There's whoring and then there's whoring

The good thing about looking for work is that it hardens you to rejection. If you are single you must put this new found skill to use by joining a dating website or going to a speed dating event. Your hardened external shell provides a useful shield against further rejection.

In fact the worlds of dating and job applications have a lot of similarities; there’s the perfect person with the perfect profile, you meet all her needs and she meets yours, until you find out she lives in Aberdeenshire. There’s the act of putting yourself on the line, of profiling yourself to the world, naked and alone. And then there’s the act of giving your details out to all and sundry at the risk that marketing companies will bombard you with emails (more about this in a future blog).

So you find a job and you’re really interested in it, it’s perfect for you and you’re perfect for it, so you arrange to get together for a meeting. Maybe you go for out for a drink or over to their place for a chat and a cup of coffee. You dress up nice because you want them to like you. You’ve had a productive first date and they promise to call.

You get home that evening, maybe slip into a hot bubble bath and think back about how you made them laugh and how sincere you sounded when talking about your fictionalised charity work.

You sit at your computer browsing other jobs on the internet but you’re not really looking. You check your mobile, maybe it’s not working or you missed a text. Still nothing and it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. You think about phoning them but you stop yourself, after all you don’t want to seem desperate. Still nothing and the whole day passes. They must be employing the three day rule. Fine, so they’ll phone tomorrow. Still nothing, so you write an email but you never send it. And then, four days later they phone you and either you’ll get lucky, get a second date or they’ll gently explain that they liked you but they’ve been seeing someone else and they’ve decided to make a go of it with them.

However if I keep going with this analogy it would make recruitment agencies pimps and me a whore. Hmmm, analyse that if you can Mr. Freud.