Unemployment: it’s not all bad

“YOU ARE AT a crossroads, Virgo, with tempting offers raining down on all sides. Yet Saturn, planet of materialism, keeps things constant, demanding you get qualified and hit the professional high road.”

Yeah right.

Horoscopes are amusing rubbish at the best of times, and this one, in the Sunday Life magazines that comes with the Sun-Herald, is no exception. It would be quite nice if it were accurate, but it isn’t.

Can it really be two weeks ago that the financial director appeared smiling nervously next to my desk and asked me to go down to his office? Heart hammering, I wondered whether I was in trouble over time sheets or something, but it turned out that all he wanted to tell me that the account to which I was allocated full-time had been restructured and as a result, my position had been made redundant. “Please understand that this is no reflection on your performance. We want to be fighting fit for next year,” the head suit said helpfully.

So that was it. My induction into the world of involuntary unemployment. Half of the department got the axe, so I’ve been trying not to take it too personally. And I can’t say I was surprised: I’ve been following the financial headlines for long enough to know that something was bound to give, somewhere. See, it pays to assume the worst. Planners are easy targets in the agency world because we come up with strategies rather than implementing creative work or shepherding it through the system, so when budgets get reined in, we’re perceived as a luxury and shown the door.

One of the ironies is that this round of cuts is being reported in the local industry media as the first significant action to be taken by the new CEO, who is a South African fresh off the plane. (He told us that he moved to Australia because of crime.) Ah well, it’s just business, I suppose.

There are signs that the economic downturn is starting to bite. News headlines focus on how spending this Christmas is a patriotic duty, as Kevin Rudd doles out money like sweeties in an attempt to stave off recession. Yesterday a friend, also living in Sydney, SMSed me to tell me she’d been made redundant (no surprises either; she’d had her suspicions for a while). Down at the local ferry wharf, there’s an ad for a Subaru Impreza hatch with only 2 300km on the clock; its owner, a female IT professional with an Indian-sounding name, has been redundant and is therefore no longer eligible to work in Australia. I wonder how many others on work visas are going through this kind of pain; I’ve heard stories about South Africans getting midnight calls before they’re about to fly out, telling them that they no longer have a job on the other side.

So I am relatively lucky. Thanks to a lifestyle of some parsimony over the past year – and the fact that once you lose your job, you don’t pay tax on your severance pay, in my case, one month’s salary — I have enough savings to pay the rent and cover living expenses for six months, perhaps more if I learn to subsist on a diet of baked beans and tuna. And there are worse places to be unemployed than Mosman. The bus and the ferry to the CBD are a quick downhill stroll away, and if I feel I need to cut back on the $1.80 it costs to get to the local shopping centre, I can always walk. The library offers free wifi, which is most convenient, even if it’s excruciatingly slow and forbids access to YouTube.

I have a wonderful view of the local marina from my tiny apartment and my bedroom overlooks a neighbouring garden where the local feral rabbits nibble the lawn; wild rainbow lorikeets take pieces of apple from my hand. A nice view and evidence of greenery are, I have found, important for maintaining a positive outlook on life. And the lack of a job to go to does not mean I am not busy: on the contrary, I am writing the third and final South African insult book for release next April, and there are several other writing projects that are getting more attention than they otherwise would, including a suspense thriller I am working on in conjunction with a friend in Sweden.

My clients tell me they liked the work I did for them, so I am hoping to go over to the other side next year, possibly in a contract role. Advertising agencies are fun and involve working with people who wear interesting T-shirts to work, but as in any service industry, they survive on a culture of hiring and firing. Any business that involves the filling in of time sheets is inherently vulnerable to the changing winds of fortune.

So perhaps the optimists are right, and their deeply annoying spiel about closing doors and opening windows (which I always thought hinted at housebreaking more than an allegory about silver linings, opportunities etc etc) is on the mark. We’ll see.

In the mean time, I have a lot of writing to do.