Week 8

Well waddya know! That's what I would have said in what I consider to be a pretty good American accent. As an aside, generally my kids think my accents are shit and tell me to talk in a 'normal' voice. Secretly I suspect/hope the kids think my accents are quite good. 'No, they're really fucking shit,' would be their response (if they were allowed to swear).

Back to 'Well waddya know'. Perhaps I thought it or perhaps I did actually say it. It would have been to no-one in particular given I was sitting on my own at home. I grew up with the notion that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. I have no idea if that's true. I think if you're on your own then talking to yourself makes a lot of sense otherwise you might not speak out loud for a whole day or even longer. That can't be healthy. I've added 'Check if talking to yourself is a sign of madness or good for you?' to my list of things to investigate when I've got some time. Obviously I have plenty of time but I still have a To Do list and there are plenty of other tasks that currently rank higher in priority.

The reason for my exclamation is that one of those more important tasks is to explore the feasibility of a change in career (see week 7 post). As part of this whilst perusing the internet, I came across an opportunity for the first step at a future career. A volunteer's position for one day a week as a Tropical Birds Keeper at London Zoo. Exciting!! A key qualifying criteria appeared to be the ability to tolerate high humidity. For me that felt like a win. Instead of toiling in the cold and wet weather of an English winter, I'd be in t-shirt and shorts in a tropical rainforest. Unfortunately another requirement was to submit a CV. I hadn't updated my CV in 12 years and I was aware that CVs had got a lot more sophisticated with photos and fancy presentation.

Unperturbed I searched 'Create your own CV - free' and up popped numerous websites offering me help. I clicked on a couple and after deciding they were all much of a muchness, I went ahead with 'Livecareer'. To date, I haven't been particularly overwhelmed by AI but with this site, if you write in your job title, it then lists all the tasks and achievements you likely completed in your role. I'm not sure if that's AI but my first thought was Winner! All I had to do was check the tick boxes for those that applied to me.

My second thought was Hmmm. After checking a number of boxes, I reviewed the proposed draft CV. It turns out that going from a bank to an audit firm to an investment bank to a hedge fund and finally to a private equity fund all within finance leads to a CV that doesn't necessarily shout 'Tropical Birds Keeper'. Nor is it even a whispered murmur.

I suspect it unlikely that someone at London Zoo would relish reading three pages about how I provided strategic financial insight, prepared budgets and forecasts and achieved clean audits etc. So I cut and pasted a couple of key 'good things' from my old CV over the proposed draft to reduce it to 1.5 pages and went with that. I also added in 'birder' to an updated list of hobbies - thereby showing my interest in tropical birds. It turned out I needed to pay £1.75 to download a copy of my CV. I figured London Zoo person wouldn't be happy to follow a link to this site so I paid the money and downloaded the CV. So much for the 'free CV'.

The volunteer opportunity also required an application form to be filled out. I used the text box to outline my many credentials for tropical bird keeping including that I recently downloaded the Merlin Birds App and I had started making a life list of birds that I've seen. I didn't mention that I was only up to 17 birds. None of which are a tropical bird. I could have included that I once found a parrot in the garden when I was a child. My Mum loves telling that story because she didn't believe me when I told her there was a parrot in the garden. It had escaped from a neighbour's house. On reflection, it's not a great story but my Mum still likes it, so I like it. It probably won't be something I bring up should I be invited to interview. Given Whipsnade had over 100 applications for a volunteer role in the antelope enclosure, I suspect tropical birds will be even more popular so I'm not feeling optimistic.

But I did end the week by seeing a Eurasian green woodpecker in our garden. 18 birds on the life list now! And it even looks like a tropical bird.