My New Jacket. On the perversity of life's little accidents with a digression into theology and the origin of superstitious belief

In December of last year it became plain that my contract to supply services to the Derbyshire Building Society was not going to be renewed. The Derbyshire had got themselves into a terrible mess over the acquisition of a new computer system and their project was not going anywhere, cancellation was in the air and cancellation of the project meant cancellation of employment for those involved with it. As it turned out it was not just the hired help like me who were about to feel the pain, but some permanent members of staff, those with long records of loyal employment, felt it too. The Derbyshire have since appealed to the Nationwide to take them over citing (as was reported in the financial press) 'a failed IT project' as a contributor to their downfall.

So, I started looking for another opportunity to deliver my skills to the market around the end of last year. To my growing dismay, I found the market wanted nothing to do with me. I tried revamping my CV, I tried hawking myself to other industry sectors apart from the banking and finance sector which had supported me (as I had supported it in turn) over the last ten years. Nothing. Nada, no response. What interviews I managed to secure generated feedback like 'too technically oriented', 'too solution oriented', 'lives too far away from the client'. These spurious and meaningless words left me feeling something was in the air and it wasn't connected to a personal hygiene problem. What was in the air was the impending doom of the credit crunch fallout. Banks had stopped lending money, first to each other, then to businesses and while the dregs of spare cash were being drained from the economy by domestic lending they were all waiting for the end of the world to arrive. My conversations with recruiters all conveyed the same message: "It's getting really bad out there" and I was out in the cold.

About five years before I had taken some summer work through a local employment agency in a warehouse and discovered that a long night shift in ill-fitting footwear was too much for my flesh and blood to bear, well for my feet to bear anyway. So I had taken a week off to gain proficiency in the skills required to operate an electric counterbalance fork lift truck and its cousin the reach truck. Thus equipped I was able to return to my night shift job and get the weight off my feet. As it happened, my new skills were worth an extra pound an hour so that was a welcome benefit and helped towards recouping the cost of the training and the lost earnings.

So there was my second string. I would refresh my skills on mechanical handling equipment and seek local employment. My locality is central for the UK and close to many fast road connections. It attracts many warehouse and distribution or "logistics" enterprises and the map is peppered with tall grey and anonymous buildings which are surrounded night and day by articulated lorries. Inside these building swarms of safety-booted and hi-vis-suited individuals are buzzing and whining about on their counterbalance and reach trucks to make sure that the lorries are unloaded and their contents put away. When they are not doing that they are fetching pallets down from the racking and lining them up on trailers ready to go out to the next warehouse. Somewhere, someone was waiting with cash to pay for me and my second-string skills, I would be ready.

I found the fork lift truck training agency who could refresh my driving skills for a ninety pound per day fee and booked my two-day course with them. As the start date approached I located the steel-toecapped footwear I had put away nearly five years before and tried them on. Not quite instant agony, but before an hour had passed I convinced myself a new pair of safety shoes was called for so, with a quick mental apology to my bruised credit, I acquired a fresh pair. The training came and went. I passed the theory test and the two practicals. I made mistakes but not enough to accumulate a failing score. I was confident in my ability to manoeuvre the vehicle in narrow spaces and to fetch down a pallet and put it away again without breaking anything or endangering life or limb of myself or passers-by.

Next I sign up with another local employment agency. The people with whom I had dealt with five years before had gone. Their premises were boarded up and had been offered to let for some considerable time. Like my own professional prospects they too had suffered from the chilly and uncaring winds of commerce that sweep away individuals, businesses and whole industries. The new local employment agency was happy to record my vital information and without bending, folding spiking or mutilating me in any way arranged for my "induction" session at the most local of low grey anonymous warehouses which is where I shall be next Monday. I am unclear about the agenda for the induction. I am told that employees are expected to manhandle refrigerators on and off lorries two at a time using a sack truck i.e. manually so it seems my expensive retraining may have been wasted.

But I do need a hi-vis jacket. And I want a warm one. It's the end of October and the night air is chilly. This morning I visited the workwear shop and acquired a brightly-coloured jacket. It's fluorescent yellow front and back with fluorescent orange sleeves. There's yards of reflective tape, pockets, zips, an elasticated waist, a sturdy zip-up front, elastic and velcro at the cuffs and a fleecy lining and collar. It's just the job. I was so pleased to find it comfortable that I wore it as I left the store and drove home. I as still wearing it when the phone call came advising me that I had been short-listed for the business analyst job I had applied for three weeks previously. Apologies for the delay and all, but the person dealing with it had been off ill for a weeks and could I do an interview the following Monday?. "No" I replied, keenly aware that this would conflict with my previously-arranged induction session and the techniques of picking up two refrigerators at a time using a sack truck. "But I can do Tuesday".

Which brings me to superstition. There is part of me that wants to believe some cosmic intelligence was waiting for me to accept the humiliating decision to abandon my comfortable professional white collar career for a future of minimum-waged manual labour. Further that cosmic intelligence waited still longer for me to squander what is probably the last of my liquid assets on safety footwear, forklift training and a new high-vis jacket. This morning that cosmic intelligence was trailing this opportunity across my path to see how I would react, tempted like Job and Jacob and Lot and Noah. I believe myself to be a rational sort of man with a belief in tangible cause and measurable effects. I really cannot bring myself to believe that this cosmic intelligence is testing my mettle with these challenges or that my response to these challenges will cause this cosmic intelligence to be either delighted or appalled, but some days it does fell like it might be the case. Sometimes we dismiss at as 'Sod's Law' but this indicates some system of cause and effect might be at work. I know, because I have seen the working out, that there is no rationale and that these events are random and unconnected because there is no God.

In another age I would call it 'God's will' that I should find myself without my preferred choice of employment prospects at one end of the year and have that choice offered to me once again at the other end of the year. Here I am in twenty-first century England, a country of mixed faiths and atheism where appealing to God's will or karma are regarded as eccentricisms, at least by people like me. So how and why do I feel that the renewal of my job prospect is a direct consequence of my preceding loss of privileges and unenjoyable financial peril. As ever, Richard Dawkins has an answer. In the wide, grassy and predator-rich environment in which we evolved a sensitivity to threat or peril was a survival instinct and this survives as a talent to see patterns where no patterns exist, to explain random series of events as causes and effects. Richard Dawkins goes on to say that's where superstition comes from and ultimately a belief in karma or a cosmic consciousness which is keeping track that everybody gets out what they're willing to put in. It doesn't require much of an orator to turn that into a divinely-enforced ethical and moral code and lead to the protestant work ethic we've all heard of.