So the Unit rolls into our office on one of his dreaded unannounced visits, raving about this girl he just met. The Unit is a kind of self appointed Mrs Mangles from Neighbours, a corporate fundamentalist, taking it upon himself to report any infidel who takes the company's name in vain. Management tolerates him like he's a computer virus that only attacks people's personal files. He spends his whole time pinballing around the building fiddling with some trinket that makes him look in tune with the zeitgeist, and spouting buzzword-blown little dog turds of marketing speak like ‘bat up an idea' or ‘drill down to the DNA', making sure that everyone knows whatever million dollar proposal he's working on, when in fact he's just trying to catch people on Facebook who can't minimise their screen fast enough. The Unit is into popular culture. The Unit loves popular culture. If the Unit had been around in the sixteenth century he would have fired Shakespeare and got in a 23 year old hip hop DJ from Cabramatta. Everything about the Unit is about popular culture. In fact, the only thing not popular about the unit is the Unit himself. Everyone hates him, but we're all too scared to admit it because, well, have you seen the price of groceries?
So anyway, everyone tenses up at their computer and the Unit starts raving about this girl he's just met. Her name is Tiffany, and she's just applied for the position of integrated strategic synergy implementer. The Unit sat in on the interview panel because no one on the panel felt safe enough in their position to tell him to piss off. He was telling us about how Tiffany had just come from six months at her previous employer in a user-generated content link-baiting lee gen fee management role, and six months at another company before that in a customer-centric b2b paradigm solution incremental blog optimisation co-ordinator role, and four months somewhere before that, and thirteen weeks somewhere before that and... one of us asked the obvious question: how come she's had so many jobs? And the unit said ‘Yeah, isn't it great? She's so confident. She said she stays at a company long enough to acquire the necessary sk**s, then looks for the next company to best enhance her career trajectory. We're so lucky to have her now, I mean, she is a real heavy hitter.' I looked around the room. Everyone was nodding with approval whilst secretly thinking ‘She sounds like an arsehole'. First impressions can be deceiving, though, and we were wrong about Tiffany. She was a major arsehole. Pretty, tanned, body like those ‘who cares about the destination as long as I'm in a bikini' presenters on Getaway, news reporter voice, you know, how they're taught that really weird emphasis that makes every fourth word sound like a car slowing down before a speed hump, John Wayne Gacy sense of humour, education from the Elle Macpherson ‘I don't read books unless I'm in them' school, and a soul as cold as the arctic winds sweeping across the tundra. She'd sit in meetings and not laugh at your jokes, walk past you in the corridor like you were a drunk at a children's playground. She'd have this way of repeating someone else's idea, change a few syllables and somehow erase everyone's memory of who thought of the idea in the first place. Even her emails made you feel so cold you'd think your fingers were about to drop off.
Then one day we got stuck together at the tram stop. She must have written off the Hummer hitting a homeless on the Docklands Boulevard. I said 'Tiffany?' No answer. I might as well have farted audibly. I said ‘how do you sleep at night?' She looked me over, seeing me perhaps for the first time. But it was too late. I was burning bridges. 'You think I'm some kind of dinosaur, don't you, and the ice age is coming. You think my generation made a mess of things with all that crap about social welfare, free education, arts funding. The only thing you understand about sustainability is the letter ‘I'. Our little globe is warming and you've used the fire extinguishers to carbonate your private spa. It's all leverage, leverage, leverage with you. You probably think love is a networking opportunity, you humourless, talentless, original thought free cyborg'.
I felt lunch poking up in my throat. My hands shook. My voice disappeared. The wind rose irritably, flapping the peeling corner of a poster for tonight's episode of ‘Australia's next top underworld hit man'. A half empty Rohypnol cruiser bottle rolled in the nearby gutter. Tiffany looked up from her iPhone, where she'd been finishing her flash animation presentation on ‘how to market ma**ive staff redundancies in five easy steps' and said, as if a thought had just occurred to her:
‘Want to come back to my place?'
I said, ‘Your place?'
Well, I am at a bit of a loose end.