So we have been in, out and in of recession. All forecasts point to our going in, out, in out and shaking it all about for quite a while longer.* As I forecasted quite a while back, the past few months have seen me go from working 60-70 hour weeks doing two separate part-time internships, teaching on Saturdays and doing interesting work in what little time was left over; to doing 60-70 hour weeks to fit in a full-time masters and a very interesting part-time job, whilst still managing to sometimes humour my [not so] secret ambition of being a night club singer.
So the hustle goes on, and this story is going to back to where we left off.

The Internships
A morality play about being careful for what you wish for and how opportunity, in this current climate, is still to be found everywhere.

Last July, whilst still away in Italy, but no longer abandoned on a station bench, I was offered an internship [A]. Joy! Much joy. At the same time, the possibility of my getting funded to do my interesting but unpaid work was flagged...even more joy! Then to my greater surprise, the Human Rights Internship [B] that I had been very nicely rejected from, turned round and reoffered itself to me. So suddenly I am faced with internships A and B, teaching work C and interesting-unpaid-but-potentially-funded work D. Panic.

Being a bit of a Yes person, I resolve to give A and B five days a week to share, C one day a week and D an afternoon and a few spare hours here and there. What ‘I’ is left with, is very little time and an even shorter fuse… But the hustle is good and busy is better than bored.

I am about to embark on my two month A+B+C+D= - I saga, when I get invited to the most bizarre interview I have ever had. My uni, as part of a work experience programme I had signed up to, admits it had failed to find me paid experience, but claimed to want to employ me to do paid research [E?] instead. Now, although far from being any sort of a mathematician (I failed a quarter of my final maths exam at school because I *forgot* what y represented…) it was pretty obvious that ‘E’ did not fit into my A+B+C+D= - I equation. However, in the interest of not missing out on anything, I went along to the interview to see what the waters were like.

Halfway through the interview I explained that although I was very interested in the research project, I did have quite a lot of options going on so wondered how flexible the research could be. At this point my interviewer said the fateful words “well, if you can persuade these internships to share you, we’ll pay you to do them full time”. As in, if you persuade these organisations A and B to agree to doing what they have already agreed to, we will pay you to work for someone else . Deal.

And so they agree, and so I do… my 60-70 hour week of stipended internships, paid teaching and unpaid-but-soon-to-be-funded interesting work begins... and I discover that all that is internship is not necessarily interesting. Whilst project managing and organising meetings and seminars and editing a film in one internship, the other consists of my turning up between the hours of 10 and 5 pm, and doing soul-numbing admin. The kind of soul-numbing admin that involves speanding a whole day reading and categorising 30 CVs by people exponentially more qualified than you. Or spending five hours double guessing the printer so that it prints out 1000 labels just so, or counting out how much stationary is left, or...

*I may have made some of that sentence up, but after all 99.9% of all forecasts are wrong, flawed or just made up on the spot (for how the oft cited fact that 88.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot affects this forecasting, see May D. Upsala [2009, pp.12-13]

It’s an ongoing joke, and actually a surprisingly effective reassurance, that the worst attributes of my current admin job will be the material for my future career writing sitcoms. What are your twenties for but to meet the unusual individuals to feature in the next The Office or Spaced? The series will feature such gems as the interview, a range of questions from the sublime, Tell us a joke, ridiculous, Provide a word for word account of the advert for this job and down right illegal, Are you pregnant? Do you suffer from bad period pain? Do you get ill a lot?
Such is the job market at the moment, this interview is unfortunately not on the list of situations gloriously escaped, but the beginning of a couple of month’s stint. Whereas my interview was strange, a bit inept and verging on the dodgy – rather a clear representation of the job itself- I’m sure in larger corporations with a wealth of competing candidates at hand are demanding more and more from the candidates at the interview stage. I’m no stranger to lengthy application forms, phone interviews, assessment days, second interviews, competencies and tasks, and I’m hardly chasing a corporate job. Although mostly this process is mundane and gruelling, I never feel entirely distant from a hidden camera show where candidates are asked to perform a number of increasingly strange and humiliating tasks. It is a lesson in the lengths a candidate will go to in order to reach the golden nirvana of employment and the strange power of the individual in the suit across the table. Unless I’ve been particularly unlucky, there is a great comedic irony in the glowing terms with which a candidate must discuss their desire to manage databases, answer phones and compose generic emails at interview, and the disdain with which the job is picked over by pub-time on Friday of the first week.
If we’re a generation taught to pass exams through meeting predetermined assessment objectives, then perhaps this is the job application process for us. We must show our ability to meet all required competencies with real-life and tangible examples, spelling out the relevance of each example in, if not simple, simplistic terms. We are all aware that passing A Levels is level of intelligence combined significantly with repetitive training in how exactly to answer the question. The job market is similarly dominated by successful candidates who have successfully trained themselves or been trained to hit each competency.
Feeling the irrelevance of these questions to my ability to the job could be sour grapes or it could be an indication that I’m applying for the wrong type of job. It could be a naïve and childish reaction to the mundane world of work. Indeed, lying in the middle of the kitchen floor and wailing It’s not fair! does feel like a tempting prospect. I’ve done all that’s been asked of me, dutifully completing school, A Levels and university, only to realise that which I already knew, but hadn’t come to terms with - that the big wide world of work is not a new range of opportunities and freedom, but a daily struggle to maintain good humour, interest and hopefully at least a small corner of your soul.

So the summer days have ducked and slipped past us. It is September, and for those graduated this year, it’s a moment of horrible clarity. While failing to have a plan or concrete employment during July and August seems like a usual and fluid state of affairs, facing down a long winter in the same position is a truly unnerving experience. This is the first September in several years to be absent from reading lists and timetabled commitments, and it has arrived. The time has come to reflect on how we have spent our first graduate months.

Between working strange and unusual hours at strange and unusual jobs, I am still job-hunting; my months since graduation cannot be said to be going swimmingly. Checking job websites daily does, however, provide some macabre entertainment. Jargon is quickly learnt. Ignore any advert that requires outgoing people or those with spirit. It is charity mugging. Money-motivated? Up for a grinding, commission-only sales job? And one quick question, when did ‘graduate job’ become synonymous with ‘unpaid’? Whilst all in favour of linguistic evolution in meaning, it is galling to click on ‘Graduate Jobs’ only to find reams of internships and work experience that claim to great opportunities, but on further inspection appear to be three months of unpaid admin, just within sniffing distance of a competitive industry.

Of course, there are internships that provide what they should, swapping the green enthusiasm of a raw graduate for an insight and experience within a company. However, there are many that do not. I have seen an advert for an internship in the film industry that actively specified, not only should applicants be willing to work long and hard in difficult conditions and have a specific political viewpoint, but also that they shouldn’t be applying for the internship in order to gain experience. Goodness knows what the company was expecting - individuals there for the pure love of photocopying and making tea? Tea and warm photocopies do both have a special place in my heart, but even I would like a little knowledge out of an internship.

Life at the moment seems to be all about the hustle, and, to use an
abused phrase, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Juggling paid
teaching, unpaid work I find interesting, and having just been offered
an internship I really really want, I keep surprising myself at being
all, well, happy. But the hustle is tiring, and sometimes it is
hard to know whether you’re running towards your own goals, or just
sweating it out on the proverbial treadmill.

Having finished my degree a good one and a half months ago, I have
finally conceded myself six days of Holiday. Well, I’m in Milan, soon
to be taking my nan up to the mountains near Venice. A holiday of
sorts, but not one that tends to be very relaxing. My Nonna tends
towards waging war on my possibilities of uninterrupted sleep: as a
chronic insomniac she seems to take anyone sleeping as a personal
insult. She once woke me up at 8 am (on a holiday morning!) by ringing
the front door bell until I got up to answer it.
She had the keys.

What I like about going away for brief periods of time - even if it is
to be a luggage mule, errand runner and recipient for all packing
stress – is that it temporarily cleans the slates. You can stop, think
and take stock, as home life shrinks into enough of a miniature model
to be in some ways analysed.
.
My arrival at Bergamo airport, via a morning interview in London and a
lost passport in Stansted, was, all things considered, remarkably
successful in that I arrived, on time, with possessions, limbs and
dignity pretty much intact. Hurried along by the departing bus driver
I bought tickets to Milan, and sank, gratefully, into a front row seat.

Having slept all the way there, I awoke, dazed and confused in
Brescia, over an hour away from Milan. We pulled in just after
eleven o’clock at night: just in time to see the last train to Milan
leave the station.

After having panicked, scoped out the station and spoken to the local
police, I eventually resolved to hang out in the station with some
backpackers until their train arrived at half one, and then sit on the
bench outside the station’s police booth until 4.44 and the first
train to Milan. Not a great plan, but a plan nonetheless.

After a typical ”only you” reaction from my nonna, my mother
unexpectedly just laughed and approved of my sitting it out in the
station plan. Whilst her laugh helped, funnily enough, I had been
more expecting (hoping for?) a “of course you should stay in a
hotel and of course we will pay” reaction.
And yes I am an adult, thank you very much.

“You are never really alone” was the advice from the
friendliest hippy backpacker, and I was reminded of how much life you
can pack into two and a half hours. After the usual “life, death and
miracles” backpacker talk I’d surmised that the italiante trio had met
in a commune-style community is Tuscany, had known each other for
years, and were travelling Europe festival to festival baking pizzas.
They offered quite a few times that I should join them, and I briefly
missed that absolute freedom that travelling gives you to go
“You know what, fuck it, why ever not.”
(Because your almost ninety year old grandma is waiting for you in Milan, wrongly
thinking you have sensibly booked into a hotel, that is why not.)

Like night-time stations the world over, this one was populated by the
stoned, drunk and permanently lost. We were offered two separate
broken and/or possibly stolen phones; played football with two drunks
and one of the permanently lost; were offered weed by an
entrepreneuring but absolutely smashed dealer who resolved to follow
the hippies to their festival and sell weed there, until the nights’
amnesia claimed him; and had a small committee of drunks/stoner/lost
dealing with the three Spanish hippies who had €50 stolen by the
ticket machine.

Given that there were about 6 people in the station apart from us,
this was a group effort of a night’s performance. The play seemingly
climaxed with one the drunks collapsing in the centre of the station,
flanked by a chorus of onlookers, spread eagled like a man shot in
full flight, his cheap carton of wine discarded, pouring out red wine
from his chest like a gunshot wound.

But it turned out this was merely the end of Act one, the curtain down
heralded by the train arriving and boys departing with half-true tales
of stolen money to stave off the fines.

Left alone on the platform, I realised that the plan (plot?) as it
stood, contained two major flaws:
Firstly, the stoned drunk etc… had not left with this last train, and
were all rather curious as to why the lone female in the station had
been abandoned by her six backpacker/hippy companions. Secondly,
although sitting on the bench in front of the police post is probably
the best way of sitting alone on a bench in a semi-deserted
train-station, it is still a deserted bench in a station populated by
vagrants, drunks and druggies (yes, ok, all six of them). Whilst the
best bench available, it still didn’t wasn’t a great option as far as
seating/sleeping arrangements go. But with just over three hours to
go until my train, leaving the relative security of the police flanked
bench to go search for a hotel didn’t seem like a great plan.
I decided to get myself adopted. I’d noticed that there were some men
in an open office doing what looked like the track controllers night
shift. I shuffled up doing my best ‘lost little girl look’, (which,
admittedly, isn’t that good.) “Um, I was wondering whether I could
come sit in the office? Just I don’t want to sit on the platform on
my own…”

The train controller looked out down he platform at the huddled
vagrants/drunks/druggies and back at me doing my best ‘timid but
wide-eyed scared’ look (again, not great at these things). “Oh very
well…”

Curled up on a massive padded office chair, I allowed the weirdness
of the situation to wash over me. With eyes that struggled to stay
open, I was being benignly questioned by the track controllers. In
front was a six meter wide green, red and yellow constellation: a map
of used/unused tracks. They were watching a badly dubbed US American
teen flick and my vain attempts at nodding off were interrupted by
periodic announcements, fast trains hurtling past and the ridiculous
ringtone they’d chosen for their office phone.

They eventually took pity of me (or maybe my answers were particularly
boring) and I was shown an unused office where, lights turned off and
draped over an assortment of chairs, I managed to snatch two fitful
hours of sleep.

Having presumably warmed to the idea of having adopted a stray
Anglo-Italian for the night, I was offered tea when I emerged bushy-haired and startled-eyed at dawn, and reminded of the train times to Milan. Suppressing an urge to hug them
all, I was off into the new day,.

Something terrifying happened the other week. Something well and truly terrorizing. Having stopped paying attention for a while due to the insomnia inducing effects of a 9cm futon mattress, I suddenly looked up and realised I’d made decisions that I couldn’t quite recognise as my own.

Although juggling paid and (interesting) unpaid work with various degrees of success, and with a confirmed Masters place that could easily become part-time, I seriously considered living out a year of full-time education whilst pretty much squatting in my mum’s could-barely-swing-a-rat-in-it office.

Now the pros of living with your parents are quite obvious: no rent, good food, a safe place to place your weary head… did we mention the no rent and (pretty much unlimited) free food. Furthermore, coming from an Italianate background where the lack of good job opportunities is more norm than recession, living with your parents until you are married/over 30/ they die is kinda the done thing.

However: this is not Italy; I haven’t lived with my parents full-time since I was 17; the room is so small that when the futon is open you have to walk on it to get to the window. And more than anything else, I can’t honestly say that I want to. Or even that I feel such a compulsion to do a fulltime rather than part-time Human Rights Masters in the midst of the recession that I would give my (scanty as it is) independence to do so.

Now this all feels rather rich as I sit in my parents’ living room, drinking (my mum’s) miso soup from her rather beautiful, probably hand painted, Japanese crockery. The plan for this summer is definitely to continue living in this here flat with its italo-japanese food and boudoir-ish décor.

(Although given my clumsiness, absentmindedness and general tendency towards having fingers of the buttered kind, the crockery could be a problem. And I’ve started following myself around the kitchen with a cloth to mop as I spill. And my limbs have become accustomed to folding themselves up futon style, as my expectations tidy themselves in dust-proof boxes.)

And the Folding up of limbs, restraining of unruly hair and tidying up of hopes and dreams is pretty much the point. Or rather, it is the fear:
- I witnessed a further education administrator getting quite emotionally angry at a university student when they suggested they might not take up a job offer in an Oxford Steet Shoe shop due to the Dragon-Bitch boss, because ”It’s a job, and not many people have one at the moment.”
- I almost kissed my imagined interlocutor when finally offered an interview for something I really wanted: an unpaid internship, but it’s a start.
- Our next female Prime Minister is currently working the doors at an (admittedly very upscale) entertainment venue.

Now a distinction must be made between fear and realism. There is nothing wrong with living with your parents, or working for free, or doing menial jobs to save up cash, or indeed working for scary bosses. What can be wrong, is our reasons for doing so. Because the overarching reasons for doing something are what determine whether we are working hard and dirty for our own goals, or working hard and low because we have been told that is all we can do.

With the Fear the question becomes more “What can I get”, and not “What am I worth?” This is supremely worrying because this tidying away of hopes and dreams can lead to a stifling of expectations. And the stifling of expectation can lead to the accepting and not pushing of limits.

Of course we are, as ever, in a recession. And as recent graduates with, say, a humanities degree, what we have spent 3-4 years learning is of little use in the job world. But we are also humans, and we are of worth. So if the choice is between working for Dragon-Bitch bosses for a pittance, or doing something we love, mainly for free, well then we are going to have to rethink those choices.

Our generation of people who are increasingly happy to work for free, because the jobs that pay are ultimately beneath us, must not become a generation of people who work to live and volunteer to be