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Airplane notes

It’s 11:55pm, New York time, and I’m on Continental Airlines flight 31 from Newark to Sao Paulo. They’ve served the meal already – I accepted the mini-bottle of Cotes du Rhône – and I’ve also popped a couple of the Calmosedans I picked up in Santiago. They’re perfect for plane travel, especially red-eyes: they’re a combinatino of valium and sleeping pill. All the same, I’ve whipped out my laptop, and am writing this.

I was inspired by a sentence in the novel I picked up at the airport bookshop, Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. (It was the last copy in the shop, buried away in the K section of the fiction shelves, despite Christopher Buckley's rave New York Times review and the obvious affinity for airport passengers. I noticed as I was flicking through the opening pages that I’d wound up buying a First Edition. I haven’t got that far into it, but I’ve already decided that it’s an excellent book, and I highly recommend it: it’s kind of Brett Easton Ellis for the mild-mannered air traveller.) The narrator, who spends most of his life on airplanes, is sitting next to a woman. “I’d guess her age as twenty-eight or so, the point when working women first taste success and realize they’ve been conned.”

Well, that got me thinking. I was 28 when I left Bridge News (or BridgeNews, as it later rebranded itself), the company where I could finally call myself a journalist without thinking I was being economical with the truth, a company which paid me $5000 a month for my expertise in capital markets: a key number for me, the point at which I always thought that a person could be very comfortable, and beyond which money became a little bit pointless, meaningless, silly. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that I’m male and not female, I did indeed realise that I’d been conned. I knew it at the time, although I didn’t really know that I knew it: it was only after I qui^H^H^Hwas fired that the truth sank in.

I was miserable at Bridge; I knew that; and the freedom which came with not having to go into an office every morning; with not having to answer to a boss wanting to know what I was up to all the time; with being able to spend any day I liked in bed doing nothing (most importantly, being able to sleep in in the morning, rather than getting rudely awoken at 6:30 by my alarm clock); with being able to take weeks or even months off on holiday; with being able to surf porn sites on the internet without any fear of repercussion (not that I would ever actually do such a thing, of course); with interviewing bigwigs while sitting in my underpants in my living room; with walking the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the day, enjoying the sound of schoolkids playing in the yard across the street; with being able to go into shops during the day and not having to suffer the weekend crowds; with going into a Citibank ATM lobby without having to get my card out and swipe it to gain entrance: this was something I’d never really known before, and which I will be extremely loath ever to give up.

There’s an astonishing work culture where I live: even I fall into it, and feel weirdly uncomfortable when I’ve been with someone for any length of time and still don’t know what they do for a living. I don’t want people to judge me by my job, yet I judge them by theirs the whole time: I honestly don’t think I could ever be really good friends with anyone in sales.

But I think for Americans, a lot of the time, it’s worse. Without exception, the Americans I meet and who find out that I’m freelance assume that the minute I’m offered a “real” job, I’ll take it. I won’t, of course, and I think that the headhunters who were chasing me in the immediate aftermath of my departure from Bridge realised that. I haven’t heard from them in months, and I’d like to think that’s because they know that now I’m a tougher sell. (Of course, I don’t really think that’s true. They just happened to find out I’d left, and so did their job on me; now the job market’s even tighter than it was then, and they probably just have very little to offer me. Besides which, come mid-September, hundreds of ex-Bridge reporters will be hitting the streets in need of gainful employ.)

Is it true that the entire 28-year-old workforce is being conned? No, it’s not. There are a lot of 28-year-olds out there who either have a burning desire to make loads of money, or who need the security of a job. I don’t fall into either camp: I’ve been very lucky in that I grew up in a family which placed no kudos whatsoever on the size of your paycheck, and I also managed to get myself a fabulous I-1 journalist’s visa which allows me to stay in the United States more or less indefinitely.

But anyway, I think now I’m going to go back to the book for 10 minutes, and then try and get some sleep. Night night.

Posted by Felix at 1:37 EST

Comments

Posted by: Holice Wiggins at 13:16 EST, September 02, 2005

Posted by: James Costa at 5:11 EST, July 06, 2006

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