The girl
When I
joined the New Factory she was already there. I passed her by each day several
times while walking past the reception desk on our floor. She looked twenty and
I thought she was a weekend-mode student working as an assistant to earn money
for her university tuition fee.
Normally
the occupation of a receptionist is treated as temporary. Usually students take
up such mundane jobs to earn a livelihood, sometimes to fill their CVs and then
they move on to more ambitious positions. This is not the case here.
She is
quite sociable. Easily hits it off with everyone, yet her come-and-go attitude
does not help her build true friendships. With time it turns out she is 45 days
younger than me, yet since I was born in December and she in January the next
year, she finished her studies a year later (in 2012). As a child she was an
actress, in her career she had some impressive roles in films and TV series. If
you tap her name into google, you will find her more-or-less up-to-date photos
and learn in 2012 she graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration of
the Warsaw University (full-time studies). Tens of fans are wonder what she’s
doing.
The job
with a New Factory is the first one she has held on to for more than one year
and the first one in which she has a regular job contract, involving all
rights, privileges and pension contributions, rather than a junk contract.
Actually she only cares about the type of contract for only one reason: with a
regular labour-code-governed contract she is entitled to 20 days of paid
holidays a year. Until now when she felt like going somewhere, she’d quit her
job and upon return looked out for a new one. None of her jobs was anyhow
related to what she had studied, comparing to what her studies should have
prepared her for, all her previous jobs (and the current one) seemed actually
well below her competencies.
She likes
the job with the New Factory. It involves meeting lots of people and chatting
to them, keeping them company during lunches, making a morning coffee to a
management board member. She appreciates the fact her job involves no strain
and no stress. Office workers around her have hectic days, face pressures, get
irate easily. She doesn’t understand their quandaries and is glad her job is so
carefree, despite the fact she earns just a fraction of what her stressed-out
workmates get paid. Her salary is just enough to meet her basic needs:
cosmetics, clothes, weekend clubbing, holidays; a very decent pocket money. Her
parents with who she lives seem to put up with her lifestyle and her grandpa
whose car she uses (and once a month she leaves the vehicle, grandpa fills it
up and then she picks it up with full tank of petrol) also seems to be quite
tolerant.
While we
lunched last week, she told me to look at her and asked what I thought she
should be doing in life. After turning down several ideas she had come up with,
I suggested she should search for a job in which she could make use of the
knowledge accumulated during five years of law studies. She nodded her head,
pulled a face, nearly burst into tears and said it would need to involve some
strain.
She backs
PO. She believes PiS is backward and would bring nothing good for Poland. She
tells Mrs Szydło should return to the sack (Szydło wróć do worka, a pun
stemming from a Polish idiom, when reversed meaning bad things should come out
of light).
The
neighbours
They have
lived in NI since ever, their parents as well. They were on this land years
before building houses on this suburb became all-the-rage in the 1990s. They
sold little of the land they had had, since the family was big and a sizeable
plot was needed to put up houses for all the children.
The
neighbour is the local, his wife comes from eastern Poland. They met the time
he was breeding foxes in late 1970s. They got married and prospered well until
1989 when exports of fox furs to the former Soviet Union came to a halt and
consequently their business went bust. In the new reality they engaged in some
trade with the former Soviet Republics, yet as they were shuttling between NI
and the borders, four children they had at the time began to be brought up on
the street. Then they switched to local trade and opened a stall on the former
biggest bazaar of the CEE, where today the National Stadium is. Golden times
have gone by and for more than a decade the neighbour and his wife have been
jobless. They do not need to. Their properties are large enough to sublet rooms
for construction workers (20 PLN per person a day, yet in black economy) and
officially let a larger hall for a company (here already a registered business,
generating a recurring stream of income of a few thousand per month).
Their older
son (32) is a successful graduate of a technical university. While he was
approaching graduation, his professors had a high opinion of him and
recommended him for a few positions which could give him prospects of brilliant
career. Eventually he has not taken up any of those jobs. I have no idea,
whether potential employers have rejected his candidacy or whether he turned
down all those jobs, because they would have interfered with his academic
career, namely the doctoral studies he began eight years ago and in the
meantime suspended for a year; his PhD is still pending.
Their
younger son (29) according his parents’ ambition was meant to firstly finish
studies and then to find a job with a town hall. Unfortunately, so far there
was no job offered to him there, while the family’s ambitions are put on hold,
the son takes up temporary jobs on construction sites (he indeed is a dab
hand).
Two
daughters (27 and 25) have finished studies and work as shop assistants in one
of clothing retail chains’ shops, most probably also on junk contracts. The
youngest daughter (14) keeps learning and watches her parents and older
siblings staying at home or dabbing in dead-end job. What are the chances she
pursues a career ambitious people want to make?
Despite the
fact the family consists of seven people they easily make ends meet. They have
a variety of sources of income: rent from their corporate tenant, some cash
from construction crews renting rooms, the neighbour’s sickness benefits, the
older son’s assistant salary, the younger son’s wages from construction sites,
the daughters’ salaries from the retailer. Except for the office rent proceeds,
these are most probably peanuts, yet add up to a sum which allows the family to
meet their basic meets. Fair enough.
The
neighbour and his family hankers after PRL, yet votes for PiS, despite not
being totally fond of all points of the party’s agenda. Yet PiS passes muster,
it will restore law and order in Poland, take away the wealth from the elites
to give it to ordinary people and put behind bars all thieves and cons who
currently run the country.
In the
descriptions above I did my utmost to include only facts and avoid expressing
any opinions on how other people choose to live. Yet there must be a reason why
I have decided to post the two stories. Every time I read in a newspaper or in
the Internet about my peers as a “lost generation” (stracone pokolenie) I
wonder whether it is the system or the people (the ever-lasting question) that
should be blamed for the failures of many of the youngsters…
Next
weekend I’m off, next post in two weeks.
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