Everything Happens For A Reason

Amongst my many previously mentioned superstitions is the one where I often firmly believe, against all logic, that everything in life happens for a reason. I picked this one up - as one might a virus, I suppose - from a friend with a very Zen outlook on life. Her vibe was that souls, like every single iota of energy in this universe of ours, get recycled - the concept commonly referred to as 'reincarnation'. However, where most proponents of reincarnation would start spouting forth about being one of Cleopatra's handmaidens or Napoleon, someone of historical significance, she preferred to think we just come back in whatever form is best to learn the lessons we need to learn... and that we keep coming back until all those lessons are learned.

It is with this in mind that I feel the truth of the idea that 'everything happens for a reason'.

So, after my visit to the GP, where my workaholism was confirmed, I followed her advice and got in touch with a 'work club' run by my local council. On Tuesday, I set my alarm clock to ensure I'd wake up in time to pop over and join the club, feeling that I should, at least, show some willing and that, if nothing else, it would get me out of the flat, and interacting with new people - the main lure in those ghastly periods where I feel desperate to return to the full office environment.

I've gone on record - somewhere, not necessarily here - as saying that I find the average office environment dangerously toxic - full of untrustworthy, frequently slothful, backstabbing monsters, with an over-active sense of entitlement - but I genuinely value the opportunity to interact with them... even if it does leave me feeling polluted. Believe it or not, that sense of defilement is preferable to being left alone with my own thoughts.

And I'm not even talking about the dirty ones.

But I digress.

Whatever I may have expected from something called a 'Work Club', what I got was surprising. For one thing, it was actually fun. Part of me had dreaded the experience, even while on my way there, I was still trying to talk myself out of it... what use could it really be, as something run by the council? Surely it would just be doing the bidding of the Job Centre? Surely it would be for lesser mortals than I?

OK, I'm not really that pompous... But I didn't expect much, so the lesson in Presentation I got was both interesting and very useful. Eye-opening, even. And meeting such a varied bunch of people was a true pleasure. I will all-too-easily slip into reclusive ways, and lose my confidence in interacting with people - particularly if I don't feel that I 'fit in' anyway, so jumping into that environment was beneficial, even before having to do any of the exercises.

The weirdest thing, though, was that I bumped into a former colleague on the way home afterward... And the timing of it was so very delicate.

After the Club, I popped into a local (large) branch of Tesco, browsed a couple of sections only, and selected two products to buy, vacillating over a couple of others. My decisions made, I went to one of the self-service check-outs. Since I had a backpack with me, I didn't need a bag, so I put each item onto the checkout bed after scanning the barcode, paid with cash (two £10 notes, fed into the machine), picked up my change (the £5 note had to be pointed out to me - I knew it came out somewhere different to the coins, but didn't immediately see where), then struggled to stuff my purchases into my backpack. Then I shouldered the bag, and left by the same route I'd entered. I bumped into my former colleague at the corner of the outside of the car park.

If anything in that sequence of events had been any different - if I'd not bothered going into Tesco, if I'd been quicker to make my selections, or not browsed all of those sections, or browsed other sections - I would not have met up with him...

...And so we would not have exchanged employment updates and telephone numbers...

...And so I wouldn't know that his employers might be needing someone like me...

And then, today, I went back to the Club for a lesson in CV- and Application Letter-writing, application form protocols, and suchlike. Some of it doesn't quite fit my industry, and what employers would tend to require from a CV, but it did prompt me to re-evaluate my current CV... again...

Now, I'm not saying that meeting up with this guy and reworking my CV is going to suddenly get me a job (though the workshop tutor believed I was likely to find work soon), but it just goes to show how a string of events can lead to something... or nothing...

It's almost like something out of a Dirk Gently story, at least according to the TV series (see what I did there?). After the third and final episode, I'm not quite sure what to make of it... other than that it really should never have been made. My assessment of Stephen Mangan's Alan Patridge impression will stand, though Darren Boyd's portrayal of Richard Macduff improved somewhat for the last episode. The biggest problem seems to be that the writer(s) cannot decide if Dirk is truly a genius detective, or just a self-absorbed and very fortunate charlatan. The only episode that really impressed me in any way was the second, and so much of that was far too obvious and clichéd. OK, fine, in both of the (completed) novels, the 'mystery' is played out fully in the narrative, so the book is about the investigative process, rather than a means of actually unravelling the mystery for the reader, but I'm now reading The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul a second (third?) time, just to reassure myself that Dirk isn't the selfish, inept tosspot shown in the TV series.

Being Human, too, continues to confound me. This last weekend's episode seemed to be a hastily rewritten scenario that would have originally featured Mitchell and George, but ended up being Hal and Tom thanks to the departures of Aiden Turner and Russell Tovey. Some aspects of it were brilliant... but the overarching theme of the arrival of the Old Ones, and the plans that have been set in motion around that, lack the sparkle of the earlier series. Then again, after reading The Delicate Dependency, I'm finding it even harder to believe the concept of a hostile world takeover by vampires...