out, damned year!

Arise, sir cat

An HTS apocryphon tells of how once, in a simpler age, we landed a big deal on New Year's Eve while our competitors snoozed.  That's the reason why most of the staff are in the office today - we're trying to restage a legend.  The trouble is that in addition to those snoozing competitors, our clients and prospective candidates are at home, too, coughing and improvising recipes around sprouts, leaving us with nothing to do but formulate battle plans for 2009 and critique songs on the radio.

It has been a very grotty year for lots of people.  As for the next one, our radio seems convinced that 2009 is going to be worse than 1666.  But anyone who's taken the time to check out the reality behind this year's media horror stories will have noticed that the media has been amplifying the negatives in what I can only assume is a deliberate attempt to force us into a state of surrender.  Which is not to say that things aren't bad.  It's just that when a corporation lays off a hundred full time employees and forty thousand contractors whose contracts were up in a few months anyway, and then the newspapers run headlines like NOT A REAL COMPANY LTD.* TO LAY OFF 40,100 EMPLOYEES! you've got to wonder at least two things:

1. Whether reducing us to nervous jelly might actually be the media's metier, and

2. How much toxic news we gulp down without checking the ingredients.

Job loss seems to be one of the big terrors of the moment.  But from the viewpoint of someone who spends every day following people's attempts to get jobs, and employers' attempts to get staff, it seems to me that 2009 may well be a good year, or at least a character-building year, for those who are willing to be more frugal, inventive and flexible than was considered healthy before The Crunch crunched.

New Year's Resolution:

- Put 10% of salary into an ISA

Things I did this festive season that I have never done before:

- Watched the spookily prescient 'Death Race 2000'.

Things I did this festive season that nobody has ever done before (admittedly in a challenge to do something that nobody has ever done before):

- Knighted a cat with a frozen lobster.

Have a fabuloso New Year.

* not a real company

relatedish:

your job search one month from now