An Offer I Should Have Refused

I woke late that Monday morning. There was a knock at the door, but I looked out my window first. There was nobody on the doorstep. I decided to have a cup of coffee and consider my day. Not having work to go to was a relief for once.

It was June and the new year of my evening degree programme wasn’t due to start for another three and a half months so that would have been normal. There was a trope or stereotype of the layabout student at the time. No matter that I was a good five, if not ten years older than such students, now it was like I was joining them. No J-1 to one of the resorts favoured by New Yorkers for me. I was staying in Ireland. Going to work in the US on a J-1 visa involved having the money to get across the Atlantic Ocean in the first place. I couldn’t even afford to get across Cork Harbour.

My parents’ food truck had long lost its charms and to have any hope of passing a job interview for the civil service or local authorities in Ireland, I resorted to applying for any and all kinds of office work – unpaid placements, called internships by some. Maternity leave cover, leave of absence cover, you name it, I was willing to give it my best shot. I had yet to find out that something that might be an immediate start might be a fast track into misery. Such was life as a twenty something desperate to please.

Dad’s new fax machine – remember those? – held out the promise of getting my resumés to prospective employers directly. By then I was weary of going into umpteen premises to hand in copies of my printed CV and the soles of my shoes were wearing out. I knew that the acknowledgement letters that my application would be kept on file was office-speak for “it will be placed in the cylindrical file that gets emptied at least once a day en route to the shredding machine.” You will never hear a word from these people, my inner voice told me. They don’t want you and they can’t be bothered to tell you.

Reading the Situations Vacant section of my local newspaper yielded a number of ads from businesses advertising for office staff. Ever hopeful, I noted the names and consulted a telephone directory for their fax numbers. In to the machine I loaded the pages of my resumé and watched them slowly make their way with a computerised gurgling sound. Within minutes of sending one fax, the house phone rang. At 9pm on a Wednesday night. I answered. A man’s voice asked if he was speaking to me. I answered yes. He identified himself as Walter Farrell and asked if I was interested in coming for interview. I agreed to come to the office the next day.

I found the tiny blue coloured real estate office along a quay in Cork city wedged uncomfortably between two tall and narrow buildings that looked reminiscent of the one in Amsterdam that housed Anne Frank’s Secret Annex. Seated at a faux mahogany desk in the reception area was a young woman called Fiona who explained,

“You’ve got the job.”

Anyone who tells you that before you ever speak to the boss is silently telling you: RUN! It is too good to be true and yes, it’s wearing a big red flag. Then Walter turned up: an older man though not elderly, wearing a dark pinstriped three-piece suit with a yellow tie. I also noticed that he had attempted a combover with a few remaining strands of hair that failed to conceal how much scalp they had to cover. After a brief conversation, I was offered the job. I was to start the next Monday.

Fiona was there on the Monday and straight away urged me, “don’t you take any crap from Walter.”

Initially, things went alright, and I began to wonder if Fiona was wrong. As far as possible I did everything that was asked of me – took the calls, offered to have Walter call them back. A sticking point for some people was that while Walter wanted them to give an approximate amount they were prepared to spend on a house, the callers refused to tell me.

“I’m not telling you that!” one woman said, outraged. You would think that I had asked her for her bra size. A man who Walter would probably have dismissed because of his accent wanted to know if there were any houses on the firm’s books in a particular area. I offered to find out and call him back but instead he said,

“Nah, yer wasting your time, girl.”

On it went like this. The hold music became repetitive after the first day. The music Walter favoured was from a cassette playing Johann Strauss music. The energetic number that played first left me pining for the Blue Danube – so that I could sail down it. When I had to phone another firm and heard their hold music – a prominent Irish radio broadcaster interviewing a guest – I could feel myself turning green though not as the Incredible Hulk, just green with envy.

Visitors to the office on spec met with the same “how much are you prepared to spend?” spiel from Walter. Or they asked about houses in a particular area, and he would say, dismissively, “We wouldn’t have anything you could afford.” He began to remind me of the snooty boutique staff early in the movie Pretty Woman who refuse to serve Vivian despite her wads of cash.

At the end of the first week, I had precisely nobody willing to tell me how much they were willing to spend on a house and began to wonder if I would be told not to return. To my surprise, Walter wrote me cheque for that week. Cashing cheques was becoming increasingly difficult, I was soon to learn. I returned to my parents’ home that weekend with the famous cheque still uncashed. Eventually I got it cashed. It allowed me to pay my landlady for another week in my damp-smelling flat and attempt to pay down my debts.

The next week continued in the same way. A French-accented man phoned and gave me his name which I wrote down as though it was a Greek name. Walter snarled about this. It turned out to be an Irish name. Other people phoned, grumbling about having to show their cards before Walter showed his, as it were. I also managed to fit in another job interview. That was something of an endurance test as I scheduled it to take place during lunchtime and had to run to it – in heels. Of course, I spent five minutes gasping to the astonished receptionist the purpose of my visit. One of the interviewers faux gasped a hello to me, the jerk. I didn’t get the job.

Walter’s tantrums worsened and he took to barking demands down the phone from the comfort of his cream-upholstered silver Mercedes. At the end of my second week, I received the same kind of nearly uncashable cheque just as I met Mrs Walter. I noticed a Chanel logo on the flap of her handbag. I was doing something wrong here and staying wasn’t going to make it right. You know what? I quit. After Walter had left the office that evening, I locked the office and placed the keys in an envelope with a letter declaring that I was not returning, sealed it and pushed it through his letterbox. I had had enough.