The Road To Perdition

After three months of sitting on my butt, I FINALLY scored what appeared to be a great opportunity to work with the TV station TV9. Little did I know that it would be the equivalent to selling my soul, my social life and my will to live.

When I went for the interview, which was initially a written test to guage my writing skills, all seemed to go well. But when I didn't hear from them for over a week, I resorted to hounding them, initially as a follow up, and later out of sheer perverseness, since I had explicitly told them I wanted a response either way.. (And I thought it was extremely badly behaved of them to leave me hanging)... In retrospect, that should have been my first clue that it was all going to go south...

Eventually, I did get a call for a second round of interviews. Buoyed by my natural optimism, i showed up fresh faced and enthusiastic 25 minutes ahead of time.. I was made to wait a total of an hour and 15 minutes before my interviewer deigned to show up.... That should have been my second clue...

In the course of my interview, I was told that since I have no prior work experience in journalism, have never studied journalism and cannot speak Kannada or Tamil, I am being hired purely for my writing skills and I am effectively useless to the company.....Third clue perhaps?

Then they listed down the rules and stipulations - The 10 hr shift system, the 3 month salary deposit and the 3 month notice period... By this time my ever present optimism had taken quite a hit... But nonetheless, I agreed (fool is me) to join and showed up starry-eyed and shitting bricks the following monday.

Within the first 48 hours, it was becoming exceedingly apparent to me that I had made a grave error in judgement. The news9 office was what I imagine any government office to run like. The head Babus posturing and screaming at everyone in sight and the rest of the staff scurrying around like mice, taking as many smoke breaks as possible to gain some peace of mind and vent their frustration, and don't even get me started on the office politics!

Being the new comer who didn't know anyone, I think I was given a crash course on job satisfaction and employee morale.... simply put, there was none. In a nutshell I was told to keep my head down, my mouth shut, not to gossip, stay on the boss's good side, smile and nod when people bitched and to always be non-committal...It's somewhere around now that I really started to panic.

However, I still had not signed any papers, a fact that they were aware of, so the News9 babus were on their best behavior with me, asking me how I liked it, asking me if I was happy, if I had any complaints... lulling me into a false sense of job satisfaction.

However, luckily for me, my ever dissatisfied colleagues kept me from being completely blinkered. After all, no matter how good your day is going, after listening to ten hours of bitching you're bound to wonder if someday that's going to be you.. Heaven forbid!!

So after taking stock of the one Pro (the work ex) and the numerous Cons, I woke up this morning and threw in the towel. Perhaps it was a tremendous opportunity to learn and maybe people will say that I lost out, and maybe people will think I didn't have what it takes to stick it out... Perhaps I didn't.. But then again, shouldn't the profession you've chosen for the rest of your life provide you with satisfaction and joy? Shouldn't you want to wake up in the morning and go to work? I'm all for the struggle and I've never ever shirked hard work in my professional life... but when the thought of walking into your office where you're spending most of your waking hours fills you with dread... now, then there's something wrong.

I suppose it's all just a matter of degree of how much you can take.. Giving up my time, my social life and my sleep cycle for a job I hated...well, I guess now I know just how much is too much..!!