The job delusion

Woke up thinking I have a job. I get up, get dressed, commute, enter office, switch on computer. Semblance of a job but actually I’ve entered the Workplace Matrix. Things are not as they seem. I appear to be a teacher, I have bad shoes, my hair is frizzy and by the end of the day it will smell of young person hormones and gym shoes. Teacher: tick.But there’s no teaching.I get a salary and have a pension (apparently one that is obscenely huge) and a “permanent” contract and yet this morning I had to pull up a bit of carpet to find the 2 pound coin that fell there in a drunken jacket throwing situation, just so I could get the bus in. I’m not joking.Not wishing to get paranoid on you but things aren’t as they seem.I’ve started to cry on public transport. A man I see regularly has started to back down the platform when I arrive.  I feel like I’ve been dumped. Characteristically I’ve gone into a malaise of soul searching, is it me or is it you? By nature I go for the its me. Being dumped is less of a shock, more of a confirmation of something that I had hoped wouldnt get out. I’m not perfect. I’ll just open the door to the room marked “internal dialogue” for you…….”is it because I is fat? is it because I have poor taste in all things musical and cinematic and don’t do porn? is it…” whooooaaaaaaa Nelly lets shut that door.Now that the internals have STOPPED SHOUTING it occurs to me that I might also be in an abusive relationship, with work. Did things I shouldnt have, said yes when I meant no and kept quiet, hoping that playing dead would mean avoiding a thorough beating. That turns out not to have helped one tatty little bit.In these recessionary precarious times, the first step out of an abusive work relationship is to drop the delusion and accept that my employer is just not that into me.