Life as a graduate is rough, especially in times of depression. Luckily, the Leiden University provided an arbeidsmarktcongres, which ,I think has something to do with strawberries, for the Geesteswetenschappen, which I think has something to do with ghost ships. I asked around, and I found out that it was also a job market where recent graduands and graduands-to-be can inform about which fast-food restaurants they should apply at.
In principle, I am against any type of event which is advertised as a good place to "network" or "interface", because, let's face it, people who interface and network are douche-bags. It is just for people who want to make "talking to people", and "trying to get people to like me" sound important and business-like. But at this phase in my life, washing dishes when I am lucky enough to be given dishes to wash, I had to go to the job market, because if I didn't it would have been good ammunition for that guilty voice in my head.
So I signed up, costing me five Euro. However, I more than earned that 5 Euro back just in terms of pens. Why is it that at these type of events, everybody wants to give you a pen? ("People who have a pen look employable!"). There were also three D-list Dutch celebrities who came to speak to us, which would be like the hairdresser for Cher's stylist giving a speech on how to be successful. Amazingly, I who knows no Dutch celebrities, had seen one of them on TV before. I remembereed her because she was weird.
Let's face it, she wasn't speaking to us to give beauty tips.They were actually great speakers, although there was no actual useful information, since all three of them had such crazy and incidental career paths that it's not followable. But it was nice to listen to three success stories to help soothe my unemployable miserableness. Thanks! You made me feel a lot better. There was also lunch included, and there was extra left over because there were only about 50 people out of the 5400 targeted students who came, so good feelings all-round.
The afternoon had a few more speakers, one of which was about translation agencies in Holland. Now, I don't want to be mean, because I really appreciated such an excellent opportunity to recieve a big lunch, but I have a bone to pick with the event. Below is the image from the website.
Now, there might not be a lot of career opportunity in Holland for me as a translator because my written Dutch is probably at the level of a 9 year-old, but I think I found a niche: an English ant-fucker. Dutch people are proud to have a high level of English especially compared to other countries, but it is still a 2nd language. They wrote this slogan in English probably to try and be cool, but if they had employed someone like me, they would see that they are, in fact, not cool at all.First off, "upto"? Really? I sincerely hope that by omitting a space they were trying to make fun of Chinese people's poor English, even as ironic as this might be.
Secondly... This is an incorrect usage of "up to". It is only ever used in common English in a question format, or in vague situations ("I was up to no good"). Let me give you a conversation format of what the above fortune cookie appears to be saying:
A: "What are you up to?"
B: "Not much, just a job with talent"
A: "Oh, you have a job already? Never mind."
Moreover, the job appears to have talent, upstaging the candidate. Burn!
Although the entire day and the speeches were conducted in Dutch, there was a link to a page for "foreign students". Since I used to be an English teacher, I took out my virtual red pen and made some corrections. With just a few changes (per line), this paragraph actually starts to resemble authentic English.
So once the depression is over, if any people need an English ant fucker, I should be able to find some time between doing dishes.
