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]