Job

Job is a funny word, both to say and to look at. Job.

“Gis a job. I can do that.”

Anxious times, here at Casa Hey, Writer Guy. 

Having taken the great leap forwards/backwards/sideways/direction-yet-to-be-determined, out into the cold hard world of being a freelance writer again, the cold hard reality that I currently do not have an active commission is sinking in.  No paying project on which I can beaver away and then send in that beloved invoice, means sleepless summer nights – and not just because of the heat.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” say my friends and colleagues. I appreciate the love, but love don’t pay the bills.

“It’s still January, everyone who could commission you is still on holiday,” they say.  Which is possibly true, but is it actually true?  What if, come July, it might as well still be January, says the crippling writerly voice of self-doubt in my head.

“You’ve got your Substack thing,” they point out, under the assumption its existence equals financial reward. I run the numbers and figure out that if I can multiply my number of subscribers by 10 and then somehow persuade all of them to become paid subscribers, then that would really help.  But I don’t see this happening, at least not in the short term.  Writing Hey, Writer Guy is about inflicting my voice on the world, not wealth generation.

“Oh, for God’s sake, get a grip,” say those who know me best.  And they are right. Even if, in the long run, they turn out to be wrong, and getting a good, strong grip changes nothing of the nothingness.

As in my way in these times of self-doubt, I look at my options for a change of direction.  Maybe there are other jobs, out there, suited to my unique set of skills.  Once upon a time this would result in me perusing the situations vacant, but these days there are specialists out there, just a few clicks away.

Thus it was I sent out an online SOS to Trade Me Jobs and Seek.  What great employment opportunities have you got for me?  In what bold new direction can you take me?  Please find me that perfect mid-life crisis job switch that will cure all my anxieties plus provide a generous income stream.

I get that Trade Me Jobs wasn’t being entirely serious when it came back with a generic e-mail offering jobs as a KFC Wicked Wing Tester; or doing Social Meow-dia for PetDirect; or hyping the Fijian Drua Super Rugby team.  I get that this was them proving how down they are with the kids.  But, quite frankly, the only job I wanted out of that lot was as some kind of law enforcement officer with the job of arresting and imprisoning whomsoever writes puns like ‘Social Meow-dia’.  Sorry Trade Me Jobs, but I don’t feel like you and I will ever be meow-d for each other.

Seek, at least, appears to be taking me seriously after I ticked their Advertising, Arts & Media box.  But the problem here is that all the employment opportunities they dangle in front of me are for journalists.  The problems with this are: (a) apparently journalism is dead, according to all the journalists I read; and (b) reminding me that I chose the shallow money trench of TV instead of going to journalism school, after I finished my BA, is just rubbing salt into the wound.

No, this is job search not working out the way I desire.

“Maybe that’s because you haven’t sent them your work history,” they say.  I’m not sure that will be any help, I say.  But hey, those who are about to be beggars cannot afford to be choosers, so here goes.

JAMES GRIFFIN – A WORK HISTORY

In the mid-1970’s my first after-school job was at Thomson’s Suits, at 355 Heretaunga Street, Hastings.  It is still there today.  From memory (and definitely showing my age) it was like a provincial Hawkes Bay Are You Being Served?  My job was to post the post and generally sort and tidy things round the shop, although the chaps who worked there kept trying to get me to serve the customers, maybe in the hope that I would eventually become one of them. But I was super shy back then, so I tried to avoid the customers at all costs.  Fast forward to now and while I do like clothes I am still awkward around actual humans, so I probably not suited to a customer service job. But I do like sorting and tidying, which could be useful in some way.

At least I was a reliable Thomson’s employee.  In fact, the only day I didn’t go to work at Thomson’s Suits was because the first time my Mum let me drive the car down the driveway at our house at 508a Windsor Avenue, I hit the accelerator instead of the brake as I pulled up, and instead of stopping I put our car through the side of our house.  Probably not a good thing to mention if I am being considered for some kind of driving job, I would guess.

Then there followed a series of summer jobs, all in Hawkes Bay.

A customer service job where I couldn’t avoid the customers, at a sporting goods store, also in Heretaunga Street.  Coincidentally it was the same store where my one primary school attempt at shoplifting took place.  Me and a mate knicked a cricket ball.  I was so wracked with guilt I confessed within a day and took it back.  Being honest is a good thing in an employee, right?

Probably not so good was that I almost got fired from this job for being very late back from my dinner break during Friday-night shopping because Toy Love was playing on the back of a flatbed trailer outside the EMI store down the road and I didn’t want to leave until they were finished.  Easily distracted by rock’n’roll music and Chris Knox offending Friday night shoppers in Hastings, doesn’t really scream “give this man a job”.

Plix Plastics, where I manned a machine making plastic trays to package fruit for export was a horrible job.  Plus I feel guilty that the product of my labours is still in landfills all over the world and will be for centuries to come.  So anything involving plastics and/or factories is out.

On the other hand, being an industrial engineer at Whakatu Freezing Works was brilliant.  I was part of a wool-pull assessment survey, where the company was trying to figure out how to pay farmers for the wool on the slaughtered sheep, according to breed and weight.  Back then, working at The Works was the ultimate student summer job – great pay; pretty easy hours; Dalvanius singing Christmas carols on the killing floor with everyone on the chain singing along as they dismembered sheep…. 

Plus, because I was handling wool all day, by the end of summer my hands were lovely and soft.

But I don’t think my mahi did any good because Whakatu shut down a few years later.  And I still worry that maybe I was the one that tipped that whole industry over the edge, into the abyss.

Also gone now is the Stortford Lodge Tavern, where I spent a summer earning money as a junior barman who was only just old enough to actually be in the bar, whilst also getting an education.  The education bit came courtesy of the public bar of the Stortford being the drinking saloon of choice for the Hasting Mongrel Mob.  I saw a lot of things I wish I hadn’t seen, but being behind the bar gave this future writer a relatively safe window into a whole other world.  I would not go back to bartending though, as I am no longer nimble enough to duck the pool cue as it whistles past me and takes out the beer fridge.  That still sometimes happens up on Ponsonby Road, right?

It is about now, when my university summer jobs gave way to actual jobs, that I think my work history begins to flatline.  Sure, at the beginning of my TV life I painted sets; I ran cable as a rigger for golf OB’s; and I upholstered prop chairs on Hanlon, but these actually useful jobs were only for a few months at a time, as I trained (and failed) to become a TV director, so to claim any skill in these craft areas would be downright fraudulent.

Nope, my work history from about the mid-1980’s onward reads as follows:

Trained as a writer.

Wrote a whole bunch of stuff, as a writer.

Kind of hit a wall in the early-2020’s, when it felt like I’d passed some kind of unspoken Use By date, as a writer.

Carried on writing anyway, because…

Because the reality is I don’t know anything else now, except the world of writing and creating worlds through that writing. 

Because the reality is that I chose, long ago, to stay in New Zealand and tell stories about us, because those are the stories I want to tell.

Because the anxiety I feel now stems from the fact that those stories are an endangered species, for a myriad of reasons, compounded by the other fact that it feels like our politicians give not a flying fuck about the tragic state of the local television production industry.

But that is far too much reality for a simple writer to deal with at once.

So I will flag all this nonsense talk of changing my path.  I am what I am and I will do what I’ve always done in my feast or famine job….

I will hope that the universe will provide.