Impeccable Timing – The Boring Tale of my Wounded Knee

A split second of misfortune and my goal scoring days are over. My once dense and vascular thighs are now rapidly wasting under the strain of disuse. Luckily for my opponents, they will not have to face my lightning quick feet, inch-perfect threaded passes and net busting long range shots.

But on a serious note, I am very quickly regretting stepping out onto the AstroTurf that night. A quite literal twist of fate has shredded my left knee, leaving it bruised, painful and depressingly redundant. Just over a fortnight in, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten any better. Oh joy.

I’ve had three different predictions on what it could be so far. For the uninitiated in all things football injuries: an MCL (medial collateral ligament) tear; a patella tendon tear, and perhaps more worryingly; an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) rupture. Two weeks has felt like two months on crutches, helped in no small part by the requirement of getting into work – where I started just four days after the injury with such excellent timing.

Luckily for me it is only in Dartford, and allows me the nostalgic pleasure of being dropped off and picked up by my dear sweet mother. Packed lunch in hand and soggy peck on the cheek, I hobble into the office with wounded knee and dented pride. As marvellously understanding as they have been, it doesn’t much help my concerns as to how it must look.

Several painkillers and withered quadriceps later, I’m sitting in Starbucks nursing a Praline Mocha (product placement in the hope of freebees) and reliving that fateful moment when I heard a crack and screamed like a girl that has just been walked in on while taking a shower. When my bandy leg buckled on that chilly November evening, I actually couldn’t believe the timing of such a horrific injury.

I had been out of work for exactly three months to the day, and I could have done it at any point prior. Instead, and according to the law of the Sod, an innocuous shoulder-to-shoulder challenge forced me back onto my standing leg and shredded everything from my thigh to my (now fat) ankle.

It is utterly black and blue and almost constantly agonising, so my sympathy for many a colleague that has suffered similar injuries is instantly massive. Even greater is my appreciation of the frustration that professional athletes must feel, having to sit around waiting for nature to take its course.

As luck would have it, my footballing ability is minimal. It still doesn’t help though, as I love to pretend that I’m amazing of a Monday, Thursday and Sunday. I would imagine that the several defences playing in the North Kent Sunday League breathed a heavy sigh of relief when news filtered through of my season-ending injury. They would be silly not to, wouldn’t they?

Chasing the dream: What do you turn down?

Perhaps indicated by my last entry, after losing my job – one for which I grew an increasing dislike – my time has been taken up by writing (in various forms) and looking for a complementary job. Having picked up some extra branches to my “writing tree”, namely a spot as a guest blogger at grads.co.uk, and contributing match reports for Dartford FC, I feel that I’ve perhaps made decent ground in getting to where I want to be.

My days have been consumed by scouring the web for relative employment positions and looking for places to get my work published. Admittedly, my efforts have been somewhat stuttered, and I hold my hands up to the observation that more applications should have been made.

On the other hand, in my being picky I have realised that there are jobs to be had – just not ones that I want. Sacrificing immediate money and an easy living have been bitter pills to swallow, particularly where actually living is involved (thankfully, my financial commitments are few). Nonetheless I think that there is probably no better time to lay the foundations of my eventual career, as I can afford not to really concern myself with hurriedly obtaining a regular income. I do not want to be misunderstood here – having no money after receiving it weekly for an extended period following graduation is not so easy to relinquish.

The luxury of disposable income and squandered pennies and pounds seem a distant memory, but I have to keep reminding myself that, should the right opportunity come along, the rewards would be clear. Patience is most certainly a virtue in my case at present, and I am just hoping for the right opportunity to come along. Thinking of ways to make cash in the meantime is a full time job in itself, but I have the evident disadvantage of not being money hungry (a fact that I have only learned in the last two months). I think that I would much rather sacrifice easier but more ample cash for a job that I love and that will give me the tools to become what I really want to be.

I genuinely thought that by this moment in time I would be bored of my pursuits and maybe gone back to “the Darkside” of chasing the Yankee Dollar. I’m delighted to say that I am not. I adore writing – especially about football and being a struggling graduate – and I have also gained an accidental interest in reading other blogs. There really are some fantastic recreational writers out there, and I hope that I can count myself among them.

I have received a couple of calls from recruitment agents, offering “graduate” positions in sales and marketing. What this essentially means is that a large number of companies have latched onto the unfortunate circumstances that thousands of university leavers find themselves in, and offer to pay them half of what would normally be offered for an equivalent role. I also discovered that not all recruiters know what they are doing. In fact, not a whole lot of them care very much about what they are doing. I am not generalising, I am simply relaying my experience. I tried my hardest to terminate a call from a recruiter in one instance – the content of which can only be described as no more than a scripted and ill-informed attempt to gain excellent commission.

To wrap up this mixed bag of thoughts, I would say that you are far more likely to find a job that you will enjoy if you know what to say ‘no’ to. Treading water and putting it down to a “stop-gap” is an easy way of saying that you are not trying hard enough to chase your dream. It’s a story that is all too familiar to me, and I hope that I have now turned the page in pursuing what I genuinely want to be doing. I’m by no means there yet, but hopefully a lot closer than I was two months ago…

Transition...

Like many others (I imagine), I finished university with not a great deal planned. An ideal world hadn't presented itself to me. My first & second year delusions of grandeur hadn't quite materialised. 

The first thing on my mind - aside from surviving the comedown of possibly my last ever examination - was to formulate a way in which to make some money. Fast.

I must say that I was fairly fortunate in that respect, as I managed to (by some luck) land a pretty good contract position at a Financial 'Big Four' firm. The work wasn't exactly related to what I had become newly qualified in, but any working position gained in a market flooded with overqualified graduates was a welcome bonus.

This sweeping generalisation cannot of course be mistaken as the case for every single graduate; there are many people that have completed their undergraduate and graduate studies in recent times that have carefully planned and executed their aims. I do not feel however that I am in the minority by quite a considerable margin.

It's been around sixteen months since I first fell into full-time working life; and it was around one month ago that I fell back out of it again.

I miss the views that had greeted me each day on my way into the office, such as that pictured above (my own photography, by the way). I also miss the vibrancy of London - I can categorically say that I did not once become bored of the scenery. The city was illuminated during the Summer, boosted in particular by the electricity of the Olympic period.

All of this was brought to a very abrupt halt, however, and the reality of a contractors working life was made very clear.

It has it's pro-points of course:

(1) it's very flexible;
(2) it pays generously (for some), and;
(3) it is apparently more available.

I did not particularly like it, because:

(1) it is almost always a means to an end for anyone in a similar position to mine;
(2) progression is based mainly on fortune;
(3) it isn't a very settled working environment;
(4) you will rarely be paid for sick/holiday time, and;
(5) it can all be ended far more easily than in the case of a permanent employee.

It wasn't until it happened to me that I took into consideration all of those that I had seen come and go in the contracting world across an array of projects and placements. It is very difficult for me to imagine being in a position of breadwinner without having the security of a permanent place of work. Nonetheless, this mode of working life appears to often be the only recourse - and can very often be the best - for those that need a comparably strong income for a reduced amount of responsibility and "out of office-hours" devotion of precious time.

The latter is describing the circumstances of a more, shall we say 'mature' clientele, but it is for exactly the same reasons that persons of graduate age are becoming engrossed in a cycle of weekly invoicing that funds the frivolous spending of which students have been deprived for 20-25% of their lives. A sudden influx of disposable income instigates and encourages an extended period of a consumerist lifestyle reminiscent of scaled down millionaire playboys.

Although this is, or so I'm told, a fantastic relief in the wake of three-plus years of economic deprivation, it is quite short-sighted and seductive. If I am being quite honest, I would have likely continued to tread water in a river of consistent and quite comfortable income had I not had my lilo involuntarily punctured.

Now there is some evocative, if not narcicistic imagery for you.

It is only now, after a firm boot to the backside, that I have decided to consolidate my efforts into pursuing something that has been a whispering undercurrent to my academic career, and an enjoyable mainstay of my extra-curricular life. My die-hard and fanatic worship of Ricky Gervais tells me that one of the best and most simple pieces of advice that I can follow at this point is to "write about what you know".

I'm hoping that I can prove him right. Starting with this blog.