Janus' Thoughts Develop (Ch.12c) : In Search Of The Ideal Career

Ch.12c : In Search Of The Ideal Career

Janus once had ambitions to succeed in the hierarchies of the normal working world.  Like most young people of these times he was highly educated and at the age of twenty he had believed that he could contribute something to his society.  He aimed high, wanting to do something useful for the world and for himself.    It was not that he had accepted the ways of the world system.  Always he had been cynical and wary of it, questioning it and wanting it to be improved.  That had been the mark of his intelligence even as a serious and sensible child.  He had believed he could work with the system to improve it from within.  So he entered the working world, training as he went on, as all must do.

His first real job had been in government employment.  He had gone to his selection interviews without any preconceived ideas about where he would work or which Department he would like to be in.  He did well at the interviews and the examinations despite his lack of knowledge.  They selected him and posted him to the Martan Tax Revenue Service where he was educated in the basic details of tax calculation and placed at a computer terminal so that he could enter figures after acceptance and answer questions from the taxpayers and their accountants if they did not agree with the figures which were produced.  He learned a lot in a short time but despite the more advanced courses he began to go on he was not likely to be moved along the career ladder quickly.  He began to regret that he had entered a department that was unlikely to alter the society around it.  He was stuck in a job which was performing an old traditional function even if they continually altered the detail of the rules of tax calculation and regulated to tighten up the checks and balances on taxable profit and income determination.  Whole hierarchies of sub departments existed just to tamper around with the details of the rules despite the continual attempts to cut the costs of all the public services and the very public statements all governments made about their intentions to gradually phase out taxation altogether.  It hadn’t happened yet and most people with any sense knew that it never would, and that if it ever did immense social and economic problems would quickly emerge to tear society apart into chaos. This still did not stop politicians and theorists from continually proposing the phase-out of taxation and the movement of society onto a beautiful rational system of checks and balances and flexible price and wage levels, all greased by ample injections of information.  In a society where perfect information is available completely rational decisions would be made.  Everybody would find employment, and no one could exploit anyone else.  The theory was nice but Janus found it hard to believe that anyone could really believe it.  And yet these were the radical ideals which had continually influenced the governments particularly over at least the last hundred years and from time to time over the last four or five hundred years.

Rather than remain stuck in a job and a department which provided him with no ways of improving the society he lived in or of providing himself with a sense of fulfilment, Janus had escaped from the confines of the government service without attempting the long climb towards a very limited position of influence.  Government employees, he had decided, could change nothing and were enslaved by the rules and regulations which bound them.  Recklessly and not for the last time he had placed himself on the job market with no sure idea of what he wanted for himself.  Fuelled by a sense of disillusionment he had decided to try anything as long as it was different.  He could think of nothing which would give him influence over the system, so he decided to seek a greater understanding of the system through experience.

At the age of twenty-five he managed to find a job behind a bar in a financial district restaurant, cafe and bar complex.  Here the customers were largely lunchtime office workers who needed quick meals in their half-hour lunch breaks, and coffees in their occasional coffee breaks.  Those people were always in a hurry, often they came in alone, sometimes they were in larger groups and seemed to enjoy their breaks, for many of them these were the high points of their days when they could talk socially with the people they worked alongside, and occasionally meet new people. 

Other customers were engaged in business entertaining, busy charming potential clients, engaged in marketing new ideas.  Persuasion oozed out of every pore, but most of it, if it was not lies, was a false act.  But the achievement of an ability to persuade was a skill revered by modern society.  If a man or woman had that skill they would be sure to make a good living and get on in the world.  They were the people rather than the mere followers of instructions who could do best in the world.  The world was their oyster and they could potentially make millions while benefiting the whole of the world economy.  These were the people who could sniff out and create new markets never tapped before, selling new ideas, being imaginative.  These were also the people who could find new ways to be more efficient, releasing economic resources for other economic activities with which to nourish the world economy.  Janus had thought, then as now, how hollow these goals were, most of it meant pinching markets from competitors in the big economic game and designing things or services that people didn’t really want or need, and selling them to them.  What a sad game it was, a sad way to lead your lives, and to lead hundreds or thousands or millions of other people’s lives.  But he had to admit that without these skills nothing would ever get done.  He intended to use some of these persuasive skills in the future. 

Tiring of seeing the same faces from the other side of the bar and spending all his time engaged in petty economic transactions Janus had begun to look around again at careers which fitted his high educational status.  He heard that investment managing and stockbroking was a career area which required judgement skills and gave high rewards in terms of being interesting and financially rewarding, and providing a high status in life.  Janus approached that career reluctantly because he suspected that many of its aspects would be similar to the office based repetitive long hours of the Tax Service career, which he had rebelled against.  The figures would become meaningless to him after a while and the experience would become sterile as time wore on.  But he needed something which would challenge him.  He was told this career was of great importance to society, enabling modern freely competitive capitalism to function smoothly.  The markets would decide merit and investment analysts and managers played an important part in determining where funds and resources should go to make the markets work.  He was told there would be more flexibility in this career, potential for promotions, opportunities to make his own mark.  He was accepted by one of the large stockbroking Houses of Marta City.  His past knowledge and experience of the Tax Service with its use of computers and the numeracy and office and management understanding which went with it was seen as relevant to the skills he would need in his new job.  In line with the belief of the Governments in education and multi-background knowledge the firm was interested in him although he would require some years of training.  Thereafter he embarked on a two year course of initiation into the basic knowledge required for the career to be followed by long years of work combined with study and training.  Janus spent two years on the course and managed to pass the complex examinations.  Unsure of whether he had made a wise decision he then spent two years on the job with periodic training periods before his personal rebellion against a false life.

Those two years were probably the worst in his life, although he did make some friends and he learned a great deal about people, about himself and the world around him.  Without the dullness and increasing desperation of his life he would not have been able to force himself to react to his existence.  He was provided with the ground for some kind of rebellion.

It gave him reasons to react. Well-educated men and women sat for hours behind little screens making decisions about the purchase and sale of investments of every kind.  Some of them were not even “real” investments but were merely trades in the right to buy or sell other assets for certain prices at certain dates.  Luckily for the operators and traders the computers worked out all of the calculations and at the press of a button comparative choices could be brought on screen.  Indeed at the touch of a button almost any relevant financial information about current and comparative prices going back years and in some cases hundreds of years could be brought on screen, although the processes to be gone through to bring the older statistics on screen were in themselves quite involved.  The computer systems had taken hundreds of years to develop to this level of relative perfection. Millions of brain hours and brain cells had been devoted to the task. Each new system had been better than the last.  Some of them had been misguided in certain respects.  The improvements of previous programmes had been forgotten, not incorporated.  Apparent weaknesses had to be solved, often by additional programming, which made the systems very complex.  Periodically fresh new systems had to be introduced to weed out inconsistencies.  Each wave of technology brought new information, new possibilities.  Some of them also brought more complexity, although some simplified the positions of earlier times.