Department Of Wank And Problems.

Lost me job.  Again.  If only I could somehow get paid for not holding on to consecutive roles.  Can’t though, so here I am again, applying for jobs that aren’t really for me so that I can afford to spend my evenings weeping in the warm, with access to crisps.  And so, once more, I find myself split between knowing I’ve got to find something and at least there are crisps, and the crushing understanding that unless something pretty sweet comes up, I will quickly grow to resent and despise my next period of employment. It’s a win-win. Wait, no, the other one – inescapably bleak. Yep. That’s it.

Part of the problem is that employers do tend to describe their vacancies using what I shall generously describe as ‘absolute bullshit’. If you want me to call people all day and try to sell them stuff, don’t tell me that you want an administrator. Tell me you want a salesman, because then I can not apply. If you want a customer service representative to assist customers with any issues the may be experiencing, that’s fine, but don’t try to get that guy to up-sell, or cross-sell, or mine for ore. It’s simple really: advertise the job you actually want doing.

Another part of the problem is the application and interview process, which goes as follows – fill in the same form hundreds of times, lie quite a bit. Eventually get an interview, lie quite a lot. If you mask your pungent desperation well enough and convince them that you’ve always wanted to sit under strip lighting whilst pecking monotonously at a keyboard until you start to dribble, you may well get a job. Competency based is the worst. ‘Give an example of time when…’ is one of the most obvious set ups for fabrication ever created. How are they going to verify that I once crawled through broken glass in order to please a cretin, or disprove that I once spent a month living under a customers stairs to make up for a missed delivery? They aren’t. They can’t. The vast majority of jobs require that you can walk, talk, recognise the alphabet and not kill yourself when subjected to intense mental atrophy, WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME DO THREE SIDES ON WHEN I LAST WENT ABOVE AND BEYOND?!?!? Can’t we just walk into a place, have a quick chat, be clearly suitable and have a trial?

Then there’s signing on. Urgh. How are people living on this? Why are they putting their energy into fiddling that particular system when it seems like it must be so much easier to just get a job? Perhaps I’m missing something. Regardless, it’s an overly complicated system that doesn’t really help, in which you are encouraged to do everything digitally and then handed swathes of paperwork to keep track of. Brilliant. I’m not dissing the individuals here but the framework they must adhere to. Like usual. It’s difficult to really help people when the rules state that you must tick all the boxes, and then all of these boxes, and then go to this dreadful website – just a few tick boxes there – and then form 34B and there – BOOM – you’ve got a meeting booked to discuss form 34B-7i.

Amongst all of that, I must confess that another part of the problem is me. I know, unbelievable! I derive no sense of worth from doing a job, nothing about the working world makes me feel complete. Quite the opposite. This makes it tricky to engage. I’m too honest as well, a quality that all employers claim to value until it shows up for work one day and points out that nothing makes any sense and that everything is terrible. The biggest issue is that if I take a job that has been sold as one thing, and then I’m asked to do something outside of that, I won’t. I won’t consciously deceive anyone, especially a potential customer. I won’t do something one way if there’s another better way. Basically, I don’t fit very well in the modern office or sales environment.

Unfortunately, although I don’t really like it or give it any respect, I do still require money. I’m not confident or ballsy enough for crime, I don’t like the idea of not being able to have and do things, and I realise that the ability to rain down gifts and dinners on the fairer sex is one of the few things that can counteract my personality. So work it is then. I just need to find something that doesn’t make me hate myself, everything and everyone else.