Harriet’s Top 8 Jobs And Internships Of 2015

It’s December again, and the world is just as fucked as ever. Possibly slightly more, possibly slightly less. I guess it’s easy to lose track of these things without an ordered list to tell you what to think. Having been precariously perched on the 2015 bar stool for quite some time now, we’ll soon be staring down the menacing barrel of 2016. So how best to celebrate yet another successful orbit around the Sun? 

We thought about publishing an objectively correct ranking of the year’s best records. But sadly we couldn’t get hold of any doof doof scientists to determine what the metrics should be. Instead, we’ve fallen back on our Top 8 Whatevers. You know the score – our trusted team of R$N scribes pitch in with lists of music they’ve enjoyed, petty grievances they want to air, obscure interests they want to highlight. Basically whatever’s on their mind. Let’s do this. Here's Harriet's Top 8 of 2015.

 8

Being unemployed. This was the worst job of all. It was simultaneously being anxious, bored, stressed, and unable to enjoy the days and days and days I had off that I would kill for now.

7

The medical insurance company. I temped here, entering data, for a week and a half before they ran out of work for me to do and I spent approximately SEVEN days of my life pressing CTRL+V and entering the figure of £1,000,000 into a database. I sat on a desk with the kind of boring, office-type people whose collective interests were the gym, Boots meal deals and the Tories. One man had the voice of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh and would make comments like “I wish I had £1,000,000 for every £1,000,000 I enter on the database”, because that is ALL there was to talk about. Still, they did have a nice “break out” zone and a fit guy worked in IT. It made me realise though I never want to work somewhere where the highlight of my day is the fit guy from IT.

6 

The Pub. This wasn’t really an awful place to work. Every Wednesday there was an open mic featuring acts either so bizarre, so talentless, or so endearing that it soon became the highlight of my week. One lady dressed up as a pirate or highway man every week and sang folk songs themed to her costume; then there was the sad alcoholic guy who would spin tall yarns about his life to us at the bar and thought he was some romantic blues legend because he played harmonica (badly) and sang (badly) a song he’d written himself about “being yerself”. The downside of bar work as any female bartender will tell you, though, is running the gauntlet every night of a drunk person doing something you don’t want them to do to you, be it a touch here or a comment there. But most people were sweet and I was even the only bartender that Loopy Linda wasn’t mean to.

5

The PR company. Now I feel bad for putting this so low down because they were a nice team, but I was an intern and they decided to arrange their office like this:

And it was sad. On the plus side, many house DJs used to swing by the premises and on one occasion a certain DJ who had a certain biggish hit last summer had a bout of ASTHMA in the office. Fucking insider info right there. 

4

When I worked for the weird old lady. I temped for another two weeks at a company that sounded quite glamorous on paper, but when I arrived on day one, I found myself at a shabby old office covered in paper, paper, everywhere. Overseeing this paper jungle, was a hunched lady the colour of nicotine who mumbled stuff like “Just bloody do it like the person before has done it, look.” And “who’s this application from? Oh, another bloody foreigner.” There were cold cups of tea everywhere and she went out for a fag every half hour. I was left by myself most of the day, and I read my book whenever I had nothing left to do. I enjoyed every second of it. She actually phoned up my recruitment agency to tell them she was sad that I was leaving, they told me, “she never normally likes anyone.”

3

The record company. I spent 5 months interning here and it was fucking hilarious. Have you ever seen what the internal workings of a record label look like in 2015? I’ll tell you what they look like: five dudes (and an intern) crammed into a broom cupboard of a draughty building in spitalfields, blowing onto their hands like Bob fucking Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, while a fat boss tells them to do stuff that is nigh on impossible, like run PR campaigns for unsellable music, rubbing his hands together as he spies the next floundering label to buy from its bankrupt and heartbroken ex-owner. Never enough money to pay anyone but we did have a banging Christmas party, flying out to Geneva to go to a guy’s DnB label showcase night. We looked like the world’s weirdest family on holiday though: our boss, me, Italian Fil and long haired, flares-donning Rich, checking into a Hotel Formule1 on the French border.

2

The chain bookshop. This is my current job. Highlights: selling kids books, I’m not a pervert or anything, I just love kids books and recommending them. Downsides: the 5p fucking bag charge, customer’s glee in getting to moan about it EVERY time they come to the counter (surely this must happen in every shop they go in) and the way that NO ONE can put a book back where they fucking found it. The mindfulness section is always in tatters, mandala colouring books on the floor, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying” all over the shitting place… But I won’t say anything else because I like my job and don’t want to be fired.

1

The VERY HIGHLY ESTEEMED MUSIC AND CULTURE REVIEW WEBSITE THAT YOU MAY OR MAY NOT BE LOOKING AT RIGHT NOW. It was dead good interning there and I had lots of fun and got to go to Farr Festival and shake a maraca and get drunk at Spoons for the Christmas do. Much loves.