Bid for work

I was told today that I would be successful in my application for a job depending on one condition:

The salary.

Another applicant with similar experience and qualifications was prepared to do the job for €5,000 less a year.

I wouldn’t mind, but the salary left a little to be desired in the first place.

I told them to go with the other guy.

Am I right to value myself and my work or should I put myself out to the lowest bidder?

Money

I don’t mean this post to sound angry or bitter so don’t take it that way. All I want to know is why is there such huge inequality when it comes to money in the world. After financial responsibilities, my phone bill, loans from the credit union, I have no money, well pretty much no money. Enough to tide me over from week to week and go out a little but nothing more than that. I have no savings. I don’t remember the last time I had enough to buy some new clothes. I owe the taxman money too, he’ll come to break my kneecaps eventually, bills are bouncing every now and then. I get angry phone calls to the point where sometimes I’m afraid to answer my phone. I’m not repaying for celtic tiger excesses, I just don’t have enough to go around. No, I can’t ask my family for help.

What I say about inequalities is obvious – the big ones where you have to stand in the rain waiting for the bus while big, new car after big, new car pass you by, hundreds of them. The smaller situations are harder to see from the outside. When the people in work almost obsessively asked as your annual leave drew near where you were going not fully realising you might not have the money to go anywhere. So you have to make something up about deciding at the last minute to make it sound exotic and mysterious rather than sad. While all the while friends are deciding on whether it will be America or Thailand this time around.

It’s almost enough to make you want to turn to socialism as I would totally kill for a redistribution of the wealth right about now. I say all this here now because I can’t say it openly in front of my friends, we don’t ever do that do we? They have no idea, I hide it so well.

And all it is is little pieces of paper or zeroes in a column. One swipe of a virtual pen and my life is changed utterly and I can get on with living. But that never happens and sure anyway isn’t that the dream the lottery sells us every week? When all it would take would be a few of the Michael Smurfits and Sean Quinns of the world to get together and give us all a few extra zeroes from their portfolios. Nothing to them, everything to us.

I’m not looking for financial advice so please don’t leave it. Just need to type it out loud.