Picture me at work today. I’m stuck to my too cheap and undoubtedly second hand chair, my hands are resting on my ugly, grey and hardly representative desk and my eyes stare at my computer screen without capturing or mentally processing anything.

I’m bored. Hell, I’m so bored. In fact I’m so bored that I have stopped feeling my body and have the pace of thought of a snail. I’m so bored I don’t even care whether my co-workers may have started noticing I hardly do anything at all throughout the entire day. But I doubt they do. They hardly notice me at all these days. On second thought, maybe bored isn’t the right word. Maybe a better word is empty, or hollow, or void.

The reason is simple: I recently resigned. I am now in the phase of slowly saying goodbye to my job and vice versa. Almost all my formal tasks have been handed over to others. There’s hardly anything to do besides finishing one single pretty easy project and simply being around to answer questions from the several people that are going to be doing several smithereens of the, all of a sudden killed and split into tiny pieces, job I’ve done for two and a half years.

So here I am. I’m imprisoned in a cage of badly chosen (“because they’re cheap and employees that complain are numbskulled tossers”) office supplies and am left with nothing to do but wait. I open my calendar in Outlook and count the days left. The number lifts my spirit: I merely have to sit through another seven days before the end. Just seven days before… before what beginning?

Suddenly it dawns to me I have to get a new job. It’s a temporary comfort I’m going to allow myself a month off to rest, write and have long lie-ins. But then, when autumn sets in, I need to make money again…

Applying for jobs, preparing for interviews and eventually actually doing job interviews scare the shit out of me. They are the one and only single best reason to not quit a job; to simply prevent yourself from having to grovel again through the swamp of HR departments, kissing up to however thinks themselves worthy enough to be kissed up to.

Maybe I’m too fair-minded for job negotiations. They usually require you to constantly switch rapidly between harsh salesmanship and smiling politely. I’ve never been able to really trust any man at all and even friends sometimes get the detriment of the doubt when it comes to trust. But with HR departments and salary negotiations I’m horribly naive and credulous. I blindly trust they will reward my abilities and effort the way they should. Which they, as we all know, hardly ever do.

But then again, it was a wise decision to step away from this company. Maybe I should’ve gotten out faster, without being so damn loyal to give them three whole months to come up with a proper replacement for my persona. But the stepping away is happening, no doubt. Funny, I was so happy when I finally decided to resign, but now, a few months later, I realise the process of leaving this company is the most mind numbing and therefore one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to sit through.

Every now and then a colleague passes by my desk. They ask me if I already have found me a new job. Or if I even know what kind of job I’m looking for. They’re secretly organising a farewell party. A good one so it seems. I know, because nothing in this company has ever been kept secret from me for long.

I smile. I try to not let anything really touch me. None of my colleagues seems to really care what I do. They have their own jobs to take care of. I feel invisible to them, like I’ve already left and I’m just a ghost in my own memory. I realise I’ve stood on these crossroads for way too long now. Job applications may feel dreadful, but so does slowly dying in an office block. The only way is the way forward.

Consequently, what else is there left for me to do but letting two negatives become positive? In this personal prison I sit all day, secretly browsing vacancy sites and writing job applications. Although I’m physically still here, I have mentally moved on a long, long time ago.

Column published by Cecile on Monday, August 20th, 2007.

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