a career in the funeral industry, packed with relevant experience and work-related skills.

I can’t quite remember how I managed to make that sound even vaguely acceptable at the time, but I must have done, because they sent me an e-mail and asked me to do an online psychometric test, which I thought was a really exciting modern idea, so I did it.

They sent me another e-mail two days later, which said that their test results suggested that I couldn’t have a job because I was hopelessly unsuitable, and probably too timid and shy and not good at dealing with difficult things: so I wrote them a letter back which said that their psychometric tests were clearly absolute rubbish and should be referred back to the Governing Body For Psychometric Testers, and what did they know anyway, because I knew jolly well I could have been brilliant at their job so it was their loss, yah boo sucks: and that was the end of it.

Until today: four months later, when they said that the position had not been filled, and would I still like to be considered for it.

I couldn’t begin to imagine how much more suitable to direct funerals I might have become in the intervening three months, not at all as far as I could see, possibly slightly less so on account of the ongoing attitude problem one has in continuous development when one drives taxis. That didn’t stop me cravenly and delightedly agreeing to a telephone interview tomorrow morning, and then spending the rest of the entire day feeling sick with fear and eating chocolate for reassurance, and then feeling sick with an unpleasant fear and chocolate combination.

Mark came out to work later, and laughed, and said they probably employed somebody rubbish because their tests didn’t work, and now they have to try again.

I am a bit concerned because I am fully aware that I am horribly unemployable due to the attitude problem and the lack of experience at doing what I am told, and my undeniable tendency to say: ‘up yours’ and go home when I think people are idiots. I know I am unemployable because that is what all my employers have said so far.

The difference is that I would really like to do this. I have spent the day reading lots of articles about things that you should and shouldn’t say in a telephone interview, and I have got until half past nine tomorrow morning to try and work out what an employable person sounds like.

I have no idea. I spend my entire working life with other taxi drivers.

I don’t think any of us qualify.