The job interview

The coffee had gone cold hours ago, but I sipped it slowly and stared down the empty barrel of the computer screen. I sat patiently, slightly irritated by the 42 degree heat, that had turned into a windstorm, blowing the dead grass clippings onto the cracked pavement as the hills hoist swung around at a rapid pace, flinging my socks onto the freshly cut grass, burnt and brown. 

Windstorm: A storm marked by high wind with little or no precipitation. 

The stove was on and the kettle was beginning to squeal, indicating it was close to the boil again. Enough hot water to make another coffee in the french press.

They were late to my meeting. 

The train approached closer, and moved past the house towards the station. The tracks had swelled on the Sandringham line, so the Frankston line was doing an awful job compensating all the passengers. The timetable non conducive, more than usual. I liked the sound of the train, especially through the night because it reminded me that people were alive outside. While I was warm in my bed, there were operations happening, things working, people moving, all through the night. 

I was hoping they would not call as the train was passing through because it made it harder to hear but of course, it did. There it was. The irritating sound of the skype bell.

When the first thing came out of my mouth, what followed was a domino effect of complex lies. Sure, I could do the job. I had done it before and I could do it again, maybe not to this extent but thereabouts, or slightly to the left of thereabouts. After all, they were looking for a ‘character fit’ and I would say that was strictly my expertise. Anyone could learn to write a speech and navigate a dry excel spreadsheet. It was  navigating the lines between the passive aggressive emails and the exorbitant meetings with a thousand conflicting personality types that was the difficult part.

Politicking. Boring as. 

I felt the English language to be a complex and dire one.  A form of communication that attempted to express thoughts and feelings through one arbitrary system, lacking structure through the symbols it did not produce, but holding onto complex sentences that could have been said, periodically, with one word in other places around the world. So because of this minor mishap, I found it hard to verbalise what my thoughts were suggesting throughout this meeting. 

I flashed back to my cognitive therapy. That’s what Jil said they used on the prisoners in Thomas Embling but they also used it on neurotic women in their early thirties. Disambiguate the cloudy things, and the rest will be clear. But I couldn't find the answer to the question. My focus, yet again occupied by the very green tree sitting directly outside my window.

Bentleigh, stinking hot, mid Melbourne summer. The year 2017. A hotter year than usual. The type of muggy heat that shortened your breath and cracked your lips. The grass had turned from a lush green to a burnt brown within two days and that can often be the sole identifying factor in an Australian summer.