Blog: Four Years At Work

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Let joy be unconfined, for today is the FOURTH ANNIVERSARY of me re-entering the world of Full-Time Employment! Whoo!

Way way back in the distant days of Spring 2013 I finally came to the end of my contract at Birkbeck College. I'd originally been employed ten years earlier to work on The National Evaluation Of SureStart, a massive project which set out to see if having SureStart Centres actually did any good (Short answer: yes, they did). It was a lovely job doing Important Work which gradually transformed into a lovely job where there wasn't that much to do anymore, especially when the actual study ENDED, and I ended up doing a lot of pottering round and GIG booking. THUS when my contract came to an end I didn't think I could really complain, especially as my years of sterling service meant I got paid some redundancy money!

This also coincided with me coming to the end of my MA at City University - my original plan had been to do my MA BECAUSE my job was finishing, and to spend a year off work doing it, but a) the job kept getting extended and b) the MA I chose took two years to do, so I ended up doing most of it while still at Birkbeck. As it happened I finished work not long before I finished my coursework, and so decided that I would take the opportunity to have some time off and become A Professional Writer!

This was not an overwhelming success. Over the next year or so I think I made about 20p from Professional Writing, largely through submissions to "Newsjack" on the radio, but I DID have a LOT of fun. It turns out that NOT going to work is lovely, who knew? Sadly, however, there came a point when I had to accept that the world of Literature was NOT READY FOR ME YET, and so I would have to seek out other avenues of CA$H while I waited for them to catch up. My first idea was to do a PhD, as I knew you could get FUNDING for that sort of thing, but it turns out that while you CAN get funding, it tends to be for BORING things that THE MAN thinks is useful e.g. MEDICAL SCIENCE, and not Doctor Doom. It is an outrage!

So it was that I had to get an actual JOB, and on October 10th 2015 I went to work at Imperial COllege. The reason I remember that date so clearly is because the job went horribly wrong, after being LOVELY for six months, and I ended up leaving to get ANOTHER job, which started on... October 10th 2016! This meant that on October 10th 2017 I was very conscious of the fact that I'd been in THAT job for a year and was a bit BORED with it, so started looking for something else instead. Before all this I had only ever really had TWO full-time jobs, at Leicester University and at Birkbeck, so it was all a bit of a WHIRLWIND, and one I hoped would calm down.

Here on October 10th 2019 I can confirm that it HAS. Indeed, someone on my team announced this week that they were leaving and I thought "Eh?! Why would you want to do THAT? It is dead good here!" which I think is a good sign. The only problem is that this contentedness will surely anger the Gods Of ROCK, who will doubtless decide, sometime between now and October 10th 2020, that the WOrld Of Literature IS finally ready for me and give me a MILLION POUNDS to put my book out.

Don't do that, Gods Of ROCK, that would be AWFUL!

posted 10/10/2019 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

Storm House is still great though. Marvel will come calling any day now and turn it into a very weird Avengers movie.
posted 10/10/2019 by Chris Abbott

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