Trespasser

Further to yesterday’s post, here’s Dickon Edwards (in his diaries) on work:

I’ve tried Normal Life on so many occasions. By which I mean, doing a job you utterly feel at odds with purely for the money. It seems to work for many people, and I admire them immensely. But for me it’s living a lie to the point of nausea. I feel a trespasser. A fraud.

The World Of Work doesn’t like me very much. It brings out all my most useless qualities, though they make for quite good reading in a diary. It’s my Borderline Autistic Buffoon side that is brought to the fore in such jobs. I have spilt soup in an old lady’s lap when working as a waiter, and have been sacked. On more than one occasion, I have accidentally deleted an entire firm’s computer records, in circumstances bordering on the poltergeist-esque, and have been sacked. I have broken the frame of a priceless gilt mirror and kept quiet about it, but decided it was best to leave the employment of the museum in question, before it happened again and I was sacked. I didn’t break the mirror itself, just a bit of the frame.

Actually, I wonder how that works with the superstition about seven years bad luck? Because this would have been seven years ago.

I have been sacked from your basic office admin job. Admittedly, this was because I kept phoning in sick and deciding instead to go to the cinema or the park. I don’t really blame them for sacking me. But on most days, the idea of going into that office per se made me feel sick, so I phoned in sick. I was merely being honest.

I’ve just remembered that this office job involved being the secretary to a lawyer. The weird thing is, although she’d been to university and I hadn’t, I had a much larger vocabulary than she had. She would ask me how to spell words, and what words meant.

She once asked me, “Dickon, what does the word “pretentious” mean?”

I resisted the temptation to reply, “You’re looking at a definition.”

I seemed over-qualified for the job, though I have no A Levels let alone a degree. To remedy this, I have considered Adult Education, and enrolled for an Evening Class last year. But all I learned was that I have trouble working in a class environment, that I really need help meeting deadlines and finding an incentive to write (hence the Angels). And when the teacher of the class in question turned out to be someone I knew, whose pyjama party I’d once attended, it was hard not to take a hint from the universe. I was always closer to the teachers than the pupils.

At the age of 35, I have learned beyond a reasonable doubt that the World Of Work is mutually incompatible with me. It makes me ill, or I break valuable things, or computers mysteriously crash in my presence. We are better off without each other. It’s a waste of time all round, just adding to the amount of sackings in the world.

I cannot convincingly play the role of a normal person in a class, or a normal person in a group workplace. But I can be Dickon Edwards. So if we’re all agreed about that, it’s just a question of developing a work ethic and treating Being Dickon Edwards like any other job. The only problem is how to earn money from it, and how to develop it so it produces something people might want. And want to pay for.

Though I know some people regard my entire existence as a form of sarcasm, I am serious about the Diary Angels scheme. I no longer view the diary as busking with words. From now on, this is Work With Sponsorship. I write to a regular body of readers and seek to provide an interesting and unusual read which they cannot get anywhere else. Tales of dipping in and out of worlds, of being a London Dandy, of oddness against the world, of being the unlikely connection between many diverse people and social scenes. I feel I don’t particularly belong anywhere. This is my greatest hindrance, but also my greatest asset.

This was all back in 2007. Dickon has since achieved a first-class degree and a PhD. from Birkbeck University. He remains, however, unemployed.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now. The fascinating Mr. Edwards is also interviewed in Issue 18.