Thursday, February 15, 2007

I have seen the future… and it is Ugly.

Every so often as I rub together the two pennies that constitute my weekly wage I think about the future and my job prospects, or lack thereof.

More to the point I think about how I could possibly make enough money to fulfil my desire for a little home in the city, two cats and a dog, a hybrid car, a house in the French Pyrenees and personal shopper who knows his way around the ladies department.

Inevitably I end up at ‘get a job in PR and suck it up, bitch’.

And sometimes I look at my bank balance or listen to suspiciously thumping noise coming from my car’s engine and I think yeah… maybe I could…

But no. No, no, nooooo.

Today the office was besieged by Channel 7 promo floozy’s flogging off Ugly Betty t-shirts and cold pig-fat-filled treats. And I know that not all PR people are required, you know, legally, to wear blue capes and big smiles and be about as shiny as something that is very, very shiny but… blech.

I wanted to vomit in their shiny mouths and hang myself with their blue capes.

But it’s more than that. I don’t ever want to have to be in an industry where I have to suck up to everyone and can’t tell someone to fuck off when they deserve it. (Clearly this is theoretical. In reality I remain like some kind of super breed of wallflower with an inferiority complex and a dislike of confrontation).

I really don’t want to be part of an industry that just sells good news and, yeah, I know it’s not quite the Washington Post over here, but we still get to piss people off, stick it to people who need to be stuck and stand up for people who are getting walked over.

I want to be on this side of the fence instead of the PR wench peddling innocuous three-sentence statements about how fabulous this Minister or that council is.

Of course I’m a moody beast so when I show up to work with a bed sheet tied around my neck and a sparkle glinting off my teeth you can probably assume, at worst, that my car has self destructed or, at best, that I need some new shoes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So is there a certain age or amount of time in the industry when you can say "yep, I've fulfilled my moral obligation" and can then sell your soul? I'm not sure there is... It's so tempting, the dark side, but I know I would hate myself forever if I succumbed to the lure of money.

Bolton said...

I know West journos who who haven't been in the industry for all that long who are on about twice what you earn. Trust me. Don't despair. x