Job Satisfaction

In Which: Our Hero Finds A Man Younger Than He Who Is Lost In The Murky Depths Of A Self Perpetuating Paradoxical Job, And Realises The Fate Of The World Is At Stake.

I just met a 22 year old career advisor. What? Something about this seems distinctly wrong. How can someone who is only 22 give advice on careers? I asked him this and he told me he just advises people which courses to go on, ‘and stuff’. Now I don’t know about you, but I along with pretty much everybody I know (with a few notable exceptions) spent vast amounts of money on completely pointless degrees – not a waste of money exactly, because obviously we all had a great time getting spectacularly drunk and talking about how amazing anarchism is, but not exactly a career enhancer. I don’t see how someone who has done exactly the same thing can preach to little kids about the best way to advance in life.

Maybe this is the government’s way of pumping more people into university – employ a youngster who knows nothing about careers except for the merits of doing a degree or further education course. Simply by employing him he will be under the belief that a university degree is the answer to all of life’s uncertainties, and tell everyone else to take one. By the time the kids have finished their degrees and got a job in Tesco, they’ll be too old to go to the young person’s careers centre, and thus career man will never know. Beautiful.

There is an inherent cyclical irony in the fact that someone’s career path is defined by telling other people what their careers are. Surely the only career he knows properly is the career advice career. If kids go to him for advice, will they eventually end up as career advisers? Is this the fate of our planet, to all eventually become career advisers, millions of us telling each other what to do and how to achieve it?

God I’m a boring wanker.

On an entirely separate note, having written this, I realise what a brilliant word distinctly is, simply because of the cluster of consonants ‘nctly’.