Posts
California Dreams
Date: Another day on set
Weather: Sunkist sunshine
It has nearly been a year since I set foot in the space ship. Yes I took up the offer from Helena and Damien and left the library job for LA. It was not a very hard decision as I was at that time sick of the pettiness and the toxic environment in that workplace.
Due to budget cuts across the university sector, nearly everyone in the spaceship was busily getting rid of people whom they think were threats to them so they can stay safe. As contractors, of course Claire and I were prime targets. Alice the Thunderland originally wanted to recruit us as her minions but then because of this she clashed head to head with Marcia, the lady who came back from 6 months’ leave to save her marriage, in terms of staffing. As smart as Alice was she would not risk her own career for two contractors. So she just manoeuvred herself skilfully and swiftly off the stage when she saw that Marcia seemed to have Sonia on her side.
The fact is Marcia never liked us. She reckoned contractors like us are not committed to the organisation. But what was more important was that we are younger and freer, which she thought was a threat to her ideal “family based” organisation where people will work hard because they have a family to feed. So, since she came back Marcia had been shooting comment at us during meetings. Sometimes her attitude was so bad that people would come to Claire and I and feel sorry for us. Marcia likes to pride herself as the “Ice Queen” in the organisation so that she could act like she played fair to everyone. However, the version of Ice Queen she was playing was more of the White Witch type in Narnia – covering up her malicious intentions with Turkish Delights. But what is more important was that at the end of the day she was just one bad actor whom every drama school graduate can smell from miles. Seriously I had no intention to play her game right from the beginning when she tried to play the divide and conquer game with Claire and I (what’s up with the obsession of these people with the age old divide and conquer game? This really must be an age issue). It was just completely stupid of her to think that we would not be talking to each other and knew all the tricks that she was trying to pull. So when she proposed that only one of our contractor jobs is available in the future to save budget (she is responsible for HR and other things that the nobody knew what she did despite her regular “glorious” reporting at meetings), Claire and I already saw that coming months ahead and were just laughing at the proposal. This is because by that time I had already decided to leave for LA but apart from Claire nobody knew.
In the remaining weeks there, Claire and I continued to play along but it had never been more fun. This is because Claire had found out that she was pregnant and had decided to go too. We kept this to ourselves until the morning of the last day for submitting the application for the remaining job. All this time Marcia thought that we would fight for the job and threw our friendship out of the window. However, on that very morning after Marcia individually reminded Claire about the application to give her some advantage, Claire and I sent a joined email to everyone announcing that both of us had decided to go. This sent a shockwave across the library. Marcia was fuming when she got the email and she went to Sonia to complain about our lack of sincerity to inform her first. At that point Sonia already knew what had happened, so she just brushed her off. Marcia had no choice but to come to our office to congratulate us on our new adventures. I still remember the satisfaction we had when Marcia was pretending to be nice and composed while her face was still red with anger. This scene will always go down as a fond memory between Claire and I.
So here I am, nearly a year on from that library job. Claire is now a happy mother of a great and cute kid. I caught up with her every time I flew back to Sydney to see my parents. With Hugo, Helena and Damien’s help, I had scored myself a good agent and a good manager in LA. Helena and Damien also worked very hard to introduce me to casting agents and directors, which I will be forever thankful, because without them I would not be able to score a pretty substantial role in my first gig. Helena still up to this date said that it was my hard work that paid off but deep down I knew this would not happen without their help.
In fact I better stop busily typing away on my computer, as the set is now ready for the shoot. So I guess this is the end of the unnecessarily catalogued fulltext open access diary as I am no longer an (acting) librarian.
Thank you everyone for reading and allowing me to share my life with you. I am sure we will somehow cross each other’s path again in the future.
Davesto Bolingra
