Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Fired, on the first day at work!
By Aditha Dissanayake
The feeling is wonderful - to wake up in the

morning realising there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to meet... because I have lost my job. Fired on the very first day at work.

Jobless once again. Back to the "employment opportunities" pages of the Sunday papers. But before that, there is time to snuggle under the blankets, to listen to the bell of the paper-boy, to ignore the horn of the garbage tractor and to recollect the events of the twenty-four hours just gone by.

When I arrived at 8.30 in the morning on my first day at the office, Officer-Administration, handed me over to a Manager, Products and Services, who was in the process of creating a website for their products. A computer wizard no doubt, even though he could not have been much older than me - very tall, very thin, with small, half-moon spectacles sliding down an angular nose, he gave me an 'assignment' directed me to a computer and, upon hearing I can work only with Microsoft Word, contemptuously brought Windows to the screen through a series of mysterious clicks on the mouse.

By four in the afternoon I finished my work and roamed the corridors of the strange office searching for my Prince Mishkin. (I had failed to hear his name, and so re-christened him after the protagonist in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot). The name had come unbidden to my mind. Perhaps it was a gloomy foreboding.

"Grrr. This is a novel. This cannot be entered into a website." He threw my five hours of work on the table with disgust. "You seem to know very little about "eye-tea" (IT). This is not what I expected from you." He lit a cigarette. I stared at him dumb-founded. "You don't read stuff like this on the Internet, in fact no one reads anything on a website, everyone scans, so you must have succinct words..." he continued to ridicule my work. I watched him inhale the cigarette smoke into his lungs. A thin line of carbon monoxide drifted towards me. He was committing suicide and murdering me with his smoke, I told myself as the room began to be covered in a white mist. "Why do you smoke so much?" The question was out before I could stop myself. "Leave my personal life out of this," he growled. "As for what you have written I suggest you throw it to the dustbin, read Jacob-what's-his-name about writing for the Internet and begin again tomorrow."

I looked with disappointment at the pages in my hand - work I had thought would one day be acclaimed as a masterpiece on the World Wide Web. I gathered my bag and got ready to leave. "Macbeth. Act II, Scene V., line 28" I muttered under my breath as I left.

When I checked my e-mail at night, I saw a message from Prince Mishkin.

"Macbeth. Act II, Scene V., line 28 - I can't do this Bl- thing?" he asked me and wrote the last words to confirm my dismissal. "As you wish." Ensconced under the safe comforts of my bedroom, I shook my fist at my newfound foe. "Mishkin, you just wait!"

But I'm honest enough to realise it is not his fault. My kind of writing would never fit, what I now see as the Warped Wild Web, and I'm too egotistic to change myself into a robot writer - writing succinct words, sans humour, sans emotions.

Now that I have looked Failure in the eye, I am determined more than ever before to meet Success next time round. For, as the sages say, if you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. What is called failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.

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