God Damn the Telephone

Dear second-person self,

Thought for the day: telephone conversations! Some good ones recently (not in the sense that they were informative or emotionally rewarding, but they provided some amusement). I returned a call from a woman named Lydia, who works for an employment agency through which I applied for a data-entry/admin job. Here is a slightly fictionalised transcript:

I: Hi, my name’s Alun Richards; I got a call earlier about a job application.

She: Hi Alun, yes…did you send me a C.V.?

I: Yes.

She: Ok, hang on a second [she pauses, pretending to look for my C.V.]. Ok! So, what was your last job?

I: [I tell her what my last job was, even though this information is on my C.V.].

She: Have you finished uni then?

I: No.

She: Are you still there?

I: No, I dropped out [my C.V., a copy of which is sitting in front of me, contains this information on the front page].

She: Ok, do you have more relevant experience?

I: I spent some time working as a concert promoter, which entailed a lot of admin work: I had to liase with artists and their management by email and phone, book venues, organise promotion [etc…]

She: I’m sorry, I’m afraid we need someone with specific data-entry experience.

I: That’s okay. Do you have any other jobs available? Yours perhaps: you don’t seem to be willing or able to read a simple C.V., maybe you should seek employment outside the recruitment industry.

She: You are a self-righteous wanker. And I know about your shriveled cock. You will certainly die a virgin [she hangs up].

So there you have it: I am insufficiently qualified to work a £6-per-hour data-entry job. It makes me wonder about the awesome capabilities of society’s marginalised minimum-wage demographic. I think the job description stated that a person with at least five GCSEs would be preferred.

*

I also asked a young woman out for a drink, and that conversation presented me with a few opportunities to display my fine wit, although it didn’t make the most of them. It turned out that she was in Ikea, and when I asked her what she was after there she said she just wanted something to fill a void in her room. I made some quip to the effect that she was looking for something the exact same size and shape as a void, which didn’t quite knock her out, but did lubricate the conversation slightly. I think this is the point of being witty - it’s a sort of finely-tuned conversational efficiency: you point out the comic potential of something that’s been said, then quickly move on. No need to linger, as is often required when being funny.

I also had to explain how I’d found out that she was back in town (Facebook), which I didn’t do as neatly. Of course, I can’t help it if the ‘news feed’ brings up the latest conversation between any two of my acquaintances; I should have said it was society’s fault. And I also should have asked if she minded me stalking her, that would have been polite.