Spirit of a vampyre.

[reddragdiva]

• If you want to make dollies of yourself but are sick of all the cartoon waifs, here are some dollies for those actually of typical sizes.

markeris told me on Saturday that he thought I was someone who would instantly know the value of a soul. I was somewhat surprised and initially denied the charge, but realised I did have some idea.

The price of my soul is to eat well. I fear and loathe working for a living. It corrodes my heart. However, being able to eat the food I want to and drink the beer I want to, to live somewhere decent and to be able to live with my darling redcountess in London certainly beats life when I'm not working for a living.

I tell myself I'm renting my soul, not selling it. And what doesn't kill it does seem to make it stronger. This doesn't make it suck less.

So, tell me. What price have you taken for your soul? How does it feel? Is there a way out?

Mark's beard is horrible, by the way. And he's very proud of that fact.

Comments

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I write Java for money.

[reddragdiva]

Yes, but what's that do? Ways out? Gory details?

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

J2EE stuff for banks. Lots of buzzwords. I think it was shadow_jess who described the company as "As close as you can come to selling your soul to the city without actually doing it".

Sanity is maintained with the aid of science courses from the OU and foaming ale.

[mofette.livejournal.com]

I sell bling and be nice to people who I hate because they have money :(

[http://users.livejournal.com/raven_/]

NICE dollies.

I sit in an office and do fuck all day in, day out, dying of ennui... so that I can have nice things. And eat.

[theladyeve.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Well, I'm going to surround myself with shallow materialistic people I'll probably dislike, work 12 hour days and lie to people pretending I can get them jobs when I'm just pumping them for information.

Why? So I can raise the money to be involved in two or more voluntary development projects in foreign land, learn Spanish in Argentina and teach English there. Then I can get a job I actually want and enjoy.

In the short term, good company, good food and drink and access to lots of books, films and music is the going rate for my soul.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

You know what I do and what a price I've paid for it. Work stupid shifts. Watch people commit suicide. Manage to keep my voice even though after watching that, all I want to do is scream. And after two years of that have a nervous breakdown.

The cost of my soul? £26K a year. I think my sanity should be worth more than that, but London Underground disagree. Maybe an industrial tribunal will decide otherwise.

And maybe you're right; it hasn't killed me thus far. Maybe I'll be stronger when I come out the other side. Or maybe just wiser.

[reddragdiva]

Indeed.

See you tonight :-*

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Nobody seems inclined to make an offer, and really, my price is high enough that short of supernatural beings nobody could afford it anyway: I'd sell for excellent health for the rest of my long life.

Not gonna happen, though.

[redcountess]

As much as I would like to enjoy excellent health, I don't think my soul is the premium I would be prepared to pay.

[jozafeen.livejournal.com]

Around fiddypee anna cig I reckon! ;-)

[reddragdiva]

No, no, I'm talking about handing your soul over, not feeding it!

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

The going rate for my soul is mid-20K + OT.
And for that I surround myself with people I have little or nothing in common with 9 hours a day + subject myself to the misery of rush hour for 2 hours a day.
Is it worth it? Perhaps not, but it's better than the alternative.
Great, this has put a downer on me now. I guess I'll have to go and have lunch to cheer me up.

[liz-lowlife.livejournal.com]

Mark's beard is horrible, by the way. And he's very proud of that fact.


it smells too...

*ducks*

[markeris.livejournal.com]

no, that was my cock.

[reddragdiva]

Ah, that's why the 'beard' looks like that.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Science has my soul. Anybody who wants to borrow my soul is going to need to have room to accommodate science as well, because I can't separate them now.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

[To self] Read The Question...

The price Science paid for my soul was that it would keep it distracted so it bothered me about how shit the world is only a third as often as it used to, so that I didn't have to sedate it with flashing screens and refined sugar. It occasionally comes back for a holiday when I stop doing Science for a while.

[redcountess]

I nearly lost my soul for a crappy tech support job paying AU$30k, because I thought I was getting a career, and training, and all it did was destroy my social life and my health :-/

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

I make junkmail database work better. Usually, this means making sure that people that DON'T want something DON'T get it. That's actually morally satisfying, because I know full well that without my efforts, more people would get more junk mail that they didn't care about, and cost the company money to send. This is worth about ukp27k per year.

However, the experience of getting Tom Siebel's software working in a highly-regimented and lockstepped environment over middleware messaging links is a deathmarch that I wouldn't be happy with for twice that.

[redcountess]

Yes, that sort of job would be satisfying for me as well, that's why I want to do support - either admin or tech - for a non-profit organisation once I have recovered, to help people that help others.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I've spent the non-academic portion of my life doing just that. It's been satisfying, this last job I've even liked my co-workers (something I never thought possible), but after my umpteenth burnout brought on by being expected to do 2 jobs, I have sold my sould for

same money (but much more scope to increase)
5 minutes closer to home; 2 hour shorter work week
reasonably pleasant people (I hope)
and getting paid to turn up, work hard, be revoltingly efficient, with the added bonus of having help available when we're busy and being able to go home and not worry about stuff.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Additional irony is that this post appeared right below The Reg's feed item:

Britons are not workaholics

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/26/brits_not_workaholics/

Just working to live

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Soul? I think I had one of those, once. It had poetry and music in it.

It went wherever they went.

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

I work for an advertising agency. A global arse fucking agency. I'm soon to move to another global arse fucking agency who appreciate their human resources a bit more, will train me and pay me more, so I can have a place to live and money for food and stuff that I want occasionally.

Actually my new boss mailed me yesterday and said that one of her senior production people is leaving and I'm just the person for that sort of thing...

I've been upgraded in one fell swoop from 'production speck' to 'senior graphic artist'.

[reddragdiva]

Well done!

Now, about doing your own artwork ...

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

My soul is currently whored out for about $42k a year, which is about twice what i need to have a life on. Against that, i used to sign chunks of it off to various Worthy Causes TM (though it only ever got up to about 10%, not the half i could get by without) to make me feel like i was doing it for some more worthwhile reason than making some rich bastard richer for a small cut of the takings to support my own indulgences.

That's changed a bit, as half my money's now going to support Elaine while she finishes her studies to do what she really wants to do with her life, which is in itself also a Worthy Cause TM. Of course, the fact that she's now found something she really wants to do for a living has made me painfully aware of the thirteen years i've spent killing time while i tried to work out what i want to do when i grow up, so now i'm restless as hell. As to the way out, i'll have to get back to you when i find it.

[juliet]

I'm not sure I really *have* sold my soul, that much. I suppose it's a bit more sold now (sysadmin/Java developer for the astrophysics dept of Imperial College, so broadening the scope of human whatnot) than it was at my previous job (information/research for the League Against Cruel Sports, so working for something I believe to be morally right). But the LACS job was becoming really quite enormously tedious & depressing, whereas I really *like* working with computers.

I'd rather not work full-time, mind, so I suppose to that extent I'm selling my soul. In which case, it costs around £21,300 per year total. But I like what I'm doing, and I think it's for something approximating a Good Cause, & the time's a bit flexible, & I get my very own office & a Powerbook as well as the desktop. And most of the people I'm sysadminning for have some semblance of clue. I guess in practice my soul costs about 1/5 - 2/5 of that, since *ideally* I'd only work 3 or 4 days a week. Which may well be possible in a couple of years.

I really don't think I *could* healthily sell my soul further than that (i.e. work in the City/what my head defines as the 'bad' private sector). I know what happens when I do that even short-term, & it's too unpleasant. If I lost my job here & couldn't immediately find something that fitted my job-sanity-profile, I'd go back to medical secretarial temping until I could find something better, that being either Definitely Good (NHS) or at least a *bit* good (private - at least you're helping people get better, though I prefer NHS work in general), if boring as shit, & it keeps the bills paid.