Rule 34 - Charles Stross [7]
If it had all gone according to your career plan—the Gantt chart you drew by hand and taped to your bedroom wall back when you were nineteen and burning to escape—you’d be a chief inspector by now, raising your game to aim for the heady heights of superintendent and the sunlit uplands of deputy chief constable beyond. But no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent. In the case of your career, two decades have conducted as efficient a demolition of your youthful goals as any artillery barrage.
It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.
Which is why you’re walking to the main road where you will bid for a microbus to carry you to the wee flat in Clermiston which you and Babs bought on your Key Worker Mortgage . . . where you can hole up for the evening, eat a microwave meal, and stare at the walls until you fall asleep. And tomorrow you’ll do it all over again.
Keep taking the happy pills, Liz. It’s better than the alternative.
ANWAR: Job Interview
Four weeks earlier:
In the end, it all boils down to this: You’d do anything for your kids. Anything. So: Does this make you a bad da?
That’s what Mr. Webber just pointed out to you—rubbed your nose in, more like—leaning forward in his squeaky office chair and wagging the crooked index finger of righteousness.
“I say this more in sorrow than in anger, Anwar”—that’s how he eases himself into one of the little sermons he seems to get his jollies from. You’re the odd one out in his regular client case-load, coming from what they laughably mistake for a stable family background: You’re not exactly Normal for Neds. So he harbours high hopes of adding you to the twelve-month did-not-reoffend column on his departmental report, and consequently preaches at you during these regular scheduled self-criticism sessions. As if you didn’t get enough of that shite from Aunt Sameena already: You’ve already got it off by heart. So you nod apologetically, duck your head, and remember to make eye contact just like the NLP book says, exuding apologetic contrition and remorse until your probation officer drowns in it.
But Mr. Webber—fat, fiftyish, with a framed row of sheepskins proclaiming his expertise in social work lined up on the wall behind him—might just have got your number down with a few digits more precision than you’d like to admit. And when he said, I know you want to give Naseem and Farida the best start in life you can afford, but have you thought about the kind of example you’re setting them?—it was a palpable strike, although the target it struck wasn’t perhaps quite the one Mr. Webber had in mind.
He must have seen something in your expression that made him think he’d got through to you, so rather than flogging the dead horse some more, he shovelled you out of his office, with a stern admonition to send out more job applications and email a progress report to him next Thursday. He didn’t bother giving you the usual social-worker crap about seeking a stable life-style—he’s already clocked that you’ve got one, if not that it’s so stable you’re asphyxiating under the weight of it. (See: Not Normal for Neds, above.)
And so you duck your head and tug your non-existent forelock and shuffle the hell out of the interview suite and away from the probation service’s sticky clutches—until your next appointment.
It is three on