No job too small

I always did need a broad margin to my life, and one uncluttered by the footnotes of employment and the joyless marginalia of surrendering my thick present to work.

Some years ago, at a particularly desperate point in my long, clumsy and reluctant tango with employment, I went after work to a course that promised to help me find a new career. Or even freedom. Who knew ?

Part of the course was filling in a vast and rambling (ahem, searching) questionnaire about talents, skills, experience, hopes (in work ??), aspirations.

It was in the days when computers had their own rooms, were water-cooled and throbbed purposefully with pensive intent. And they were distant, too. In this case, my answers were dispatched to Leicester, some 60 miles away, and I waited 10 days for the results, which came on a small stack of fan-folded paper.

And there it was. The answer. In black and white (or the closest to black that a dot matrix printer could manage):

This search has not produced any well matched career titles for you to consider

I KNEW it ! I just KNEW it !

It was one of my very few triumphant moments related to work.

The computer comforted me with the thought that:

Some other factor, beyond the scope of this system, is exerting a stronger influence on your thinking about career choice. 

Too right. The other factors were the dreams of having a life rather than a living, the settled feeling that work was undermining my sanity and had already compromised my enjoyment circuits. I remember there was also a desperate desire to see sunny days and not have them slip away unused.

That the fanfold still lives in my filing cabinet says it all, really. The computer's admission of defeat felt like a sweet affirmation.

Ah, to be validated by a primitive computer, however mainframe. 

How sad is that ?