The Irish magic of work

With low unemployment and Ireland's "Celtic Tiger," it took me only two months to find a permanent job in Dublin. What's more, the temp assignments that sustained me until then were far more pleasant than any I found in New York. That includes my five-month stint at ABC-Disney in Manhattan which, glamorous as it sounds, translated as 21 weeks and three days of insults and temper tantrums at the hands of two spoiled producers of children's programming. Magic kingdom indeed.

My other New York temp job was assistant to a senior VP in international branding. I came aboard Weider Publications just after the family-owned business sold out to a conglomerate, at a time when my boss was secretly organising her department's downsizing. Weeks of preparation culminated in a Monday morning bloodbath in which unsuspecting employees came to work only to be laid off before lunch and shown the door by security guards. Travel mugs sat, coffee going cold, on desks that would never again see their occupants. Wednesday, my boss was stunned to receive her own pink slip and I spent my final days there packing company freebies, pricey knick-knacks and expensive "product samples" for her to spirit away.

Improving upon those shining examples of neoliberalism was easy. My first Irish temp assignment was routine admin-support for Boots pharmacy and while their computer hardware was antiquated, software ancient and internet connection dial-up, they were friendly, appreciative and a pleasure to work for.

Next came the mailroom of a Dutch investment company, where I made the acquaintance of the laziest person I've ever met. Scottish and 20-something, your man lived 15 minutes' walk from work yet didn't arrive on time once in six days. Forty-five minutes late, the first words out of his mouth would be, "Three buses went by without stopping!" Or, "Fell asleep on the bus and missed my stop!" This hapless victim of a global tardiness conspiracy would then hand me half the work and head out to purchase a sticky bun. After eating breakfast while checking his email, he'd begin his daily routine of telephone calls to friends and cigarette breaks. By lunchtime, he'd have given me the other half of the work and as new work came in, he gave it to me without a pretence of taking half. He surfed the net, gossiped, fetched free Cokes from the canteen and disappeared, reeking of cigarettes on his return, while I stuffed envelopes, franked letters and logged courier packages. When half past five rolled around – as measured by a clock 10 minutes fast – he was gone.

Temp work is short-lived and I gladly left this job behind and concentrated on interviewing for permanent positions. What I find hardest as a female-to-male transsexual job-seeker is a female work-history I can't allude to. Given that I graduated from college in 1992, look 15 years younger than I am and leave my birth date off my CV, I am taken as a youngish man starting out in life. In reality, I juggled fulltime office work on college campuses, lunchtime and evening classes and primary custody of a teenage daughter to become the first person in my family to graduate from university at age 40.

I don't want to lie even by omission, but most employers shy away from transsexual applicants. So if asked, "Why didn't you pursue journalism out of college?" I'm afraid to say, "I couldn't face undergoing a sex-change in a newsroom." I refer instead to the (truthful) fact that during my two years of graduate school, local newspapers laid off one in five seasoned reporters who then competed for available jobs. Likewise answering, "My daughter was in high school and I didn't want to drag her out to the boondocks where journalism jobs could be found," raises eyebrows, for "real men" prioritize career over a child's preferences. Not to mention, a teenaged daughter ten years ago provokes a double-take on my age and age-discrimination is a genuine concern.

So the sex-change improved my job prospects as I'm now perceived as younger and male, but I'm at a disadvantage because socialized as a girl in the 1950s, I lack male competitiveness. As I knot my tie preparing for a coveted second interview I wonder, how would I be greeted walking in as my former self? Who would get the job in a competition, the 50-something divorced mother or the thirty-something single man? In dedication, intelligence, university degree and job skills, the two are identical, however, each walks a very different path.