Who do you think you are?

While staying with my parents, I was quickly updated regarding the status of almost all of my mothers friends, their children and various peers from my primary school days. A lot of this I now already know thanks to facebook. This is superceded when one of my mum's friends visits and I get double the dose of updates about people who I only know vaguely and care for even less.

However, this one friend of my mother (Carol) also has a daughter graduating this year from a respectable red brick university (henceforth referred to as Daphne). Psychology. What else? She was visiting this weekend and I bumped into her across the kitchen table. Daphne was looking for work to help her become a psychologist and had been offered a fairly useful experience as a paid research assistant at the university she was studying at. However, she had turned this down without a second though, as it had only paid her 16 thou a year and that was clearly not enough seeing as "she had a degree and everything". Carol spouted on how scandalous this was, that her daughter had studied so hard and was being offered almost nothing in her eyes. Carol had then gone onto say she would expect Daphne to be on at least 25k-30k a year as this was, in her eyes, an average graduate starting salary.

Mum took this as a cue and launched into my own long drawn out story (most of which you probably know if you have been reading this blog for any significant time). I just sat there cringing, while mum let loose about the rollercoaster that I had been through. In my almost teenage level of selfishness I had completely been oblivious to the impact my constant sob stories and requests for money had on mum. Carol seemed to turn white, then almost brushed off the story saying she was sure Daphne would find something high paying and suitable soon and then went off on some other tangent. The clear signal was "It was not to be talked about".

Carol then tried to get me to offer Daphne a job ("see if I could pull a few strings"). Because I so frequently offer totally unexperienced students, who haven't even graduated yet, 30 thousand pounds a year on the recommendations of their mother. If there was an award for most clumsy counterproductive networking attempt 2009 I think this would win it hands down.