Circa 2015 I accepted a shitty web developer job for a salary of £25k. It was to be the first of many shitty web developer jobs. I was hired because I was dirt cheap and could just about code in Python. Immediately everyone realised I was not a good hire. Not a good fit. Not even an adequate fit. No, the new hire will not be able to build a CMS in Drupal 7 by themselves. I may have tipped them off to this fact when I brightly asked “What’s a web framework?” My manager subsequently referred to me as “very junior”.

No, I don’t have a clue what a REST endpoint is. No, what is uglified Javascript? No, I will not able to do that thing you wish of me - at least, not without a huge amount of guidance.

An unfortunate thing about being a burden is that coworkers can only maintain a friendly demeanour for so long. Your inadequacy will churn their patience to a pulp. Your tyranny of questions and inability to answer theirs will grind goodwill to dust.

I was a bad hire, and when you’re a bad hire, people will truly loathe you for it. You were supposed to ease their workload, but instead you are a workload. Equally, you may begin to loathe them for hiring you. Aren’t their hiring practices supposed to whittle people like you out? Aren’t they - not you - truly the ones who are at fault here?

The honeymoon period was over before it started and I could barely bring myself to show up to work at all, let alone be on time. I believe I was meant to physically be at my desk at 9am. Instead, I had begun waking up at 9am, and then sleuthing into the office around 10am. Being late can really get under people’s skin. Even if nothing specifically happens at 9am. Your lack of presence is larger than your presence.

One morning I’m running a little late. A little more unpunctual than usual. I’m waiting to commute into the city. Waiting for my train, suffering my quiet life of desperation. My train squeals into the platform and the carriage doors open. The commuters are packed like battery hens and none of them attempt to escape. Nobody gets off, so there’s no room to get on. The carriage doors close and the train departs. This is London, another will be here momentarily. I will get the next one. I will enter the battery farm. The next train arrives and the carriage doors open. The commuters are crushed like grapes but they produce no wine. The carriage doors close and the train departs.

At this point I am really quite late. I double back, and exit the station. Being late for something you hate is somehow worse than being on time. So I’ve decided I’m going to be unwell. Pull a sickie. This doesn’t fill me with excitement. I don’t feel elated about my sudden vacation. I just really genuinely don’t want to face another day of this life.

I walk back to my shoddy abode in Camden. I rent a shitty bedroom in a town house with three other struggling saps for half of my salary. There is no lounge. I sit at the small desk in my bedroom and I start watching a film called Demolition. Now, I will not spoil this film for you, but I will relate to it. This is the synopsis:

A successful investment banker struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash. With the help of a customer service rep and her young son, he starts to rebuild, beginning with the demolition of the life he once knew.

It’s not often enough that the media I consume gels with my current emotional state so thoroughly. I embrace this fiction tightly. The apathy of the main character towards his own state of affairs, a mirror to my own.

The film begins with the tragedy of his wife’s death.

Dear Champion Vending Company, this letter is in regards to a poor vending experience at St. Andreas. I put five quarters in your machine and proceeded to push B2, which should have given me peanut M&M’s, regrettably it did not. I found this upsetting as I was very hungry and also my wife had died ten minutes earlier. I’m not saying that was your fault, I just want to be thorough. Julia was a good person, she worked with special needs children. She snorted when she laughed, other than that I don’t think I knew who she really was. And now that she’s gone I don’t really feel sad or pain.

I didn’t feel sadness or pain towards my own circumstances. The actual problems I faced were really fairly minor. I didn’t like my job, big whoop. How commonplace. Welcome to the working world, kid. What were you expecting? Did you think it was gonna be like the TV show Friends? Move to The Big Smoke and have a swell time? Maybe you shouldn’t embrace fiction so tightly.

I stood in my shitty room and foolishly believed I had accomplished all of life’s milestones in some form. I’d gone through university and graduated. I’d landed a job in my field of study. I’d had a long term relationship. Currently I was incredibly single, but still, I’d checked that box. I’d moved out of my parents home. I’d paid for the roof over my own head. Can’t touch this, umbilical cord.

And then I was hit with a deep sense of is that all there is. Is it really just shitty jobs and shitty rentals until death? But unlike Peggy Lee, I didn’t break out the booze. No, for a brief flicker of a moment, I felt I could end it all. What’s left for me to really do, anyway? This was hardly a serious contemplation, of course. My apathy for the day was still in full swing, these were just obtrusive thoughts. If I were to quote fiction I would say the quarter life crisis kicks like a mule with his balls wrapped in duct tape.

The shitty web developer company terminated my contract at just under six months.

I accepted a different, slightly less shitty web developer job, for bit more money. I moved into a slightly less shitty apartment; it had a lounge. I embraced the fiction, tightly.

Music