As much as I love rising late, watching cartoons all day and working four-hour evening shifts at the university library, I’m forced to admit that such a bovine way of life is not entirely sustainable. The dream has to end sooner or later. In anticipation of this, I’ve been attending job interviews over the past week or so for jobs markedly similar to the one I currently hold but with a greater number of working hours and/or better career prospects. So far the interviews have gone very smoothly though no one has yet seen fit to hire me.
Today’s interview was for a job in the very same library in which I’m currently employed so the interview panel consisted of people I knew. For some reason, this really spooked me and so the interview went a lot less smoothly and a few with stuttered, dry-mouthed answers. I was also aware that they’d he heard my standard interview routine (read lies, jokes and bullshit) before and so I’d have to think on my feet a lot. A few curb-balls from the main interviewer resulted in a few raised eyebrows suggesting I was out on a limb with my improvisations. Bah. On the positive side, there is a twisted logic in favour of being successful this time around: since the smooth interviews resulted in no job, this clunky one which felt like cycling a penny-farthing down a cobbled street will surely result in the high-paid and idle job of my dreams, possibly involving my own office and daily mandatory naps.
Coming out of the interview, I bumped into my friend Keir, whom I decided to join for a quick coffee in the student union. Not actually being a student, I always feel as though I’m cheating the system when I take advantage of the union’s cheap, quasi-palatable coffee. The alternatives are to hoof it down to the cafe-packed Byers Road which takes up valuable coffee-break time or to use the academic staff lounge where the machine-pumped coffee is so utterly revolting it makes the student union look like Starbucks.
Keir told me that he’d read in the newspaper of someone tracking down one of Hitler’s decedents with the goal of asking him if he’d like to be given seventy-odd years’ worth of royalties for the Führer’s best-selling title, Mein Kamf. Understandably, the guy has refused the money in order to distance himself from his unpopular ancestor. The guy in question is some sort of distant nephew or cousin or something, because, as Keir pointed out, “Hitler didn’t have any kids. He only had one ball”.
“Does one testicle mean you can’t have any kids?” I questioned, “Maybe you could have half a kid.”
The absurd idea of Hitler’s freakish secret halfchild had me laughing uproariously – a welcome thing indeed after the tense interview. “I love him”, I said in an hilarious Hitler voice, “I shall call him Harvey”.
With clever, topical, good-taste jokes such as that one, you can see why I have so many friends.
The rest of the coffee break was spent musing over whether Hitler’s hemi-child would be a top half, bottom half or a left or right half. The further thought occurred that the poor child might be given the opportunity of a ‘half transplant’ at some point in his life but that the new half might have come from a Jewish donor. The shame of it! Would Hitler have to execute his halfchild? Would he merely have to half-exectute him, essentially undoing the work of the pervert doctors responsible for the transplant? Of course, it’s entirely possible that the two halves, much like many Siamese twins, would have become inseparable and he’d have to die entirely. That’s certainly the outcome I find most likely. Either that or he survived and became the world’s most literal case of a self-hating Jew.
“I’d better go now,” said my coffeeshop chum, now rising from his seat, “not because I’m late for getting back but because I don’t want to hear more of this horrible rubbish”.
Some people just don’t have the stomach for stories of Nazi halfbabies and their inevitable botched operations.
In other news, we’ve been suffering a wasp nest on the outside of our converted loft for about three months. The council pest-control guys aren’t too keen to do anything about it since we’re so high up. Every now and again (okay, twenty times a day) a wasp makes his way into our living space. I wish they wouldn’t do this. After all, I’m never invited over to their place. Despite their persistance, I’ve only been stung on one occasion: the little bugger must’ve crawled into my jeans in the night, resulting in his death and a sting behind my left knee. Anyway, yesterday saw major victory in the battle against the wasps: a low humming, which I assumed at first to be a rogue bee, drew my attention to a wasp the size of my thumb. It could only have been a queen. Rather than land a newspaper upon it, which would have resulted in a mess of ludicrous proportions, I sprayed it to death with a can of supa-hold hairspray. That’s an entire nest nipped in the bud right there, wasp-haters. The result of such a peculiar execution is one very hard, perfectly preserved queen wasp. I might skewer it with a cocktail stick and show it to occasional house guests, though I think I should probably (a) donate it to science or (b) sell it to an art gallery. Any further suggestions should be made via the usual channels.