When You're a Stranger, People are Strange

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There are two notable things about the post for which I was interviewed today. First, although it does involve the promised IT work, it consists mainly of answering the phone and checking timesheets. And second, it doesn't exist at the moment.

It seems the most effective way to create a new job is not to make the vacancy and then fill it, but rather to find someone to fill the role, and then tell head office that a new role urgently needs to be created, and by the way the ideal person to fill it has fortuitously appeared, as if by magic.

So, I've got the job, even though it's not the one I applied for, and it may or may not exist by the end of next week.

I have three more interviews coming up, two of which seem to operate on the same basis.

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That was the first half of the morning. The second half was spent chatting with an unemployed security guard. Like most security guards, he's a great big hulk of a fellow with a beer belly, puggish features and a long black coat.

Unlike some security guards, he's camp as a row of tents and has a degree in linguistics. So we spent some happy hours discussing Madonna's failing career, glam rock, trashy movies...and the inadequacies of Krashen's "LAD" hypothesis in the light of a praxis based model of concept formation in infants.

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There's other characters in the same room.

One woman of about forty is an ex-biker. She spent most of her life riding around Britain with biker groups, being fiercely independent and working casually in factories when she had to, before an injury suddenly put a stop to her whole lifestyle, leaving her with only expert knowledge of bike repair and no prospects.

One young fellow has decided with his girlfriend to leave Portsmouth. In itself unremarkable, but they've got no transport, no possessions and no money, so they're going to walk. They're going to keep walking and wherever they've got to after a week, that'll be their new home, because they've got no destination in mind either. It's an act of desperation, but I can't help admiring it.

There's a tiny woman who weighs 90 lbs. She takes care of six people with physical disabilities and psychiatric problems, and dates rough men three times her size.

There's a man who had a high-flying job in management until he stood up to the wrong board member and found himself sacked and seemingly blacklisted. He's going through the painful process of accepting that he doesn't have the automatic right to respect, and some people know better than him.

One very handsome young man is (a) nineteen (b) happily married with two children and (c) the most amazing flirt with everyone, male and female. He asked me to check whether his nipples were the same size, and presented them for inspection - so I examined them and the surrounding muscular area in quite a lot of tactile detail.

Would it have been going too far to lick them too? I certainly wanted to.

A tattooist/bricklayer/former basketball coach sat through two weeks of my off-colour jokes about gay sex before starting to wonder if I might be gay. He's now disturbed by the possibility that some of the other people he knows might not be straight.

Someone once said, "Normal is whatever everyone else is that you're not." I think I've met plenty of normal people - it's just that I can never remember anything about them ten seconds later.

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