Democratic changes brought Karamustra the sack and a thousand kuna in welfare payments. Luckily, he had always been an ascetic, a faster, and he somehow made do. Today they summoned him to the Employment Office and offered him the job of cleaner in a shipyard. The clerk asked him quickly to write a short CV, and this is what he put down.

So, I was born fifty years back, an unspoiled and brilliant idiot, you could have convinced me of anything, just not in the existence of God and Communism, I couldn’t swallow those two things. I was in the phase of being a moderate optimist. Working with people I gradually began to sink into pessimism, and so it was until the army. In the army my picture of the world began to darken. Then to my misfortune I started to read a lot, look, and compare things. I started to feel the first signs of disgust. This was then an agnostic phase with indications of scepticism. After that came the eighties, searching for myself, travelling around Europe, having culture shocks, more comparisons and I became a moderate sceptic and existentialist, the image of the world was ever darker. The great Bolshevik Comrade Tito had to report to St Peter, and at home there were long winding queues for coffee and oil and I became a hard-line sceptic, and inclined to cynicism. I was into my thirties, looking at the huge amount of stupidity, crassness and idiocy, poisoned by it all, I became a cynic. I formed my own idea about God the creator and my own religion, in which I myself sometimes do not believe. In the nineties when we were juicily killing each other, I became a total nihilist, which took for granted an anarchism of the bourgeois liberal type, and people disgusted me for all time. Now I am hoping to get the job of cleaner.

When the clerk read it, he asked Karamustra:

“What’s this?”

“It’s my CV.”

“Are you taking the mickey, Mr Karamustra?”

“No, why?”

“If this is not a joke, then its better you went home, because this is not a psychiatrist’s, but an employment office.”

Karamustra got up and said:

“Listen you pen-pushing twerp, between you and a psychiatrist’s there’s no difference. Stinks the same, same hopelessness , no help or sympathy, and you hand out valiums in the form of wretched jobs, the only difference is you don’t have a white and there are no nurses for you to pinch their arses.”