Story: The best day of Toby’s life

The best day of Toby’s life could very well be constituted as his worst. If you asked his mother or even his friends, they would at the very least describe it as bad. But for Toby it was a day of ends and yet also beginnings. It was the day Toby Scott quit Recruitment.

You see when Toby was six, he had not dressed up in a cheap suit and charged about the house decrying to all that would listen ‘I AM A RECRUITER’. No that would be a fireman. And when he was 14 the personality analysis he did in school did not suggest he was innately, down to his very neurons, put on this earth to recruit. No that would be Marine Biology. And when he paid over £27,000 and spent three years of his life studying Drama he did not do this with the intention of abandoning the lights of the stage for the glory of cold calling. So exactly one year and 4 days after leaving university behind it was with great bemusement that Toby found himself shaking hands with a balding, slightly sweaty man in a cheap suit welcoming him to the greatest new recruitment agency going.

Now the series of events leading up to this point are rather predictable. Firstly Drama, while incredibly good for the soul, does not have a very good track record of providing graduates with jobs or money. Secondly while Toby loved his mother (he made great points to stress to me here how much he does love his mother), she was a nagger. Capital N. Now I believe all mothers have a proclivity for nagging, especially to their jobless 20-year-old sons. However according to Toby, she had turned Nagging into an art form, and Toby was the canvas upon which she painted.

 And so Toby had gone looking for a job, a job which would provide him the money to leave his darling mother behind and had almost zero special requirements. He landed on Recruitment because if there was one thing Toby could do well it was speak, if he could master the stage he could master the phones. And the commission, oh the commission. If Toby was gods gift to recruitment, as he suspected he would be, he could be renting within two months.

 So Toby set out into the world of Recruitment, and found himself to be rather average at it and the world to be rather drab and the people to be rather boring. He did move out, but sometimes, when it was very quiet, he found he might rather have liked a little nagging.

 Hence one year two months and three days after beginning Toby quietly quit his recruitment job and moved home to his wonderful mother all on the same day. In many ways he felt like a failure. But as he sat in his room and begun to search for local theatre jobs, and his Mothers voice faintly rung up the stairs asking about washing, a small smile crept onto his face. And for the first time in, well you know exactly how long, Toby felt like Toby.

 

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Essay: Exploring the Rewrite