26 August,2009 10:14 AM IST | | Juliana Lazarus
The recession can't be all that bad if it's given birth to a word like funemployment.
u00a0
Funemployed basically means having so much fun being unemployed that Richard Branson takes one look at you and knows that you is who he really wants to be. Same with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the rest of that lot.
Only problem (their problem, mind you) is that they haven't ever had the chance to take a look at you.
But coming back to funemployment, I think the word was born about eight years too late.
Where was it during the dotcom bust of 2001 when the company I worked for folded up like a pack of virtual cards and the owners ran away with our unpaid salaries like a pair of thieving alley cats?
Because we didn't know of the "khooouuul" concept of funemployment, we ended up with a distinct look that can now safely be called shifty-eyed (if you so much as suggested that we were shifty-eyed then, we would have left you with around 206 broken bones. And shifty eyes. Yessir.)
We generally kept away from employed friends because even they would become all shifty-eyed in our company. And sometimes, when we'd meet up for coffee (relax, it was only Coffee House) and pretend to fight to pay the bill, one of the Have's would end up saying, "No, no, not YOU!" and then relapse into mortified silence for the rest of the meeting, all shifty-eyed and eager to get away.
So, we ourselves liked to keep away because it's a tad difficult holding all that laughter in-check while someone else pays for your coffee AND looks uncomfortable doing it. Ha! Ha! What fun!
We weren't averse to meeting strangers but it was a lot of hard work for the vocal chords.
Our cue was when the stranger in question started saying, "What d...." and we would embark on a conversation that touched a wide range of subjects the audacity of the terrorists behind 9/11, techies, poor sods, coming back from the US, population, global warming, toilet paper or water, Halloween tricks, how writing 'this floppy contains a virus' will ensure that no one will steal your floppy, and why shifty eyes are not really a sign of true character, circumstances maybe, but definitely not character.... Phew!
Unemployment was a LOT of hard work, I can tell you. And that's why, I think, we didn't have the foggiest notion of this thing called funemployment.
That came with eight years of experience in between.
Of knowing that bad times don't last forever. And that we will survive. And that overworked vocal chords don't generally kill people.
And so when recession officially set in last year, I decided to voluntarily (I swear!) quit my job and enjoy the perks of funemployment.
It was all going well till someone wanted to know if I had really retired and that surely, I had a few more years in me? Hmpf!
