Limited Time Offer, perfect for the holiday season.

“So, honey, have you met anyone new?” Does your mother ask you that? Are you tired of evading and prevaricating when asked this question?

“Are there any young men around who you find interesting these days?” I'm pretty sure that's grammatically incorrect, but arguing about when to use “whom” is only going to avoid the question a limited number of times.

Well I have the solution for you.

Special limited time offer: Rentable Boy Friend

RBF is your quick and painless protection against prying relatives. (Warning, RBF may not be effective at fooling your friends.) RBF will pose as your new “friend” for the length of a meal, and comes pre-loaded with a number of scenarios to choose from.

Option 1: RBF spent the last five years traveling, and is now settling down, with promising paths in a professional field as well as graduate school. He is likeable, but a bit bland, very non-threatening, but fairly easy to forget. Perfect for the short-term “Well, he seems nice” that can easily evolve into “This new one is much more interesting than that last guy, and more reliable too.”

Option 2: RBF is Scottish or English, studying abroad, and would love to learn more about your country. Pontificate and brag at will. This option is great for its short-term entertainment value, but is easily discarded by “Oh, he had to go back to Scotland. Yes, I'm very sad, please don't bother me with these questions for at least 13 months.”

Maybe borderline between smarmy and
employed, but your mom might approve

Option 3: Wallflower mode. RBF will sit there, smile at jokes, and reply with the minimum necessary verbiage to be polite. Wallflower mode is perfect when you don't want the RBF to make much of an impression, whereupon family members are free to project whatever personality upon him they choose.

Note: Wallflower Mode requires additional payment, due to its stupefyingly boring nature. Namely: dessert.

Terms and Conditions for RBF

-Both parties hereby state that this is a fictitious relationship, and will not extend beyond said contract period, namely the length of one meal.

-Both parties agree that there will be no physical intimacy required.

-Payment for RBF's services will be the right to write about anything interesting that comes about during, or as a result of the encounter. Names of those involved will be changed to protect the innocent. Foibles will be exaggerated for the amusement of the audience.

Special costumes available upon request

-RBF is not responsible for reimbursal of any food or beverages consumed by RBF during the course of the event.

-The goal of the RBF professional is an interesting story to blog about, thus, advantageous consideration will be awarded to candidates whose families include any of the following:

     -Racist uncles/aunts

     -Rebellious nephews/nieces

     -Conspiratorial grandmothers/grandfathers

-RBF will not get drunk and embarrass you. That's your family's job.

Well...I found something.

That didn't last long.  About 6 minutes after posting that last one, the temporary agency called and said it would be okay if I worked just 14:00 to 20:00, and I took it.

So if I never blog again, it's because a Call Center has eaten my soul.

And I stiiilll haven't founnnd...what I'm looking fooor.

I had a job interview tonight.  Well not an interview, an “info session.”  Just like it wasn’t another bloomin’ Call Center it is a “strategic impact consulting” company.  Blech.  Spending all day in a cubicle, annoying people over the phone…is a call center.

I got to the dingy mixed business-residential district outside of Antwerp super early, and inside the building it was a mutant cross-breed between a traditional hellish office and a modern Google-inspired “workspace” but straying far closer to the former than the latter.

They put me in a room to wait, plasticky whitewashed walls with the rectangles of unevenly settling cinderblocks clearly showing through.  A big bookshelf loaded with books on marketing, sales, and all the assorted weird shit businesses talk about.  The only window was a porthole into the central office.  This turned out to be the design for the whole place, only interior windows and white cinderblock walls.  I kept thinking we were underground, but the funny (that is, horrendous) thing is: we weren’t!  There was no valid reason to have no windows beyond the sadistic design tendencies of capitalism.  The same people who gave us midlife crises, nervous breakdowns, and the term “human resources.”

Anyway, I was sitting in the little room, kinda digging the place still, and my first co-interviewee came in.  Turns out he’s from Portugal, and was told the job is in Portuguese.  Then the third guy showed up and he’s Chinese, expecting a job in Mandarin.  The fourth guy is from Valencia, and is expecting Spanish.

The interview was supposed to start at 16:00, but they left us in there until 17:00.  We were discussing half-jokingly the possibility that this was the interview, hidden cameras seeing how we interacted with each other.  Did I say half joking?  Make that 10% joking.

Eventually they did come claim us and we were taken to the conference room, past the call center area, rows of undecorated shared cubicles facing each other with blank-faced automatons looking at us walk by exactly like zoo animals.  I expected them to snarl, beg for food, or possibly fling their feces at us as we passed.  Or maybe just mouth “Run!  Save yourself!  Take me with you!”

Over the course of our short chat with the company lady I came to the belief that this company is chronically understaffed, by policy (bad idea, I’ll never understand that) and by a relentless habit on the part of their employees to flee.  (Oh, and it turns out Juan is a lawyer!  From lawyer to Call Center Jockey…I want to know his story!)

My co-interviewees were all cool guys, and I enjoyed chatting with them.  Wang (not either of the Iberians, in case you hadn’t guessed) drove me and Juan (Wang and Juan…the cultural linguist in me was positively titillated) to the train station where I thoroughly enjoyed watching the ebb and flow of humanity as it is uniquely visible in European train stations.

Middle aged women with headphones stuffed in their ears.  Frumpy businessmen looking intensely annoyed whenever they are forced to interact with others in any way.  Greetings and farewells among friends and coworkers, and the differences between them.  Warm scarves, fogging breath, and of course a waffle shop in the hallway smelling fantastic.

It was an interesting experience, but taking the job would mean giving up Dutch lessons (as well as exercising, or having any social or romantic life outside of the weekends) since the hours are from 14:00 to 22:00, and that is too high a price to pay for a shitty minimum wage job.  I think.  Right?  Are my expectations too high?  Shit.

End of the year cleaning

Some tidbits from the last week or so I want to file away...

On Monday of last week my Dutch teacher started class by asking us if we knew what year WWII ended.  Instantly sobered by the idea of a lesson on the devastation in Belgium during the war, I was relieved and disappointed when the pertinent detail was that in 1945 they set the record for the most snowy days in December.  (Brutal timing, no?)  They had 16 days of snow that year.  That Monday was the 20^th, Winter had technically not even begun yet, and we had had 18 days of snow.  Since then it has kept snowing more often than not.  I am looking forward to hearing our total, and getting bragging rights that I was there in the winter of ’10 when it snowed all month.  Unless climate change makes that the new norm.  Gawd, climate change is such a killjoy.

A couple weeks ago we went up to Antwerp for the day (the picture above is downstairs in the train station and the last one is upstairs).  Katrien and her cousin went shopping, while I walked around from holiday music band to band, people watching, and occasionally taking (disappointing) pictures.  It was a tad below zero, and I went to heat up in my default favorite option for this, a massive bookstore…to find that it was a travel agency.  Turns out just the bottom level is a giant travel agency, packed with people buying package tours at desk after desk, while upstairs is the bookstore, which focuses on, surprise, travel books.

Fine by me, so I had just lowered a massive tome about South America when my phone rang, Katrien calling to say she was ready to meet up and head home.  I replaced the giant book and was hustling down the stairs, answering the call as I went.

On the other end Katrien heard me say hello, then I assume a moment of silence or maybe rushing wind, then a massive banging sound, silence for a second, and me saying “s’alright.”  Yeah, I had fallen down the stairs.  In front of the entire flat of travel agency.  The stairway, slick with melting slushy snow, was of course metal, so the acoustics on this thing as you can imagine were mighty.  The ratio of concern to hidden smiles was just about right, maybe 1:473.

Good thing that didn’t happen when I was younger and easily embarrassed, hey?

And today I applied for a job with Procter & Gamble, and in addition to sending a resume they have you answer an ethical and hypothetical questionnaire, then take a “reasoning test”.  That thing was hard!  I had to take one before they’d let me take the Dutch class (oddly enough), and the questions were along the lines of

What comes next in this sequence?  One dot, two dots, three dots, _____.

A: Four dots.  B: A triangle.  C: Turmeric  D: A circus monkey.

But not P&G!  Theirs were way more interesting.  Abstract shapes with surprising shading and indecipherable 3 dimensionality.  And you only have 2 and a half minutes to figure them out.  So if anyone here has access to those tests, send me a copy, I want to figure them all out!  Maybe on the plane to Edinburgh tomorrow…which reminds me, I should pack.

Festive Hogmanay and Happy New Year to all!

Peaceful anxiety

I just spent a couple hours looking through job postings, and was well under the cold thick water of discouragement, frustration, and anxiety regarding my chances at successful living here.  Then I looked outside and saw snowflakes.

There is a unique stillness to snow.

Passing on bicycle under a highway overpass Monday morning, the sound of relentless and self-important semi trucks of shipping empires overhead was just the murmur of a television turned down a couple rooms away, and the modest whir of my tires was humbled and self-effacing between snow-covered fields.

Maybe my awe at the uncaring and intimate (it’s like a zombie that wants to snuggle) whiteness reveals that I am a nooby to this stuff.  Maybe one who has lived at mountainous altitude or monstrous latitude for awhile finds it simply something to deal with, but for me it is still magic.

So I still feel sick to my stomach at the barrier of finding employment here, but in the meantime the gentle drifts are slowly growing on the balcony, and this cup of tea sounds better and better.