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The older I get, the more cynical I get. It is not a fact I am proud of, but it is a fact. I disbelieve just about everything the establishment and the media tell us. I am convinced that we are manipulated into being the submissive, law-abiding robots that we have become. It grieves me greatly.

Thursday 28 June 2012

Unemployed ... it's a full time job.

The country is in chaos, flash floods abound - or so I am reliably informed by friends who should be working but kindly skive off every hour or so to entertain me on facebook. Sitting here in my garden in Kent it all seems hard to believe. The sun is high in the sky, and I can hear lawnmowers whirring up and down my street. All we need is the sound of church bells and I could be in a television drama. I check the back door- no pool of blood. I therefore have to accept that this is real, I am not in some twee village setting in a detective drama and I am still unemployed. I have contributed nothing since February to my blog, and, because I remain unemployed, I am presumed to be loafing all day while the workers have their noses to the grindstone so I can live the life of Riley. The reality is that I am living the life of Yosser Hughes. Apart from the odd glass of wine on a sunny afternoon, I have been greatly occupied in applying for jobs.

Having a job means you go to work, and you get to come home later and relax, or if you can't relax at least you get to not be at work. Unemployment is different - on the plus side it is a very short commute and you get every weekend off, but the very, very steep downside is that being unemployed is a round the clock job. It constantly occupies your mind. You never stop looking for work, worrying about money and trying to think of new ventures, new careers, different approaches to the same old problem. Picture the woman searching frantically inside her handbag in an attempt to locate her ringing mobile. That is what it is like looking for job. You know it is there, you just can’t reach it, and for the unemployed the handbag is vast, the mobile is tiny and every time it rings, 50 to 200 other people are knocking you aside in an attempt to get to the phone first.

Under Einstein's definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, I am insane. Being middle-aged, single and menopausal, I may also be insane under many other definitions, however for now I will just stick with Einstein. Not only do I do the same thing over and over , I also have to document it, so that DWP can see that I am doing it, albeit see that I am doing it without making comment, actually reading what I write or even actually looking at me. Sometimes I hand over an old spreadsheet just to see if they are really reading them. Only once has this been spotted. I'm not even trying to get one over on them. I just feel that my job search is futile on all counts. If the dole office treat my job search and me as irrelevant, what chance do I stand with employers? Monday was a signing on day, so I dragged myself down to the fun-factory formerly known as the Job Centre. It is now known as JobCentrePlus - plus what? Plus no jobs? Why do all the words run together? Rebranding used to be writing everything in lower case. Now capitalisation is back, but spaces are out. Some smug, slick git in marketing will have been paid a fortune for that breakthrough branding moment. In marketing terms, it was akin to splitting the atoms. In everyone else's terms, it is a complete waste of time and money, and it is a scandal that public organisations have branding, let alone rebranding.

Again, I digress. JobCentrePlus, signing on, actually being on time for once, but still having to wait for at least 20 minutes. You can feel your brain cells dying and the will to live slyly looking at its watch, muttering a lame excuse and quietly sliding down the plastic bench and sneaking across the carpet tiles away from you whilst you wait. As I walked to the dole officer's desk, I felt my shoulders droop and my legs turn to lead. He wasn't going to torture me, it is just soul-destroying, possibly for both parties. He took my form, asked me to confirm my name and address and then asked me if my situation had changed at all since my last visit. I replied that I was somewhat poorer. To that, he gave no response - no sympathy, no humour, no acknowledgement. He continued to look disinterestedly at my list of job applications, handed it back to me, got me to sign a form to say I was there, and said 'you're done'. No mate, turkeys are done, steaks are done, I am poor, desperately seeking work and your job should be to help me find work, not to judge how cooked you think I might be.

I read endless articles on how I should 'network' and get myself out there. Brilliant, why didn't I think of that? I remember, because I can't afford to keep popping into London to hang around for friends and acquaintances to finish work and also because at times unemployment feels like a communicable disease. The employed don't want to deal with the unemployed. We have become the lepers of the 21st century, unclean pariahs in the financial meltdown. We are, as UB40 said over thirty years ago, a statistic, a reminder of a world that doesn't care. That recession was different - primarily in my case because it didn't affect me. Selfishly I then didn't give a toss about the unemployed, I didn't know anyone who was unemployed. Now it is different, now there are even unemployed people in the Home Counties. How I remember with shame the callow young woman I once was. My search, which occupies so much of my time is fruitless and futile. Recruiters and HR departments advertise roles which require 'an immediate start', and then immediately rule out anyone who has been out of work for more than a few months. Now they even have software that fulfils that role for them, so they don't have to taint their delicate little eyes with the CVs of the long-term unemployed. I have tried different approaches - which basically boil down to begging friends to find me a job. I am fortunate in that several people have passed on my CV and recommended me, but so far nobody has so much as given me an interview. I know it is down to me, I know I need to be doing something else. I just fail to know what that something else is.

Today I received not one, but three rejections. I don't know whether to be grateful that my applications are being acknowledged, or dejected about being rejected. One of the replies was by letter. This is a first. Most rejections are via e-mail, the occasional company or recruiter will call, many will just ignore you, having first warned you by computer-generated auto-response that 'if you don't hear within two weeks, you are clearly pond life and beneath our contempt' or words to that effect. I am waiting for the day when a company is honest enough to just send out a standard rejection "Millwall", i.e. an e-mail singing 'you're shit and you know you are'. Yes the press would be up in arms, Dave would be bleating about broken Britian to the first video camera he could find, regardless of whether the camera was wielded by BBC, Sky or just a Japanese tourist with only three words in English, one of which was 'Beckham'. However, I for one would have a bit more respect for them.

A letter, however, is a rarity. The firm in question are to be congratulated. I will therefore forgive them for the line 'there were other candidates whose experience is a closer match to our requirements'. The role was advertised again this week - so those other candidates weren't a great match really, were they? I said I would forgive them, and I will, but I can still bitch about it. The 'better match' line is a common one in rejection emails. I really don't understand why companies which receive dozens of applicants for each role, then go on to readvertise the vacancy. Just take one, stop faffing around with endless rounds of dithering and soul searching, wasting more and more money when you could take a chance on one of the first applicants and have someone actually doing the job whilst you (a) see if they are a good fit; and (b) covertly line up another applicant from the several hundred that have applied. 90% of all job descriptions bear no resemblance to the role, so stop trying to find an exact match and whittling people out (and by people, I mean me) for completely spurious reasons! Why do firms take so long and invest so much in the recruitment process? The chain of people a CV has to pass by to get to the actual person recruiting is now ridiculous. Most industries eliminate middle-men in a recession. The recruitment industry seems to be overflowing with them.

I think cowardice is the culprit here. You can't fire a permanent employee unless they have threatened, in writing and in their own blood, to kill the CEO - and even then if they were working for one of the big banks they may be let off for having carried out a public service. Companies are therefore more wary than ever of employing the wrong person.  You can, however, let someone go who doesn't perform well during their trial period. You can fail to permanently hire a temp-to-perm recruitee. You can just not bother to renew the contract of a contractor. Why isn't this done more? Because it requires man-management skills. Where are all the man-managers? Unemployed, replaced by Consultants, with a 'C', HR graduates and bonus packages, after all, why manage, train and develop someone when you can bribe them. If all this sounds very much like sour grapes, that is because it is. I now define myself by my unemployed status, and it isn't a status with which I wish to identify. A friend of a friend asked me what I did for a living, I replied that I didn't work, I was unemployed. She nodded and smiled, as if I was talking about a floral display, and asked me what I did when I was employed. She was being polite, and merely making small talk, I was being difficult and taking it all too personally. I wanted to shout 'but I'm unemployed, that's my job now'.

Several friends have assured me that it isn't me (I find it hard to agree), that I may be over-qualified for many of the roles advertised, too 'mature', i.e. likely to undermine 23 year old managers merely by being twice their age. Surely it would do someone of 23 good to realise they don't know everything? I would even promise to refrain from ever pointing out that, actually, they don't know anything. It could possibly be of benefit to have the occasional employee who doesn't come into work dressed for a night out clubbing, can spell, has a reasonable grasp of the English language, and can understand simple instructions from even more simple 23 year old managers. But who am I to question the trend for younger and younger managers. Where does it end though? Nursery school business leaders?

As if the endless search for a job wasn't exhausting enough, being unemployed impacts the other areas of your life too. At first I socialised less, now I socialise in different ways than previously. One of the good things to have come out of being unemployed is changing my attitude towards money and its importance. I still need money, I just realise that I actually need a lot less of it. I go round to friends, I invite friends round to me far more than I ever did. Neighbours pop in, and we while away a few hours in the garden with tea and home-made cake, or a glass of wine. I have also fostered by a virtually blind shar pei; left in pain by the "rescue" sanctuary, I have fought for him to have the care he needs and in return he has kept me sane these past months - well relatively so.  He has shared my home and eaten his own weight in tripe and we have both  thrived.  Long-term unemployment can find you still in your pajamas at midday, however having to be up, dressed and out with the dog early means I get much more out of each day.

I am much more active in the community.  A neighbour and I have encouraged residents in our road to join a community planting project to improve the look of the house fronts. The road look tidier and much, much greener. I am truly blessed in the amount of support I receive from family and my friends. My cousins descend on me with food, alcohol and their keen sense of humour and raucous laughter - my neighbours are still getting over Saturday night's prosecco-fuelled revelry. Friends drop in and telephone to check I am OK, invite me to dinner, invite me for a cup of tea and ply me with wine. Both sets of immediate neighbours keep my fridge stocked with goodies from their allotments. Although people I considered good friends gradually dropped contact, not wanting to be unemployed by association, many more have shown what true friends they really are. One even offered to lend me the money to cover my mortgage until I was back on my feet.

Friends and family also keep me sane with the tales and normality of their working lives. I am not employed, but at least I can say 'I know people who are'. I live in hope that a job will come to me, and probably from a completely unexpected route. In the meantime, I keep on applying online and calling agencies and recruiters, knowing that the outcome will not be any different, but hoping against hope that one day it will be. It’s been a sobering experience, an eye-opener as to how easily it is to fall out of the loop, to lose your footing and how an extended holiday has extended almost a year beyond that planned, leaving me struggling to pay bills. It has also taught me that I don’t need a fat bank account and a stressful job to be happy, that the simple things in life are sometimes the most satisfying. When I get a job and restock my wine rack, I will raise a glass to that.

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