The man sitting across from me reminds one of Toad from wind in the willows – if he was allowed to live out all his capitalist dreams.
The beady eyes of a marketing vulture stare at me behind the kind of suit a midlife crisis sufferer wears to fit into the duck-faced and ripped masses of a Friday night.
“THIS POSITION IS ALL ABOUT YOU BEING YOU” he booms.
But this is not me.
I do not harass people at train stations committing guilt-rape in the name of charity – the innocents’ bloody wallets in my hand.
I have always measured my achievements in what I have gifted others and myself, rather than how many Generation Y stragglers I’ve left falling off the pyramid scheme of direct marketing.
How the fuck did I manage to get here, I think to myself as the classic Bill Hicks ‘kill yourself if you’re in marketing’ plays in my head. My mind’s holding my eyebrow back from raising at every bit of hot air given to me, enough force to hold down a crack addicted tiger receiving a rectal based medication.
I had already reserved judgement messaging my girlfriend upon entry, berating the lack of biscuits and the soulless vacuum of an office. An office accompanied with the kind of top 40 garbage you’d play at an enemies funeral to spite them – surrounded by the torn egos of millennial desperation.
Clicking on every single seek ad in site, like each one is the holy grail that will set us free.
I walk out of the interview and leave, more sure than ever in myself that I will never become a toad. As I do, pleading eyes follow me as I make my escape into the air of day.
Free of the vultures, my standards not yet defeated by the need for sustenance. I would rather eat Mi Goreng complete with radioactive msg from Fukushima, I claim to myself.
This is the life of the unemployed in Perth.
The loveless, corporate wank.
The monotony of replacing a lead singer in a band – being forced to recite words that are not your own for a crowd that will never know you.