Frankie Gets Rejected

He received the news by phone yesterday, access denied. The pain Frank had endured for those bastards at H2O came, as he had predicted, to nothing. The misinformation and shock at seeing that same interviewer, bad haircut and neatly tailored suit, smug smile and mild speech impediment, was now ingrained in his memory. The fact that he could spiel for over an hour was a good thing, Frank had thought that day, but now he wasn’t sure. Maybe they saw through it, smelled his desperation; saw the plainly presented insincerity in his pained quivering eyes.
Frank wanted a job, but not that badly. the indignity of the whole situation sat uncomfortably with him, poorly digested and leaving an aftertaste, metallic, sickly. Back to the drawing board he thought to himself, back to the grind of looking for a grindstone. The past six months hadn’t been the first time he felt his dignity slowly eroded, squeezed dry in the hands of blankly indifferent and idly inefficient civil servants. He had sat for hours on cold mornings, waiting for the nod of approval from a dehumanized race. Sat apologetically as they meted out the reasons why he was ineligible, or in the wrong. Those sideways accusational glances, the whole thick atmosphere of thievery in the sterile room, filled with the hopeless, filled with the desperate, filled with the afraid.
He had applauded himself from time to time due to how smoothly everything seemed to be going. But he was, he knew, kidding himself. Those long mornings, shrouded in desperation and old clothes, gleaming fag butt scrapings enough to fashion a dirty rolled cigarette, standing in the rain, hungry and on the verge of tears, seemed mostly distant to him. On days like this however, his situation presented itself so brazenly as to erode the fragile remnants of his confidence. I am in the system, he thought, they have me by the balls.
It didn’t bother him so much that he didn’t get the job, it was after all, only retail, and any fond memories he had of that sycophantic profession, the pheromonal reek of a target dependant environment, at once slippery and sticky with hope and fear, had long eroded to a mere sour chunk in the back of his neck. What bothered him was the letter they had sent. It went to his home address, they hadn’t bothered to update their files he deduced, and was opened excitedly by his mother. It stated that they were impressed with his experience and qualifications, but alas.... a complimentary way of saying no, fuck off, deadbeat. That in itself was expected, in fact the jittery way in which he had conducted himself throughout the interview, over-caffeinated and needing the bathroom, desperate to impress and unable to mean any of it, had elicited the prophesy of failure right off the bat. He didn’t expect that letter though, the very same letter he had received when he failed to get a job with them in Galway, failed to impress the same stuttering moron, failed to leave a lasting impression other than that of, well... failure. "its a new day, a new chance" the bastard had said, upon recognizing our Frankie. Frankie wanted to hit him, was desperate to grab him by his self satisfied throat and tighten his garish, look at me im wacky and approachable tie, till his eyeballs popped out, use the eyeballs to beat the smug disinterested ice bitch of a HR "manager" whist she neatly disregarded his efforts to bridge the gap.
He felt low, powerless, and unimportant to anyone. Picking himself up and making a coffee, over stirring away the stress, lighting a cigarette and sitting on the couch he had procured, in his nice apartment, Frankie thought of his sleeping lover and smiled. They cant take it all, he thought, they can never take it all.