Even The Queen Makes Mistakes
'Click, click, click, click.'
For those who have been unemployed for a long time, I have a question.
How do you do it?
Where do you—forgive me for asking—get the money? How do you go out and buy new sneakers, pay endless bills and that scam they call Council Tax, order groceries from Ocado, and keep your Apple TV+ subscription?
How do you survive when you don’t have an income or, at the very least, a credit card from some significant other (read: dad)?
It amazes me how many online advice articles and videos exist about finding a job. It took me several months to finally give up and install Threads, and suddenly, my entire feed was filled with 30-somethings lamenting how hard it is to get a job in tech these days. But nobody—and I mean nobody—talks about the reality of being unemployed for longer than two days.
“That’s what savings are for!” I can hear my happily employed readers say with a satisfied grin. “Saving for a rainy day keeps bankruptcy away!”
I agree; saving money is one of the main skills in Adulting. But as anyone unemployed for several months can tell you, when you have the same expenditures and no income, that bank account dwindles pretty fucking quickly.
It took me six months to burn through my entire life savings, and I mean all of it. Sure, I was traveling to Europe and spending too much time at Zima Karaoke in London, belting Russian prison anthems, and soon, Masha’s friends began saying, “These people live as if every day is Saturday.”
But once the money ran out, I became a freeloader, relying on the generosity of my (rich) friends and eating crumbs off the table after Masha had dinner. I prostituted myself for pennies online, secretly hoping for a Medium comeback and the return of the golden days when I could write for 30 minutes a day and make $2,000–$3,000 per month.
“Have assets!” you might say.
But what does that even mean? Stocks? Never understood the concept, even though I went to business school.
Whenever people tell me a certain stock is about to go up, I give them the same look as when people talk to me—in all seriousness—about this month being good for Aries. Betting on stock fluctuations is as “smart” as betting on the weather in London.
Crypto? Please. Been there—done that. After I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money, my family’s money, and other people’s money on two consecutive stupid bets, I’d rather sit on a hot stove with my bare ass than buy BTC.
Real estate? As anyone from my generation might say, “Next question.”
Cars? Well, up until very recently, I had a car. You don’t need one in London, but I had it anyway because it was cool and fun, and I wanted to learn to drive. But then my insurance per year cost a quarter of the car’s worth, and when I calculated all the parking tickets I had accumulated, it suddenly made my savings shrink like testicles in the Moscow cold.
People who know I am unemployed and seeking my next proper role—although my criteria for the word “proper” change almost every week—like to ask me, “Serge, why don’t you just get a temporary job, say, in customer service? Go work at Costa Coffee or something!”
This sounds reasonable to the well-intentioned people who say that. It's so reasonable that they don’t even know how stupid it sounds.
The last time I worked in customer service was thirteen years ago when I worked the phones at my father’s e-commerce company. By day two, I got bored and started watching Family Guy during customer calls. By day four, I argued with a customer because they thought I was a woman. By week three, I quit and went back to what I was doing at that time in my life: masturbating and kissing girls on rooftops.
(Though at different times, of course.)
Recently, I was invited to a well-known organization to volunteer. I will parody Kanye West and not tell you the location, the organisation's name, or what it does.
It was The Moth in London.
I’ve never volunteered in my life. The team consisted of four people, who were lucky enough that I forgot their names because they wouldn’t be mentioned in this piece. The Main Guy, tall and lean, was nice and smiling as he introduced himself and told me I’d be “working the door.” I had two pints before this, so I wasn’t really paying attention when he said it, but I doubt that even sober I’d know what “working the door” meant.
He passed me over to his colleague, a guy whom I immediately disliked because he wanted to be the center of attention—like yours truly—and because, with his beard and nice blue shirt, he looked taller and more handsome than me.
The Main Guy approached him, pointed to me, and asked him to show me “the ropes,” as if we were on a ship. Then he just left.
The bearded/tall/handsome guy, whom I’ll call Nick—so as not to refer to him as bearded/tall/handsome guy because it makes me jealous even to type this—handed me two objects I had never held before.
One was a clicker—the kind flight attendants use on airplanes to count the number of passengers or farmkeepers use to count the number of geese. The other object was a black rectangular hand stamp, the kind my grandmother used in Russia at her accounting firm when she was still working and signed documents all day long.
Armed with these two weapons, I went to the front door to “work” it.
Nick motioned for me to sit on one of the stools behind a makeshift reception desk, which was just a desk.
People started coming, and Nick said, “Let me show you how it’s done.”
Then he put four pieces of paper with printed names in front of him and turned to the first arrivals with the fake smile of an insurance salesman, yelling in their faces, “Hi, can I have your last name, please?!”
The person gave him what Nick demanded, and Nick scanned the four papers with his lean finger until he found the right name and used a black pen to put a small tick next to it.
“Well, that’s easy,” I thought and almost forgot to click my clicker, which was now hanging around my neck.
Click.
“Next!”
We kept “working the door” for another five minutes. Nick—asking people’s last names and scanning his lean finger down the paper to tick off their names; me—smiling stupidly at the people as Nick checked them off the list, stamping their hands with a branded Moth stamp featuring, you guessed it, a moth.
A few times, I spotted a grimace on people’s faces as they walked away, shaking their wrists in agony.
“Have a good evening!” I yelled to their backs, as I saw Nick do, and they turned politely and nodded.
I forgot to use the clicker several times, so I estimated the number of people that might have entered the door while I was daydreaming and clicked.
Click, click, click, click.
At one point, there were so many people that I lost track of who was who. Nick kept pushing my elbow, “My colleague here will stamp your hand.” I hit people’s wrists with the stamp like a Whack-A-Mole game, then rushed to click my clicker, only to find five more people waiting to stamp their hands.
Stamp, stamp.
Click, click.
“Nick, I think we need to change the ink in this thing,” I said, showing him the stamp, which had become visibly fainter.
“Oh, right. Work the door while I take care of it,” Nick said and rushed off toward the restroom, where, apparently, a hand stamp repair station was located.
Now it was my turn to greet people. I put on the same smile—though mine looked like I was not an insurance salesman but a mentally challenged conman—and said, “Hi, can I have your last name?” Then I used my finger to scan the list of names, trying hard not to miss one because that would have been embarrassing.
“Saint-Claire de Bonjour, it’s right there,” they might say. “What’s taking you so long?!”
I’ve lived in English-speaking countries for the better part of a decade—if we put all the years together—and I’ve watched American TV and listened to English-speaking podcasts all my life. But for some reason, I still meet native speakers, especially from the UK, whom I can’t understand. And I know it’s my problem, not theirs—English is my second language, they can speak it any way they want—but fuck!
Every time I misheard the name because of some peculiar Northern England accent, I had to say, “Pardon? Excuse me? Can you repeat that, please?” only to mishear the name for the fourth time in a row and just sit there and stare back blankly.
Because of this and Nick’s lengthy absence, a queue of people formed, waiting to have their hands stamped before they could enter the venue. I motioned to Nick to hurry up, and as he returned, I grabbed the stamp.
“Let me,” I said, pointing to a new batch of people arriving.
I could tell Nick didn’t like how I bossed him around—he was a long-time volunteer, and I was supposed to be “learning the ropes”—but that’s just me. If something stops working, I take charge. Even if it has worked before, I want things to work my way once I am here. Perhaps this is one of the things that makes me completely and utterly—as my father likes to say—unemployable.
I put my right hand, armed with the freshly inked stamp, in the air and took an elderly lady’s hand in my left, aiming to smash it with a fresh moth-shaped tattoo.
She winced as she saw the stamp coming down like a hammer on a nail and then—bam!—the fresh ink Nick had put in the stamp spilled all over her expensive-looking blouse.
“Oh. My. God. I am so sorry,” I said, squeezing my own butt to hold back laughter.
“It’s fine, dear,” she said, wiping the ink off. “Even the Queen makes mistakes.”
I considered this phrase as Nick rushed to fetch toilet paper from the nearest restroom. The other people in line took a step back, unsure whether to give me their hands. I tested the stamp a few times on the paper, leaving ink-smudged, moth-shaped marks over the printed guest names, as if to say, “See? This was a one-time thing! Please give me your hands!”
Once the ink stopped splashing in all directions, I motioned for the next guest to step forward and smashed his hand with the stamp.
“Ouch,” he said once I was done marking him.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“It does.”
And, because I wasn’t sure what to say, I said, “Have a wonderful evening!”
Then, realizing it had been at least ten minutes since I last touched the clicker, I made sure Nick wasn’t around and pressed it a gazillion times.
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click...
Once the event started, the Main Guy approached me back at the venue and asked whether I could tell a story. I said I wasn’t ready, but IF THEY REALLY NEEDED MY HELP, I could wing something.
I like to pride myself on doing scary things. I once read that courage is a muscle that can be trained. So whenever an opportunity comes to do something that terrifies me, I take it, even if just for the sake of doing something that scares me. What started as a habit for self-improvement is now a compulsion.
The Main Guy nodded and made me sign a waiver, which I didn’t read but signed anyway, as I usually do with waivers. Then he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You’ve done a lot today. After the story, have a break and grab yourself a beer.”
And because I had seen him talking with Nick before, I knew a rat was on this ship.
That night, I told a story on stage at The Moth. It was an embarrassingly personal story about how, after my ex-wife left me, I had to face my biggest fear, which was living by myself.
Once on stage, it amazed me how easy it was to forget my fears.
To make serious matters lighter, I decided to start with a joke and said, “In Russia, we say same-sex couples bring everyone up because everyone lives with their mother and grandmother.”
The silence that followed after this line was so thick I could hear a cockroach fart in the back of the room. But after that, I quickly got back on track.
By the end of the story, I received some applause and a score.
Mine was one of the lowest of the entire event.
“The scores are all over the place today,” the Main Guy tried to console me afterward.
“Who cares,” I said. “At least I told a story, and you didn’t.”
“True that,” he said, giving me a weird look that I am sure meant I wouldn’t be invited to volunteer again.
As I stood by the bar, sipping my IPA, I thought about what had made me come here today. What was I trying to prove to myself? What was I trying to prove to others?
Having worked in corporate all my young professional life, I am embarrassed to say that I used to look down on people who worked in service professions, as if they couldn’t figure out anything better to do with their lives. To paraphrase Marc Maron, “Let’s face it. Being a barista wasn’t their life goal. It wasn’t the big plan for them.”
When I saw unemployed folks, I was one of those people who said, “Why don’t you just get a job at a coffee shop?”
But in the past several months, I did apply—out of curiosity more than anything—to a few service jobs.
It took me becoming unemployed to realize that a) getting a job as a barista is almost as difficult as getting a corporate gig (especially if all your professional life you’ve spent staring at a computer screen and can’t make a cup of coffee without spilling half of it on your shirt), and b) getting a temp job doesn’t solve problems; it creates them. Now you have to not only look for a normal job but also, you know, work. And while you’re working, you’re not looking for a job. Opportunity costs add up.
The question of how to survive while being unemployed is one of those questions that, I guess, doesn’t have answers. Or maybe the answers lie in being creative. This is another way of saying that everyone comes up with their own path.
Such questions also include: How do you drink regularly, eat whatever you want, and not gain weight?
Or how do you love one person and still explore the joy of falling in love?
How do you, in other words, eat the cake and have it too?
Or, to quote a Russian saying, “Eat a fish and sit on a dick.”
When it comes to managing money, I had no good reference models. I was raised as a rich kid without actually being a rich kid.
I have all the habits of an oligarch’s son—I like to waste money, drive expensive cars, stay at luxury hotels, use Hermès cologne, smoke shisha, and get drunk on a Tuesday afternoon simply because why not?—but unlike an oligarch’s son, my father is, well, not an oligarch.
I imagine that if I were hired as, say, a bartender, I would be one of those people who spills pints on customers’ shoes.
And because this would be some pub—and not the great Moth, filled with nice people—there wouldn’t be a lady saying, “Even the Queen makes mistakes.”
It would most likely be some guy from Northern England, who’d use a lot of words like “cunt” and “fuck” and “mate,” and because I wouldn’t understand a word he was saying, I’d just reply, “Have a great evening!”
And probably get punched in the face.
And then get fired.
This would probably teach me a lesson—that some people are good at everything, and others, like yours truly, should just shut up and stick to their lane, playing the cards they were dealt.
Because that’s what long-term unemployment does to you. It makes you question your worth and puts you exactly where you belong. Once the savings run out and you seriously consider delivering pizzas to cover your credit card bill, any illusions of your own grandiosity magically disappear.
Suddenly, you see yourself exactly as you are—warts, debts, spilling ink on people’s clothes, unable to do any work beyond what you’ve been doing all this time, and all.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this, why not support me by becoming a paid subscriber? It costs less than a cup of coffee per month and will make me very very happy.
As always you make me laugh Serge but I am so sorry for how tough life is for you and so many young people, not to mention the impossibility of ever owning a property. I started work in an era when as a chartered physiotherapist I had hospitals desperate to employ me and home ownership was affordable, easy and taken for granted. That world no longer exists, I hope that the future will improve for all of you, but.........