Mark Binelli with Brad Pitt in Rolling Stone. Melanie Reid on a friend who fell from a star role and had to suffer humiliation at the Job Centre, as we all do. Cool Geezer had a similar experience after Pinewood. Roy Orbison knew all about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune too. Loo cleaning is OK if the loos are posh.
19h22-UTC Friday 02 January 2009-CE
Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone 1068/1069 interviews Brad Pitt and I like the bit where the actor speaks about papparazzi and fans and his children.
“…I can’t begin to make someone understand, unless they’ve been in the car with us, and can see the 12 cars and seven motorbikes we’re being chased by… …I ran into a lady in L.A., where we were trick-or-treating. I had my daughter and she said, ‘Every time I see her picture, you’re always carrying her -you need to put her down!’ I said ‘Every time you see me is in the magazines, and I’m being chased by 20 people…’ “
20h44-UTC Tuesday 06 January 2009-CE
Melanie Reid in The Times of Tuesday 30 December 2008 reports about a friend of hers in her forties who lost a post she had held for 18 years. In order to get her National Insurance contributions paid whilst she was out of work, she Registered as Unemployed and applied for Job Seeks Allowance. Much humiliation followed because nobody at the Job Centre was experienced in dealing with someone in her circumstances. The lady said:
“As a businesswoman, I could see a system crying out for reform. They need to step up a gear. They need people working there with a commercial background; they need to make the boxes on the computer [screen] more flexible; they need to retrain everyone. They need basic stuff like links on the Government website about national insurance contributions.”
If people FROM HUMBLE BACKGROUNDS rise to the executive level they need to be told that the rules for them have now changed. They are now nouveau-posh and they need to acquire new habits, such as saving for a rainy day. In a similar way, my mate Cool Geezer had a mega-paid high-skill technical job with a company contracted at Pinewood Studios to convert Pathe News film footage to a modern medium.
The end of the four-year spell of work coincided with the completion of the conversion of the industry from analogue to digital, and the employment of no-skill school leavers who now merely have to press keys on a computer keyboard. The movie, or whatever, to be run, is not celluloid on a reel in a can, or mylar in a cartridge, it is ones and zeroes, pulses and blanks, saved in a computer.
Cool went to sign back on, a procedure he was very familiar with having been a working man all his life. But he made the mistake of assuming that the protocols at the Job Centre could cope with his case. He told the clerk what he had been doing, what he had been earning, and what he was seeking. But Cool knew the score. He was just having a laugh. He took a sorting office number.
But those high-pay posts are to be found via some sort of professional organisation, or advertisements in a professional journal. You are expected to survive in the gap between posts, or accept permanent poverty with dignity and be seen but not heard.
Melanie Reid discusses the possibility of universities helping by providing facilities and counselling for senior executives who have been slung out. She says that existing company efforts to council the fallen-mighty are, in the words of her friend, “chocolate teapot” stuff. Melanie writes:
“Bright, thrusting high-achievers have been warned. Should you fall from grace, through no fault of your own, do not expect the State to offer you a safety net. Just appreciate the ultimate irony: you could run a better system yourself…”
When I quit my job as a loo-cleaner (nice white uniform) I thought about accepting a loss of face and applying for a dustman’s job. But I knew I was “…not tough, nor strong, enough, to take a lotta strain, take a lotta pain…” as I think Roy said in his pop aria Love Hurts, bless his funny face, to wrestle those skips around for an hour, let alone a shift. It is not really the same thing though, I see that.
The lady found another job by herself. I expect she just paid the stamps out of her own pocket. I am so lucky. I have never had to face such a Job job…
FIN 21h44
