October 22, 2007

the announcement a.k.a. mind-numbingly stupid

About two weeks ago something happened, and I thought I'd save it for a success story. Unfortunately the success wasn't exactly successful as of now. Here's what went down:

Right now I should be doing an internship at Austria's lone TV station. They offered it to me back in July. I met up with the editor back then, presented myself to the editor-in-chief which went absolutely fine and was told to start in October. The secretary asks me to call back in September for the exact time at which I had to show up on October 1st. In the middle of September she tells me to come at 9 a.m. I then get a call a week later that there is a (badly enclosed) "technical problem". Apparently it was a problem that I had already worked at another department there earlier in 2007 (note: I sometimes work as a floor manager to earn some money). But they would figure it out and would I please come in the afternoon on October 1st to meet the new editor (the other one is a correspondent now), because he'd like to meet me.

We meet and it turns out they literally lost me. The leaving editor didn't tell anyone about me, the editor-in-chief couldn't remember me because he didn't have his usual assistant the day he met me. So basically no one had any clue that I was going to appear for work in October. Luckily the new guy apparently thinks it's ok to employ me but isn't sure about the exact time frame of my employment. He promises to figure it out and call me within the week. Well, he DID call me, only to tell me that I couldn't do an internship after all. The problem wasn't that I had worked in another department, but that the journalistic internship that I'd done in February is posing some "legal problem" (apparently you can't be employed twice in a year) and no, sorry, they couldn't do anything. The editor said he'd try, but I haven't heard from him since. Fuckers, right? Incompetent little assholes.

Fortunately 10 minutes after this last conversation with the TV editor, an editor from a newspaper calls me. The editor was my teacher in Uni for one semester and we got along really well. He's a geek and a Buffy-fan (if those two aren't congruent anyway) and has offered me a job before, which I unfortunately couldn't take due to previous engagements. Anyhow this time he offers me a job again. I send him all my data, and he talks to the paper's editor-in-chief who says Aye!

By now I've been left hanging for more than a week because apparently the decision is with the people who pay the money. I don't know exactly what it is about (Can they afford to fill the position? Do they want to fill the position?) - what I do know is that I still need three weeks of internship for my degree. I know that I'm really missing out on the money that was supposed to fatten what little income we have. I know I was originally counting on four months of income until the TV people fucked it up and I know that now I'm sitting here with no job, no internship and sometime soon no money. For fuck's sake, I have bills to pay! And it's not like I went after that TV internship in the first place, they frickin' OFFERED it to me. All I can do is hope and beg the universe that the job at the paper will work out after all. Editor-guy is not calling me back though (admittedly and unfortunately he's a bit undependable).

So that's the "big" announcement. Although it was originally supposed to be a positive one.

1 comment:

LG said...

I've had shit like that happen to me before. It sucks. The thing I try to keep in mind is, "Do I want to work for a bunch of fucktards?" If they can't keep that shit straight, think of what they'll do with your paycheck.