The Creaking Machinery

“But this is absurd. You keep bringing me in here, then throwing me out again.”

Alan Collocott's patience is at an end. This is the fifth interview he has undergone in a seemingly endless selection process. He has been assessed, time and again, by the same executive for the same sales job for the better part of a year.

Throughout this series of interviews Alan is menaced and confounded, bullied and humiliated by the sadistic, emotionally unstable Human Resources Manager who oversees the process. But Alan is also a former army sergeant, a man with a few dark secrets of his own. A man fast approaching his breaking point.

“This interview is going to be over in less than five minutes and your name is not on the top of anyone's list, so you'd better tell me, why do you deserve this job?”

Anton Spadley, The Human Resources Manager, has nothing but contempt for the candidates he interviews on a daily basis. Anton's life has been a triumph of upward mobility. Born into an upper middle class family, he attended the best schools, made the best connections, acquired the highest qualifications and his corporate career has, accordingly, gone from strength to strength. He has a good home, beautiful wife and children and, at forty-two, is already a top level executive.

Anton is accomplished, successful and unendurably miserable. His affluent childhood was unhappy and has left him neurotic, his marriage is failing, his success at the company is illusory and beginning to unravel. He smokes in the office and has trouble controlling his emotions. He is paranoid and lecherous. He lusts after every woman he sees – particularly Nicollette, his sexually adventurous assistant, who rebuffs him continually. He takes out his frustrations on the applicants he interviews, torturing and toying with them for his amusement. Anton is a man courting his own inevitable destruction.

The Creaking Machinery depicts the job seeking process as a kind of living nightmare. It uses the job interview as a vehicle for exploring such tragi-comic themes as greed and grief, love and lust, the dehumanising effects of modern corporate culture and the confounding search for meaning in a largely indifferent society.