Job

I just woke from a slightly unsettled dream: it was about my work, for the gambling company, and more particularly about how I lost my job (there were also shades of Charlottesville in there, some type of crossover). Anyway, I wake and I feel an urge to write about it, the realisation that something might be repressed – especially as I haven’t talked about it with anyone (the shame of getting fired).

So this job I had, well it was always a pretty weird job – me and Jim and Rick, mostly, just larking about and doing our thing ‘trading’ on the games – and I sort of liked it. Indeed, at first, I thought I’d finally found a job that I wouldn’t get bored of – since it mostly involved watching football, and interacting with a computer in an almost gamey, competitive way, and – did I mention? – larking about with some boys in our shorts and flip-flops/bare feet, and that was all cool. And when I started it was even more well cool – my first month I was top trader, and got a healthy bonus, and felt like just maybe it was something I could get really good at, even if at the same time I just dismissed it as ‘beginner’s luck’ – and maybe it was. Pretty soon, problems followed.

Sure, I made mistakes; who didn’t – but the biggest mistake I made in that job (in the sense of wanting to keep it) (and I’ve done this before) was getting into a slightly heated moment with my immediate superior, Will, in which I pretty much blatantly said that I didn’t respect him as a trader. Truth is, nobody did. He was the office manager and he was fine at that, but whenever he got involved with the games, or did them himself, something always went wrong. And everybody laughed about it, and he laughed about it too, but I guess I went too far; it was one night when he was trying to “teach” me things and I was getting frustrated – he was as abstract and anticommunicative as a university professor – and I said something like, “you know, if I could see your methods actually working, it might be easier for me to grasp them – but I don’t.” And from the moment that I said it, I could see that it was just too much and once again I’d failed in trying to bite my tongue as far as superiors and authorities go and overstepped the bounds. He was angry, and I thought I’d better try and smooth things over here, and later, in the pub, I thought I had.

Well Will and I got on pretty well in some areas – we played squash together several times, and chatted about travels, writing, beliefs (although he was also a nob at times, one of the worst people I’ve ever met to get into an argument/discussion with) – and over the next month or two things were better. I started to come around to his way of doing things (although there never really was any clear way of doing things; the trading we were doing was never an exact science) and in that sense, things were better. But in another sense, they weren’t, and I started to feel that I was being frozen out, not given the hours that I had been in the beginning, not being trusted. I asked Rick, the head trader, if I was doing something wrong, something I could improve on, told him what I felt, and all he ever said was there just weren’t the hours, it was the same for everyone – meanwhile Jim (who had, in fairness, been there longer than me) was working seventy hours a week. I tried to accept Rick’s words – but at the same time I’m not sure I believed him, felt that he was uncomfortable being put in the position of maybe actually having to tell me the truth. And the truth is, as it turns out, he was.

I was working on the Liverpool-Arsenal game – a real seesaw of an encounter, always guaranteed to be a loser, and a fairly major loser no matter what the trader did – and in the event we lost about five grand. It was pretty bad – though nowhere near as bad as other games, and other traders have had, Rick and Jim included – and it was the last game I ever did. Will pointed to something in the game that I could have done better and said it was emblematic of the way I worked and, along with other things, that was that. Basically, he didn’t feel like I was on board with his way of working and it was time for me to go. “We won’t be working with you anymore,” was what he actually said.

Except…except for me, there are problems with this: number one, the way he described me working may have been true of a few months in the past, probably up till around the point where I did my little faux pas, but since then I’d significantly changed my style, my approach, my way of thinking about him and the job, and I was on board. The results were no better, but I was on board. To him, though, I was still the same guy, and I guess that questioning him, and disrespecting him, had stuck in his head and that was that – my image was created, solidified, and stuck, and that was what I was to him. It’s annoying because…had we talked, had he made an effort to find out where I was then – to update himself of my persona – then things might have been different. But the Englishman doesn’t express, he represses – he doesn’t share, he gets stuck – and the first thing you hear about it is usually the last. If only he had voiced his concerns, given me a warning, I might have been able to do something about it; at the very least, we could have talked. And similar things I have found myself saying about Perlilly, too. But, like I’ve said, it’s not the English way – and, to be frank, the English way sucks.

Now the other thing about this is: the main reason we lost five grand on that game was because of something he told me to do – which is sort of technical for those who don’t have a clue about what I was doing, but which basically involved ceasing trading on the game with fifteen minutes to go – something we had been told over and over not to do – because it was 3-3 and because he said we shouldn’t trade at 3-3 since there wasn’t enough information. Well this was the first time I’d heard anything like that – and certainly there had been plenty of 3-3 situations in the three months that I’d worked there. But I did as he said, and stopped trading, when what the program would have done is invest heavily in the draw, and in the event it was a draw and we lost a load of money. He never said anything about this and the next day I was gone. And I’ve always wondered if maybe, just maybe, when the big boss genius man Paul came in the next day and saw that cessation in trading on the logs, and asked Will what went on there, whether it might have been me that actually took the fall for it. I mean, did Will blame me? Because, as far as I can see, the decision he made was about a million times more inappropriate than the one that I may or may not have made that he cited during my sacking (it was in no ways clear that I had made any such incorrect decision – and, indeed, at some point in that game he was actually clapping me on my shoulders for a good decision made, which he said out loud, with a big smile, was “the trade of the night.”) So how could it all change so quickly? Seems like the more I think about this, the more the fingering/lying/passing the blame hypothesis makes sense…

There are more issues at work here though. Number one, did I really like that job? And was it healthy for more? For sure, I much preferred working with Ollie and doing the removals, getting some exercise, being in more refined and psychologically together and more interesting company. But I still did like the footie job – undercurrents aside. Healthy though? Probably not. All that computer use was hurting my legs; I was getting into gambling in a fairly unsettling and major way; I was staying late in the office – like till 2 am or after – playing Risk with the boys; and I was getting a bit sullen and uncommunicative at work, focussed too much on the screen, losing the ability to talk. Plus, also, paranoid and suspective of things going on, feeling left out, pushed aside, the story of my life. So, no, not really healthy – but then it was my income; I relied on it. And what did I rely on it for?

I relied on it to keep me in the flat with Perlilly, to keep me in London – but Perlilly was gone now; and was London healthy for me too? The place where I was supposed to be? These are the rationalisations that I’ve had in my head, that it was for the best, that it was meant to be – and that it was no coincidence that it happened when it did, the day that I was feeling I just wanted to get out of there, the day that my friend Laila messaged me and said, “come to Peru.” It all seemed so perfect, made sense. At least, her beckoning did, the timing of it – a beacon, and a ray, and an answer to the question of why all my things were so maddeningly being stripped away from me. Peru. But was Peru just that? Just a beacon and a light? Because, for sure, it’s two months later and I still haven’t got a plane ticket and, with the way the prices are going, I wonder if I’ll ever get one (I’m certainly not going to pay nine hundred pounds, a grand; it’ll have to be reasonable). So here I am, back at square one, once more trying to figure it all out.

What was the meaning of my dream? I woke and…I felt like it had something to do with my writing, that sharing what I shared yesterday had perhaps uncorked something – and, in truth, perhaps the only thing I hadn’t shared – and, perhaps more importantly, haven’t shared; not in the real world, not with friends – is what actually happened when I lost my job. I mean, I’ve told people I had a falling out with my boss, and that’s why it ended, and there’s truth in that (I’ve told others that it just ended, that there wasn’t any work, season over and all that) – but I’ve never told anyone the real reason: that I was fired. I feel ashamed, I guess; I don’t want to acknowledge the truth to anyone else. Weird, isn’t it? And very typically male. But I didn’t want to deal with the rejection, the feeling of not being wanted, not so soon after Perlilly, after everything else. Once again, the story of my life…

And now I have to lay down so a sort of pretty nurse can put some sticky pads on my body for an ECG. Good morning!