Guardianwork

Sunday 14th October 2007

I woke up this morning with blue lip disease.

Don't panic, dear reader, this was due to the fact that I celebrated a fantastic victory for the England rugby team over France in the world cup semi final with a bottle of Des Trois Seigneurs, vin de pays L'aude. That is ironic, Alanis Morissette. England 14- France 9, and what a game? I wondered how many times I would need to go around the M25 to get such a score in The Norbert Dentressangle v Eddie Stobart game.

The landline telephone in my house is in the lounge. As discussed earlier, I smoke, and I therefore spend the majority of my time at home in the dining room (with my spider benylin friend). I rarely go into the lounge. This means that I check the answerphone messages about once a month. This is not good for urgent matters, I agree, and I apologise to any friends who have yet to receive a returned call.

However yesterday I heard the dulcet tones of Lesley-Anne Ryan from tenuk! She would like me to call her to discuss my application further. Are these people mad?!? I applied to them on the 9th October with:

Dear ten

I would love to be part of your revolution!

Please find attached my Curriculum Vitae.

Kind regards



Ian Carpenter

And they want to discuss me being their Marketing Operations Manager? Well I will have to call them tomorrow at lunch time. I am slightly nervous about this, and I do not know what I am going to say, but we will see what happens. I see it going a bit like this:

Lesley-Anne: Hello tenuk, Lesley Speaking, how may I help you?

Me: Hello, I am just returning your voice mail message, my name is Ian Carpenter, and I have applied for your jobs advertised in the Guardian.

Lesley-Anne: (papers rustling in the background) Oh yes, which job where you applying for: it was not clear from your e-mail.

Me: All of them.

Lesley-Anne: But the jobs are very different, Marketing Operations Manager, Operations Director, and Analytics Manager are very different roles. Do you have any experience in any of these areas?

Me: No, sorry.

Lesley-Anne: Could you please stop wasting my time?

Me: Yes, sorry, bye -bye.

I will let you know how it all turns out tomorrow evening.

Anyway the next job:

Can you sell Manchester as a World-Class city region?

I don't know, can you? Not wanting to get all Ross Noble about it, I had images of actually selling Manchester as an object. You know when you have to move a piece of turf on your lawn, you kind of edge it with one of those crescent shaped lawn edgers, and scoop it up with a spade. I had the images of going around the outskirts of Manchester (this might take a while), with said lawn edger and literally picking Manchester up and selling it. This would need some quite heavy lifting gear, I would imagine.

Let's see.