I dreamt I had flown back from holiday to attend a job interview. The journey was arduous and dull. I returned home dishevelled, gathered up what I thought I might need, and walked to Newcastle’s Civic Centre.
The civic centre is an interesting building caught somewhere between a genuinely interesting piece of modernist architecture and a drab bit of neoliberal utility. I have only been inside it once, to record an interview for a documentary about accelerationism as two separate couples got married down the hall. That just about sums up the vibe.
I’m not sure what the job I had applied for was. It was all very secretive, which made it seem interesting, albeit basic and entry-level enough for me to be a viable candidate. I think it had something to do with telecommunications. It may well have been a job in the post room — the sort of role that involves sorting letters sensitive enough to warrant the signing of the Official Secrets Act.
I was trying to fill out a form on my phone, which required a stupid amount of codes and a bespoke app to access their network. It took me hours and hours and it wasn’t long before I’d been hanging around the offices for the entire day, from dawn until dusk. But people didn’t seem to go home or work a normal 9-to-5. They were all lurking around, waiting to see how the potential new recruits were processed. It felt like living in the 2019 videogame Control, although much more mundane and without superpowers.
I got distracted talking to a man and two women sat under a gold-plated plaque with the word “HAUNTCOMPULOGICAL” embossed across it. (I will forgive my unconscious for settling on such an ugly word and imbuing it with an amount of interest and significance it does not deserve.) They were in charge of the company archive, which included sensitive documentation of the company’s history and development, as well as a collection of artworks commissioned over the years to connect the company to the public, although these were now deemed sensitive as well.
I assumed that my job might be in this department, maybe in dealing with the archive, as I’ve held that sort of job before, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the sign, the ‘hauntcompulogical’. They didn’t seem to know or think about what it meant, as if it had been adopted as the unofficial name for their department long ago and an overfamiliarity meant they no longer questioned it. But it made sense as a name for these bureaucrats in charge of a collective memory bank, who were nonetheless more invested in maintaining a collective amnesia than sharing its contents.
I wondered about the internet today and all of its ghosts, its dead links and redundancies and the enshittification of everything. At a certain point, I realised I’d missed my interview and basically wasted my entire day waiting around in a haunted Kafkaesque labyrinth, which didn’t feel like a total waste (because vibes) but I had other things to be getting on with.
I left the building and woke up.