Coping with redundancy in your 50's. Again.

Voluntary contribution

2010-11-23T17:33:00.097Z

You have all this spare time now you don't have a job. So why not volunteer and give something back to the community?
So goes the received wisdom. Usually from those who have never volunteered. Often in the Government or Civil Service.

I've done voluntary work now for some years. It was called a job and involved working much longer than my contracted hours such that the effect on my salary was to halve it if you divided actual salary by hours worked. But I digress, I'm not talking about the goodwill factor that most organisations use to exploit their workforce, or the the implied 'if you don't do it then we'll find someone who will' chat that some managers indulge in, I'm talking about good, honest doing it for free stuff, pro bono, because it makes a difference. That sort of stuff.

It's a good job that so many people are prepared to do this as our society would collapse if they didn't. Or, conversely, someone would have to pay for people to do it and reduce unemployment and not have amateurs doing professionals' jobs. I digress again.

Of course it's not easy doing doing voluntary work if you are unemployed, oh no it's not. First of all you have to convince the Guardians of the Job Seekers Allowance at the Job Centre (say this in a portentous voice and follow with roll of drums or dramatic orchestral score to get the true effect) that it will not affect your job search. In any way. They, the Guardians, have a whole list of proscribed voluntary jobs that you can't do or can't do much of. We'll avoid the weirder ones such a water divining, squirrel walking, porpoise training and manufacturing spectacles for parrots. You have to convince the G o t JSA (roll of drums) that first of all you are not getting paid. The words 'But it's voluntary isn't that a clue?' don't hold much truck here. Getting paid involves interrogation about 'expenses' - that concept so alien to the Guardians that you might give your time for free but the Volunteer-er, as it were, might actually contribute to your costs of travel or specialist equipment you may need to buy. Anyway one is clearly expected to search unceasingly for jobs 8 hours a day, 5 days a week or they want to know the reason why they should continue you to pay you £65 a week for lolly gagging around at home in a cold home scraping the ice from the monitor and unable to buy the bairns shoes to walk to the workhouse.

There are hundreds of opportunities to give your time up for free. But having said that is it just me that finds the idea of 'virtual volunteering' well, just a bit too modern (and that one really exists). I virtually volunteered to do the washing up the other night but Mrs EotP dragged me away from the computer saying 'That site is definitely not a jobs site or I'm a Dutchman.' Which she isn't or a even a volunteer Dutchman.

I convinced the Guardians that my preferred volunteering was acceptable, bodyguard for Laa Laa, Tinky Winky, Dipsy and Po and could legitimately 'work' during the day or night for free and still be considered a keen seeker after work. And so that's what I do to keep the boredom at bay when not actively seeking work which I am doing right now if any one from the Job Centre reads this. Hey I'd be delighted if anyone read this.

The problem with volunteering is the volunteers. You see there is a fundamental difference between volunteers and employees which we need to remember at all times.
Volunteers don't get paid.
That has come as a shock I know.
The whole problem with volunteering is predicated on this basic fact. You see, if you pay someone to do a job there's a reasonable expectation they will turn up at the correct time, do the job and leave at the agreed time. I say reasonable expectation - I've just finished working in the public sector for the last 18 months and shall we just say that it is a different country there. For another day.
There's also an expectation that they will do what you ask, undertake any necessary training when required and generally work as a collective team towards an overall objective.
Volunteers on the other hand tend to turn up when they like, go when they feel like it, do what they want during they the time they are there and disappear when it is convenient to them, and not tell you, despite the fact that the world might be kicking off at that very moment and their presence is vital. Words and phrases such as 'mandatory', 'must arrive at...', 'Must wear the official uniform according to policy', 'Don't touch that button that says DON'T TOUCH', 'Please leave any equipment you are not trained to use ALONE' 'You must know this information...', 'We agreed that you would commit to X hours a month' are routinely ignored. These words and phrases are, at best, treated like guidelines and, at worst, like instructions written in Cyrillic. Don't understand so don't apply to me. In fact not just ignored but regularly treated with puzzlement as if never seen or heard of such stuff before. All of them work in other organsiations so it's not as if we have just beamed them in from Planet Sector 9Alpha++ or anything. Something goes on in the brain that says 'Not paid therefore don't comply (much).'

And organising them, OMG. I look after 15 volunteers for something or other. Probably Dolphin Watch West Midlands. We have agreed that the preferred method of communication is email and that reasonable notice will be given when asking for support. We have also agreed that people will respond. Do they donner und blitzen, thunderbolt and lightning? Nope I spend a good proportion of my time herding kittens, well that would be easier I think, and trying to get responses. It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you post a comment on Facebook it gets answered in seconds but ask for a reply to an email within a week and you get the Sound of Silence. Don't misunderstand me, on the whole these are lovely, lovely people (in the main) who give generously of their time.

How far is the Government, or the country, prepared to go with this volunteer philosophy? I don't want to go into my local library and ask a volunteer librarian for advice on books only to be told 'Mills and Boon are very good, bit racy though and do try Barbera Cartland saves on palpitations.' Or have volunteer surgeons 'Pass me that sharp thing Bob, what's it called, a scalpet I think.' Or have a volunteer anesthetist 'Got the extra air whatsit here, just let me look at the instruction manual and see where it goes. Oh it goes there does it, changed since I did the training in 1966.' I don't want volunteer pilots 'Hi my name is Captain Bob I trained on Chipmunks in the CCF and don't worry. I'm sure this Airbus A330 is just the same really.' Yes I know we have retained Firefighters (but they are paid), the Territorial Army (still paid) Special Constables (ah, not paid) and so on. And we are probably able to sleep far sounder in our beds knowing that volunteer part timers are out there at on the front line because there ain't enough money to pay professionals. Actually I think many of us would sleep much less soundly if we know just how thin the thin blue line is. Spider's web thin. My advice - don't ask.

The other thing you should know about volunteers is that they are not impartial. I was a Finance Governor for a local academic institution a number of years ago. I learnt very quickly that 'We need to expand the school to meet the growing needs of the community' really meant 'My little angel is in a class with more than 15 pupils and we need lots more teachers so that the teacher/pupil ration is 1:5.' Or 'The school should expand its external educational facilities' meant 'We need a herb garden so my little angel, who has just said this very morning she likes flowers and bees, can have her own publicly funded garden in school.' I'd be pointing out the legal requirement of Governors to make sensible, defensible budgetary decisions on behalf of the school and the best part of the pack would be out hunting for the best deal for their own little Amelia/Miles and the budget could go to hell in a handcart.

But it is a good way to pass the time if you can give it and a way of contributing to the community. And, if you fight the Guardians and find a worthy role to volunteer for then do so. Potential employees appear to have absolutely no interest in the fact that you have used your time wisely and for the good of the community but that's their problem. You have to decide whether to tell them anyway. Just remember though that if does kick off and you turn around looking for immediate support from the other volunteers - they may just have gone home.

Things that go bump in the day

2010-11-09T14:48:00.001Z

This is now my 10th week of unemployment. My previous record, if that's the way to describe it and I don't think it is, was 12 weeks. I fear a new record is about to be established unless someone offers me a job PDQ. And, as there is no sign of that in the offing, it will now be the New Year at least until I find something permanent to do. It will no doubt all sort itself out in time. It's that word 'time' - troublesome that word, lacks a precision in definition.

Today I've been shopping at Tescos and, after having swopped a few words with the very pleasant but English language challenged Polish check-out lady, have not spoken to anyone since 8.30. It's now 2pm. I feel I ought to make a sound just to check my voice is still working. I find it quite strange to spend so much time in silence. I'd have made a rubbish monk. Well apart from not being able to obey any pledge of chastity I'd have failed miserably on the vow of silence as well. I don't consider myself a naturally gregarious person, needing to be surrounded by loads of people all the time, but it is good to have a chat with one or two people during the day. I reckon the Postie will get nervous soon if, as soon as she delivers the letters, I metaphorically pounce on her and try and pass the time of day.
And that reminds me.

As a student I used to have a summer job as a driver for Advance Laundry in South Wales. This was a great job. I loved it. I drove a specially converted white Transit van, 2.0 litre diesel engine mind you, with an automatic gearbox. Very much a constant speed, variable noise sort of affair with it's very own waterfall into the cab during heavy rain. I'd set off at 8am daily with the van loaded with wicker hampers of laundry for hotels and pubs, racks of clothes for the well heeled of Abergavenny, Pontypool, Brecon and so on. I'd drop the clean and laundered clothes off and collect the soiled ones for return to base. What a great way to pass the summer, driving around the glorious Welsh countryside.

I had the small town of Blaenavon on my route. Hilly it was in places. In fact so hilly that my Transit would not go up some roads - there would come a point where the engine would be revving, the automatic gearbox would be turning but the wheels wouldn't and the vehicle would be in stasis - going neither up nor down. There would always be a girl watching disdainfully. There I had two elderly gentlemen as customers who sent in two shirt collars each a fortnight to be laundered. And when I went to deliver them two weeks later both would pounce on me and try to chat about anything, anything at all, and try to get me to stop and have a drink of squash, ' Such a hot day you must be parched walking up that steep road?' I would, as an unsophisticated teenager, do my level best not to get bogged down in the conversation and leave as soon as I could without being rude - but of course I realise now, after all these years, that they were just very lonely and I was probably one of the few people that they saw during the week. Both lived up a very steep hill so it wasn't the sort of place you might casually stroll past. Crampons, pitons, oxygen and ropes were needed plus a Base camp. Their wives had died and they had no phones. How sad in retrospect that I couldn't, wouldn't chat for just a while. What little difference would have made to my day - 20 minutes later returning to base? What a difference it would have made to theirs.

The house is not quiet during the day. It creaks and groans and moves and whispers. All sorts of noises come from it. I don't mean the electrical hum of the freezer/fridge or so on, but the other noises. During the summer I don't think I hear them so much. The windows are open, you can hear the traffic, people walking past outside, music from the boys if they are around. In Winter the house is hermetically sealed behind three layers of glass, the traffic is muted to just a swish on the road. But the rest of the house lives. There's a lot of wood in the house and it's always on the move, shrinking with the cold and change in moisture and then altering again as the heating comes on. Sometimes it is a if some little thing is moving around in various places, like tiny footsteps or a change in air pressure. Not that I'm paranoid of course. No really I'm not, but the house y'know, is just noisy and sometimes I can't figure out just where that noise is coming from. And just what's making it. But I prefer the summer if I'm going to be unemployed (and it seems I am). I find winter a real constriction. The cold and poor weather keeping you in and around the house - I want to be outside but not when the rain is coming in horizontally with the temperature just above freezing. Having just read that I sound like some sort of psychotic Labrador.

I see that I contacts live on Skype - I'll have to see if my voice still works and give them a call. They couldn't even do that in Blaenavon.

No sacks please I'm British

2010-11-02T13:57:00.003Z

Well it's back to the future and I'm spending more time with the family.
Actually I'm not as Mrs EotP works (thank God), one is in school and the other at University.
This means that me and the house are rediscovering each other all over again. That took about a morning and I can reliably inform you that there are no priest holes (though there is an unexpected gap where John the builder accidentally broke through the wrong internal wall two years ago with a lump hammer and I learnt a new word), no hidden cellars connecting the houses on the street up in some long forgotten secret tunnel, no bat colonies in the eaves and no asylum seekers living in the garden shed. We did have a Polish 'neighbour' living in our then neighbour's garden shed for a quite some time a few years back but then they were, shall we say, bohemian in their outlook. Sadly missed too since they moved, as it is not often that you bump into Ben Kinglsey and Kenneth Brannagh at someone's summer barbecue. Or have your garden fence set alight when a bespoke New Year's rocket made by a 'friend' in a film studio SX department fires horizontally and not vertically. How we laughed. How we dived for cover. How we wished we'd had an Anderson shelter.

I'm at home for a good proportion of the working week again. And doesn't some crap come through the letter box? In an attempt to be a reasonably environmentally responsible person I try and do as much as I can on-line. Y'know bank statements, payments, email, begging letters for jobs, virtual driving so I don't have to use real petrol, that sort of thing. But still stuff comes winging through.

My pet hate at the moment is/are collection sacks for clothes for charities. I can't say I've noticed these in the past - perhaps the kids picked them up as they came home from school and said 'Oh look letters from Estate agents saying they are desparate for properties just like ours/free newspapers/junk mail//actual mail here on the mat as I come in. Let me just pick them up and place them in a handy and accessible place where my beloved parents can review them later at their leisure and not be trampled by everybody else's muddy shoes.' You know I made that last bit up didn't you? Never, never have they done that - well of course. And, whilst I think of it, we have double the glass tumblers we actually need as the kids fill them with squash, partially drink them and them abandon them all over the house. I feel as if we should have them linked by a mechanism that requires a coin-in-slot to release them to encourage repatriation and not a game of parent hide and seek as we attempt to get them all back together.

These plastic sacks though. 'We are collecting for {insert Charity here} please fill with unwanted designer and famous branded clothes worn only once and leave on the doorstep and [Charity] will benefit with 0.000000001 % of the amount donated'. Ah, I see we are at home to Mr Sceptical today. This week, and it's only Tuesday, we've had two pushed through the door already. How many clothes do they think we have in this street? If I put something in each sack that came through, even if it was one sock each time, I'd be practically naked after 10 days and have run out of clothes. Look guys I'm a man and not interested in clothes that much, as Mrs EotP will endorse. If I can't order them on-line or chose within 1 minute of entering a shop then, frankly, I'm well passed my boredom threshold. What is the point of paying more than £10 for a pair of jeans? I mean Tesco sell them for £3 a pair and they last at least a week and fit where they touch. The instructions on the sack then tell you that 'they' are collecting on a certain day of the week and to leave them at the threshold of your drive just outside of the armed response boundary (neighbourhood just a tad concerned about security round here and the butler can only run so far).

And then...the sacks just sit there. For days. There seem to be three states of being for these sacks.

State A. No sacks on the street whatsoever. Ever. Doesn't matter whether the sacks have pictures of air ambulances, puppies, kittens or cute kids on them, no one puts them out.

State B. Nothing ever happens to them and they get taken back in surreptitiously by the householder, the way people do when they realise they've put the bins out on the wrong day and were 'just putting them at the front to give them a bit of variation in their bin lives before putting them away again and of course I know what day the bins come I'm not senile you know.'

State C. A nondescript dirty, white, battered Transit van with two lads in it races up and down the road grabbing the sacks and flinging them into the back of the van. Whether these are the official collectors or savvy opportunists who, like seagulls following a ship for scraps, just turn up on the appropriate day and grab the bounty before the official collectors arrive is not possible to say.

So into my recycling bin goes yet another unused plastic bag with a picture of a distressed horse on it. Could be a hamster but I didn't look too closely.
Or care at all.

94520 jobs added in the last 7 days

2010-10-18T16:12:00.002+01:00

Right then.

94000 jobs. Added.
To what?
To Father Christmas's present list? Because all I can find is a sous chef post in Dundee.

And hallo blog. Back again and rather sooner than I'd hoped. Well, actually I'd hoped that I wouldn't need to be back at all but then there was the recession. There is the recession and, as far as I can tell, there will continue to be the recession. Look it's quite easy. I had a job, a job I liked very much and then the recession hit. They couldn't renew my contract and that was that but...three weeks later I got a fixed term contract that lasted for, well the fixed term. That was OK'ish, 60% eye wateringly less salary than I had been earning, but it was in the public sector and I thought, clearly naively as it happens, that I'd be able to find a full time position before the fixed term was up.

The Gods said 'Did you hear that, he said he'd be able to get a full time position?' and showed me the error of my ways. During that 15 month fixed term I applied for 27 jobs, had 3 interviews and, as you can deduce if anyone is reading this, no offers of employment. So here I am again 6 weeks into my umpty umpth period of unemployment and it's still the recession. And will continue to be the recession. It feels as if there is always a recession but is that just me?

Back in my favourite chair in the Job Centre I continue to sign on with quite a bit less condescension from the staff there than in the past. Gary, who 'served' me on my first signing this time round, commutes 120 miles a day to get to the Job Centre. He's a graphic designer in his mid 30's who couldn't get a job where he lives. Steve, who signed me on last Thursday, is a purchasing manager in his mid 50's who was unemployed for over 8 months before he got the part time job of inflicting pain from the other side of the counter. This still doesn't stop them making you go on the mandatory 'How to write a CV' and 'You really need to get a job now you know or things will get sticky for you have you seen our cattle prods?' hour long courses. Remember Pauline from 'League of Gentlemen'? Just like that. Like medical interns they've had to do it so now you've got to do it. This time they say, because they know 'Of course it's a complete waste of time.' Gee thanks, there's another hour of my life gone that I won't get back.

Because, sadly, I've been here before then I know the routine. Upload CVs to Monster, TotalJobs, TotalWasteofTime, WeignoreyourCVbutpostitmonlineanyway and so on. Scour Reed everyday for a position that pays more than minimum wage and doesn't involve being an IFA or self employed employment consultant (sound of snigger coming from EotP). Why so many IFAs? I thought we were all skint? I don't need advice on where to put my £65 Job Seekers' allowance thank you I just hand it over to Tesco. Scour every on line job resource until my eyes are red raw and my heart has sunk so low I'll need help from the Chilean miners' rescuers to recover it.

And then you get the email from some aggregator jobs site that proudly proclaim 94520 jobs added in the last week. As I ask right at the beginning just where are these jobs added? To the German economy perhaps? When I look at these proud posts I find jobs in Perth, or London or possibly Reading, but NOT where I live. Not even commutable from where I live.

I haven't yet reached the point of 'I'll do anything rather than sit in the house all day long' but it's not far off. But, and this is a good but, just whose going to employ me when they know that I'll leave as soon as a reasonable job elsewhere comes up - in about 8 years at this rate?

So back in the blog. Swept out the dust and leaves that had blown under the door, plumped up the cushions and assumed the position.

I'll be back.

Eyes on the Prize

Making introductions

2009-06-14T12:16:00.008+01:00

And so you start your first day at the new job.

There are two sorts of starts.

The informal induction
The formal induction.

The informal induction.
It goes like this.
'Here's your desk, here's your PC, there is some paperwork for you to complete, see you in November'.

IT haven't set your log in, you therefore do not officially exist, you can't access your email and your default printer is set to print in another office on another floor but no one tells you for a week. As you do not exist you cannot book holidays and the IT help line is always on answerphone. HR do not seem to have heard about you joining and ask for your bank details five times.

You now spend six months trying to find out what your job is, what it is you do and what you do does. Forget it, you'll never find out, just fill in forms A/11/C1957 and fax them to 5543 as soon as you have done so and don't forget the pinks go to ACCAT7 and the blues in that tray there.
You never find out what or who is ACCAT7 or whether there is a 1 - 6 version either.

You spend the first four months walking half a mile to the nearest loo and then find out that there is one around the corner.

You are startled by the fire alarm once a week, looking around to see if any other members of staff are making any attempt to leave only to find out it is the regular test. Then, when the fire alarm goes off on a different day and time you look around to see if any of the other members of staff are making any attempt to leave and can't hep feeling concerned that they aren't when you can hear approaching sirens and notice there does seem to be a lot of smoke coming from the stationery cupboard.

For the first year you can only navigate your way from the entrance to your desk and back and do not realise that there are 1500 other members of staff on the same site, on different floors only nobody has told you anything about them.

You are told that there is a probationary period before you become a full member of staff and that performance objectives will be set. You never hear anything more about either.

You hear stories about a staff canteen but never find it. You eat your sandwiches at your work station whilst all around you your colleagues disappear for two hours, for lunch, but you don't know where they go.

You have never seen the MD of the organisation but see his/her car park space immediately outside the main door. You however have a quarter mile trek from the staff car park along a muddy path. You believe the MD is the one whose presence causes everyone to quit looking at the BBC news site and eBay on their PCs and look intensely busy as he/her strides through the office looking neither left nor right

You finally make contact with the two key people in the whole organisation - the keeper of the stationery cupboard and the one person in IT who can actually make your PC work without first asking you to reboot it.

The formal introduction.
It goes like this.
You have four days of tightly scheduled presentations from members of staff who you never see again in your whole time with the organisation.

The presenters never start or finish on time and about 33% mysteriously never turn up causing the over jolly person from HR to go into meltdown and end each day session early.

You are given an introduction to the aims and goals of the organisation by the highest member of the senior management team HR have convinced to turn up. This could be the cleaner, though their introduction is usually an improvement on the one given by the senior manager who clearly thinks that achieving his/her performance bonus is the major aim of the business. They tell you about the structure of the business. It looks like someone has upturned a bowl of spaghetti but presume it makes sense to someone somewhere. Actually it never does.

85% of the presenters start off by apologising for the boring nature of their subject. They do not lie. 95% then go on to overrun their alloted slot causing you to think longingly of blunt objects with which to strike them and thinking maybe signing on once every two weeks wasn't that bad after all.

90% of presenters believe that a good presentation depends on them standing in front of the new staff with their back to them reading directly from 173 densely written Powerpoint slides which they use as their script. They do not notice they lose their audience from slide 2 and neither do they understand why, after two long deadly dull hours of talking in a monotone no one has a question. Everyone is now comatose. The new staff only have one question - how long before I can go home and tell myself this is all a horrible dream.

IT haven't set your log in, you therefore do not officially exist, you can't access your email and your default printer is set to print in an office in France but no one tells you for a month as you frantically try to find the scurrilous emails your friend has sent you and you have sent to print. As you do not exist electronically you cannot book holidays and the IT help line is always on answerphone.

You finally make contact with the two key people in the whole organisation - the keeper of the stationery cupboard and Kevin in IT who can actually make your PC work without first asking have you rebooted it. You have, 26 times that day for a start.

You are required to sign an additional 23 forms telling you about data protection, eating at your workstations, staff socials, joining a Trades Union ('We welcome it.' They don't.), DSE, GSE, ABH, DDT, ABAGH and other abbreviations and acronyms you can't understand.

Then, on the first day at real work, you get a 'local' induction. 'Here's your desk, here's your PC, there is some paperwork for you to complete, see you in November'.

You are told about PDRs or PDPs leading to NVQs or possibly RACs and NFIs. You are so full of information after the first five days you can no longer absorb any more. You stagger back to the staff car park and drive home, exhausted.

Welcome back to work.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on*

2009-05-26T14:13:00.014+01:00

So where did it go right? Why, after 2 years, 82 applications and six interviews did I finally get a job?

I have no idea. It's a mystery.
That is not very helpful is it?
But it's true.
Why my carefully constructed, honed and polished CVs made no impact when applying for jobs that you'd have thought I absolutely must be the best candidate for the job got nowhere, yet I managed to get a job in a totally different business sector will, for ever, be a mystery to me.

However I have learned somethings along the way (covering all 5 redundancies, we must learn from history) that I feel impelled to inflict on you. It may help, it may stop you making the same mistakes or you could always print them out and make a draught excluder from them.

Prepare for rejection (and more rejection). 
Did I mention rejection?
Expect to be out of work for some time. Expect rejection, many rejections. Expect not to hear anything from most applications. Move on immediately - remember the HOE curve (yes rejection is very hard you don't have to tell me about it, now a fully qualified Master of Being Rejected) and keep looking. Keep a file of jobs applied for - you may need it as proof that you are actively job seeking. 

Stay positive. 
There will be good days, there will be bad days and there will be mind bendingly awful days. However there is a lot of silliness in the world. Sometimes it is very hard to see it but it’s there. And it can make you laugh. Well it made me laugh. Whatever happens try and bounce back. And there is life after redundancy. It may not be the life you had but it might very well be better.  It might have more kittens and yawning puppies.

Use every way you can to find a new job.
 Use every channel you can think of to find a job and keep scouring them.  Do not stop using them even if you think they may not be working. You will not be able to predict easily where a job might be found. There are many channels: on-line jobs (Monster, Total Jobs, Fish4jobs), national newspapers (Times on line, Daily Telegraph, Guardian), local papers, local library, notices in shops, referrals, information from your friends and acquaintances and so. Get creative and think of any others that may work for you. Use them. Don’t stop.  And if you keep doing the same thing you will keep getting the same result. Evolve and adapt.

Stop spending.
Now. 
You may have a reasonable redundancy payout, statutory redundancy pay or even nothing. What ever you have you need to stop spending now because you do not know how long this is going to last. Cancel all non-essential spending and start budgeting and get real. The kids may hate it, your partner may hate it, it may put you in a difficult position with your employed friends but that’s their problem. If they are that insensitive then have nothing to do with them because they will only vex you more - or ‘get in your grill’ as my kids say. You can do without many things - stay solvent and, if you have any money left when you get the new job, then is the time to spend. 

Keep fit. Learn something new. 
This time may be gruelling, will sap your motivation and test your sense of humour. Don’t sit in the house all day telling yourself life is crap, get fit, walk, go running, do something, get creative, learn something new. You’ll feel a whole lot better and able to face the job hunt. And it is a way of demonstrating a positive response to this difficulty to a potential employer.  Believe me chewing endlessly over and over the subject of 'no one replies to my job applications' tends to empty the room you are currently sitting in quite effectively.

Respect your partner’s space. 
Your partner might be at home or still doing whatever they were doing before your job loss. Respect their position and their space. You are going to need them for lots of support and it won’t help trailing after them all day around the house like a demented toddler following their mother. They will not want to hear your ills and moans all the time - try and remember that and be supportive to them. 

Don't pay good money to snake oil merchants.
There are many organisations that are waiting to take your severance pay, savings or JSA. They are very seductive and promise much - some are very expensive. But none of them will find you a job, that's always down to you. So you might as well save your money.

Sign on. Don’t be proud. 
This is, admittedly, not the most rewarding experience you will ever have. Be prepared for quite a demeaning process which may include giving all your private financial details to a complete stranger in an open office. However you are entitled to State Support (subject to a means test) and your National Insurance will be paid. There is some help in retraining available and there may be jobs available that the Job Centre Team can put you in touch with though usually in Fife I found as a sous chef or CNC operator.

Sell yourself properly with your CV. 
Employers and or agencies will be inundated with CVs for most jobs - their first task is to carry out a paper sift on the applications - and they will be ruthless. Your CV is your only opportunity to get through that first filter so make it count. Can you describe what you do and the benefits you could bring to an organisation in one minute? Well make sure you can - the question you have to be able to answer is ‘what benefits to the company could hiring this person bring?’ And they don’t want to know about your hobbies and they certainly don’t have any right to ask for your age. If you haven’t updated your CV then do so now. Remember: contact details, profile, relevant competencies, examples of tasks (plus problem solving and outcomes), list recent employers (but you don’t have to list them all), qualifications - in my experience hobbies, interests, pictures of your cat, holiday photos and gold star from Mrs Edwards in primary school for making a paper mache dinosaur are not required but suprisingly often included.

Treat finding a new job as a job in itself. 
Set aside time every day to look for a job or do something positive in finding a new position. There is always something that you can do .

Don’t apply for jobs you’re not qualified for. 
This is difficult but unless you want more rejection then do not apply for jobs you are patently not qualified for. Remember there are many more applicants who really will be better qualified so why beat yourself up? 

Three steps backwards to go forwards.
There comes a time when you might have to accept the lesser paid job, take a considerable drop in salary and perks. That was then, this is now. Ask yourself do you want the money and see it as a way of fighting back up the ladder. Or do you continue to wait for the 'right job'. Ask yourself 'Do you feel lucky?' Well do you?

Voluntary contributions
Almost the subject of a blog in its own right, local voluntary organisations are looking for volunteers to muddle through the many layers of impenetrable bureaucracy as we speak. If you'd like to spend time helping others, just jog on down to your local volunteer centre, making sure it's not an Army recruiting office and ending up in Helmand Province.

With a little help from your friends...
Keep in contact, don't become isolated - contact by email, Skype, iChat, smoke signals, two tin cans with a piece of taut string. What ever it takes don't become isolated and, whilst I'm at it, thanks Neil, Dennis and Dick for your invaluable support.

And that's it, down to the irreducible level - forget the books, forget the seminars, this is what it comes down to.

And don't give up.

*Robert Frost

Life, but not as we know it. Hmmm

2009-05-25T19:43:00.008+01:00

Sometimes you need to count the number of buses at the bus stop.

I'd walked into town last week to photostat all the documents required to prove that I exist for the new job. We'll ignore the rather obvious one of actually being in the room at the time of the interview which suggested to me that, unless I was some phantasm, my corporeal existence could be taken for granted.

No we wanted, or rather they wanted: birth certificate, driving license, passport, evidence of NI number, copies of educational certificates (I just knew someone would want to see my 'O' level in Agriculture), photos of me as a baby, saliva sample, DNA, palm prints, iris shots, and my Cub Scout badge for using a phone box with a 'Push button A' and 'B' (I cheated, I asked a passerby to phone Akela for me). Then, just as I was about to post the signed T&Cs I thought 'Sod this, I'm vastly overqualified for this job, I'm going to ask for more money' and walked home. There, on the door mat, was an invitation for an interview for a BETTER job with MORE money but two days after I potentially start the new job.

OMG, two years, over 75 applications, five interviews the last one being six months ago and now, in the space of just three weeks two interviews and a firm job offer. Now what do I do? It's true what they say about buses you don't see one for ages and then you find out they are big, run on diesel and carry upwards of 60 passengers to somewhere where you don't really want to go at a time that is massively inconvenient.

Well the first thing to do was to dither. Then procrastinate, then consider the HOE curve and finally cry hot tears of frustration. OK not cry, but is that frustrating or what?

I felt the only course of action was to first swear loudly, and for some time, in the fortunately empty house then call them to ask for more money...and I got it. So I decided to take the job where there was a firm job offer (and therefore money, even more since I asked) and sadly turn down the interview for the other where I might not get it - wouldn't I feel foolish then? After two years of determined searching that hurt I can tell you.

And now work. Next week.
But this feels odd.
I've had to check I've got enough shirts to wear during the week. I haven't.
I had to check if my ties were still in the proximity of fasionable. They are not, they are not even in the same neighbourhood.
I had to check if my suits still fitted. They don't, I've lost so much weight during the last two years.
It is going to cost a small fortune going to work just in buying clothes.
I hate buying clothes.

Then, as Mrs EoTP also has a job we will, for the first time in our married lives, be out at work at the same time. So in our ever changing world we are having to evolve and adapt once again to deal with this. We've managed to fit our respective requirements for Mrs EoTP's little blue car (lbc) around our lives over the last two years but it now seems that I will also have to have a lbc of my own. Good grief that's a quarter of my yet to come salary already gone and I haven't actually started yet.
That can't be correct, can it? My WIGAJ list involves lots of expensive electrical gadgets for me and not necessary transport.

And yet it is. For the cruel fact is that it costs to go to work.
And yet I am not complaining. Not yet anyway, that will come after five months when the halo effect of having a job has worn off, when I discover that most of my colleuagues are paid at least as twice as much as me but collectively have half the qualifications and that I could do all their jobs without even breaking into a sweat. At least I think that is what happens at work, it is all in the distant past.

In the end I don't think there was a choice. Yep, I'd have loved to have a job with a salary near to one I enjoyed two years ago and all the rest of the 'package' but it's a very tough world out there right now as we all know and this might very well be the career change that gets me out of the industry that keeps making me redundant. I'd quite like a spell away from the Job Centre where they will be buying me my own seat soon, I've been such a regular visitor over the last few years.

So the JSA back-to-work form has been completed and posted to Fife - well that's where all the jobs ever seemed to be on the Job Centre Plus site, the contract of employment has been posted to the new employer, I've bought some shirts and ties (and Mrs EoTP has returned them and bought something more suitable) and we are good to go.

Once I've negotiated the use of the lbc before I buy my own.

Because I'm worth it?

2009-05-18T08:37:00.003+01:00

I've been offered a job.
No really, after all this time, after all these applications, after all this searching on every job site in the known universe an organisation has offered me a job.

During the interview I batted every question out off the pitch (that's a cricketing metaphor I believe but as I loathe sport of all descriptions it might well be a reference to tennis for all I know) and kept thinking 'Is that the best you can do, come on make me really think.' Anyway the organisation rang later that day and said the job offer would be in the shredder. Post. Sorry that's just a habit after two years searching.

The thing is, and I say this with all due modesty, I am vastly over-qualified for the job and therefore, naturally, will be vastly underpaid to do it. Think Nurses. However as it represents 100% more than I am being paid now I think that's not a bad deal really and I'm very happy to be employed again. It's also a totally different business to one I've been in most of my working life i.e it doesn't lose money and most people currently want what it offers, unlike the car industry where I've come from where the reverse seems to be true. The last time I made a bid to leave the automotive industry in, oh let me see, 1985, this proved to be such an unmitigated disaster that I rejoined it two years later only to see my career path prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the next 20 years. There's consistency for you. Still I did get to travel around the world selling who-ha's to anyone who wanted them.

A couple of light years ago, in one blog, I explained my concept of intelligent capitulation - you can even Google the phrase now (you must have read it, 'Brilliant concept' The Times) - sometimes you just cannot cross the bottomless chasm with two planks, some string, a candle and an oil drum, and have to walk away. Thats walk away from the edge of the bottomless chasm of course, because if you went in the other direction you'd fall down it. That's how I felt with this job offer. I posed some questions to myself:

Have you got a job?
Are you anywhere near getting another job?
Is the economy in free-fall, think it's on a bungy jump but has forgotten to tie the harness securely around its waist?
Can you find any other jobs in the desired salary range?
Are you already fed up with signing on?
Has some one just offered a position you can make a demonstrable difference to and is willing to pay you to do so?
Are you desperate?

Well it was 'No' to number 7, but the others had fairly self evident answers and anyway I believe I can make a difference and, in a couple of year's time, the economic outlook will have changed and we can see what happens then.

And finally...I signed on last Thursday, once again.
'Do you use the JobCentre Plus web site to search for jobs' the jolly Job Centre person enquired?
'No' I said 'I think the site is quite poor and just keeps offering me jobs as a sous chef in Fife, I prefer to use Monster or Reed Jobs.'
Patronising smile. 'Shall I search for you right now?'
'Please do'
And the result of the search?
An admin job for £10,000 p.a in Perth. 'Oh' she said 'I see what you mean. You carry on doing it your way.'
Point proved I think.

I've always done it my way.

Routine matters

2009-05-07T14:13:00.003+01:00

You see when you have a job you have a porpoise. You have a purpose as well (Blogger spell check not working too well today).

You get up on a Monday, moaning about the time and how you are so tired, stuff breakfast into your complaining body, stagger into the car still half asleep thinking about the budget, sales, deadlines, memos, have any of your colleagues actually bought milk and coffee supplies, drive to work but not remembering the bit from leaving your house to getting to the car park, and then collapse gratefully into your seat at your desk. It takes 45 minutes for Windows to boot up on your PC. You can then moan to all your colleagues for the first hour or so about the dreadful weekend, try and find someone with fresh milk to put in the coffee when you've first found someone that a) has coffee who will let you have some or b) was foolish enough to leave their coffee unguarded and so was assumed to have volunteered it for the other 25 members of staff who have also now found this trove. Men will not buy fresh milk incidentally. They would prefer to shave lumps into their coffee from the rancid whey left from milk gone past its sell-by date by some margin rather than call into Tesco on the way to work.

You can waste another hour as you try and get the photocopier to work. Photocopiers have three states: warming up, on and jammed. 'Warming up' takes about a day, 'on' lasts for exactly the amount of time it takes you to get to the machine needing 45 collated, stapled copies for a stroky beard meeting in a hurry when it goes immediately into the 'jammed' state. Only one person in the entire company knows how to resolve the 'jammed' state and she is on holiday in Florida. Very occasionally the photocopier enters a new state, 'Add toner'. This is guaranteed to happen when you are wearing your newest, brightest, whitest shirt or blouse and you end up looking like a Friesian cow.

And so the week continues.

Tuesday is still an opportunity to have many 'coffee machine' meetings ostensibly for informal internal lobbying but really to moan about the management whilst drinking scalding, bland, liquid from plastic cups that are marginally thinner than the average condom.

Wednesday is a difficult day being half way between the two weekend states and generally, and unhappily, this is when the work often has to be done.

Thursday is a chance to catch up on the paperwork, emails and office gossip and CC in everyone else on the email network slowing the server down to the pace of an asthmatic snail.

Friday is, of course, only half a day long and that is mostly spent talking about the upcoming weekend and wishing everyone a 'good one'. For many companies, Fridays are enlivened by a dress down policy (which is interpreted to mean dress up) and where half of admin wear clothes that would be more suited to a club environment and are therefore deemed 'inappropriate' by HR but somehow 95% of the male members of staff find a compelling reason to visit admin on that day. 60% of the management team wear patterned jumpers and Rupert Bear type trousers that are more typical of a particularly brash Florida golf course. 10% of management wear clothes that would be more suited to a club environment and somehow several members of admin find compelling reasons to visit their offices or desks to discuss urgent admin problems concerning stapler supplies. 10% of management always forget about dress down days and dress in suits and try and pretend they knew all along but have client meetings and the balance is HR and no one knows where their offices are so can't recall what they wear anyway. And Windows takes 60 minutes to shut down and 'save your settings'. Where is it saving them, in Nepal?

And then the next week starts all over again.

But if you don't have a job...

You don't have a routine. There is nothing you actually have to do - well, apart from searching for and applying for jobs and that is quite important really, but that can be done at any time of the day or night. You can clean, shop and watch the 18 episodes of 'The Wire' that you have recorded at any time. Dress down day is everyday and I can't find my watch anywhere as I no longer need to wear it all the time. But I think it is important to find some rhythm to life even if that rhythm is a longer beat than it used to be. It takes work to deal with the lack of routine but that in itself can be quite liberating. Don't get me wrong I want to get back to work as soon as I can but just how often in life can you be largely free of the routine of work? Especially when I can send Mrs EoTP out to earn money.

Hedy Lamarr said 'Some men like a dull life-they like the routine of eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, petting the dog, watching TV, kissing the kids, and going to bed. Stay clear of it-it's often catching.'

There's something in that.
Now what shall I do next?

This blog contains Graphic language.

2009-04-23T15:52:00.016+01:00

I believe that each week starts, as I've said in earlier blogs, full of hope and promise. I like to think that I'm a fairly positive sort of guy (or a complete prat, take your pick) in the circumstances. But sometimes the pheasant of promise is shot down by the gamekeeper of despair.

I think most of us travel in hope. You know the sort of stuff: your teenager might spontaneously clean their room without being threatened by the withholding of their pocket money, they might change their underwear more than once a week, they might have a conversation with you that includes words with more than one syllable and lasts longer than 20 seconds, someone in a call centre is actually able to sort out your problem, that sort of thing. However hope is usually powered by experience and often our travel plans end up in Welshpool bus station late at on a Saturday night after the last one has left and there's not another bus until Monday. Next month.

So it is with applying for jobs. Unless you are applying for a job so ludicrous and so far beyond your abilities and qualifications (and I still don't understand why the White House won't let me run for President they are so narrow minded) then you cannot but help but hope some teeny weeny goes against all probability speck of hope that you'll get the job. And, because you have this teeny weeny goes against all probability speck of hope then, like a grain of sand in an oyster, a little pearl of optimism starts to grow and glow faintly - go on, don't deny it, it does doesn't it, and you start to visualise yourself in that very job.

Well it's no good, this has to stop for your own good.
Therefore I have produced a scientifically based series of graphs to demonstrate this tendency in a variety of job seeking circumstances and to help you all (well all three of you readers) quit hoping unnecessarily - a bit (but only a bit) like the NHS stop smoking campaign except with a lot less money and no pile of fag stubs outside the door where we all go outside with our coffees to have a drink, smoke and serious slagging off of the organisation and the boss and have you seen what they've done to our budgets, slashed them how can I run a department on 35p a year? I call this the EoTP HOE curve.

HOE = Hope Over Experience.

Let's start with the 'applying for a job on a on-line job site'. Here you can see that once you have submitted your CV you may as well go and feed the hamster, wash the car, disconnect from the broadband and go and live in remotest Peru because you are never going to hear from them. Ever. Again. Notice how one doesn't even start off with any hope at all as we all know that a giant electronic points system is directing all CVs into space as part of the CETI project and, even now, aliens on the planet Thorg are involved in the universe's largest ever job paper sift preventing them from launching their Earth invasion fleet until 2506 at the earliest.

Next we have the job application where your skills and experience exactly match the job specification, so much so that your Mum must have written it. Note how you start off with such high hopes and then, as time passes, those hopes decay a little and then you start hoping again, then fading steeply and rising so that the graph looks like a little range of mountains such as Hobbits might have to climb with the Ring. Perhaps tomorrow the call to an interview will come, they've all simultaneously gone down with the vomiting bug that's why they haven't called. You fool you.

Now here we have the graph that shows the HOE curve for those jobs that we think we might have a bit of a chance with. You know dark horse, got to be in to win. Hmmm.

Note here that despite all the evidence and knowing that there are 603 applicants for every job we still can't stop ourselves having just a glimmer of hope and that we'll hear. Something.

And then finally, in this current series, we have the 'Job Centre insists you apply for three jobs a week' HOE curve. Even though there are zero vacancies in your sector and yet 35627 job seekers we know, they (the Job Centre) know, the recruiter knows, even the aliens on Thorg know that this is just plain silly. But then you never know.

So there we have it. Scientifically graphed evidence that demonstrates that you might as well forget about every job application the moment it leaves your hand/PC/Mac/quill and indeed you might as well shred some of them yourself straight away as it saves time later in the process - if you are gong to be contacted then you will be, so no point worrying unnecessarily. The Gamekeeper of Despair has just reloaded both barrels. You're not going to make his day are you?

But...

Mrs EoTP applied for a job last year after not working (in paid employment, I know, I know child care and looking after the house is a 26 hour a day, 8 days a week job) for 16 years; we must not forget her HOE curve because it shows that, sometimes, the pheasant of opportunity gets away and leaves a very large message on the head of the gamekeeper of despair. And that message says 'never give up'.

Applying one's self

2009-04-15T10:14:00.006+01:00

Is there any more fiendish way to get one's blood boiling than trying to complete a job application sent to you by a prospective employer in a template created in Word? I ask, as one who has made many applications for jobs over the last few years and whose heart sinks and soul dies a little more each time every time one of these doozies turns up.

There are, as we all know, many ways to apply for a job.

There's the click, fire and forget method of the on-line job sites where you can apply for (and be subsequently ignored by) many jobs with the practiced ease of a professional job seeker. 'Look at me apply for this job with my my back to the computer and using just a mirror to use the mouse whilst juggling two apples'.

We have the carefully tuned, honed and polished CV where you spend hours skillfully attempting to match the skills and competencies outlined in the job description and that you email off and then are subsequently ignored.

There's the 'Oh just send a standard CV as the company or agency doing the recruiting gives just palimpsest details of what the job entails' and then are subsequently ignored.

We have the proactive approach CV where you have forensically targeted a potential employer and sent in 'Let's meet up and talk about how I can turn your company around in 48 hours CV' and then are subsequently ignored.

However with all the above approaches there is one positive aspect to the whole process and that it is you, with whatever word processing package you use, who are in control of the layout, formatting and aesthetics of the CV. If the final result looks like a dog's dinner and hamster's nest remember that you that prepared it.

But then, but then, we have the templates, the very output of Beelzebub.
In Word.
Or created in Word but turned into a pdf.
These seem to turn up mainly from public sector organisations who have clearly had a giant big strokey beard conference some years ago to decide that no single public sector organisation will ever ask for the same information in the same way or same format.

Now this is all OK'ish if you make one job application every, say, 10 years. Any higher frequency than that and the whole thing makes you want to tear cushions apart with your bare teeth which goes down badly in the waiting area of the doctor's surgery I've found. And, furthermore, the application forms are created by people who never have to fill them in and have only been on the Word Perfect basic training course in 1992. If they did they would realise that some boxes are too small for people with addresses in Wales. Try fitting Llanfihangel-yng-Nqwynfa into a fixed text box.
Try entering Llanfihangel-yng-Nqwynfa into your SatNav after a good night out come to that.

There are those that want to know every job you have ever had, not just the employer but every title, every start date and finish date, all starting salaries and ending salaries and details of the job responsibilities. I was sorely tempted to put 'take bosses dog for walk daily and clean car weekly' for my first job with a major car manufacturer to see if any one read it. I can't remember what I did last week let alone 25 years ago.

A particular favourite of mine are those that want to know the year/month/date/time of exam/number of questions/name of invigilator/grade of each and every 'O' level/'A' level you have taken and the make of pen you used to complete the exam paper. Never, in all my working life, have I ever been asked to prove that I have the qualifications I say I have, so to find the original certificates would be a small miracle after all these years. I just ignore these boxes and say I have stuff, lots of stuff.

Let me give you some other examples after first taking a strong sedative.
I particularly like the forms that invite you to add additional details to support your application. These invariably permit you to type free text in small box that, when you exceed the length of the page, cause the text to mysteriously disappear on the next page because Word can't handle the page break. You can then spend hours of what remains of the rest of your life trying to find a way to make the text reappear on the following page without messing up the formatting of the rest of the document and swearing like a Marine as you fight a losing battle with Word.

And, because the forms all differ, you cannot cut and paste the information from one form to another as you can with a CV that you have created. Oh no no no, that would be too easy, all the boxes are different lengths, sizes and widths. And can anyone tell me why Word does not line up text exactly in columns? Why not? I can see the formatting marks, I can see they are exactly the same and I can also see that freakin' Word does not line up. Exasperation.

Sometimes the potential employer gets cunning, or more stupid, I can't decide which, by sending the document to you as a pdf. Presumably this is to encourage you to complete the form in your bestest hand writing. As I don't have bestest hand writing, or even averagest hand writing I convert these forms into Word and complete them as normal - see above for comments, and send them back in and let them work out how I did it. And then get subsequently ignored.

My favourite example, in the recent past is one I completed last week. There was no electronic version of the application form, just the old fashioned 'complete in ink' paper form except, except that it said 'You may complete the form by pasting in appropriate answers to the sections'. So, let me understand this clearly, there is no electronic version but I can type my responses in Word, print out the result once I have worked out the size and shape of the boxes and then cut them out and glue them into the various sections. Yes. A masterclass in wasting time if I ever saw one and presumably that won an award at the public sector conference for imagination and innovation in application form design

I suppose it wouldn't matter if you only did this occasionally but, as a dedicated job seeker now fully signed on, it's a regular thing. However one of the requirements of having a Job Seekers Allowance is that you apply for three jobs a week. I pointed out that there weren't three jobs a week that I could apply for that were in any way suitable for my skills and competencies. So we agreed I would just apply for any three - but you can bet they won't be for public sector organisations.

Tales of the unexpected

2009-03-30T14:45:00.011+01:00

Looking for a job is a lot like buying a house really. You lie back in your sofa in your current home, just after switching off 'Grand Designs' where Kevin McCloud has once again waffled on about the architectural narrative remaining coherent ('I think it does'), finish your second bottle of wine and decide to move to the house of your dreams.

But you have to remember that for most of us buying a house follows this inevitable sequence:
What you want.
What you will accept.
What you end up with.

So it is with a job, especially when there are at least 10 applicants for every job, according to the Trades Union Council a few weeks ago. Ten, I should be so lucky, there seem to be the entire population of the Isle of Wight applying for every post that I think looks interesting.

When I last lost my job I once again went through the 'no need to panic, plenty of time, important to find a position that fits my skills, knowledge and interest' rationalisation, then panicked. Nah, I didn't I'm a job seeker vet, man don't panic, man gets on the street does a little hussling, y'know whad I'm sayin?

Well 70 plus unsuccessful applications later I'm beginning to doubt my strategy a little. Having spent all this time carefully targeting selected organisations, finessing my CV to meet the job spec and writing covering letters that Mr. W Shakespeare himself would have been pleased with and to have achieved nothing at all sort of tells me something and this is what it tells me...

If you keep doing the same thing you keep getting the same results.

So is it time to abandon the strategy, shout everyman for himself, push the women folk and children aside, grab a lifebelt and throw myself into any job that looks like it might pay something and the 'fit to skills, knowledge and interest bit' can go to hell in a hand cart? Is it time to respond to those advertisements tied to lampposts at road junctions that ask do you want to earn £2000 A WEEK? Just ring this premium number in Columbia and ask for Serge, own AK47 an advantage. Or should I consider a paper round?

I was in my school's CCF (Combined Cadet Force), RAF section. They probably have a MI6 section these days. Yes, that sort of school. Anyway we went on mandatory annual camps to military establishments all over Europe where we got to do all sorts of spiffing military stuff like fire big, noisy weapons (must tell you about the Bloodhound missile I fired at a Russian jet sometime) and get cruelly bullied by the regular squaddies who had very innovative uses for Kiwi boot polish. At one camp we had the task, as a teams of five, to cross the mythical bottomless ravine using only two planks, a teddy bear, tube of toothpaste, four sticking plasters, 10 foot length of rope, three oil cans, a woman's bra, (empty, pity) and a copy of yesterdays Daily Mail. I learned two valuable lessons here, apart from never volunteer and just how hard boot polish is to remove from the body:

Sometimes it is possible, with imagination, teamwork, innovation, planning and not quite enough time, to figure out how to get the team safely across the bottomless ravine.
Sometimes, no matter how imaginative you are, how well you work as a team, how superb your planning and despite having more than enough time it is actually not possible, with the equipment to hand, to cross the bottomless ravine.

What the military seem to be looking for in 2 is the concept of what I'm going to call Intelligent Capitulation. That is to say you realise that what is being asked for is just not possible so you stop wasting your time and give up and go and do something else. Or wait to be captured. Or helicoptered out. Or blow something up. I don't know I didn't join the army, stop asking.

So now we have two concepts to consider. I just like to get you thinking.

If you keep doing the same thing you keep getting the same results.
Intelligent Capitulation.

The problem comes back to process of buying a house. Do I now abandon my dream of having a replacement job with a salary that was similar to one I had? Do I dilute my expectations to that of looking for a job that is somewhat less than the package I had? Do I just accept anything at just about any salary as long as there is some income coming in? What do I tell the Job Centre when I sign on? Shall I tell them about my theory of intelligent capitulation and see if they still want to pay the Job Seekers allowance?

Or do I just accept that with my background , skills and qualifications then hell will freeze over before any one offers me a job with a significantly lower salary than I used to have and I might as well stop bothering applying for circular meat patty high temperature rotating operative jobs.

Answers on a postcard please.

Now then, I still have the bear, bra and one plank left - just place it on the Teddy Bear's head and tie it tightly. I'm sure we can cross the ravine that way.

Let us prey

2009-03-19T16:16:00.013Z

Do you know what gets on my toot and really, really annoys me? Many things actually, so many that I need two bouncers with a red rope rail only allowing selected annoying things through, so that there is often quite a queue to get on my toot at any one time of the day or night. There is health and safety everywhere these days you know, the bouncers even have to carry those clicker counters to ensure that the maximum capacity of my toot is not exceeded.

What annoys me are those organisations that prey on your deep felt sense of insecurity as you search for a job.

First up are those that clearly come from such on line job sites such as Monster - I'm not picking on Monster - no actually I am, they all seem to come from that source now I think of it. The emails start off innocently enough as the mark is identified; 'I've just reviewed your CV which is of considerable interest to me' (heart begins to speed up slightly) 'and I think it may be worth us meeting to consider your CV and possible career moves.' (Blood pressure rising, adrenalin starts kicking in, it might be an interview, it might be, OMG, a job offer). And then, so so seductively, the letter continues its tantalising message of hope until the sign off, 'Let's meet' it oozes, 'at our nearest office to you for a chat.' Then you notice, but only in the mouse type or by checking out its web site, that actually it is not a potential employer but an agency trying to flog you a course in how to find a job, for a big fat fee of course. It doesn't promise you will find a job. Just that it will take your money from you. And it doesn't tell you how much money either, presumably not until it has ensnared you in its web of promise and seduction.

Next on my list of let's profit from other people's misery shall we is the 'Is your CV being targeted at the right headhunters? Just send us £500 and we'll make sure that we distribute your CV to selected headhunters who will then whoop with unabashed joy, and jump in the air pumping their arms with clenched fists at seeing exactly the right candidate for the job they are seeking to fill, fall into their hands with no effort on their part just as they were about to despair. The job is practically yours right now'. This sentence is, of course, correct up to bit in italics. OMG people fall for this? Well of course we do, we are desperate, we need a job; any thing, including handing over large amounts of our fast disappearing cash has to be worth it doesn't it? Er no, in my experience. Handing over large amounts of cash to Snake Oil merchants is the last thing you want to be doing. There are plenty of organisations that help you for free - just look at the wonderful web site www.copingwithredundancy.org.uk and you'll see what I mean. For £5. Kidding, it's free.

We have the pernicious CV writing companies. 'Just send us your CV for a free review' they gush and we'll tell you how to write a CV that targets your desired job with the accuracy of an American missile.' Oh yes? How so I ask? If CVs were that easy to manipulate that potential employers would immediately jump into their company car, drive to your house, go down on their knees and beg you to work for them the instant they glanced at the carefully crafted document don't you think that might, just somehow, have leaked out or potential employers become inured to them?

Now don't misunderstand me. I'm a pretty positive sort of guy that sees the start of each week as full of hope and promise (or a complete prat, you can take your pick really). But these sort of things just get me going. So much so I feel that I have to go to Tescos and see if I can buy some hope and promise there as these organisations do so well in destroying exactly that by about Tuesday morning.

I see the Government believes that there is an opportunity to fast track refugees from the business world into teaching. As some one still intimately involved in the world of education (Mrs EoTP and her job and with children still at school) you can only gasp open mouthed at the sheer audacity of the scheme. Now I accept that many of us ended up in the wrong industry, and some of us are still wondering how we can escape. I ended up in the car industry because Big Thirsty Cars of America offered me a job first during the milk round at Uni and hinted that a company car would follow in short order - and it did, a 2.0 saloon no less, with a brown vinyl roof covering, velour seat covers and optional push button radio (LW and MW, eat your heart out). One of the students I knew stayed on to to complete teacher training after Uni because he fancied two blond babes on our course. The rest of us could see that they would rather run around naked on the campus in mid Winter than have anything to do with him, though he and I might have voted for that if we'd had a choice and Mrs EoTP (to be, though I didn't know it then) was away for the weekend. However that decision cost him dear as he is still on the fringes of teaching and can't escape either.

I went to one of my child's parent teacher evenings last week. I get annoyed before I even get to them, and I've been to many now, and therefore been annoyed many times You'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world to organise slots for clots (i.e, us parents) and rotate the meetings in a controlled and organised manner thus enabling us all to talk to about our little darlings in the time allowed. You'd think. What actually happens is anarchy, every time, as parents/children/teachers fail to get a grasp of what is going on and mill around ineffectually. We never did get to see, literally, one teacher, who was surrounded by layers of parents even though it is meant to be a one-on-one meeting. The Government clearly believes that bringing in experienced people from industry will give a much needed boost to these apparently ineffectual academic types and sort things out. Well it won't because, in industry, the well paid executives are far more incompetent than in academia - it's just that they can hide their giant, enormous mistakes much easier than you can in public life and in the public eye - I present the evidence of the finance industry M'lord but, if you want back up, then the automotive industry is quite instructive. For example GM. And Ford. And, well, possibly many other car manufacturers. 30% over capacity in a booming world economy? No wonder they are in trouble now. I wouldn't want to be a teacher. I think that they do a great job with such variable inputs (i.e. kids) but one does question their ability to manage an organisation of more than three people. At times. Such as parents' evenings.

Anyway back to retraining. I have been extensivley retrained I can reveal. It was suggested to me (and when Mrs EoTP suggests you'd better listen) that we needed a grout cleaning brush, as my bathroom cleaning came under some detailed scrutiny a week or so back. Apparently the grouting wasn't clean enough and needed a good scrubbing and therefore I concluded I needed a good scrubber. The old ones are the best I feel. A grout scrubber was bought (men - Lakeland - sells everything for the house that you never knew you needed and then some) My grout now gleams with the intensity of three white hot suns as do my toilet bowls and basins.

See, we men can multi-skill and multi-task and if the Job Centre ever finds out I'll be cleaning the municipal toilets as part of my next career step.

Cold comfort

2009-03-13T12:50:00.008Z

Mrs EoTP has a job (yippee).
Mrs EoTP is home at the moment, and has been for two days, with a streaming cold, which she has very kindly shared with me.
Thank you, Mrs EoTP.

As someone without much work to do, (but don't get me started on the toilets and bathroom which 'need cleaning'. Mrs EoTP doesn't take much notice when she's out at work but she has the eyes of an eagle at home) when you don't feel well you just stay in bed as everyone leaves for school/work. Or you wave them off and then dive back into bed and feel very sorry for oneself all day, such a luxury.

Of course, at work, there are all these procedures to follow when you've been off sick.

Notify someone who is the slightest bit interested. That's not always easy as all your colleagues are immediately ensconced in their own work on arrival at work or at least arguing about who is going to make the coffee. Of course you have to tell them this in a voice that suggests that you could come into work if it was absolutely necessary and would be sure that your slumped, fever wracked body in the corridor wouldn't get in the way too much but if it is OK with them you'll just hang on at home with your tissue box clutched to your side.
Find out if you have to call in sick on subsequent days. Nobody ever seems to know this.
On returning to work try and figure out how on earth you report your sickness and decide how graphically to describe the symptoms which are generally asked for in a big box on the sickness reporting form. Too little and there may be just the hint that you've been swinging the lead; too much and you've been Googling for just the right words to elicit full sympathy and plausibility and noted down an illness that only three people in the history of medicine have ever had.

Many smaller organisations seem not to be too bothered about all this reporting stuff. They wave an airy corporate hand at you suggesting 'oh don't worry about all that malarky' but actually means 'We'll make sure we make it up from you in the next year as you work twice the hours you are actually paid for.' And of course we do make it up - or you do if you are in work. I don't have to at the moment but just find that the ironing mountain is three times higher than when I last looked at it.

Then there is this fiendish system called the Bradford factor: using a cunning formulae and algorithms devised by the Devils's own little imps it measures the disruption of short, unplanned absences thus;

(and you thought you'd left algebra behind for ever didn't you?). Don't say that this blog doesn't teach you anything. This identifies malingerers with the accuracy of an American missile. Sort of like a speed camera for illness at work really.

Of course for most illnesses the most sensible thing to do is take to your bed and ram Ibrprofen down your throat until everything seems a whole lot better. In just about all the illnesses I've presented to my doctor in the last 10 years that has been his stock response : 'Oh I've had that just take some Nurofen and stay at home.' No more signing off from work for a week. Though I did ask for a little more help than that when I fell headlong down the stairs and dislocated my shoulder.

If you are of a certain age then you may remember Mother's remedys. Mrs EoTP and I do.

Colds, No tissues just one hankie which would be soaked after an hour as would the pockets of your school trousers, skirt (or both if it was a public school). Your nose would be the colour of the plastic noses for Comic Relief. I tried to dry mine (hankie not nose, there was health and safety even in the 1960's) on the fire guard of the coal fires in the classroom. Yes, in the classroom, Big cast iron stoves. With coal scuttles.
A warm onion in a bag for earache.
Warm olive oil poured into your ear to cure earache.
Syrup of figs for the going problems
Milk of Magnesia for the stopping problems
Calamine lotion - for making you look stupid with pink residue drying on your skin
A scarf tied around your head when you had mumps
Vick's rubbed on your chest to help just about everything

The other thing that always helps is a Brandy. Surely it's not too early for one of those? Well I'm working on Doctor EoTP's orders so mustn't ignore them, must I?

I'll be back

2009-03-09T09:17:00.002Z

The one thing you discover about searching for a job is that...it's just a job.

The last month has been a very difficult one with a death in the family. Naturally that takes precedence over all other things - like looking for a job.

Still, the show must go on, and I still have things to ramble on about. And will be doing so later this week.

I will be back.

EoTP

People who need people are the luckiest people

2009-01-27T13:06:00.009Z

There are a number of phrases that set my in-built danger bells ringing loudly.

'Dad can you help me with my maths homework.'
'Dad I'm going out I don't know where I am going or what time I'll be back.'
'Dad I'm just going to use the phone I won't be on it long.'
'You've won a weeks free accommodation in Florida, call this premium rate phone number to Croatia to find out more.'
Can you cook the meal tonight I'm going out?'
'I'm calling from BT to tell you about our new calling rates.'

and

'People are our greatest asset'

This last statement is generally uttered with the implication that the CEO/MD is also saying 'I love our people so much, so very much, that I want to take them all home with me every weekend for a party and give then give them all picture of a kitten and a puppy each because I love them so much did I tell you that?'

The last phrase sends shivers down my spine as it often associated with not investing in any other physical asset to enable staff to do their job with any degree of efficiency. There is also the proudly uttered 'We are investors in people' - great, but can you get a new biro from the fearsome Keepers Of The Stationery or more paper for the photocopier, can you hell as like.

You see, from my perspective, telling your employees that they are the company's greatest asset and then actively preventing them from undertaking the job they are paid to do by not giving them the correct tools is, well, unfortunately far too common. And if organisations are not actively preventing the staff doing their job then, by not fixing the problems, they clearly are condoning the whole can of wiggly things. I know that W Edwards Deeming covered all this back in the 50's so I won't go on about it (well not more than I am already doing) - but in my experience most people come to work with the intention of doing a good job, or at least the one they are paid to do, and then spend the day fighting the system which seems intent in preventing them doing exactly that. This is also true of volunteer work as well where the great British spirit of muddling through is alive and well and being honed to new levels of muddling not hitherto considered possible.

And then the recession.

'Get rid of people and get rid of them now'
'But I thought people were our greatest asset?
'Who said that, I never said that, I hate people, they are a liability, there are too many people around me I feel crowded get rid of them, preferably lots of them and they are drinking too much coffee and eating my biscuits. And shred those pictures of kittens and puppies, they make me feel nauseous.'
'But without people we will not be able to provide the high level of service to our customers that we, er, like to pretend we are delivering.'
'You still here, just lose the people and quickly. And you can go too.'
'Oh...'

Well that is Capitalism for you I suppose, in all its ruthlessness, but when you hear of all the people now without jobs, and know there is more to come, it sort of reminds me of the first letter I ever had making me redundant - 'You are surplus to requirements'.

That's not how you deal with your greatest asset, that's how you treat a filing cabinet.

Door stops

2009-01-23T10:58:00.013Z

It has been so cold in the house during the day over the last month I've had to use an ice scraper on the computer monitor before I could use it.

EoTP develops a new law of finance

When you have a much reduced income then the sensible thing to do is to reduce your spending at the same time. However there is an immutable law of the universe that states 'a drastic fall in your income and a sensible and matched reduction in spending is immediately followed by a corresponding substantial rise in your utility bills and an expensive failure of several vital domestic appliances.' Thus our gas and electricity monthly bill has just risen by 74%. Now I have appealed, in vain, to the accounts department of Horrendous Gas Bills and Laughingly Large Electricity Costs Ltd and thought I'd proved that, actually, our fuel consumption had fallen over the year - cunningly I used their own graphs and data but they remain unmoved.

So back to the cold house. You see, when you work you are so pampered, well at least many of us are/were, with warm buildings and, sometimes, even aircon during the summer. Mrs EoTP would like to point out here that she works in an Elizabethan building where the only way to warm it up was throw another Catholic on the fire. That was in the 16th Century of course. As a result, at home, the heating does not get switched on during the day and I have to wear so many layers to keep warm that the Michelin Man looks anorexic compared to me. I can't bend my arms to use the keyboard and have to rock from side to side to press the keys. thiz hus teken mi al dai to tipe.

Being at home also involves talking to a lot more people who knock at the door during the day, people I didn't know existed before unemployment. There is of course the Postie. Consistently, through snow and sun, rain and fog, she never fails to drop yet another substantial bill through the letterbox but never, ever any job offers. Don't get me wrong, after being home by myself all day with just my head goblins to chat with, the opportunity of talking to another human is one I can eagerly grasp.

But there are the others. We have the proselytisers, naturally, a steady stream of people most weeks, with the convictions of their faith, wishing to share it with you. I have no problems with anyone trying to convince others of their faith and will listen politely at my door for up to several seconds before declining their various tracts. Live and let live as long as it doesn't scare the horses I say. They seem to travel in twos: good proselytiser, bad proselytiser? Sometimes it is necessary to be a little more assertive in convincing them to leave, they having mistaken my smile as I greet them for someone desperate to be converted to Pantheism, become a Jedi Warrior, Man from Uncle or whatever. It is the ones who presume on my innate politeness by coming back for a second or third go over the next few weeks that, frankly, start to get on my er, er, er, wick (that'll do). I do point out that I don't come to their door and attempt to convert them to paganism or atheism on multiple occasions even though they have made it clear that they are not interested but we could make a pact and, if they don't stop calling, I will dress in a long white sheet and pointy hat and dance round in circles, singing and clapping on their drive whilst waving an inflated pigs bladder on a stick at each turn of the Equinox and other divers ancient ceremonial dates and is that OK with them?

We also have many itinerant peddlers call. They launch into their sales pitch for Latvian Gonks, Peruvian nose flute music CDs or super cloths (super cloths??) the instant the door opens, presenting you with an 'Identity card' that they have clearly made on a 1950's John Bull childs' printing set with a wonky, blurry picture of what looks like a Womble stuck on. I generally laugh at this identity card and tell them my kids could make a better one. Last week one presented me with a 'Peddlers' licence', allegedly signed by Sergeant in a Nottingham police station. I scoffed and he huffed and said 'Well, call them then it's pukka.' 'Right', I said, 'I will.' and made for the phone. He departed so fast he left scorch marks on the gravel on the drive.

Outside the house the Council are repairing the path. They are changing it from the 4 x4 testing ground it has resembled for many years to a blacktop surface with the smoothness of baize on a snooker table. Anyway they have this sign up - see the top of this blog. I wondered then, what sort of assistance they might offer me?

'Can you help me with my job seeking?'
'Yes go and talk to Albert there on the concrete mixer, he's a renowned expert and talks regularly on the Radio 4 'Today' programme to John Humphries amongst others. Albert is so motivational and passionate on the subject he'll soon put you right and get you back to work.'

'I'm confused about Marxism-Leninism could you explain the difference?'
'Of course, Brian driving the dumper truck completes the Wikipedia entry on that subject and lectures in many countries during his holidays - good friend of Castro actually.'

'I've never had cause to use the horse's hoof stone extracting tool on my Swiss Army knife, why do they still include one in the tool set?'
'Ah, now Jenny can answer that, she's an expert on medieval armour as well as our JCB driver.'

'I've been writing this blog on people who call at the door now I am at home a lot and don't know how to finish it.'
'That's an easy one, I can answer that for you, all you have to do is...'

Testing, testing

2009-01-07T20:32:00.006Z

OK so we've had a letter saying they might, just, not promising anything though, it's only a thought, look I still have my fingers crossed whilst I'm saying this, be interested in you.
For a job.
But first, before they even start actually speaking to you, before they even deign to actually even start to pay you any attention whatsoever, you have to be tested.
Tested.
What with? Needles, samples and involving latex gloves and bend over Mr EoTP, that sort of testing?
No, scarier than that.
Psychometric testing.

You see in the old days you'd get a tap on the shoulder and a 'You're alright, just turn up for the interview more or less on time, try and find the right office, don't dribble too much, pretend you like the boss's wife and the jobs yours'. Then all those HR managers were targeted by recruitment professionals selling their snake oil and, suddenly, an interview with the pre-meeting shoulder tap was no longer good enough. HR had been convinced that some of us could blag our way through interviews without knowing anything about the job, managing people, team building and yet still be a complete and utter power crazed sociopath who would ruin most of the business before moving on. Many of those types found their way to the top I found. The HR team wanted to know more, much more about your psyche, team playing abilities and what your head goblins were saying to you when all was quiet and still.

So they came up with testing.

Now I am the first to admit that relying on an interview alone is a poor way of deciding who should get a job particularly if it is me that hasn't got the job. If I have got the job then it is a first class way of recruiting exactly the right person and don't tell me otherwise.

My first test was handwriting analysis. They asked me to write all the letters of the alphabet as neatly as I could between the lines on a page in a notebook using a pen with a nib and an inkwell. No, false memory there, that was at primary school. Shame I accidentally spilt all that ink over the dress of the little girl sitting next to me. No my first test came, strangely, at the end of an interview process. I was reasonably confident that I'd got the job and 100% confident I wouldn't accept it. However the HR manager remarked, seemingly out of no where, that I should have filled out the initial application form in ink, in my very bestest handwriting, and not have printed it out on a computer. Did he not know how many bleedin' hours I'd spent making sure the print came out in exactly the right places on the application form after lining it up in Word? Well no, he didn't so he made me write it out in longhand like some form of after-school detention. Now I'm left handed and wondered whether all the resultant Rorschach inkblots would count against me and they, too, would be analysed - 'Be careful of this one he thinks he has special yellow friends living on the ceiling.' No a week later he rang up and said, simply, 'You're OK.'
OK?
OK?
Is that all the handwriting analyst could come up with on their professional scale? What was the scale then?
1. The ruthlessness of Genghis Khan
2. The sheer terror of Margret Thatcher
3. The team building skills of Stalin
4. OK
5. The honesty of Blackadder
6. The personality of Eeyore.
7. The intelligence of George W Bush

I turned the job down.

Next job application came with the computerised version. Left alone at a screen and keyboard I was given an hour to complete the test. Twenty minutes later I'd finished and, eventually, the HR person returned and was suitably impressed at my speed. 'That was fast' she said 'Some of those maths questions are very tricky, you did well to do them in your head.' 'Head' I thought 'I used a calculator I had in my pocket.' Well as no one had said not to I decided not to say anything - and took the offered job.

Of course HR are not so easily diverted anymore and the tests have become longer and more involved. I still have the results of several to hand. Let's share:
Actual quotes here.

'EoTP is unlikely to be reticent about coming forward.' - er, aggressive?
'He doesn't seem to have problems with stage fright in large groups.' Show off?
'Naturally curious'. Stop pushing your fingers in that electric socket - that was my Mother.
'Strongly creative.' Yes I see that of course I am, but 'don't let him work in finance'.
Rules - likely to exercise a degree of flexibility.' Yes, I treat them as guidelines.
'You should employ him now.' Are you listening?

Here's another one, only 25 pages long this one. My own Mum wouldn't recognise me.

'Affable, socially confident.' Lock the drinks cabinet and hide the party food.
'Very independent.' Well I think that means very independent what do you mean you disagree, I don't care I'm going to do it anyway.

Should I take any notice of it, should anyone? In some ways they are like horoscopes as they all talk in very positive and flattering terms about someone very important to me i.e. me. Whether they truly make a difference in recruitment when the potential employer finally groks my age and goes 'No we wanted young and cheap, I don't mind if they have the personality and moral scruples of Pol Pot tell the older guy we actually wanted uncreative and totally biddable.'

So I leave you with just one question?

Why?

Consultation period

2009-01-06T12:51:00.012Z

I could see the gleam of hope kindle and then blaze in her eyes with the heat of a white hot sun. She'd read my CV, discussed my career aspirations, and now she pounced with the zeal of someone revealing the entire secrets of the universe to the uninitiated.

'You could be,' she paused dramatically, 'a consultant' and then leaned back in her chair with the triumphant look of someone who has just bought the last bag of brussel sprouts in Tescos before Christmas whilst all around her the unlucky ones wailed and gnashed their teeth at their misfortune (well they do where I live).

And that was it, 50% of the result of the career counsellor's output after exhaustive psychometric testing, CV evaluation and interview skills. Oh that and be an interim manager which proved to be the other 50% and we've already had a little look at those roles. Having developed a poker face, as a result of so many people telling me 'Oh you'll soon get a job with your qualifications', and then not having done so, I asked, simply, 'Consult who with what?'. Had I asked how to fix the Large Hadron Collider for just £5.30 I feel I might have got a more fulfilling answer. 'Ah' she said, 'I've just forgotten that I had another client, er right now in Mumbai, must go'.

So let's put the beefburger of consultancy over the flames of possibility and see what catches fire. Well I've been an independent 'consultant' and it falls, in my experience, somewhere between the fun you have hitting your face with a house brick repeatedly and running over your foot with the car. Both interesting experiences in their own ways but you are very glad when they stop.

Firstly, consult what? Well, when you've had many years in the wacky and fun filled world of the sandwich-in-a-balloon industry you might feel uniquely qualified to be able to consult with the said purveyors of sandwiches-in-balloons. Of course, you first have to get over the hurdle that the the employer that has just ejected you might not feel like having you back on the premises, in the same town, county or even country and the fact that their competitors probably loathe them and their staff with a passion bordering on an obsession. The moment you left you were erased completely from corporate memory unless you figure in the same sentence as 'Ah that was the fault of XYZ, he/she didn't complete it before they left.' Your departure is good for at least six months of backside saving.

Then you discover that, strange though it seems, there are 65 other people who also claim to be to be consultants on the sandwiches-in-a-balloon business. You've never heard of them, you don't know where they've come from but they all seem to be pitching for the same teeny weeny bit of work. And all have strangely sounding business pedigrees that somehow make yours just that little bit less lovely and cuddly.

How much do charge? Oh this is so hard, so very hard. You are desperate for the work but don't want to sell yourself short because, once you name a day rate, hell will freeze over before you can raise it. £500 a day sounds a lot. But how many days will you work for and how any days do you have to spend not being paid looking for the next job. And you don't get paid when you are on holiday or have a sickie - pulling a sickie now costs you money (and that's a bad thing). Remember consultants often have the same, or slightly worse, survival rate of a soldier in the trenches during the First World War. I once turned down a week's work at £250 per day on the basis that it was half my usual day rate and then spent that week at home not earning anything. Still I had my pride. And an empty wallet. But I had my pride and that's what counts Tesco, that's what counts why are you escorting me out of the store?

The car, what car do you buy? Right, the big shiny company car has gone leaving only a small oily stain and few weeds on the drive. Now you have to buy your own. Prudence says a 10 year old Fiesta will do - but what will the client think? Too big a motor and they will think you are charging them too much, a pile of rust and they will think nobody else will employ you and have they made a major error. But how can you be a consultant without a sharp suit and a big shiny car? Everyone else has a big shiny car, why can't I Mummy?

And then there is the actual work.
'So what value exactly will you add to our company Mr EoTP?'
'Well I know stuff.'
'What stuff do you know and will that stuff enable us to sell more of our stuff for more money?'
'Well I know stuff about the industry and stuff about selling and stuff about marketing. And I have a kitten.'
'OK we like the kitten but not you - the kitten can stay.'
Fundamentally you will only get work as a consultant if you can actually show that, by the end of the paid period, that things are actually better in some way. Compare that to most people's jobs where they are satisfied if things are not actually materially worse than when they started out that morning or, at the very least, somebody else has been blamed for it.

And don't think that a groovy web site that lists your qualifications and Alma Mater will make the blindest bit of difference: it won't. Neither will funky headed paper - I had really very funky and colourful headed paper and I couldn't find any work after 18 months and therefore no one to send it to. Anyone like to buy 15 reams whilst we're here? The people who pay you money want the knowledge in your head extracted and put into a bottle and then they can throw the husk of your body out onto the cold, cold streets.

There are the accounts and the Inland Revenue to deal with and I still have nightmares about the day the VAT man sent in the bailiffs. Yes I was VAT registered. Pay the VAT before the children eat, before the mortgage is paid, above all else do not fail to pay the VAT man as they have super powers that transcend all us mortals. Pay them and all will be well, they said. Well I did and the one time that the VAT system paid my cheque into the wrong account, through their error, I had the bailiffs knocking on the door three days later demanding anything that wasn't too large to get through the front door but not including Mrs EoTP fortunately. Oh it was all sorted out, how I laughed, though I'm still waiting for an apology 10 years later.

In the end I gave up the consultation work. To be fair it gave me up first. All my contacts dried up or moved on and in the end there wasn't really a market for what I was offering. Marketing support for small to medium enterprises since you ask. Though I was prepared to do anything by the end of the period. That work as an ice trucker paid handsomely thank you. As if.

So before you decide that consulting is the very thing for you, in the worst recession the country has seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out by a giant meteorite or some one said 'there's a big black rat just got off that boat do you think it might be carrying a funny foreign disease', just be sure that the stuff you are selling is the stuff organisations are buying.

Or you'll be stuffed.

No country for old (wo)men

2008-12-15T15:22:00.015Z

Welcome, welcome to to our small but rapidly growing country, as you now know it is called the Benighted State of Redundancionia.

Please sit down here at the table in our small customs post.I haven't much time to go through all the details about our State as there do seem to be rather a lot of people in the queue behind you all waiting to come in. Strange how the State seems to grow very quickly, almost all of a sudden and then shrink slowly again over time. Last time it grew, our population was over 3 million. We are not sure how big it will grow this time but it seems to go in ten year cycles or so. I suppose someone in your country knows why this is. No? Oh that's curious you'd have thought...Well I suppose they have a plan to fix the problem quickly and are working in a concerted way to enable you all to return to the State you were in. No? Oh that's a little curious as well, still...

Where was I, ah yes the population. Well of course some of our population never leave us you know. Once they've entered Redundancionia they never seem to be able to leave this State though they say they want to. They talk about 'Waiting for Jobbo', or someone with a name like that. But they never appear or arrive to take them away. Sad really. However I'm sure you'll be soon back where you were. You're not sure? Well there must be plenty of opportunities. No? Well...

We have all types here with all sorts of very good and useful skills, both sexes (and some who are not quite sure), single parents, young people, indeed all ages, though we do seem to be particularly popular with the over 50s for some reason. They seem to stay with us longest. Why is that do you think, you all seem very, very capable with lots to offer back home? Can't think why your State doesn't jump at taking you back, except of course for Estate Agents and anyone who was a Banker, we all understand that.

Now you'll find there's much to do in your new State. We particularly like filling in forms, oh yes we do, many of them, often asking for the same information week after week. We make it more interesting by changing the person you have to speak to who then has to collect all your information all over again. Laugh, you'll not want to stop. Or is it start? I can never remember. It's such good fun.

Then there's the games many of us like playing called, for example 'How can I buy enough food for the family to eat on this pittance from the State, 'Do you think I'll be evicted from my house' (such a good one that, many play that game even when they thought they wouldn't be able to), 'How many job rejections must you receive before you feel totally shattered and feel totally like giving up' and 'Why am I not even getting interviews have I turned into a sociopath?'. You'll love them especially as you'll play many of them time and time again.

What to do when not playing the games? Well there's the national pastime of Mooching. This is where you wander around the house aimlessly, having scoured the papers for jobs, applied for anything that vaguely resembles work and not received a reply. From anyone. There's also 'Annoy your partner time', this is a growing pastime especially amongst those who have been with us longest. For some reason being in this State doesn't rest easily with those in the other State. Still it causes much discussion and hilarity amongst those couples I can tell you.

The weather? Oh very much a gloomy State, not much light at all, with depressions coming around regularly.

The geography is, I'm afraid, not very interesting. Everything is very flat and, being gloomy, it makes looking forward to anything very difficult. Oddly, even though the land is quite flat, we have many tunnels, though as you might imagine there is not much light at the end of them either. We do also dig many holes but, sadly, we seem to almost immediately fill them back in again. Communications are, I regret, still quite poor and you will find that you are cut off from many things that you enjoyed or were used to. You'll find that the telephone rarely rings anymore and there is no mail except bills. We are working on that. Still musn't grumble eh?

We have a muti-faith religion here called 'The Exit'- you'll find most people are praying for a way out.

Our scientists are particularly proud of our best defense mechanism - we've managed to find a way to make you all invisible once you leave your old State and join us here. Isn't it exciting? That means that all your old colleagues will no longer be able to see you and possibly a number of your friends as well.

Yes the currency, must explain about that. Our currency is called Beyondyourmeans, popularly known as an I'm broke. 20 I'm brokes equals a Beyondyourmeans. We expect our people not to live Beyondyourmeans but we set a little task for them by not giving them enough so that have to use I'm brokes. A broke can be divided into a 10 I'm skints. Simple isn't it

Our capital city is Itscompletelyhopelessnoonewantsme and that can be found next to the River of Despair. True there isn't much to do their except, well despair.

We do offer a suite of training courses to keep you alert and ready for when you go back to your State. We offer 'Springboard into a new life', 'Bounce back from boredom, 'Dive away from despair', Computer skills for chicken sexers', 'Lurch into a new career', 'Explode into employment', 'Fall gratefully into the hands of anyone who offers you money', 'Estate Agency - the BIG opportunity' (no not really, my little joke there) and 'Have you ever thought about becoming an independent consultant? Well don't, you'd be mad to try it.' Most of these we insist you go on. They are usually at the other end of the State from where you live. Consider it another of our little jokes. Actually no, you can't pick up the chair or any other furniture it's all screwed down in Redundancionia. We find it better that way.

Well yes there are other places to visit other than our capital. Not places we'd recommend though because they are, how can I describe it, sort of positive and upbeat. Not for me, I prefer the gloom. Since you ask there's 'You'vegottolaffaboutitorgomad', 'You'vegototkeepgoing', 'Thingswillgetbetter' and 'Heyyouneverknowthismightbe Forthegood'. Quite a number of people do go there though, seem to have a good time and then return to the State they were in. No accounting for taste is there?

You know I could talk for ages to you but there we are, the queue is not getting any shorter, in fact it is still growing. I've stamped your Passport, welcome again to our Benighted State.

Have a nice stay. Is good? You like?

Next.

Equitable life

2008-12-11T09:47:00.004Z

I know boredom. I was brought up in West Wales and I can tell you that once 'Sing something simple' started on the radio on Sunday evening at 7pm you might as well go to bed as there was nothing else left to do. It was no good asking your parents either as they would respond with 'How about you finish your homework about the sheep industry in North Wales, make plasticine sheep, colour in pictures of sheep or go and count the sheep.' Sheep figured largely in our young lives in Wales. And did you know that when sheep fart it sounds like a human one? Of course you didn't you are far too refined. So when it got dark all you could hear from your bedroom was the sound of ghostly farting from the fields and the distinct impression that some ghastly axe murderer was outside your bedroom window with dark intent but having eaten too many brussel sprouts for dinner. You longed for school on Monday.

The dynamics have changed. Wise up.

So when you have left your job (or, more accurately, your job has left you) and found that you no longer have a daily destination to go to boredom can set in quite quickly. For example I've just bought the 2009 'week on two pages' calender refill for my battered and beloved Filofax. So far I have birthdays and a dental appointment in there. For June. And that's it. If it had been available I would have bought a 'one-year on one page' refill but that might have been optimistic as it currently stands. In the old days, sigh of nostalgia here, I'd have been penciling provisional dates to beat up Marketing on their bonkers ideas to increase sales of badger warmers, dates for fighting with Finance who had the nerve to suggest that my entertainment budget might be er, 'a little constrained', dates to deal with the never ending list of disaffected employees who considered company property as a perfect eBay opportunity and the staff toilets as a useful centre for the distribution of marijuana, other illicit Class A, B, C drugs and stolen items and the bear pit fights aka as the Board Meetings that I chaired and were similar to Medieval street brawls at times; 'No please put the water cooler down we know that won't help the Sales Director explain the downturn in sales.'

Where did I put it?

Losing your job (doesn't that sound odd? 'I seem to have misplaced my job Mavis, have you seen it anywhere?' 'Well where did you last see it?'. Sort of like putting your spectacles down somewhere in the house and then spending the next two hours looking for them getting increasingly crosser and looking in more and more outlandish places.) There is a grieving process that you have to go through when you lose your job - can't be avoided it's gonna happen. When you start to come out of that you get bored and that's when you start following your partner around the house like a demented toddler seeking attention. Now we have to remember that your partner had had their own space and possibly job for many years. They've been running the house, managing the kids, living their own career without your intervention thank you very much, for a long time. So standing at their shoulder tugging at their clothes saying 'I'm bored' will become very wearing.
Very Quickly.
And you probably will not have pictures of sheep to colour in either.
The dynamics of the relationship have changed.

It's a hard thing but you have to find a new level of living and that means not having much of a structure to the day anymore - and finding that the day has many more hours in it than you remember. It does take a long time to come down from the demands that a job makes on you and the social benefits it also confers - where else are you paid to moan about the people who manage you with like minded soul mates, who now strangely do not return your phone calls and emails?

Do stuff. EoTP says it will help. Really

There are practical things you can do as you partner will not want to run the household whilst you are mooning about the house all day in your Winne-the-Pooh jim jams.

The shopping (I know the layout of Tesco intimately now and get annoyed if they move the shelves around.)
The cleaning - you should see my toilets, the pride of the street, twinkling with the intensity of the summer sun.
The ironing - creases so sharp you could cut down mighty oak trees with them.
Washing - there are 232 washing permutations on our washing machine though I only use 2. Still, I have now read the manual.
Getting fit. You should see me out sprint the milk float to the tune of 'Chariots of Fire' at 0630.
Cooking - no I'm not perfect I can't do this. I heat a darn good M&S Lasagna though.
DIY - moving swiftly on...
Communicate - look this is harder on men (comments on a postcard please) as we are genetically wired to hunt woolly mammoths and sabre toothed field mice and not clean the cave toilets. Women are, of course, far more adaptable than men and can catch and cook the mammoth whilst cleaning the cave without making a big fuss about it all and they don't need a stroky beard meeting beforehand to set objectives either. I don't mean that you should whinge every day about how bad it is not to have a job but talk about how you, the both of you, will collectively will get through it.

And so on.

Basically you have to find a new way to live your life with your partner in an equitable way and recognise that, temporarily at least, the relationship has to change and the roles have to change as well.

And if you don't recognise that or can't change then don't get too close to the water cooler.

Class distinctions

2008-12-02T11:55:00.009Z

Training is like measles. You get it once and then never again. In this blog I'm going to have a look at the subject of training after you've signed on and become a 'Job seeker'. And then take a peek at Corporate training.

EoTP says don't get me started on religion. Oh you did. Your fault

Job seeker - sounds vaguely biblical doesn't it, like after you've answered the knock on your front door and been confronted by a small weird man and his smaller, even more weird partner? 'I'm a seeker of Job' the small man squeaks, 'Would you like to be a Seeker of Job too?' nodding furiously and offering you a handbill printed using a John Bull printing outfit. 'No' I say 'but how would you like me to come and knock on your door and ask whether you would like to be part of my Pagan Cult and worship oaks and ash trees and dance around wearing white tablecloths and pointy hats and chant about fairy folk?' They always leave at that point.

Don't be proud, be humiliated.

In my experience it's always better to sign on. Come on, don't be proud you're entitled to the money, (well pittance actually, money is an exaggeration and insult to the term), and your National Insurance gets paid (for your stunning State pension of course) and we all like to be officially demeaned in front of complete strangers who undertake the equivalent of a public financial strip search whilst asking us to sit on chairs screwed to the floor. Sounds great doesn't it? Who'd want to miss such an experience?

Impulse power only. My impulse is not to go.

Training is available but not as we know it Jim. My initial training, when I first became a 'Job Sneaker', was in how to use a computer. For 'Executives'. Yes, I know, I know. OK so not everyone in the early 1990's had used a computer to be fair. The venue was a shabby outhouse attached to the Job Centre 12 miles away from the Job Centre in the town where I lived. I pointed out to the extraordinary caring and supportive Job Centre person ('Can't do anything for you can we, you're not eligible for training unless you've been unemployed for 18 months and are dead.') that I didn't have a car and there was no bus service to the other town except on Sundays. 'Not right bothered' seemed to sum up her response. As you HAD to go on this training to keep your Job Weaker payments (so no change there then) I eventually found a way to get to the town only to find that the computer equipment consisted of Amstrad green screen computers, no mouse, and badly typed instructions on how to type a CV. There was no way to save, electronically, the CV you had typed and the printers were line printers with hole feed. Classy.
This pretty much sets the scene for all the other training at that time. All training courses were given dynamic and thrilling names such as 'Leap into work', 'Bound back to employment', 'Replace', 'Restart', 'Renew', 'Give in', 'Reluctant to go but do you still want your dole?', 'Do I really have to?', 'Surrender to the inevitable' and 'We have Tasers, come out from under the table'.

This sums up my experiences:

Shabby facilities.
A trainer who clearly had much better things they'd rather be doing with their time and had a degree in Patronising.
One flip chart with two sheets of paper left, six marker pens, all dry.
An overhead projector, no bulb, no replacement. Screen that only came down half way.
Old desks and chairs.
Training that could be done in 15 minutes by reading a handout but was strung out all day so the trainer could claim a day rate.
A coffee machine from which came brown warmish liquid regardless of the input you gave the machine; coffee, tea, hot chocolate, orange juice, warm stoat piddle.
One person in the group to be trained who clearly was going to do their level best to be as disruptive and obnoxious as possible. If training proceeds at the pace of the slowest member then most of the training I went on actually went backwards and I came out knowing less than I started with.

I'm told that training has now improved. You can really tell the difference in taste, apparently, between the hot liquid that comes out of the coffee machine but which is now so hot that it is actually melting the plastic cup that holds it and your fingers are burning as you rush to put it down on a table somewhere. It is a while now since I was last on a training course - when I signed on last year I was told that 'You are too well qualified for any further training. Now how much money have your children got in their piggy banks it all counts for means testing.'
The relief.

Of course corporate training, when you are employed, is so different. Here even more dynamic phrases are used to justify it such as '360 degree',' 1-2-1'. 1-on-1', 1x1=2', '180 degree only so we can really criticise You in public', 'Customer is king, queen and on-hold on the phone something should be done', 'Telephone techniques to keep the customer on-hold on premium lines so we make more money from them whilst telling them we value their business with a recorded message' and so on.

This sums up my experience of corporate training

Always booked at hotels miles from where you work or live and are in the middle of an industrial estate.
Hotels that have just opened and are desperate for any occupancy.
The food is on a plate. You know it is food only through the fact that it is on a plate. There is no taste or texture but is always given a French description 'A wheelcover of mange tout lovingly coated in a moue of une Mars Bar with a garnee of les fruits de la catering pack of vert bits'
The shower delivers one small jet of lukewarm water unless you shower at three in the morning.
The room is overwhelmingly hot
The training room is overwhelmingly hot.
The staff are underwhelmingly undertrained.
A trainer who clearly had much better things they'd rather be doing with their time and had a degree in Patronising.
One flip chart with two sheets of paper left, six marker pens, all dry.
Role plays - I so hate role plays. 'Hold onto this telephone hand set with no cord and pretend to deal with a difficult customer'. How about we pretend I'm bludgeoning an overpaid trainer?
Training that could be done in 15 minutes by reading a handout but was strung out all day so the trainer could claim a day rate.
The bar has the attraction of an 1950s Eastern European police station (but is always engagingly called something like 'Antonio's Well' (good I hate an ill bartender) yet five members of staff will stay at the bar drinking until they pass out. Every night.

There's always something that you can learn from any course, I used to think.

Well, of course, you can be upbeat about life or stew in your own cauldron of despair and I know what I prefer.

However thinking back about training please pass me the matches, I need to light the fire to heat up the water.

The lie of the land

2008-11-21T10:17:00.014Z

I looked down the garden and saw my then three year old son poking around in the long grass looking intently for something. Thinking Teddy might have made a bid for freedom from the daily indignities imposed on him by a three year old boy, some other special toy had been lost or there was some particularly interesting cat pooh I walked down to talk to him and see what he was doing. 'I'm looking for the fairies that you and Mum said were at the bottom of the garden' he said. Yeah that's right, in a moment of whimsy the previous day one of us must have trotted out, unthinkingly, the myth that fairies could indeed be found at the bottom of the garden.

So what other untruths have we told our kids I wonder?

Father Christmas
Snow at Christmas
Peace on Earth
The tooth fairy
The Easter bunny
The DFS sale will finally end one day
You can do and be anything you want to be
Education is the route to success, happiness and wealth

Let's examine those last two.

Can you be anything you want to be? This is the line peddled to children as they grow up. Hard work, focus, dedication and a commitment to your dream will make it come true. Except of course, for the majority of people it simply doesn't and you can't. I mean you can't have more than one President of the USA at the same time (unless the Americans come up with an innovative job share scheme), or British Prime Minister and if they then get re-elected then you end up as old as John McCain hoping that, in his 70's he's going to make it to the POTUS at last but, darn it, some youngster pips him to the post. You might want to pilot a 747 but if you have spectacles with lenses that are as thick as double glazing and you can't see the the ends of your fingers let alone through the window then your options are sadly limited, though I suspect the pilot that landed the aircraft that bought me back from Paris the other night on Ryonjet might have slipped through the net. I think he thought we were the Mole from Thunderbirds as we tried to drill into the runway on landing rather than bowl along it as is normal practice.

That's not to say we shouldn't encourage our youngsters.
We tell them that they should always try hard, they should be the best they can be, that very few things come easy in life, that things you worked hard for are much more worthwhile than things that come easily, that if they do not clean their bedroom we'll have to declare it a health hazard with the World Health Organisation, that teenage spots really do not mean the end of your life and girls really don't mind, that school shoes do not clean themselves and that drinking more than six pints of Best Old Badgers Piddle is bound to have severe consequences the following morning and you can clean the toilet. No, we perpetuate the myth that you can do anything and, if you can't make the dream, then you are, by definition, a loser.

We then compound that by defining success as money or possessions. We don't say 'Wow fabulous bunch of great friends you have there, they'll stick by you through life and never let you down' or 'What a fantastic appreciation you have of art/literature/philosophy' or whatever or even 'What a lovely partner and beautiful kids'. No the emphasis is on salary, house, car marque, possessions and, if you don't have them, then you must be a failure. Instead the world seems to favour the arrogant git that has a large German prestige car, is on his third wife, his kids hate him but, because he is the MD of Consolidated HooHahs and Tinkly Winkly Bits Inc and lives in a large Tuderbethan new build on an anonymous but strangely desirable estate built over an old plague pit, it is a good thing. How come?

But by not being honest and telling our kids the truth that, yes some people do make it to the very top (and that they just might) with even fewer making it to the top without trampling over the souls and lives of many others to get there, and actually luck plays a huge part in what happens in life seems to me to be just wrong. I am surrounded (well not literally of course because that would make this room very uncomfortable and far too warm and I'd have to keep making them all coffee and offering biscuits) by irritatingly smug people where I live (and they are usually men) that say such things as 'S'funny the harder I work the luckier I seem to get, anybody without a well paid job is just shirking and doesn't want to work' and then looking at me in a meaningful way. If I were given one super power I would wish to be able to shrivel to the size of a gherkin anyone who says that. Do they not realise that they have been supremely lucky not to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time like so many others? It's not your innate skill and loveliness that has kept you in a job matey boy, it's largely luck and having had opportunities. Oh how I'd like to kick some butt like a bad ass mother sometimes. But being British I just tut, tut.

Let's consider education. I can count to ten in Latin, vaguely remember stuff about ox-bow lakes and Pingos (as opposed to Pingu who is far more interesting), recite a few poems by John Donne and Wordsworth and recall the periodic table. However what people who pass exams are very good at doing is repeating back some barely analysed information you've been told to the very people who told you it in the first place. You could argue that it is the 'University of Life' and what you learn after you leave the education system that is more important. You get older and wiser in the ways of the world and discover that knowing the structure of an iambic pentameter is not helpful when Sales are telling you that the order bank has fallen off the edge of the known world or HR want to sack 50% of the workforce. Lots of people are very intelligent in some ways but stumpingly dim in others. Have you noticed that the IT support team can often fix a networking problem but have no idea how any real world application works i.e in other words the very thing you need to finish the quotation for a very important customer who wants to give you large amounts of money. "Just reboot and that will fix your Excel problem'.

Then, armed with all these qualifications, you enter the world full of hope and badly managed expectations: 'You can be anything you want' and a B.Sc. degree in Badger Care and Squirrel maintenance is a passport to wealth, success, regular sex and a new iPod every six months (might get one of those degrees then). And then you find that half the world is anti-academic 'Oh no I don't value those GCSEs and degrees, everyone has them, give me someone from the School of Hard Knocks, Illiteracy and Obsequious Fawning' or 'Look, this is my opinion OK that's all you need, just find me supporting arguments to back it up and make me a coffee and take the dog for a long walk while you're at it'.

So older, wiser and vastly experienced we 50 + year olds are, with much eclectic and valuable business knowledge at out fingertips (and I can still complete the declension of mensa, mensam plus discuss elementary badger care as well). So why is so difficult to find a full time job after a certain age? Is it something uniquely British not to value enthusiasm, experience and knowledge and do we all have to emigrate to somewhere like the States where they seem to do so, although they also value personal ownership of assault weapons and powerful handguns which is much less of an attraction.

Remember I am going to get that superpower. Then there'll be a lot more gherkins around soon.

________________________

I've just read a review of a new book, 'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell that goes into this topic in more detail. For example 'Bill Gates was lucky enough to attend a school in Seatle that, very rarely for any school in those days, had a computer connection to a manufacturer...his talent for programming was given an...opportunity to flourish...came of age just as personal computers became a reality...he had talent and entrereneurial vision...but also opportunity and luck.' The Times: Books: Saturday November 22 2008. So there.

And this (thanks Neil) - you couldn't make it up could you?

Bored position

2008-11-14T15:17:00.010Z

When my job was made redundant for the first time, in the recession of the early 1990s, I swore to myself.

I need to finish that sentence; I swore to myself that I would do anything to earn money rather than sign on the dole. I duly went along to the Job Centre, a misnomer if there was ever one, as during the last major recession there were virtually no jobs where I lived unless you were prepared to relocate to Kirkaldy. The Job Centre person looked at my qualifications, of which I have a fair few, and said 'There's nothing we can do for you is there? Any job we have here will bore you in a few days.' And that was that. Sign in triplicate that you promise to look for work really (wink, wink), see you in two weeks and next please.

This presents us with a dilemma doesn't it? The answer is yes if you're still thinking about whether it does or doesn't. If you thought 'no' then the rest of this blog would seem pointless, although some would argue it crossed over that line many months ago. When the unemployment numbers are rising faster than flood waters of the summer of 2007 and the number of jobs are falling at an equal or greater rate then if follows that finding a job is gonna be a bit tougher than usual.

I wanted to shout (explain patiently yet assertively) at the Job Centre person that you need to let me worry about whether I'll be bored or not because my prime aims are to stop the bank repossessing my house and to feed my wife and baby and for that I'll need an income. Even if that means flipping burgers for many months which I would be quite prepared to do. But no, prospective employers clearly do a paper shift and instantly exclude anyone with too much experience. Or any experience in many cases because they don't leave enough space to put in more than one GCSE on the application form. And if you lie on your application form then that excludes you as well. Perhaps I no longer want to commute for hours each day but be able to walk to work; perhaps I no longer want to deal with the daily doings of hundreds of members of staff; perhaps my experience would help a company survive during the recession?

Some one left this comment on an earlier blog of mine 'There's no age discrimination now, of course, so I'm getting replies of 'too experienced'. Too experienced for what? Too experienced to do the job you're advertising? What will happen if someone too experienced did the job being advertised? Maybe they'd be too good at it. That would never do.' Well quite.

Personally I'd prefer a fully trained pilot flying the aircraft I'm on rather than someone young but cheap. And if the paramedics have to be called I don't want to see them stop and look at a handbook before treating a serious injury or calling Control and asking for the best way to stop excessive bleeding.

Marvin the Paranoid Android 'with a brain the size of a planet' ends up parking cars for the restaurant at the end of the Universe. At least he got a job. I end up wondering just why, if companies need part time labour, most automatically seem to exclude any one who is, or seems to be too experienced, whatever that means. I read there are plenty of jobs available 'but no applicants.' I apply for these part time jobs and all you hear are the sounds of the tumbleweed blowing through the abandoned town with the faint but ghostly cry of 'too experienced' in the wind.

When I was first made redundant I thought 'OK if I am too experienced for some jobs I'll take some of the free training on offer and be retrained to a level where I am just trained enough for a different sort of job and would therefore be considered.' Got to be creative when you are out of work and looking for a job. But the Job Centre wouldn't have this at all. 'No Mr EoTP you are well qualified already and therefore too qualified to qualify for training for different qualifications. Do I need to qualify myself?' I asked whether they had heard of 'Catch 22' but they stared at me blankly. I did manage to blag my way onto a course at the local university aimed at senior managers who were long term employed. I'd only been out of work for a few weeks but had to find some way of getting more training. The course was filled with senior managers, in their early 50's, most of whom had worked in the financial services industry (isn't that all very spooky?). See what experience brings? I've seen all of this economic downturn before, it's just Groundhog Day all over again. And the way to solve it is...well I'm not telling you because you won't employ me. No you'll be sorry, you wouldn't take me on because you thought I'd be bored. No I really am sulking now.

However I've had a rant once again. Let me leave you with an upbeat message with these two quotes from Marvin the Paranoid Android that, I feel, best sum up the whole 'you're too experienced' thing.

'Well I wish you'd just tell me rather than try to engage my enthusiasm' and 'Wearily on I go, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow.'

Interim results

2008-11-06T13:30:00.003Z

We had a careers office at my school. To enter to it you had to get past the school leopard guarding the entrance way, scale the 250 metre high turret that had every third stair removed, get through the barred and locked substantial wooden door that was booby trapped in many cunning ways, smoke a Players full strength cigarette without vomiting or turning green and then recite a substantial portion of Ovid, in its original form, to the guardian of the room, a wizened and ferocious goblin (well actually the school chaplain but the lighting was poor). He would then give you one of two dog eared and fusty career pamphlets and encourage you to a) join the army b) join the police or c) be fed to to the school golem. Being a public school you were expected to go straight to Oxford or Cambridge and then into the Foreign Office or some such Civil Servant career. Anyone that said they were considering anything that smacked of being an artisan was considered a dangerous Communist and probably a Russian spy.

Where am I gong with this? I'll tell you if you are still with me. When you go to many career councellors, after 'R' day*, they often take a similar line but without the Players cigarette. They listen sympathetically, note your full career path to date, nod wisely at your cores skills and competencies and then wince when they note your age. 'Ah' they say sagely savouring the moment, 'have you considered consultancy or interim management?' and then sit back as if they have delivered the meaning of life. We'll deal with consultancy another day but let's have a short wander through the fields (or back lawn anyway) of opportunity and interim management. I feel that there are things you need to know, much like a career in the army - did you know that people shoot at you it's not all international travel and marching up and down in lovely uniforms.

Interim management is a numbers game. There are X interim management companies. There are Y to the power of five possible candidates. Yes, there are many, many more candidates than positions. Therefore, to have any chance of even being considered for an interim position, you have to register with (and I have calculated this in Excel) 3427 agencies in the UK.

If you are then selected for an interview (or win the Lottery, the odds are similar) you then have to make your own way, at your own expense, to the place where the interim job is. It could be anywhere. Well philosophically speaking I suppose it always has to be somewhere. Anyway, as it is an interim position they, the prospective slave master (I mean temporary boss) does not have to treat you in a fair and meaningful way during the interview process and can end the interview on the basis they don't like your suit and tie or skirt, or both if you are feeling particularly bold that day. And in my, limited experience, when you get the job you are often on a very short period of notice, 'just finish your coffee and be off with you'.

There are, I'm told, people who do very well out of interim management. I'm also told there is gold to be found at the end of a rainbow. I'm also told that the successful interim managers also spend over 25% of their income on marketing themselves so that they can move quickly into the next position so as to avoid 'resting'. This is actually quite a problem. Here's an exemplem from my own life, once again.

EoTPs exemplem for this week, plus a recommendation (for free)

I had a very successful run as an interim marketing manager for a local company who wanted marketing support but couldn't afford a full time marketing manager - I worked for them for 6 days a month for well over a year. I was on a one week contract renewal. Failing quite spectacularly to heed my own advice I stopped looking for alternative work after about six months as it was all going so splendidly. Then suddenly it wasn't. Economic downturn, very sorry, you did wonderful work, still here? And that was that. What I should have done was
a) charge much more (to cover the hard times, but it so hard when some one says what is your daily rate and you so much want the money and are afraid to sound grasping, and expensive, and yet not desperate.).
b) work very hard at looking for alternative interim management work whilst actually earning.
c) sign up to another 3425 interim agencies as I was only registered to two and one of those had gone belly up during the year.
So, if you find this sort of life appealing (or you find the idea of actually earning an income again instead of being offered sous chef positions at your local Job Centre) then go into this eyes wide open and not be seduced by the careers counsellor. A good question for them is 'Have you actually ever done any interim management yourself?' Watch the body language and for other clues such as 'Well Mr EoTP next client is here, must go', exits stage left at speed.

EoTP hasn't quite finished.

There is one other aspect to interim management that should be mentioned and that is you are never quite a member of the team. Now interesting dynamics start going on here especially without the formality of having a particular place in the organisation's hierarchy. No body seems quite sure how to place you - are you important/dogsbody/secret consultant looking for victims/in the wrong office? I mention this only as I recall, as someone on secondment once, going to a confidential meeting one day, sitting there listening to all these secrets and stratagems being discussed only to realise, after a while, that I was in the wrong meeting - and no one had questioned my presence.

I apologised to Mr Blair and the rest of the War Cabinet and made my way out.
They've never asked me back.

* That would be Redundancy day, do keep up.

Parent company

2008-10-30T11:14:00.006Z

I don't think they believe me.
My parents that is.
We spoke the other day, on the phone, and I made a fundamental mistake. They asked me how the job search was going and would my contract be renewed early next year.

My fundamental mistake was that I told them.

Now do you remember Zaphod Beeblebrox? I'm sure you do. One of his heads wore glasses, as I recall, that in the event of danger would become completely opaque so that he could no longer see the danger and therefore could not panic. My parents are like this. I think it stems from living during the war. 'Eh lad, thou cannst no longer hear sound of t'V2 flying bomb, so thou's safe'. Or was it the other way around? Anyway they're from Yorkshire so that explains a lot I feel.

They deal with every crisis of whatever magnitude in two ways. A cup of sweet tea and a denial that it is happening. 'What are those multiple mushroom clouds and large bangs our lad?'. 'Put on kettle our wife and t'finish Telegraph crossword.' would be a typical reaction. So I've learned over the years not to tell them anything that does not have a positive spin and makes the whole world sound utterly lovely and full of fluffy bunnies and pink field mice.

They must have got me at a moment of weakness because I launched into an explanation of the difficulties of finding a job, CVs, recruitment agencies, experience, age, salary expectations, the state of the economy, the Amercian election anything and everything. In fact it was a mini rant. 'But', they said after several minutes of puzzled silence, 'you've got lots of 'ologies'. (Hands up all of you who remember the BT ad then). I then compounded my mistake by trying to explain the difficulties of job searching and the over/under/wrongly/too/not enough/not quite/if only you'd had one more days experience matrix that is used to weed you out provided you even pass 'he must be so totally kidding shred that CV and use it for the hamster's bedding' first filter.

Well I suppose it makes some sense. My father was a Civil Servant so worked for the Government all his life, retired on an index linked pension and had never heard of the word redundancy. My mother never worked (Mrs EoTP has pointed out that anyone saying that a woman who has brought up a family and managed a house hasn't 'worked' is asking for more trouble than they've seen in a long, long time and suggests that person recants...if they know what is good for them. I recant. I meant hasn't been in paid employment. Close call there.) No one else they know seems so have racked up such an impressive ability to have their job made redundant during their working life as I have done, so they are puzzled as to why I can't get another full time job. I think they think I'm shirking, slacking, swinging the lead, possibly not making enough effort and living on the vast earnings of Mrs EoTP's renaissance career. Make it so. Only it ain't so. If their lovely son can pass all his 'ologies and get two degrees then he must have something very wrong with him and be unbalanced. Let me tell you I am a very balanced individual - I now have chips on both shoulders.

Having made this error I am now seeking to retrench my position by taking a Panglossian view of the world and its many opportunities with my parents and refusing to say anything that doesn't seem as if is only a matter of hours before I'm snatched up by some desperate organisation seeing me as their saviour of the moment. They clearly prefer this approach and have not questioned me anymore about the job search. Their house is full of fluffy bunnies again.

I'm off for a drink now. A Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster will do me. According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it is the best drink in existence and says that the drink's effect is similar to having one's brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster has also been described as the alcoholic equivalent to a mugging: expensive and bad for the head.

Beats tea anyday.

Premature speculation

2008-10-20T10:27:00.005+01:00

This is a subject that affects everyone, I'm sure, over a certain age. There's no need to be embarrassed; it's just better if we get it out in the open (no joke intended) and talk about it. Once we've done that you'll realise, I hope, that you are not alone and that you can be treated and no ointments or surgery are required (joke intended).

'The problem is premature speculation.'

Now there are two objectives to this blog. One is to mark my progress in finding another full time job after my fourth redundancy whilst in my early 50's. The other is to be noticed by a major publisher and be offered a huge advance to publish my memoirs which will then be taken up as an option by Hollywood and David Tennant would be perfect to play me. Sorry drifted off for a moment there - the other objective is to help anybody else in a similar position by attempting to describe how it feels trying to find another job and all the stuff you have to do (and not do) and then make all our lives feel better. Substantially. When we get the next job.

Back to premature speculation then.

The symptoms:

You've been out work some time and you've cut back enormously on spending (you need to do this as that redundancy package you have may not last as long as your unemployment, even though that holiday in the Maldives does look raaaather tempting and you can't believe you'll be out of work for more than a month - hey, go read the newspapers.)
You're now driving around in your partner's 15 year old 2CV and telling all your employed friends with big company cars that 'yes it feels really good to have a much lower carbon footprint, should have done this years ago, will never go back to a car with a CO2 emission greater than that of a turnip, think I'll convert the driveway into an allotment', turned the heating down, started wearing the jumpers your Mum knitted you in 1967, thinking that the local Oxfam shop might have interesting clothes after all and cooking with offal that cost no more that £1.50 a meal but looks, well, like offal.
You've sent off bucket loads of CVs but with absolutely no response.
In fact no one has called you back, responded at all to your speculative CV and everything on Monster jobs seems targeted at 18 year olds.

And then, out of the blue, comes a request to come for an interview. You haven't had an interview for months, can't even remember applying for the job really. You look at the job spec, well actually first you look at the salary , then the job spec, decide you'll say you can do it whatever it is the job entails ('Yes I have substantial experience of fighting polar bears and breeding guinea pigs and have been to the centre of the world lots'). You have the interview and the interviewer seems slightly interested, might call you back for second interview and/or definitely put your CV in front of their client.

EoTP bangs on about recruitment agencies. Again.

And this is when it will start happening. You begin to start speculating about what it will mean to have a regular income again. How you could use what's left of the redundancy package to go on a decent holiday, have the 2CV scrapped (bloody awful thing) and buy a 6.0 litre 4X4 SUV for your partner ('that will show them at the golf club that I'm still standing'), get a plasma screen TV, convert the patio into a Elizabethan knot garden - and so on. It's no good standing there and saying you'll think no such thing 'cos we all do it. And, as I have learnt to my cost, it is totally pointless because until you actually have the offer letter in your hand, all the blandishments of the recruiters are - well whatever it is you could use it on your new allotment for the vegetables.

In my experience virtually all recruiters are too scared or unprofessional to say 'Great meeting you but you're not what we/our client wants, now get out before I call security.' Most would rather get you out of the office leaving you with some vague notion that you actually may be just what they want and will be in touch very soon (define 'very' and 'soon' - 2020?). The reality is they have 25 other candidates to see and have already forgotten you.

And by giving you this impression you start to dream the dream about a salary again and all the possible opportunities for consuming that go with it.

The prognosis:
You've got to be tough. You have got to be moving onto the next application even though you might have a second interview. Whatever you do, don't indulge in idle speculation because, when the rejection comes, not only do you get the wobbly lower lip because you've been rejected (again), it hits all the harder because you've already spent the salary in your mind. However that is not as bad as actually spending the salary using your credit card. Even worse if you've mentioned to your partner and or kids that you'll buy them that expensive thing they've wanted for ages when the job offer comes in. Your disappointment will be trebled when that happens.

I'll bet you're glad you came to Dr EoTPs' surgery today so we could sort that out. Any other problems before you go? How about some CV implants, boost those last two positions a little shall we, make them a little perkier perhaps?

Confidence tricks

2008-10-17T13:53:00.006+01:00

A year ago to this week Mrs EoTP started back in full time work for the first time in sixteen years. A week later she had turned into a complete jelly, a metaphorical jelly that is not real one of course, as that might have caused some problems in the staff room and certainly with her driving.

Why the jelly thing? Because, despite being fully qualified with the degrees and lots of letters after her name, Mrs EoTP thought she could no longer handle the work load.

Now a year later and Mrs EoTP is barking out orders left right and centre, managing her working time time to the second, taking on additional management responsibilities and generally showing a fair proportion of the rest of the staff up for being complete woosies and shirkers. And she's giving me a hard time too. You should see the list of things I was expected to do today.

And that's the subject of this week's blog. Confidence and where does it go? To hell in a handcart is the answer. No, there's more.

'Winnie-the-Pooh plasters do not solve confidence problems' says influential report

When you've lost your job it is, to put it mildly, a bit of a blow and it can't be fixed with a Mummy's rub of the sore knee and a Winnie-the-Pooh plaster. The job search itself can be a long, hard and, dare I say it, distressing journey. Mainly because the journey involves REJECTION. Time for another exemplem from my own life.

So far, over the last 18 months, I've applied for well over 70 jobs. I'm still here rambling on about redundancy in your 50's so I would describe the time as a journey rather than a destination. Now I've had a number of interviews during that time, a little over 15% of the total applications. Ignoring the part time job I have, that's a 100% failure rate to get a new full time position and 11 interviews also with a 100% failure rate to get a new position. That, I put it to you, is a fair amount of rejection for one person in a short period of time.

The effect of this multiple rejection is, sometimes, a feeling that actually you'll never be able to manage to make toast in the morning, let alone be responsible for people and a business ever again. It's daft really but, if someone tells you you are rubbish repeatedly and not wanted, you develop a sort of learned helplessness, and a corresponding feeling that you can never again be thrusting and successful as General Manager of Consolidated HoHahs (now merged, because of the economic climate, with Incorporated Whatnots). Little over three years ago and I was managing over 400 people in a business with a £24million turnover. Today I cleaned our baths and toilets.

'Stiff upper lip needed' says EoTP. And sense of humour. And lots of tea.

How to handle this then and make your job seeking life better? Substantially. Let's start with the jelly. After sixteen years of not working Mrs EoTP took just three weeks to get back into working life. After twelve months you wouldn't think she'd ever not worked. Though you may think you can no longer hack it, the fact is that within the week you'll be right back in it wondering how to choose a company car above your grade and whether you can travel business class on an aircraft. Last week I had an interview. No really I'm not kidding, really did. Problem is, the recruitment agency told me three days later, is that there is a recruitment freeze at the company. 'So why did you interview me and have me travel miles at my expense' I wanted to scream but there you are. During the interview I was asked about my Excel skills as they would be important. I almost turned into jelly there and then and yet, yet, I am totally fabulous with Excel, no really. However I found myself thinking 'Oh no there's no point in going on I don't even remember how to launch the application let alone enter any data'. See, confidence slipping because I can't believe that any organisation is interested in me - despite being interviewed. Hmmm, flawed logic.

Stop planning ahead. I mean it, listen to me. Take one day at a time, cliche I know, but there's no point in fretting about something you have no control over.

'If they don't want you that's their big mistake'

Don't give up. It does not matter how many rejections you get, just do not give up. I have been told I am overqualified, under qualified, wrongly qualified, the wrong type of snow and at the wrong meeting but you just have to keep going. Mind you I don't bother with the 'would you like some feedback on your interview' anymore. I can only take so much kicking after all and, anyway, every organisation is so different that it's just their opinion, and as their opinion involves not taking you on you know it must be deeply flawed anyway and definately not worth listening to.

Reading this back this all sounds a bit sanctimonius except that being out of work is painful, can be demeaning but cannot be ignored because there are bills to pay. There's always something good that comes out of the experience. My toilets are gleaming for example. I'm not going to let anyone use them for two days.

Hours: not to reason why

2008-10-13T15:01:00.003+01:00

I was talking to some police officers the other day.'Can't you loosen those handcuffs they're rubbing my wrists?' I said. No I didn't. I wasn't under arrest at all but we were talking. They'd told me that they work a 12 hour shift on a rota that required an IBM AS/400 to compute the permutations of days on/nights off/on. But the amazing thing is, they told me, was that everyone up to the rank of Inspector gets paid overtime.

Overtime.
I mean paid overtime.
Can you believe it?

I mentioned to the officers, in passing, that the last time I got paid overtime was in 1979. 'No way' they said. 'Yes way' and No Kidding. When I left the lowly clerical grade that I started on in my first job after University I, like many others, was expected 'to work the number of hours necessary to complete the job'. This, of course, means that the organisation could now exploit you to the full by making you work so many hours that your salary fell rapidly to the equivalent of 10 pence an hour. As a young ambitious and, just possibly, tad naive graduate I naturally fell for this malarkey and promptly started working around the clock, down in the mines and cleaning chimneys. Mrs EoTP however, worked for an organisation that did no such foolish thing and had proper start and finish times. This meant that we saw each other during July only and rarely at any other time during the year as our arrival/departure times at home never coincided.

Fails to go to hospital to see the baby

So ingrained did this way of life become that when we had our first child, born late at night on a weekday, I actually went to work for a while the following morning before going to see my wife and new born in hospital. Mrs EoTP was not impressed I can tell you.

Then of course, five months later the company made my job redundant - so it had all been worthwhile hadn't it?

Exemplem: Eyes on the Prize gives example from own life.

And this is the thing of course. Organisations rely on this huge level of unpaid work to get anything done. I'll come back to this in a minute. Come with me for two tics and let me give you an example from my own life. Working for a company down in West London they, the daft management, decided that they were going to enforce rigidly the start time of 9 am. Failing to take into account the appaling traffic in the area and the fact that employees who were unable arrive on time, through no fault of their own, always made up the time at the end of day plus they also did lots of unpaid overtime, the new policy was introduced - you would lose a full days pay if you failed to arrive on time. Oh yes, it worked, everyone left home an hour earlier to get to the office but...no one actually then started work until 9am exactly and everyone left exactly on time. In just two weeks the Management (good grief, couldn't find their backsides with both hands and a route map) recinded the rule because they found the company was beginning to fall apart without the unpaid extra time being worked.

Working many, many hours is 'silly' - shock report says.

When you've been kicked around a bit, like my four redundancies, you begin to see that working many hours for nothing is probably, well, silly. After all you're not going to be lying on your death bed thinking 'Gosh wish I'd spent a few more hours at the office' are you? So when a senior manager colleague moaned, a few years ago, that most of the staff were actually daring to go home on time I pointed out that that was, contractually, what they were paid to do. 'Maybe we should pay overtime if you want them to stay on' I suggested. Look of horror on colleague's face.

There is another aspect to hours worked. And that's logging them. I work 3.5 days a week. I have decided, as no one else has, that a 'day' is 7 hours work plus 1/2 hour for lunch. I log any work that takes longer than 10 minutes. I regard travelling time as 'work' but not if I'm going to the office because that's my place of work. Not contentious so far is it? Except that there are sorts of discussions about this. Some of my colleagues think I shouldn't regard travelling as work - well what is it then? If you stay away overnight when does work stop? When you arrive at the hotel, when the meal with your colleagues is over (as you discuss work with them) and so on. I am paid a fixed salary but I still have to work more hours than I am paid to to get the job done. Am I mad? No need to answer that one. Well, in the end, I try and be sensible about all of this because I like what I do - if only there were more of it - and you have to deliver.

The final aspect of hours I'd like to share with you today is 'where do they go'. Look, at 0910 am this morning I decide that my day will consist of completing a number of specific tasks. By 1630 hrs I discover I have partly completed one, put off all the others until another day and started on six more that were given to me during the day and were totally unexpected. I am not the Prime Minister of Great Britain or a Captain of Industry, so where has the time gone? Who has taken it and can I please have it back?

Oh well, no option then, I'll just have to stay on after work to finish it.

Bleak expectations

2008-10-07T11:55:00.008+01:00

'Well I'm looking on the brightside this morning' said Mrs EoTP 'I've a new pair of scissors to use at work'. We'd been discussing, before we both left for work, the increasingly grim economic news (you may have noticed it recently unless you've been living in a parallel dimension) and I, in my optimistic and prophetic way this morning, had opined that this was probably Not A Good Thing for my full time employment prospects. I had also stated that it would probably start snowing and not stop until March, fuel prices would rise a further 100% by December, interest rates would treble, a herd of llamas would invade our garden, the house would be repossessed, the family would disintegrate (split up, not disappear into individual atoms which might get a small mention on the news), and, you know the sort of fully rationale response we all have to the odd personal setback in life. Mrs EoTP declared that you have to take all the small pleasures as they come, though I think she might have been making a point but it passed me by.

Why this gloom? Easy one that. Because 17 years ago, when I was first made redundant the market conditions were remarkably similar and suddenly no one was recruiting - I was, of course, in an anti-recruitment situation. The dastardly HR team didn't actually say those words but I bet they wanted to. Being in the automotive industry as I was (and still am) it seemed to take the downturn very badly though those in the financial services industry probably believe that things aren't quite as rosy at the moment as they might be. Saying 'Have a good day' as they pass might be considered akin to having a death wish. With five months of falling vehicle sales in the UK you can bet that further rational phrases such 'for Pete's sake slash all the budgets, nobody spends anything, ban travel, turn off all the lights use candles, ban entertaining, in fact ban everything, employees have to pay us to come to work, however I still need to travel business class to San Francisco for that meeting make sure the hotel is 5 star won't you?' will be used throughout the head offices of all the car manufacturers. It still makes me smile that the instruction used to come through, all those years ago, to only make phone calls in the afternoon and stop sending faxes to save money. Rome burning and all that. All about you the business is failing and collapsing and you have to stop sending faxes. Whatever they are.

You can't give yourself away. A local company advertised for a part time marketing manager (did I tell you I am a qualified marketing manager, I'm sure I did, you just haven't been paying attention). I was vastly over qualified for the job but, wanting some extra work, rang the MD before sending in my CV to explain why someone so clearly so wonderful would want one day a week work. 'I fully understand' he said, 'love to see your CV, just what we were after.' Needless to say a) the pay would have been impressively low and b) I got the inevitable email 'we found someone who's experience matched our needs more closely'. I have an MBA with a marketing focus and they found someone with better experience! I was virtually giving myself away and there is someone they want more?

Right now there are lots of well meaning articles in print and on the web aimed at the recently redundant and I have to say that I think most are meretricious rubbish. Not that I have strong views on this you understand, but most seem to have been written by people who have never been made redundant and are trotting out the same old tosh. Over 40 years old and you have, in my experience, a heap big problem, over 50 and it is a heap bigger problem only the heap is smellier. OK I admit that in the good economic times it is easier to get a new job but when thousands are having their jobs made redundant and all employers are freezing recruitment then believe me, it's gonna be a long hard winter.

Charles Handy (he of the 'Empty Raincoat', Reinvented lives' and so on) wrote extensively of developing a portfolio of jobs. Great idea, not so easy to do. See example above. I am not quite sure what type of employee these companies who seek part timers want but I bet the words 'young' and 'cheap' are part of the description. And of course there is the theory of why people have low paid jobs: because they accept them. Yes I know, get down from your soapbox before you start lecturing me, many people have no option but to accept these type of jobs but, in this country, employers seem not to value experience but prefer cheap. And young.

I continue to apply for part time jobs, though I don't spend much time on the nuances of the application forms, cut and paste makes it easy. And by emailing them you save on postage.

Well Mrs EoTP will have been using her new scissors all day and will, no doubt, be savouring the delightful experience.

Me?

I'm sure it's going to snow.

A small case study

2008-10-02T14:57:00.007+01:00

The first time I opened it, it creaked very loudly, like an old door with ancient hinges, creasing the pristine leather. Inside was a soft, yellowy lining, with differing sized compartments, so many compartments, to store so many things, so many things that I actually didn't possess. And then, in my best handwriting, I wrote my name, in biro on the inside of the flap, because this was my first, my very first satchel. In brown, pristine leather with gold coloured buckles and a long leather strap. In fact it was the first time I recall having to carry anything regularly to and from anywhere and the reason? I'd just started at my new secondary school and it was on the list of required items sent home by the school, along with body armour to protect one from attacks from pupils from the rival school plus a 'make yourself hideous to girls' kit (for this was a boys only school and to be seen anywhere near a young female was tantamount to making them pregnant instantly and tarnishing the name of the school - which was the most heinous crime of course). I think we were naturally hideous to girls as a result of the extended peaks on our mandatory school caps, having to carry satchels and having nascent acne but that might be simple prejudice coloured by time. On the first day of school I put my pen, eraser, pencil sharpener and compass in the cavernous bag and set off for lessons. By the end of the first term the satchel had become, progressively, a weapon to hurl around on the strap to keep assailants at bay, a pitch marker for rugby, something to drag along the ground like a dumb pet and, very occasionally, a container for carrying substantial numbers of books.

When I started work full time I reverted back to the not having to carry anything to and fro for several years until I got my first company briefcase. This was the size of a small steamer trunk but was mandated for the position of field manager - everyone who had the role had to have and use one. It was a badge of office. It was made out of material that could withstand an airburst nuclear attack at a height of 50 metres, could accommodate a small motorbike and had clasps to secure it that opened with a sound similar to a large gun being cocked. When all the field staff came in for a meeting and opened the cases you needed ear defenders on to protect your hearing. In the five years I had it (it really was indestructible, it's probably in a landfill site now and will still be there until the crack of doom) I never managed to fill it more than a third full and always felt faintly embarrassed when my dealers glanced in and saw how little I had to carry. And you needed 5 managers signatures to get a new case but only 3 to replace a car. Totemic or what?

At least it was sturdy (in a Forth Road Bridge sort of way) because I also recall duffel bags purposely designed, I'm convinced, so that you would deposit your games kit on the road as the bottom tore out at random times when cycling home. And why were they always covered in a tartan material?

Anyway when I left my first organisation for greener fields (oh how I now laugh now at that naive thought) I had to hand my case over to my successor. This left me feeling rather naked without a suitcase attached to my hand when arriving at the new offices. Recognising, belatedly, that I never actually filled the first briefcase I bought a slimline Samsonite case with locks that sounded like large guns being cocked when opening them. What is it with briefcase locks? Naturally I never filled this either though would jauntily take it on aircraft and then feel embarrassed when having to open it at security when all it had in it were two pens, a pencil sharpener and a compass. This lasted about two years until I finally realised the futility of carrying a 90% empty briefcase around with me.

Then I discovered leather document folders and these have been my standard carrying item ever since. Slim, elegant and seemingly indestructible they have accompanied me around the world. All the papers I need always fit in them and I can get my iPod, glasses cases and sundry other items in with ease - and no more embarrassment at security as it passes through all their scanners.

I had several company laptops that came in bags of a similar size to my first briefcase - so big were they they wouldn't fit behind the driver's seat of my car but had to be towed on a trailer behind the car or rest on the back seat sliding about as I drove along. Now, if I take my Macbook out, it fits in a messenger type bag slung over my shoulder. Easy. And probably cool too. A little.

You can see this progression in trends by looking out of the window at the kids making their way to school. A few years ago it was all backpacks, bigger than those used by the British Army, then a year of plastic supermarket bags with various bits of games kit and school books poking out and now it's mainly messenger type bags. Good heavens I'm keeping up with the youth scene. Gd grf thts Gr8.

There are times though when you do need to make a statement with a bag and when that happens it's time to deploy the old battered briefcase that was my wifes and her brothers before her. Battered, scratched, marked and with a clasp that probably last worked in 1935 it is a true statement of pedigree and style (and a refusal to spend any money on a new one). So why I carry it I don't know, but whenever it is out and about it always attracts positive comments from true afficionados who know that a bag is for life and not just to impress.

Pitch battles

2008-09-02T13:21:00.004+01:00

Have you ever been involved in pitching for new business? I mean really, have you? Is there any more soul destroying and irritating event in business life, except of course for the annual Christmas party or IT installing a new company wide system and stating 'it will all work without problems we promise' whilst keeping their fingers crossed behind their backs and hoping you don't notice?

When I was self employed I found that the search for new business actually took 3 out of the 5 working days a week. There are actually creatures who can noticeably evolve faster in the time that it takes some potential clients to make up their minds about who to use to create the advertising for their new range of rubber bands or multi-coloured what-nots. I found I was compelled to start charging my actual clients a new tax, on top of the agreed daily rate, called the 'dithering tax', a variable sum of money necessary because of the amount of time it took for some people to make up their minds whilst I subsidised their inability to make a decision - and I mean both yes or no. Because, whilst they dithered, they also expected you to reserve the time in your diary so that, in the forlorn hope they actually came to a decision, you would then start immediately on the project, notwithstanding that they'd taken six months to come to a decision in the first place. No, continents could come together and move off again in the time it took to decide to spend £115 on a new leaflet design that would go straight into every recipient's bin without a glance. I believe my all time longest gestation period for a decision was just over two years. Yes folks, two years after submitting the pitch the potential client replied that they would like to go ahead with my proposal if I could please start tomorrow. By that time I had actually been in a new job (full time, I just about remember what that feels like) for 18 months. And then they asked plaintively 'What would they do now I'd turned them down.' I almost told them.

Just as bad as those not so potential clients who are just using you to pick your brains for good ideas and have no intention of ever using employing your talent. I call them the...oh no better not, keep it clean. After bitter experience I can now recognise the symptoms. A brief that is quite vague except for precise phrases such as 'How can we reduce our overall operating costs by 25.63% in five months - be totally specific and name names for the big chop.' A client who, when you submit your business proposal passes it back to you and asks 'but how exactly would you do this'. I was in an interview once and had got quite tired of this line of questioning after answering in a general fashion and eventually replied 'well you could employ me and then I'd tell you' but got the big glare but not the job. I now use the 'sell not tell' technique as, if you are too specific there go your ideas, floating by in Powerpoint, presented to the big boss as someone elses's big answer to the giant problem.

The worst example of this was - no can't name names once again. Anyway they wanted the organisation I was working for to come up with a way of changing a process. We were 'the only bidder' (how they must have chortled) and therefore they wanted us to be fully specific about the process, the costs, the project timing, the colour of the walls and the name of the office cat. So we did. In good faith all this was produced, including an animated 'fly through' of the process. I constructed spreadsheets of such complexity you could calculate the effect of buying one extra biro on operating costs and profits. We presented the information, we recalculated it, we coloured it in in crayon without going over the lines, we presented it to anyone who would listen. And then they took our plans, gave them to one of their subsidiaries, 'we didn't have any budget in the first place', and took the work we had been doing away from us. And imagine how pleased they were when we asked for the costs of the project to be repaid (estimated at £30,000), oh the outrage, the huffing and puffing, the 'do you not consider yourselves partners of ours, oh how ashamed you must be to have asked such a question.'

And it doesn't change. Just a few days ago I spent four days responding to a client's pitch that was urgently required so I could start the project at the beginning of September, please hurry up with your detailed response. Now they've asked me to completely rewrite it as, as they've had a little think, it wasn't what they wanted after all, and I could possibly start in late October or even November, possibly.

So what do I make of all of this? It's hard to say as maybe it's just the way of the world. But yesterday I did go for an interview where they said 'a decision will be made on the day'. I'm still waiting to hear that decision - they didn't say what day though.

The day the gerbil broke free

2008-08-25T11:01:00.006+01:00

You can see what happened here.

It all started with the best intentions. We'd agreed to look after a pair of gerbils this year. Well it beats the duck sitting that we agreed to do last summer. They arrived, two little rat like creatures, in their cute gerbil cage. It started well with one of the boys having the cage in his room. That lasted one night. 'They kept me awake all night with their scratching' he complained so off to another (empty) room for subsequent nights. He's a teenager and needs sixteen hours sleep a day. Then came the extra food treats, a little piece of carrot, a slice of juicy apple. Next an empty cardboard roll for them to 'play in, they'll find it interesting'. What they found was it was good for was chewing into teeny weeny pieces. In seconds. Like piranhas on little legs.

Then it moved on to more daring thoughts.

'I don't like them cooped up in that cage they need more exercise and gerbil stimulation' said someone.

And then came the hunt for a suitable receptacle to put them in for. What Mrs EoTP found was a large packing trunk and she, and the boys, then created what they believed was gerbil heaven. But we will soon find out that gerbils have a different view of what constitutes heaven. The story continues. In the trunk are placed more empty cardboard rolls, ramps and bridges, little huts with doorways and peep holes, a restaurant, swimming pool, car hire outlet and Tesco Express. What more could a gerbil want you might ask?

And the answer is freedom.

I don't want to say 'I told you so' but about 30 seconds after they were placed into gerbil paradise I mentioned, casually, that these little cute creatures could jump like a kangaroo. 'No worries' came the reply followed by a scream of 'One's got out'.

Yep, eschewing gerbil paradise for freedom one of the little horrors jumped and ran - and boy can they run. Within seconds he'd cleared the room, got into the kitchen and headed for the back of the house with all of us now in hot pursuit. Fortunately all the doors to the outside were closed. However, we all coped admirably and only ran around like headless chickens for five minutes, shouting 'OMG, OMG'. One of the boys opened a door to the outside (for some reason) and promptly found me screaming at him to shut the door. 'Can I come back in now?' he kept asking plaintively from the other side. 'No' I said 'keep the door shut'. I think he's still outside, I must check. The other boy stood laughing but contributed nothing to the recapture plan which evolved (put a bucket over it, throw a napkin over it, appeal for it to come quietly using a bullhorn, show it a picture of an attractive female gerbil, tell it we don't care and it can run around all it likes it's only amusing itself and so on). Mrs EoTP was on her knees peering under the furniture and pointing to said escapee which was interesting but not terribly useful.

Contemplating, just for a nano second using the vacuum cleaner to capture it (I was desperate at this point), I came up with a cunning plan which was then executed with skill and panache, and quite a lot of swearing, to round the animal up. I don't think there is a career as a cowboy waiting for me anywhere but if you have a small, fast domestic animal loose in the hoose then I'm probably your man. Their is nothing quite so pathetic as four humans trying to round up an animal the size of a mouse. We can get to the moon...

So now the gerbils are back in their cage and that's where they are staying. Looking after other people's pets is too stressful. Mrs EoTP has to check on the welfare of some chickens in a few days. I have made her promise not to open the hen house, I can't face the angst of them flying the coop (as it were) or trying to come up with an alternative metaphor like headless chickens in front of the chickens (they might have feelings you know - howabout runaway gerbils?)

Last year it was the duck and the teenager (see here)

This year it has been the year of the gerbil - and the teenager again (not so bad this year, only left the windows and doors unlocked this time).

I think next year we need a break. From the animals.

The burden of work

2008-07-11T13:43:00.008+01:00

When I had holiday jobs as I student I carried only my thumb so I could hitch lifts to work and back. I might have carried some loose change in my pocket just in case I had, if all else failed, to catch a bus home but this would be a mark of such abject failure that it was not to be deployed if at all possible. I wouldn't carry a coat either, just a T shirt and jeans, that's all I needed to get through the day. If I got wet then that was all part of the teenage macho image. If I took sandwiches then they'd be wrapped in some grease proof paper and stuffed in my pocket and the crumpled remains, delightfully unchilled, would be plonked on some surface for the morning until it was time for lunch, though lunch was usually provided free in staff canteens - the perks of working for a hotel. We won't go into my summer of cleaning sewers.

Then I started my first full time job. By this time the jeans and T shirt had gone replaced by, and it embarrasses me to recall this, a brown suit with lapels so big you could glide several hundred feet in the air with them like some gigantic flying human squirrel and flares on the trousers that could knock pedestrians over 30 metres away with the back draught as they flailed around my ankles as I walked. But jumping from the car and walking into the offices from the staff car park, I carried nothing more than my wallet and pass to get me through security. You could be out of the house and into the car in seconds and then from the car to the office in a few minutes. When it came to the end of the day all you had to do was push all the stuff on the desk into a drawer with your forearm, lock the filing cabinet, wake the boss and walk out.

It all started, straight after a promotion to a field job. First came the briefcase, then folders to put in the briefcase. Because you now had a brief case you felt you had to take it home at the end of the day, for no good reason as it stayed firmly closed all night in the hallway, it was just what everybody else did. So that meant unpacking it in the morning on arrival in the office and then packing it all up again in the evening. An extra ten minutes either way. No more jumping in and out of the car either. The case had to go on the back seat or seat well which now meant opening the rear door.

Then came the mobile phone. At first it was installed permanently in the car and then it became 'mobile' or, for those of us that remember such things, the size of a military sized field radio that needed carrying on a back frame. So now the journey involved remembering the briefcase, the phone, switching on the phone, wedging case and phone in the car on leaving home, getting phone and case out of car in the office car park walking into the office, unpacking the files, finding a place where the mobile both received a signal and could be charged and then reversing the process for the return journey. We've just added 15 minutes to the journey each way.

Now the field based job. It got even harder. The briefcase, the phone (smaller admittedly), the suitcase (as I had to stay away for several days at a time) and the complete set of A to Z's for Northern France and Belgium and the Baltic States plus all my A4 files, probably 50 in total. Now it takes half an hour to leave and half an hour to unpack at each hotel or when I get home.

The executive job. This includes a laptop because having a laptop means that you can work on from home after a full 12 hours at the office, and can therefore never be away from the 'office' which indicates you are important, plus a Blackberry, colloquially known as a Crackberry because you can't put the damn thing down as it chirrups incessantly as new emails arrive demanding to be dealt with NOW. Of course this has all added more time to the leaving and arrival palaver as you now have to put the laptop in the special docking station in the office and boot it up. For some reason booting up a laptop onto a network takes the best part of a morning as does the shutting down process in the evening, when Windows likes to take a very leisurely route to turning itself off. You only have about two hours during the day when you can actually use the thing. Naturally I circumvent this by yanking the whole unit from the docking station after half an hour of 'Windows is shutting down please waste 30 minutes of your life that you will never get back as we decide when we want to go home, not you.' I gave the Blackberry back after a month. I couldn't stand it anymore.

Today. I pack my laptop in its own case, put my files and notebooks into a leather document holder, pick up my three glasses cases (driving, reading, and sunglasses) and walk to the car and place them on the passenger seat. Then I come back into the house put on my jacket, pick up my wallet and Filofax, pick up my mobile phone, Bluetooth hands free set, SatNav and Coolbag with my sandwiches in (thoroughly chilled) and return to the car. I then attach the SatNav to windscreen, wire up the power cable to the SatNav and stick the Bluetooth hands-free slug into my ear. It's taken 45 minutes to prepare to leave. For goodness sake they can launch the Space Shuttle and have it in orbit in less time. There are palpable signs of evolution on animals in the time it takes to put all the equipment in the car - and this is without unpacking it all when I get to the office or my destination. Then I have to work out what needs to go in the boot of the car for the time being, because of the issues of security when leaving the car in a public car park. Thieves would need a fork lift truck to move all this equipment from my car.

I thought the electronic world would relive us all from this burden. I see I am wrong. What I really need now is a Bergen military backpack to carry it all. But who will carry me?

It's all in the cards

2008-07-04T14:12:00.004+01:00

I am a man of many identities. I know this to be the case as I have the papers to prove it. These are, of course, business cards and I have about 20 of them charting my career as it, too, has careered over the years. From account manager level to Director level and, my all time favourite, no job title at all level, they rest in peace in a box somewhere in the house so I show my kids the rise and fall and fall of my career.

At the moment I actually have two different business cards. How cool is that? One set for my three and half day a week job and the other set for the other organisation I was desperately needed for, sign the consultancy agreement papers NOW and send them to us immediately is there anyway you can hand deliver them there is a job that needs doing NOW, can't wait, hurry, hurry, hurry we'll print you business cards and FedEx them to you. Actually that was four months ago now and yes, you knew it really, it never actually happened.

But what happens to these cards, I mean does anyone actually do business with them? I diligently collected other people's business cards for years on the basis that they 'might be useful.' I have them here, right now in this purpose designed business card holder with the words 'business cards' picked out in sky blue Dymo tape on the top, in case I was under the illusion that it held a Faberge egg perhaps?. What's even more astounding is that they are in alphabetical order. That's why, presumably, I have the Mayor of Cordova's, Alabama card. Now I can't begin to remember why I have his card, where I met him or why I though this would be useful. Here's some others. One for an online used car sales company (out of business, I just checked), a paint shop in Singapore (just in case I needed some paint as I was passing through?), Banco Fiat in Sao Paulo, the delightfully titled Directeur de l'Observatoire in Paris, a barrister (ominous) with his name, telephone number and one word title (full marks for going overboard with design there), one for Gasper in Sao Paulo (who was Gasper, or what?) and one in Arabic on one side and Japanese on the other.

I can honestly say that I have never contacted these people again. And they haven't contacted me either but we all go through this rigmarole of handing out these little paste cards to each other. For some reason. Of course, like so many things, cards have become more and more ingenious. They have changed size, they are bigger/smaller, open out like a folding ruler and some are quite clever bits of origami. You know the sort you can't fold them back up properly afterwards, like a large newspaper after you've read it. I've got transparent plastic ones, ones with people's pictures on, square ones, ones written on rice grains, three dimensional cards, holograms, ones that don't exist in our time space continuum, ones printed on the back of live animals that I now have to look after, talking cards and even mini CD cards that you are meant to put in your PC computer tray and then look at. And look at them you will for ever if you put them in some CD trays because they never, ever come out again.

So all this effort to create attractive cards that represent one's business and capabilities and they all get put in a little red book with blue dymo tape for ever until they are forgotten. How sad. I did have a really groovy one, when I was self-employed, that was designed by my friend, a terrific graphic designer. The design wowed people, they would stop in their tracks and admire the striking design. They never called me though and I sent out/gave out hundreds of them. Would you like one, perhaps a box of them I have several left over?

Then there is the ritual of the exchange of cards. If you are the one entering into an office you always have the advantage - card already secreted in a pocket you whip it out and hand it over with a flourish - there that's my credentials so now you have to take me seriously. They, on the other hand, immediately dive into a drawer stuffed full of loose elastic bands, staples that have escaped from the box, fifteen pens that don't work and twenty seven pencils that you keep meaning to sharpen if only you had a pencil sharpener, 126 paper clips all connected together from when you had that really boring on-line conference that took hours, six memos that you meant to reply to but had lost, sixty seven business cards from previous visitors and a year's supply of PostIt notes and mutter 'I have one here somewhere' and then hand you one with a coffee stain on as they can't find a coaster for the coffee either. Then you leave and your card becomes the sixty eighth. Of couse there are always the dreaded V cards, little attachments to emails that are meant to update your central collection of business contacts - somehow these never seem to work and get deleted.

Then there's people's titles; Grand wizard, Associate (i.e we don't actually employ them), Gerente Geral (sic), Head of Group Synergies (you just know from that that there aren't any), TQE District Manager and so on. Some put all their academic qualifications on: GCSE in woodwork, ironing and coracle weaving, along with the big ones: B.Sc (HONS), M.A (HONS), FRIXT Assoc, GMINT Acc, FRIAPP (Fellow of the Royal Institute of Associated Pygmy Photographers) or whatever. They have a qualification and boy are they going to make sure you know it, whether they actually earned it or paid an annual fee to have membership to the association.

It's all now lost on me anyway - as soon as I get a card that I know I will need the details for I write them in my Filofax anyway.
And throw the card away.

The Iron Man

2008-06-26T13:51:00.001+01:00

I think King Canute got it wrong. He should not have attempted to stop the tide coming in, as legend tells us, he should have tried to stop ironing appearing, a much, much harder task.

I'm getting to grips with this household management thing though. When I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago about doing the cleaning yet again (on the one and half days a week I don't have paid employment) Mrs EoTP looked at me (the Look) and said 'I've done it for the last 16 years so a few months won't hurt you.' and strode off to boss the Parachute Regiment around. She terrifies them. She has changed so much since starting work again. Somethings I just can't do - cooking for example - I still struggle with all meals except those that involve 'remove outer sleeve and pierce film, place in microwave' or food that can be put in the toaster. Sometimes I confuse the two with hilarious results. Try toasting frozen lamb mince and you'll see what I mean. Toasting and microwaving are just about within my competencies.

DIY is something I try to avoid - I can't do that either, and it has to be more of a PSE or 'pay someone else'. Mrs EoTP still reminds of the day I was replacing a light bulb, fell off the chair and broke an occasional table...with my head. Or the time I wired the electric cooker to the mains. That blew the fuse box right off the wall when I switched it on. The fact is that my hands will not completely obey my brain in certain conditions, usually those involving practical issues.

I've more or less cracked this dusting and vacuuming thing though. I can now clean the house, for the week, by 1230 on a Monday and I only need to start cleaning at 1145. Mrs EoTP will never discover the little 'short cuts' to cleaning - not until the holidays that is but by then it will be too late.

But there is one thing I can do and that's iron. I have discovered that I can put creases in trousers or shirt sleeves that you could spread butter with, they are that sharp. I can happily while away several hours ironing, listening to my my iPod and getting the cable of the iron tangled up with the earphones of the iPod (with hilarious results). Oh what pleasure there is seeing an empty laundry basket putting away the iron and ironing board and then turning around and finding there is still washing on the line, in the washing machine or hanging on a drier somewhere in the house. But no matter how much I do it still keeps on coming. It seems to make no difference how much I iron or when I do it (throughout the night at this rate) the amount of laundry requiring ironing never stops - in fact we seem to be have about 30% more ironing than than we have clothes. I am becoming suspicious that somehow I am doing the ironing for the street. The neighbours must be creeping in and depositing their ironing in our laundry basket, it's the only answer. How families that have more than three children keep up I don't know. Perhaps they are ironing in perpetual motion or in shifts. The other annoying thing is that, and I hate to admit this, Mrs EoTP is a lot faster than me - she seems to polish off shirts in no time but then can cut you cut a steak with the creases in her shirt sleeves like you can with mine? I think not.

I believe it is a Good Thing that I can iron, a way of demonstrating my solidarity with the necessity to keep the family clothed and fed. Mind you it is not a skill I put on my CV admittedly and neither is it a topic that gets raised down at the pub with the lads. Not for me the 'Oh forget about Chelsea's performance against Man United last night let's talk about whether non-iron shirts really don't need ironing and don't you think that linen is awful when it's become bone dry on the washing line. Those new man made fibres iron well on low heat don't they?' I think that might lead to me losing my hard man status. And any further invitations to go to the pub.

On reflection maybe Canute chose the right thing to try and stop. How would the history of the British Isles have been different if the Royal lineage has chosen laundry as the battle standard? The Doomswash Day book anyone? Magna Overnight Soaking?

Chips with everything

2008-06-13T08:16:00.003+01:00

I manoeuvred my car slowly down into the quarry following the muddy track the trucks used to enter and leave the site. By the time I reached the site office car park my company car was covered in a grey sticky film of mud. I got out of the car and, walking on tiptoe in a vain effort to keep the mud off my shoes and suit, headed for the Portacabin where the person I was due to meet worked. Two mangy Alsatians, held back only by their long leashes barked loudly at me eyeing me up as if I had been scheduled to be their meal today. As they jumped and strained to reach me they showered me in more mud. I entered the Portacabin, shook hands with the site manager - he offered me a cup of tea before we started the meeting. I thanked him and said 'yes please'. And then I saw the mugs.

The mugs were weapons of mass destruction. They were stained in ways I couldn't believe it was possible to stain a mug without using ancient banned magic. The deep brown stains of a millennia of never once seeing warm water and washing up liquid. Not a millimetre of white left on them. Striated like some monstrous geological fault with deep cracks running around the outside and inside. The rim of the mug was deeply chipped around the whole circumference. There were the stains of dribbles of tea from the last user running down the side. The site manager plonked the mug down in front of me, and drank deeply from his own mug - it had what remained of a cartoon on the outside 'The world's greatest...'. Indecipherable - poisoner, mass murderer? 'I'm going to die so young' I thought 'Of some horrible virus that has mutated for years on this mug and for which there is no cure. That's why the Alsatians were eyeing me up - they knew this was my last walk.'

Well I did die - oh no, I couldn't of of course. Staff facilities - they are mostly gross, rarely clean and generally have torn and crooked notices hanging from one drawing pin exhorting staff to leave the facilities as they would find in their own homes. On the basis of many years observation I would have to say that with most people's homes therefore you would be wiping your shoes as you leave they must be so disgusting.

As a student in self catering halls of residence our particular kitchen was singled out for praise by the long suffering cleaners on the basis that:

We actually appeared to wash the tea towels more than once a term
When we washed them we used warm(ish) water and soap powder
We wiped down surfaces in the kitchen and actually used disinfectant to clean surfaces
The contents of the freezer did not pre-date the last ice age.

Staff facilities have that rare ability to deteriorate within seconds of cleaning, if they are ever cleaned at all. Tea towels that are so stiff with dirt and stains that you could attach four wheels to them and use them as skateboards. Dish cloths that have a smell so peculiar that they could be used instead of tear gas during a riot. Washing up bowls that look like they have had an oil change performed in them, the sinks themselves that are scratched and scored like an ancient glacial valley. Mugs and cups that are never actually washed, just rinsed and put upside down to dry before the next, random user. Tea spoons that are left to dry so that a brown rim forms in the bowl of the spoon which can never be cleaned.

My current favourite that I use, favourite in that I have to don a full nuclear/bacteriological hazard suit before I enter actually has, get this, a dish washer that is never used. Dirty mugs, plates that are deeply encrusted with late night curry detritus and tea spoons. We'll quickly pass over the state if the tea towels again, last washed in 1968. And just what happens to tea spoons? No matter how many are provided they all disappear within a few days. Must be a thriving international trade in contraband tea spoons. And,yes, there is the inevitable notice pinned to the wall that says 'Please leave these facilities clean or they will be withdrawn.' The notice has been there as long as the tea towel to my knowledge.

In one place where I worked I couldn't stand the state of the coffee making facilities any more so I bought my own bottle of washing up liquid to work and started, daily, washing the team's mugs before we used them and at the end of the day. At first I was regarded as a two headed monster and then, one day accidentally leaving the washing liquid behind, returned to find a queue of people waiting to wash up their mugs with my lovely soapy suds. At least we had a sink - don't you just hate people who wash their mugs in the staff toilets? The sinks I mean not the loos.

However I knew I reached my nadir in one country in Africa. I was there on business. I'd been offered refreshments at the office I was visiting. They kindly offered me sweet coffee, which I accepted (mustn't offend the host) and, of course, the drink came in the inevitable chipped cups. 'Would I like some food to go with the coffee' they asked. Now on full hygiene alert I havered, what to do? I finally said yes and so they proudly brought out some disreputable looking plates and emptied some white spherical objects from the fridge onto the plate - there were as many flies in the fridge as in the room as the temperature difference was only about 2C between the inside of the fridge and the room. 'Eat up' they said indicating the plate. It was only then I recognised what they were on the plate. Sheeps eyes. 'I'm going to die so young I thought (again) of some horrible virus.' For the Queen and Country I drank the coffee and swallowed the Sheeps eyes.

So that is why, when offered a coffee from anywhere other than a machine, I look very, very carefully at the staff facilities before I make a decision - it's going to get me one day.

Claims procedure

2008-06-02T10:00:00.007+01:00

I'm owed £400 this month.
From expenses.
There's a word that brings both delight and terror to the claimant.

As you regular readers know I have worked for many organisations - therefore, by dint of my work, I have had to claim expenses throughout my working life and the experience has varied from one end of the spectrum 'Here is the rule for everything and you will obey, exterminate, exterminate' to 'Dunno really just claim what you think is reasonable'. Both ends are as difficult as each other.

Let's go for a stroll to the 'We have rules' end. This company, a substantial multi-national had an expenses form that an accountant must have devised with codes for everything and a strict requirement to account for VAT. Receipts WERE required or you were shot. No, thinking about it, your expenses were just not signed off and you starved. The rules were made and kept by two elderly house elves who maintained the company archives and who were locked away night and day on the fifth floor where the company library was located. Here giant dusty tomes were opened with the spine of the book creaking as the heavy pages were turned. 'You may claim for a car wash each week with no receipt as long as it does not cost more than £2.50'.
'Right then' we'd ask, 'can we just claim £2.50 a week and put it on the expense form?'
'Yes' the house elves would reply.
So we'd claim the £2.50 a week and the cars would get dirtier and dirtier (as, of course we didn't wash them) until we could convince a car dealer to clean them for us - for free.
'Field staff can claim £2.50 a day for lunch without a receipt.'
'Can we claim that every day whether at home or in the office or on an interplanatery trip?'
Well of course we could and did, and most days the dealers bought us lunch anyway. Fuel was a good one as well. You claimed on a pence per mile basis according to a fuel rate. Basically, unless you were driving in excess of 100 mph in second gear all the time, you made a substantial profit on fuel.
And this was all condoned by the management - no wonder few members of the field staff wanted to return to head office for promotion - you couldn't afford the drop in salary. It all started getting difficult when my then manager started asking me to get blank receipts from restaurants, get an amount filled in, claim that amount and when reimbursed, pay him the money in cash so he could go horse racing. We were talking serious amounts of money here - then some of my colleagues who lived in my territory, thought it would be a jolly good jape to take their friends/wives/mistresses out for a meal and get me to claim the bill as 'entertaining' and then pay them back, 'No problem the boss will sign it off'. Bit of a problem really as are you really going to shop an influential and senior manager and then continue to have a career in the same company? The only answer was to join the CIA, become a hit man and take him out. Actually I had a quiet word with another manager and it all stopped, as did my career, but at least I didn't do anything dishonest as I said to the manager of the Job Centre as I signed on. The daft thing was that you make a substantial profit on your expenses by just claiming them as allowed - you didn't need to make dishonest claims

Wandering across to the other end of the spectrum we have the company that has no rules and has an expense form that is basically a blank piece of A4 where you write your name at the top. For this company, Consolidated Who-Hahs, I travelled the world selling who-hahs to anyone that would buy them.
"Can I travel business class?'
'Suppose so'
'Can I stay in 5 star hotels and claim laundry as I am away for several weeks?'
'Seems fair'
'Can I arrange my flights so that at weekends I can stay in fabulously exotic resorts at the companies expense?'
"S'all right.'
'Can I eat like a King and buy the most expensive wines in the world, smoke the most prestigious cigars and be waited on by fair hand maidens selected from the world's most beautiful women who I will fly in especially?'
'Spect so'
You see, no rules and the net effect was that I would actually travel like a penurious student to save the company money that I hadn't been expected to save anyway it would seem. Of course they had no idea what I was claiming as all the receipts were in Thai/Vietnamese/Saudi/Brazilian thingies and so on and the Caribbean island I was actually buying on the basis of expenses was never spotted.

And so we have variations on that theme across the expenses spectrum - right now I work for a reasonable company that takes a reasonable view and therefore expenses claimed are always reasonable. Still got a big form to fill in though and the phrase 'I need a receipt please' is still in daily use. And will be for years. Spect.

'Every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man.' ZZ Top

2008-05-29T11:25:00.008+01:00

Well I haven't been here for a while. It's like your house when you return to it after two weeks holiday and it has that strange smell when you enter for the first time and just before you fling open the windows to let some fresh air in. Sort of fusty and with the hint of another smell - this is actually what your house smells like to strangers just as, when you go to another house, it too smells odd. Anyway no mail in the porch, no free newspapers stuck in the letter box, no dead flies on all the window sills and no huge spiders in the bath glaring at you.

I thought I'd come back to the blog. The thrill of working 3.5 days a week has, frankly, worn off and so I feel it's time once again to return to the ramblings of Eyes on the Prize. No full time job despite my every creative attempt in finding a full time position (the stories I could tell, and may very well do if you are unlucky) but the bills are being paid and we dared book a weeks holiday in July. Got to be better than this time last year.

I'm not one of the world's greatest dressers.
I have never liked suits and ties and could quite happily exist in T shirts and jeans until the end of my days.

I think my aversion to suits stems from the dress code at my school.

You see I went to a Public School, a minor one in the scheme of things, but Public all the same. In my defence I had passed the 11+ and won a County Scholarship to attend said august place and that is where is all started. That and being marked as 'dead meat' by all the boys I used to know in primary school and who now regarded me as target practice for whatever they had in their hands as I passed them to and from school. Being a dayboy I had to run the gauntlet of the mean streets of the small town the school was located in to get home, and we all know how mean they can be. Well reasonably mean. Sometimes a little mean and there was often litter too. Anyway the school code stated that boys had to wear a proscribed uniform to be bought from the school outfitters also located in the same town. This, of course, was duly ignored by the rich and this was my first lesson in capitalism. My mother and father struggled, I know, to afford the uniform which included a mandatory school cap (which HAD to be worn until the third form if you were OUTSIDE school). Well, this cap had a peak that was so long it required scaffolding to support it - and, being tall for my age, meant that it was as instantly recognisable as a policeman's helmet in a crowd. Therefore it became 'Target 1' for the lads about town that now hated me with the intensity of a burning star. Then you could wear, if you wanted, a straw boater in the summer term. Well not having a death wish, Grievous Bodily Harm being bad enough most days, I pleaded successfully for Ma and Pa not to buy me any such thing. What we did with the peaks on the caps was to soak them in water and then they would curl up like a Turkish slipper - yes we must have looked stupid but it seemed enough to calm the blood lust of the townies who then just called us bad names as we passed. Of course the fact that I soon aligned myself to Ian at school who was built like The Incredible Hulk and who could grow luxurious sideburns at 12 probably helped a little as well.

What the parents of the boys who paid to attend the school did (and somehow, in a strangely inverted world that made them, in their eyes somehow superior to those of us who actually had the brains to justify being there) was go to a bespoke tailor in London and have their uniforms made for them. Yes made-to-measure at 11 years old. I had then, as now an odd shaped body - short legs but a long torso and the school tailor could not cope with sizes outside the norm. My Mum did her valiant best to turn up the trousers but, let's face it Mum, this wasn't a core skill was it? So the hems would come down regularly and there would much mirth from those with Savile Row suits but with IQs that were similar to the number of buttons they had sewn on the jacket. So I had 6 years of this then cast off the uniform for the freedom of own clothes at university. I think we will pass over quickly the fad for wearing clogs (bloody clogs in a hilly university town?), flared jeans with flares so big they resembled a two man tent, tie and dye T shirts and cheesecloth shirts. And those are the less embarrassing items of clothing that I am prepared to mention in public.

Of course being in work means that I have to wear a suit from time to time, like yesterday, and two very nice Austin Reed suits I have as well - but really my heart is in jeans and T shirts and, even when I go to the office, it's still very casual stuff. And just what would be wrong with a clip-on tie? Of course Mrs EotP objects from time to time and dares point out that I actually look scruffy - but what is to object to with £3 jeans and £1.50 T shirts from Tesco anyway? So I do have to buy some clothes and have them vetted by her. However what is weird is the person I know who works for a very large PLC and lives nearby - he wears his suit and tie when working at home. 'Can't wear anything casual if I'm at home as it doesn't feel right' he claims.

OK so moving on quickly. It is, of course, all so very different for woman and clothes for most females occupy far more temporal and physical space than they do for me. One drawer and two hangers in the wardrobe and I'm done. But when Mrs EotP wore a pair of linen trousers to work the other day (the hot day, you remember it before the rains came again) her colleague posed the question 'Is it time for linen trousers yet?'

There's a time for certain clothes?

How does one know these things or is it a woman thing passed down through the ages without us menfolk knowing or hearing about it? I can't say, but it perplexed Mrs EotP that's for sure. Clearly some subliminal messaging going on here that is not fully understood even at womanfolk level. However Mrs EotP has fought back and bought a linen blouse today. Whether it is an acceptable date or not.

Sending her out to work has hardened her heart. But I'm still in my jeans and T shirt and now the sun has come out again maybe it's the time for shorts.

Back to the future

2008-01-14T11:55:00.000Z

Being ill when you work at home is decidedly odd. I started back at 'work', that is sat down in the room where I work with fingers poised over the keyboard, on 2nd January. My commute to work is at least two seconds and it takes me that long to commute home. The staff canteen serves whatever I want it to (provided I have bought it and can cook it, a moot point). Coffee and tea - as much as I want and nobody can surprise me by looking over my shoulder at what's on the screen when I should be working.

When you feel ill and decide not to go to work there's a process. Call your office and talk to whoever you need to in a voice that suggests manly perseverance under extreme duress where many other lesser chaps would have succumbed already but you have managed to stagger on but is just pitiful enough to garner immediate sympathy and the magic words 'Oh you do sound ill best not come in today. See you when you are better.' Staying at home then means largely being immune from work, emails and phone calls. And if you do get them you can practice the 'I'm getting better let me just crawl by my fingertips to my Filofax so we can rearrange our meeting.' voice. Now at home no such luck. You can either get up or not. Mrs EoTP has gone to work, the kids have gone to school. I did get up one morning and decided that the move from the horizontal to the vertical was not something that my immune system was currently supporting and would I please reverse the entire move. So I did. After an hour I was bored so started all over again and this time managed a posture that one of our ape ancestors might have been pleased with having just discovered upright walk. And that's where it starts to go wrong.

Nobody is forcing me to work. Nobody has called on the phone to demand I meet a deadline. In fact nobody is asking me to do anything. The kids had pointed out that the dust bunnies were the size of Corgis and therefore the house might need a clean (I am still astonished that they even noticed). So why am I in front of the screen working when I have to stop to sniff and cough every few seconds and my head feels like its been put between the jaws of a vice? It can only be some deeply rooted Protestant work ethic that says you must NEVER stop working even though you are like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and all your limbs have been cut off. What does the Black Knight say?: "Just a flesh wound.'

So I'm here. I've been working, I've met deadlines, I have shopped and cleaned. And nobody told me I had to.

But this is life for the medium term. The full time job search goes on and I will continue to work for the 3.5 days agreed with the company. Mrs EoTP and I have dared to think we might book a holiday this year as it seems possible that we might be able to take one. As Mrs EoTP has not been further than Birmingham in 9 months Shrewsbury is currently regarded as a remote and exotic location but I think we need to go further than that.

Like Wrexham.

'I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink', The Beatles

2007-12-14T09:01:00.000Z

I could have lain down on a frosty lawn this morning and slept. In my ongoing quest to stay moderately fit I still go running, usually at 0630 in the morning, so as not to frighten the neighbours and alarm the local dog population. At the speeds I achieve running the slipstream is causing ice burn on my exposed extremities and I recall David Niven's anecdote about he cured similar problems after skiing: I couldn't find any brandy at 0700hrs and even if I could have I'd have drunk it and not poured it over the affected area like he did. The cold does wake you up though, which is just as well as I am so tired and could have just had a little nap after running a few steps. Until I discovered that it was really minus 4 C.

Anyway back to tiredness - this is what happens when you get tired, your mind wanders. Now that I have a longer term job much of the angst and worry that unemployment causes has left me. Yes I still need to get a full time job but the kids will not be in the Workhouse for Christmas and we can buy a few presents. Now the immediate future seems a little brighter I have relaxed: this happened quite suddenly in town a few days ago and I almost immediately fell asleep, which was a shame because I was in the queue at Boots at the time and it caused a small commotion until the customers behind me decided to use me as a mini roundabout until I woke up. And who says there is no compassion left in this world?

It's very strange. I mean nothing has really changed. The job I am doing is basically the same hours and the same tasks, Mrs EoTP is still working and will continue to do so but it is the knowing that there is some sense of continuity. It's all artificial - may I remind you of my favourite Woody Allen joke 'How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.' The universe is a big, random, unfeeling sort of place. It doesn't care if I have a job no matter how much I rant and think it monstrously unfair so it could go horribly wrong in a few days again.

However I have seem to have entered the TATT zone, that is to say Tired All The Time. I've had boundless energy over the last few months. I could moan for hours without a break. Shopping, pah, I spit in the eye of shopping. Cleaning, pshaw I care nothing for it, me and my Marigolds. Cooking. Well OK that really hasn't been my strong point, or weak point come to that - it still defies classification.

It's like children in the long Winter term at school. They struggle along for the full 12 week term, getting alternatively cold and wet going to and from school. Finally they make it to the Christmas break. Then they fall ill. Colds, flu, headaches, you name it they get it. I think I'm the same, heading for man flu I'm sure.

I'm looking forward to the break - can't wait to ruin the Christmas dinner, though Mrs EoTP is starting to think that letting me loose on it may not be such a great idea after all. I may be relegated to the preparation of the brussels sprouts, can't do much damage there. At least I will be able to sleep after the meal (and the drink).

So I'm having a break from the blog until after Christmas - may I wish all of you a Happy Christmas.

Cheers

Eyes on the Prize

The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

2007-12-06T14:07:00.000Z

I think it was Churchill that said something like this: 'This is not the beginning of the end it is perhaps the end of the beginning.' Well something like that probably after the Battle of Britain, or something init?

Anyhow I have felt embattled over these last 259 days of unemployment. Perhaps my frustration has seeped through into this blog from time to time. But we may have a resolution for the time being. A white knight has galloped over to save me from the dragon - or perhaps he's sent his squire on his bike as I've got a nasty paper cut. Whatever. The organisation I have worked for during the last eight months on a part time basis has offered me a job on a full time basis. Yeehaw and throws hat into air. Well to be strictly accurate, a full time job working 4 days a week on a full time basis with a mutually agreeable escape clause for when I find that elusive of animals, a well paid full time job.

Now I am delighted.
No signing on next week.
No claiming the mortgage protection insurance.
A combined income that is equivalent to about 80% of what I was earning.
OK no car/fuel/office and so on but hey - money and no need to have the kids in the workhouse.
And it starts from next week.

This is a huge relief to us all in the EoTP family and we permitted ourselves a spending binge, buying a small bar of chocolate to eke out between us before before the one guttering candle we allow ourselves for illumination in the house during the long winter nights.

OK we hit John Lewis and had a big spend. But it was quite hard. We have all become so used to not spending anything except on priorities that to spend on a luxury item felt, well, reckless for the sake of a better word.

Of course they know and I know that I will leave as soon as I get a five day a week job that I like. But, and this is a big but, I do enjoy working for and with them and my quality of life is much improved over what it was. In fact it's even better now that the 600lb gorilla of impending unemployment has been shipped back to the zoo.

So that's why I say this may be the end of the beginning - still have to find that other job, still looking and will not give up.

Christmas will be a lot happier occasion for us all though. Now I can look forward to it.

I did say to Mrs EoTP that I could look for another job to fill the spare day.

Mrs EoTP. The look.

'How about the shopping and cleaning?' she said. 'That's a job.'

Where did I put my yellow Marigolds?

'Things ain't cooking in my kitchen', Weather with you, Crowded House

2007-11-27T16:24:00.000Z

I'd rather face a drunk with a knife.

It's true, I would rather face a drunk with a knife than cook. I know this to be a fair statement because, recently, I did face a drunk with a knife on the streets (but that's another story) and I have tried cooking.

I said just at the weekend to Mrs EoTP, 'Why do you use that saucepan on that ring on the cooker? I don't, I do it this way. I just may be getting the hang of this cooking thing.' Mrs EoTP gave me the look. 'The look lasted about 12 months, or so it felt. 'You haven't mastered cooking' she said, 'you have just about learned how to warm things up.'

I was deflated, it has to be said. But there is a small grain of truth in there somewhere with the lumpy gravy.

I don't know what the problem is. I am (if I say so myself and as there isn't any one around at the moment to contradict me I will say it) a pretty good project manager. I mean I have set the aims and objectives for many substantial projects. For example: collecting all the rubber bands in the organisation and making a huge ball with them; organising the ugliest paper clip contest; working out why the consumption of internal post envelopes massively exceeds the amount of internal post sent; determining the optimum day for most managers to be in the pub at lunchtime so that the company is being run entirely by nineteen year olds for the best part of an afternoon (like Woolworths over the weekends). And all of these projects were delivered on time and on budget. Cooking is just another sort of project so why doesn't it work?

Well Mrs EoTP says that's because you haven't any staff or colleagues to boss around, you can't set progress update meetings and harangue staff for not performing, have no opportunity to write well aimed minutes so that you can pinion the underlings and make them wriggle in embarrassment because they have failed to undertake some action point and so on. 'Basically' she says 'you've got to do it on your own.' So that's the problem.

The other problem is that my hands do not always do what my brain says. It was the same with Airfix models. My resultant efforts were always covered in excess glue (and fluff where I had dropped the model on the floor) with the transfers placed erratically over the fuselage or hull on whatever I made. Same with cooking. The instructions may say blend but the output is lumpy, sticky, the wrong colour, all three. I can chop an onion but it looks like it has been hit with a hammer and not finely diced. I can peel potatoes but there is more potato left on the peelings than on the bit that is peeled. I can sautee a steak but it looks like (and tastes like) the bit of carpet you wipe your feet on. Recent meals have included:
1. The night I finally managed, I thought, to bring the cooking all together to present the family with their meal only to find that I had completely forgotten to cook the different meal for one of the kids (he had to wait a further twenty minutes to eat). That is referred to regularly at meal times along the lines of 'Haven't forget me this time have you Dad?'.
2. Making bolognese sauce, putting the remainder in the oven to keep warm and finding it still there the following morning. Still, it now makes a very effective whetstone for sharpening the knives or acting as a chock for the wheels of a 747.
3. Making a shepherd's pie and forgetting to put the potatoes on to boil. The meal didn't work quite so well after that.
4. We won't talk about the apple crumble, though the local fire brigade still use the episode as part of their video training about domestic fires.

So I struggle on but am beginning to think that I may never master this art - perhaps for me I am doomed to be forever warming up ready meals from Marks and Spencers. Oh pass me that cooking wine and I'll have another go at dicing the onion. Mrs EoTP has pointed out that if I carry on with that Spanish wine I'll soon be able to face another drunk with a knife, 'Just go and look in the mirror.'

Party politics

2007-11-19T09:15:00.001Z

'You're not still married to her, I thought she was a real [add insult of choice here]?' His tone was incredulous. I'd bumped into an old colleague from the company I first worked for. He asked me how things were going and we'd had the usual conversation. He was doing supremely well, now in charge of worldwide biro purchases for International Whocares, huge salary, was living in a wonderful country house, his fourth wife was charming when not drinking, he had supervised access to the kids once every Candlemass and then forgot to ask about my life. I remembered this conversation as I drove past the location of a long forgotten office Christmas party for the first time in 25 years last week.

You see, I don't like office Christmas parties very much. Here's some examples.

1. As above. Three line whip demands you bring your partner. At the time partner meant a heterosexual relationship involving marriage or engagement. Anything outside that was viewed as evil, a pact with Satan (at the least), perverse, an anomaly in the universe and outside the parameters of a good company man (and the company was, inevitably, male). If you considered that living in sin (how quaint) with a partner older than you was OK , the Company considered she was likely to be a Wicca and probably worth bringing out the ducking stool and stocking up the timber faggots for a good fire just in case. And the word from the Three Line Whipper ins was 'turn up to the party with your partner, the Company will pay all fares and bills and having turned up expect us to ignore them completely all night did we mention it was Dinner Jackets? Did we also mention that not turning up with said partner means instant end to career prospects? Did we also mention that if you do not get totally out of your head we will consider you a baby girl with bows in her hair?' And the heinous sin Mrs EoTP committed to cause that comment many years later? She dared to disagree with my then boss about some literature he had read. Mrs EoTP - English graduate. Boss - 'O' level in Patronising, 'A' level in Condescension. Degree in Boreish.

2. Senior manager decides that the company really is a family organisation and sells idea to MD. On what basis this is decided no one knows. We all know that his wife is a passive aggressive obsessive and his son regularly comes home drunk and they fight on the front lawn. Perhaps he sees the company like that. Two line whip this time. 'We expect you to bring your partner, please sort of stick to the conventions of relationships and not turning up means an instant end to your career prospects. We might talk to your partner if she is good looking with good legs and doesn't answer back. Did we also mention that if you do not get totally out of your head we will consider you a baby girl with bows in her hair?'

3. CEO decides international company (they in States, we in UK) ought to be a family organisation (just like a family, live hundreds of miles from each other and never talk) and that Christmas party is necessary. Tickets go on sale and only three are sold one week before party, and MD bought two of them. MD cannot understand why low paid employees will not fork out £55 per ticket to drive 30 miles to venue and did we mention it was Dinner Jackets? Three line whip to management team. 'You must go to the party and you must get all your supervisors to go as well. Did we also mention that if you do not get totally out of your head we will consider you a baby girl with bows in her hair?' I point out that price of ticket and low morale in Company may explain low ticket sales. Instant end to career prospects. Result is Christmas party with 45 sulking managers. 44 very drunk managers. And a fight later on in the evening between two partners.

There are other issues.

Does anyone really want to go to an office Christmas party? I mean really want to go or are they just doing it because they think they ought to?

Which of the supplementary Christmas meals do you go to? Finance, Sales and Operations have all invited you to their evening? All of them, none of them? Oh the angst.

When you are part of a organisation that has conflicting Christmas parties on the same evening what do you do? Right now I have invites for a meal at a local bar/fight club (especially Saturdays) or a 20 mile drive to an elegant hotel for a meal twice the price (and yes DJs are required. Why?). I'm going to upset someone. And this is a voluntary organisation as well.

When all around are totally out of their heads what do you do? Easy this one. Come 1115pm everyone is so drunk they are no longer capable of knowing if they are still at the party let alone anyone else. So you leave surreptitiously and on the Monday pick up a little gossip about what went on post 1115pm - then just tell everyone how funny that incident was. Works every time, no one knows you left early.

So you might understand why, when someone mentions office Christmas parties, my soul dies a little each time

Oh, I forgot one type. MD of Company asks whether I would like to go to Christmas party at a local pub one evening, with a reputation for good food, at the Company's expense to have a meal with a few of my colleagues from the last eight months. Partners not expected to come, soft drinks only if driving, smart casual is fine. That's odd, I want to go to this one. Perhaps it is not all bad after all?

And I'm still married to the same woman.

'I've been driving in my car it's not quite a Jaguar', Madness, Driving in my car

2007-11-16T13:21:00.000Z

There's a large oblong on my drive where my company car used to be. Where once stood my shiny Jaguar/Mercedes/other large 'executive' car now stands a small shrine to company perks plus the last faint trace of an oil leak. I now drive Mrs EoTP's little blue car.

I'd describe the little blue car (lbc) as one of variable noise constant velocity. In the last three months I've driven around 5000 miles in it, that's about as twice as many as Mrs EoTP would do in a normal year as I undertake interviews for my part time job. I feel like it's being part of the the early days of flight. Pull on leather flying hat, screw goggles firmly into eyes, chocks away and then clatter off into the sky with the smell of avgas and oil streaming back from the propeller engine. When I had my company car I would turn the ignition key, open the driver's window just to check that the engine had actually started it was so quiet, turn on the air-con, the CD player, settle down into the sumptuous leather covered seats (that were heated) and then majestically point the vehicle into the traffic and glide off to whatever my destination was. Speed? Just look at the accelerator peddle and you'd be doing 70 mph. Overtaking? Blink of an eye. Motorway clear? Cruise control on. Mobile phone? Hands free with teeny microphone in sun blind.

Mrs EoTPs lbc is not quite that at that level. Start engine? Ear defenders in. Struggle to get into traffic and maintain poise whilst wearing made to measure suit and trying to adopt a 'well it's good for the environment driving a small car' look. Overtaking? Best to book several days ahead. Speed? Press the accelerator to the floor and there's a change in engine noise and a barely perceptible increase in speed. Hills? We don't like hills. Mobile phone? Stuck in a spare compartment. Will answer when arrive at destination. Radio/CD player - fine as long as you are not actually moving because after that the road noise drowns out the sound anyway.

When you drive a company car vehicles like the one I'm driving now are an annoyance. They take ages to overtake, they slow down on hills on motorways, they don't accelerate away from roundabouts. They are driven by mums and losers! And by me. I think my driving is better mind you, but that is on the basis that as I can't drive fast anymore I can avoid things more easily as it takes me ten times as long to arrive at an incident as I did in my Jag. Company car drivers actually look down at you. Stop at a motorway service station to eat your sandwiches and you can see the sneers on their faces as they step of of their big cars and see you in your lbc. Not that I'm prejudiced but come the revolution and I am made el Presidento, all you BMW drivers are up against the wall.

And the bills. I've never seen such bills. Because of the increased mileage the car has needed a major service, a replacement cam belt, new tyres, new exhaust and so on and so on. Because of the increased mileage the insurance cover we had was no longer applicable so we've had to change it and, guess what, much more expensive. With a company car you just take it to the dealer (or in my case they would come and collect it then return it) and that was it. All the nasty paying stuff would be handled by the leasing company. Nothing to sign. OK I know there was a biggish tax bill for the car but that was taken from your salary beforehand. Now I have to pay the bills myself you see the money flowing away like water over Niagara.

Long journeys are not much fun. In the old days (e.g. big car) large numbers of miles in one day were no problem. Geneva to Yorkshire in a day? Yes. West Midlands to Munich in a day? Of course. Now West Midlands to Essex and back in a day and I'm exhausted. I hadn't realised how hard driving was in a little car. When I went to the HQ of a large prestige car manufacturer recently I can honestly say the the lbc was the smallest and cheapest car in the car park by probably some £30k. I was dwarfed by huge new cars, SUVs and the like. I thought I'd be asked to leave or enter by the tradesman (persons?) entrance at the back. Mind you Mrs EoTP positively revels in that sort of thing. Before the latest car she had a 16 year old Golf and would love parking it next to the big, glittering car of the MD of Consolidated HooHahs. 'I don't care' she would say 'It's reliable, cheap and I can always find a parking space. And the drivers of these big cars don't like parking next to me in case I open the door and scratch their lovely paint work.' And off she would roar fighting to turn the steering wheel in the absence of power steering. Muscles like a stevedore she had.

But here's an interesting thing. Would I have a big car again if I could? Well of course I would I was just teasing - the more gadgets, leather, cubic capacity the better. No I am still teasing. I'm not sure I would anymore. When I had the Merc I chose it on the basis of brand snobbery. I wanted the three pointed star on my drive and actually that particular car was one of the most unreliable I have ever had. The Jag was a great car but was really a Mondeo with a different body. And in any event it was only me in it 95% of the time. So maybe I wouldn't...but then there is that space on the drive.

Of course it all entirely academic at the moment as the lbc is all we have and I'm sure that's a new oil leak on the drive. But then I do have a motorcycle license - I could always have one of these...

To CV or not CV

2007-10-29T19:29:00.000Z

What is the purpose of a CV? Well it's not to give the recruitment agencies a good laugh when they read it, 'Look at this one, you're not going to believe it he thinks he can be [insert job title] and he's only got a GCSE in Guinea Pig care.'

The purpose of a CV is to get you an interview. Now my CV has been worked on by people from an outplacement agency who are are so rough and mean and bully you so vigourously into getting it just right that even the SAS wouldn't dare take them on . They helped me hone my CV to a pitch of perfection such that it would be declared a lethal weapon in half the States in the USA. In addition a good friend elsewhere in the UK has also pitched in and helped me tone it and shape it accordingly. It is now a CV that, if a Ninja carried it about his person, the Police would declare a state of emergency in all the surrounding counties. Shakespeare would wish he'd written it as a sonnet.

It is that good. However I haven't had an interview in months and I'm now on my 41st job application and almost 8 months without a full time job. So what's going wrong?

In the last week or two there have been quite a lot of news reports about a TV nanny celebrity who had done very well for herself indeed, until one of the national papers looked at her CV and discovered that most of the claims she made about her training and background were, er, without any substance (if we are being polite). And don't get me started about some Peers whose academic record doesn't stand more than a nanosecond's scrutiny either it seems. It doesn't stop there. The further I research this topic the more I realise that most CVs have more fairy stories in them than the Brothers Grimm.

I once spent a weekend long ago role playing in a War Game scenario with some jolly chaps from the British army. I seem to recall one of the chaps wanting to go nuclear after half an hour when a 'Russian' pulled a face at him. Anyway, what I learned during that weekend was the concept of 'plausible deniability' - basically if you get caught, lie with just enough truth and you can get away with it. Whilst working on my CV the outplacement agency were at pains to get me to tell the truth - everything must be verifiable but presented in a way that demonstrates the problem, the action taken and the positive outcome. Once you've done that, you then shape your CV according to the job you are applying for and bingo, many interviews followed by negotiation over the package offered and start new job, that wasn't too bad after all was it?

Only it isn't working. My CV is sharp as a Toledo blade and is shaped on the potters wheel of CVs according to the role (mixing of metaphors there, but it is my blog) - it's always accompanied by a letter succinctly pointing out all my wonderful features and benefits that may not immediately be seen in the CV itself.

So do I need to start lying? I realise that there are hundreds of applications for some jobs so the recruiters can carefully pick and choose and that I have applied for jobs that I could best be described as tangentially qualified to do. I've also applied for jobs where I could overlay my CV on the job description and you'd swear they were one and the same. Am I not getting interviews then because the other candidates are embellishing their CVs to my considerable disadvantage? I have a bucket full of 'O' levels (including Guinea Pig care), oodles of 'A' levels (Advanced Guinea Pig and Llama care) and two degrees and not once have I been asked to prove it. So perhaps I should start making things up in my CV to attract attention. What could they include? Master and Commander of one of Her Majesty's ships? Jaguar Fighter pilot? Managing Director of Consolidated HooHahs? Man from UNCLE?

I realise that you can't put an earing on a pig and make it pretty and my experience and background is what it is - I can alter the way it is presented though. I can't alter my age, if that is an issue, but I can hide it (and the recent legislation, in theory, stops ageism. Prove it!). I could also 'lose' some qualifications. I have used my exact titles from my previous jobs - perhaps they seem too intimidating? Maybe I should 'lose' a degree? Perhaps it makes me look far too overqualified? Actually I don't know what to do for the best and you rarely get feedback anyway. Even if you do get feedback it is for that position only and may not be relevant for the next one.

In the end maybe it is a case of 'To thine ownself be true' take me as I am with what I offer and I will sit it out until that time. Except I need a job and, so far, the best part of a year has gone by. Maybe Will was right: 'Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.' And that comes from 'All's well that ends well.' Could be an omen.

'Alone again, naturally', Gilbert O'Sullivan

2007-10-29T09:18:00.000Z

Monday morning, 9am and the house is all mine until 4.30pm. And silence reigns. Mrs EoTP and the kids have gone to work/school and I am master of the universe. This means I get to use our computer without having to negotiate access like some internet cafe or the local library. If you are not careful when the doors are opened by the library staff in this town you'll get trampled by the rush for the PCs with internet access. You can't hear yourself talk in the library so that you can be shusshed by the fierce librarians anymore because of the noise of the twenty keyboards clicking away throughout the day. Even the snores of the tramps are drowned out by the frantic need to access the web.

I'm think I'm getting the hang of this housework and shopping task although last week Mrs EoTP took me for shopping lessons at Tescos. I proudly arrived home the first week with much defrosted food (as it took me hours to find everything in the store) but with the list duly ticked off having spent only £75 for what I thought was the week's eating needs. After much whinging from everyone about not having bought their favourite snack/food/hair product/drink I pointed out that I had Bought Everything On The List. Only then did I have it made known to me that there is an invisible list of things that need buying but are not written down. How was I meant to know this? So on Sunday Mrs EoTP and I had a little amble through the many aisles having instructions on what to buy even though it may not be written down. This time the bill came to £140. So that's where the money goes. I noticed the Tesco staff eyeing me warily and moving steadily away clearly remembering me as 'the man who doesn't know where anything is and keeps asking us, we are not trained to deal with idiots like him' but then relieved to see that I was clearly under the control of Care in the Community for the morning in the guise of Mrs EoTP.

I thought I was getting the hang of cleaning as well. Warming to my domestic chores yesterday morning I sat down on the bed and gave to Mrs EoTP what I thought was a very interesting list of domestic tasks I was intending to do that morning, the order in which I was going to do them and the estimated time for completion. She stared at me me for a full minute and said 'That's just like a man. If men do anything they need a meeting, an agenda, to assign tasks and decide on outcomes, allocate responsibilities, meet afterwards to discuss performance and so on. Women just get on and do it. I'd have cleaned the upstairs, done the ironing and gone and met a friend for coffee and a chat in the time it has taken you to tell me what you are going to do. If a woman undertakes a task men don't consider it as meriting attention but when a man has to do it suddenly it becomes very important, requires a strokey beard meeting, a clipboard, a mobile phone, a big company car and a P.A.' She then left the room. I thought I ought to clean the toilets at that point, it seemed suitably symbolic.

I don't like being alone. It's lonely. I seemed to have spent most of my working life by myself which of course is delightfully ironic as I don't enjoy it very much. Now I have the house to myself I am wondering what to do. I have, of course, to make all those phone calls for my part time job and I do have to undertake about thirty face to face interviews. However this means hours in the car by myself, an hour's conversation with a stranger, then hours by myself in the car again driving home.

I spent many years of my early working career either as a sales manager responsible for a sizable territory or travelling the world when I was involved in international sales. And in those days there were no mobile phones so I would be out of contact with my office for days. I'd say goodbye to Mrs EoTP on a Sunday night and talk to her again on Friday when I returned and reintroduced myself 'You may recall marrying me, I am your long lost husband.' Then, when I finally make management, you get an office that cuts you off from your staff but underlines how important you are by not having to be amongst the riff-raff anymore. It may be lonely at the top but its lonely at the bottom sometimes as well. I may very well have operated an open door policy but many seemed to treat my office as the place where people enter and just blink out of existence as they entered the maw of doom. 'No, you're mistaken, Mrs Biscuit never came to my office, I haven't seen her for days, perhaps she went to Stationery to get some more padded envelopes from Kevin. No my name isn't Sweeney Todd, why do you ask?' I was self-employed for a number of years as well but it was the loneliness of that existence than got to me in the end and drove me back to working for an organisation. Being self employed is when I first started talking to the computer during the day just to hear to sound of a voice, even if it was mine, whilst I worked at home. It's when it started talking back to me that I knew I ought to get out more and re-evaluate my career options.

'Hello EoTP, this is HAL. I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit.'

"Er who are you? I'm trying to finish this spread sheet for Consolidated Hoo Hahs and they are very picky. They like colour in their spreadsheets. And pictures. Nobody told me Apple Macs were this good.'

'Are you sure you are making the right decision?'

'Well yes HAL because I want the money and spreadsheets are very important to them but I don't know why. They must have outcomes and allocate responsibilities and give women instructions whilst drinking coffee and talking about their next company car.'

'Look EoTP, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.'

Look HAL go away, I need to work on this shopping list for Tescos and look at these emails from Nigeria, they sound like a good deal to me, you know the ones that say they a going to transfer $1 million to my account for helping them out for five minutes. I could be really rich.'

'I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.'

So what do you do? Right now there is the problem that at 0930 there is no one to talk to. Everyone is out.

Maybe I could call some one? 'Anyone for a coffee?' But then all my friends are at work. Wait, I have it. I am going shopping this morning. I can ask every member of Tesco staff I see where items of food are stacked and when I get to the check out what a lovely conversation I can have whilst packing the bags then suddenly discover that I have to pay, what a surprise, and spend another five minutes finding my purse at the bottom of my bag along with the fifteen discount vouchers I should have handed over when I first started passing items through the till. Then I can argue about not buying enough of one product and not getting the discount. They won't mind I'm sure. That should pass half an hour and then off to the library - I'm sure the tramps would much rather talk to me than sleep.

Rules of engagement

2007-10-23T15:38:00.000+01:00

And so Mrs EoTP finishes her first week at her new job. In theory anyway this should be the best part of a job, the new start. After all they've chosen YOU over all the other candidates (and how good does that feel?), you should be happy with the salary for at least three weeks as you accepted the job on those terms (after that you find that 25% of the staff have 50% fewer qualifications than you do and 30% more salary but let that pass for now) and, as you don't really know what is going on in the organisation, you don't know how much a mess you are making of the job so far; you may not realise it for months.

Mrs EoTP needed a lie down at the end of the week with a cold compress and a cold bottle of white wine. We'd forgotten about the hell of the new job.

Clothes.
Best to wear them for the job I find, saves on the snide comments. But you have to have them. Mrs EoTP has had to buy a new wardrobe of clothes to go to work of course, not having had such stuff for many years. Unless you work for some laid back company such as Google there is the small matter of confirming to the dress code. Of course, no one has written the dress code down, especially for women, so you have to interpret it as best you can. So new stuff is needed and quite a lot of it as well - such as a waterproof coat as Mrs EoTP now walks to work. We walked the length and breadth of the Midlands trying to find a suitable coat for walking to work in and staying dry but not looking like a serious hiker ready for a week in Snowdonia. Don't woman wear waterproof coats anymore? How do they stay dry? Do they drive into their workplaces and step out directly into the office? Or are we unusual in that we do actually walk? So there goes the first month's salary on the set up costs for work.

Security
All the doors to the site are locked and controlled electronically. To gain entrance you have to double up to get close to the speaker set low in the wall, press the entry button, state your purpose of the visit whilst the tinny voice says something like 'Snargle, snig, buzz, ganding boing' in reply. The door buzzes and you gain entry. Then you get in but, like the Second World War when all the signposts were taken down in the UK to foil those dastardly Nazi paratroopers, there are no signposts to guide you around the site. I know this because I was asked to deliver the usual 1 kilo of forms to the admin office that you need to sign to prove you are not an illegal immigrant and a Drain On The Economy. I gained entry, 'Snargle, burg, admin, zing, boink', went through the door and got lost. Now I'm all for security but given that I was wearing a T shirt and jeans and carrying a large padded envelope you think someone might have challenged me but no they didn't. I wandered around, smiling and saying hallo to staff who politely smiled back and ignored me. I dropped off the envelope and walked back to the gate by another route and was I challenged? No of course not but lots of other members of staff smiled at me and said hello all over again. Anyway Mrs EoTP finally got her electronic pass by the end of the week so can now get in, although all she did for several days was follow others in through the open gate as they arrived.

Forms
There are so many. Salary, security forms, pension, medical history, values and belief systems, criminal records, birth certificates, wedding certificates, certificates for swimming the length, you name it they want it. Then, when you give them it and they hand you back an officially printed form to say they have had it, they deny they have had it two days later and want it back (again). This happened to me recently in another organisation. I tried to log onto a part of a system that I had legitimate access to and couldn't. The response from IT to my company email was 'You don't exist' which I felt was a little existentialist of them really.

IT
Mrs EoTP has to switch on her three PCs in a certain sequence or they don't work. Why they don't work if you don't follow the sequence no one can explain. You can launch nuclear missiles more easily than this. There are passwords by the box full to remember each different for a separate part of the system.

The stuff they don't tell you

What to do if the fire alarm goes off. I know it usually consists of standing around in a desultory manner hoping the alarms will turn themselves off in thirty minutes.
Where all the toilets are - after five months you discover one around the corner after you have been making a 30 minute round trip to the one you were first shown.
Who actually knows how to make the photocopier work.
How to turn the heating on or off.
Where IT are actually located and what they do.
Why IT always have their 'help' line on voicemail.
Which Christmas party you should go to. Admins, Finance, Sales, all of them?
Who will be your enemy and who will be your ally.
Who really gets things done. Forget the suits and the bosses as they haven't a clue. Find the one person who really keeps the whole creaking structure together. Make them your friend. Stay close to them.

And that is just week 1. As you don't know what you don't know then the first six months of a job are hell until you find out what is going on and can ask for help. But then you may never find out.
In my experience at work most people know what it is they do, but don't know what they do does.
I think I need a lie down.

Home alone too.

2007-10-15T11:33:00.000+01:00

It's 1 o'clock. There are all sorts of odd noises I've not heard before: a creak from a floorboard across the landing, clocks ticking that I haven't noticed before, odd electrical hums from machinery throughout the house. No other voices, no other sounds. It's all a bit eerie.

No, I'm not awake in the middle of the night unable to sleep and sitting at the computer completing my blog. It's 1pm and I'm all alone in the house - something that very rarely happens to me, it is very strange and it is the future. You see Mrs EoTP has a job. Yes this morning I waved the entire family off into the October sunshine and closed the door on them until late this afternoon.

Mrs EoTP was offered the job two weeks ago and accepted. It's local, within walking distance, the hours are very reasonable and, even more strangely, it's directly connected with her vocational career which I have been doing my best to wreck since we got married by moving us around the country.

I was, of course, delighted that she had fought off all the other candidates to get the position particularly as Mrs EoTP has not had a full time paid job for over 12 years. The salary is modest but what an economic lifeline this will prove to be as I near the end of my part time job in early December.

Of course the maths of job hunting are interesting.
Mrs EoTP: five applications, three interviews, one job offer. That's a 60% interview rate.
Me: thirty six applications, three interviews, zero job offers, that's a 'we don't need to discuss the percentages do we?' rate.
I think I'll get Mrs EoTP to complete my CVs and applications from now on. What ever she is doing is working.

As I am home several days a week naturally it has fallen to me to do much of the work that was done by the one we will now call 'The Breadwinner'. But this morning I have to deal with with tasks of bewildering complexity. I have, in the past, scoffed at Mrs EoTP's inability to use DVD recorders, XBoxes, PlayStations and the like. Now I am faced with the washing machine with a control panel like a 747. And I don't understand it. And then there are all those different detergents depending on what is going to be washed. Whites, coloureds, mixed wash, delicates. 'Honey I've shrunk the washing' I'll be shouting if I don't get this right. There is worse. Shopping and cooking. Shopping I can handle providing I have a precise list of what to get, but in Tescos yesterday I had a crisis - just what is muscovado sugar, where would it be and what does it look like? What would I do with it if I found it? And to make things worse Tesco is expanding the store and have moved many of the aisles. I sailed around the store like the 'Flying Dutchman' doomed to sail the seven seas trying to find stuff (though I did find the wine aisles, tee hee) for hours with the chilled and frozen food forming puddles on the floor as they dripped through the trolley at the checkout.

Cleaning the house. This I can do as it is a low complexity task. A pink duster, some polish and the vacuum cleaner and I'm off. Except there are showers and baths and toilets - I'm sure you don't use the same cloth for all of them. Or do you? Marigold gloves. Not sure they go with the manly image I try to exude. And as for the chemicals, Dr Frankenstein would have have been pushed to have more. There are grime buster liquids, non- scratch creams, eco stuff for toilet bowls, conventional bleach, weapons of mass destruction (no, haven't found them yet but they must be here Dr Blix).

So far this morning I have been working from 0830 to 1pm (with of course a coffee break) and I haven't finished half the house yet - then there is the cooking to be done this evening. OK, I'm cheating tonight because there are pizzas and not even I can mess them up. No wonder Mrs EoTP set off this morning smiling. She may be working but she ain't doing this stuff any more.

Cooking. Not a strong point of mine. Indeed it may not even register on the scale that runs from 'pathetic, microwave a ready meal at one end to Jamie Oliver standards at the other.' The cooker - buttons, red lights, temperature thingies. Oh dear. Maybe this is that extra incentive I need to find a full time job. 'Get work or give the family food poisoning.'

There is one more thing that has just popped into my head. I haven't uttered a word since 0830. I speak more in my sleep than that. I am never quiet for that long and now, having thought about it, I'm no longer sure that I am not speaking out loud or internalising all my thoughts. If anyone answers me then I really am in trouble and this is only day one. In an office you have people around you all day, joint coffee breaks, time to slag off one of your esteemed colleagues. Just when I had adapted to the change of working from home and finding ways of not standing in front of Mrs EoTP when she was trying to cook off they go and leave me alone.

The Postie has just dropped the mail from last month through the door so I'll go and find out what job I was rejected from in September. Maybe if I'm quick I can chat to her for a minute or two, no she's seen me and has run off up the street. Wonder if they do coffee mornings around her - for us househusbands?

Telephone lines

2007-10-08T13:16:00.001+01:00

'Go on punk, make my day.'
I make phone calls to complete strangers for my job (part-time job don't get excited, still searching for the Big One). I want to interview them and get information from them. They are busy people (well of course, they are they have jobs ergo they must be busy, busy mustn't they?). They do not want to be interviewed.
We have a problem.
Actually, I have a problem.

I call potential targets out of the blue. I have about thirty seconds to grab their attention, present my pitch before their auto-reject kicks in and years of hardened training makes them tune out and start putting the phone down on me. I have to complete forty interviews over the next six weeks.
I have a problem.

If I was an author I could hone my first sentence over the months, or years, so that you become hooked and want to continue to listen to me. I could make it memorable like 'It is a truth universally acknowledged...' or 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay..' but someone has beaten me to it and anyway when you are calling to find out their views on coconut futures (or whatever) literary allusions are, frankly, a liability.

So over the last few months I've been working on my techniques and lines so that I can instantly interest my targets and engage them in conversation. And once you do that the chances of securing an interview become measurably better. In theory.

Of course when at work you do not have to bother with this preamble. You can bark on the phone to a hapless underling and demand spreadsheets, data, coffee, chocolate biscuits without explanation. Or, of course, put the phone down on people like me who call out of the blue and who are trying to make a living...

It starts with the telephone stance. I went on a telephone training course years ago that urged you to stand up as you make the call and smile as you dial. That way the unsuspecting target would unconsciously realise that you were a happy, engaging person who they would love to talk to and probably take out to lunch and introduce to their family. Personally it made me feel like one of those cult members dressed in garish robes on the street and ringing little bells. It's meant to give you a sense of dynamism. If I do this at home anyone passing by on the street would see me with a manic grin on my face meandering around the room talking to myself and probably call Social Services.

Here's how not to do it.

'Good morning, lovely morning isn't it, oooh look at that squirrel on my tree, silly me you can't see it. Now I want information from you so I'll be there at 10am tomorrow and have the coffee ready, mine's white with four sugars and I like the custard creams best.'

Or, in a deep, sonorous American accent, 'Coming soon to a phone next to you - Consolidated Hoo Hahs bring you: The Questionnaire - bigger than the questions you were asked last week about corporate staple purchases, longer than the telephone interview trying to sell you a time share in Latvia and far more understandable than the one about mobile telephone rates ... we bring you ... [dramatic pause] ... padded envelope purchases you make annually. In stereo.'

When I started off with the interviews my opening gambit was an explanation that resembled the instructions found in self-assembly furniture booklets. 'Now Mr Porkscrathchings, I work for Consolidated Hoo Hahs you may have read about us recently in the Camarthen Examiner, no you didn't you live in Edinburgh, well there we are, anyway we are a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Wing Wang Solutions and we undertake research in a cooperative and...' See what I mean. Your eyes have glazed over and already you are replacing the phone on the handset.

I moved to plan B. 'Hi don't put the phone down I'm not trying to sell you anything I just want two hours of your time to ask you questions, no don't put the phone down, no this isn't a joke, oh he's gone...' Not entirely successful either.

Plan W, the one that works best, and has been honed through many iterations, goes like this: 'My name is Eyes on the Prize, I work for Consolidated Hoo Hahs and we are undertaking research in a number of European Countries of behalf of European padded envelope manufacturers. I wonder whether I could spend a few minutes talking to you about your padded envelope purchases. As a thank you for your participation I'd be happy to send you a copy of the report due next year.' Or something similar. And it seems to work. I generally get a 1 in 8 acceptance rate. Yes that does mean that to achieve forty interviews I have to call about 300 people but then it is money. This doesn't include the dance of the first contact in which you have to negotiate Kevin in Stationery who really doesn't give a rat's breakfast about the research and will not/does not leave a message, the PA who is a more formidable barrier than the Great Wall of China in getting through to the Boss, the 'he'll call you back' (they don't), the follow up call and 'they are now in a strokey beard meeting' and so on.

I had thought about writing a story and then, each time I finished an interview, letting them have just a few lines of the plot so that they would actively want me to call back with the next installment, sort of get them hooked in a literary way. I actually think they could do this on the motorways with the overhead information boards that encourage you to 'Stay alert, have a rest.' Why not put consecutive lines from a story on each board so that drivers and occupants can be amused and entertained on long journeys? I digress.

There are two notable successes that come to mind.
First there is Mr R. the MD of a very successful local company. I rang him up first about 6 months ago and he spent 20 minutes telling me why he will not do interviews. 'I don't do interviews, I don't do interviews, I don't do interviews, you can come tomorrow at 2.30pm'. I saw him for the second time earlier this week with the latest round of research into the use of A4 transparent plastic envelopes and bird feeders.

The other one was Mr K the owner of most of Staffordshire as far as I can tell. Nothing he likes better than to be taking engines apart apparently. Spoke to him for 50 minutes on his mobile - only about 25% of what he said was usable as he had an impressive grasp of English profanities but boy did he know his stuff on padded envelopes.

The final point. If you say you are going to send someone a copy of your report into bird feeders then do it. I now have my regulars for interviews. Now it's a case of 'Hi it's EoTP here' 'Oh yes' they say 'Let's get it over with shall we, what is it this time, staplers, black biro usage, internal envelopes and why there are always 500% more internal envelopes available than could ever be used?'
To which there is only one answer.
'You have to ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky? Well do you?'

In response may I say...

2007-10-03T16:41:00.000+01:00

'In technology response time is the time a system or functional unit takes to react to a given input (wikipedia.org).'

Or 'The delay experienced in time sharing between request and answer, a delay which increases when the number of users on the system increases.'

Or the total amount of accumulated time EoTP has spent waiting for slack jawed, drooling, swivel eyed, intellectually challenged recruitment executives to actually provide some feedback to one of his job applications. As most never respond at all there is a factor for infinity built in somewhere in the formula.

When I look back over the last seven months without a full time job the one element that stands out amongst all the other ones (there are coloured graphs and pie charts as well a list in ranked order if you'd like to see them) is the time spent waiting. I've already blogged about this several eons ago so to save time I've just cut and pasted the same rant in...no just kidding a whole new rant fresh from the oven is yours for the reading.

The second quote above is quite instructive because it is a truism - if you increase the number of users in a system then the response time will increase. Like encouraging more rail users and wondering why the railway carriages are full or any Post Office queue. Today, and this is true, there is a line of 15 people waiting to post stuff and what do the staff do at my local Post Office - go for a break that's what. So response times increase unless of course you increase the ability of the system to deal with the number of users (such as saying loudly like I did 'How about some more staff then?' My parcel will now be off to Papua New Guinea instead of Peterborough). See what an education does for you, gives you deep insights into capacity management.

Let me put this to you then. You place an advert, you expect shall we say 300 replies. You are a reasonably large recruitment agency being paid an absolute fortune to recruit someone preferably warm and breathing and who can at least write their own name so they can sign their expenses. Do you:
a) tell your IT team to set up an automatic response mechanism to all answer all inbound CVs so that the respondents know that their precious manuscript has actually arrived and spent at least a few nanoseconds in the 'In' box before being sent to the Trash can?
b) Set up a mail merge facility in Word, manually enter the candidates details into an Excel database so you can post out received/hold on/reject letters?
c) Do you say 'Blow this for a game of soldiers let's not bother letting anybody know anything except the three most likely candidates as that way it doesn't eat into our enormous fat fee and our expense account lunch times?'

I think you know where my vote will be cast.

To deal with this tosh this you have to build up a defense mechanism.
The first is to visualise the person responsible for finding the preferred candidate and then thinking up ways of causing them much pain. The early Chinese dynasties have some useful tips I find.

Secondly you begin to know instinctively when the threshold for getting a reply has passed. For those on the volume on-line job search web sites it's the moment you send your CV - for the other positions once 10 days have gone mark the application dead and bury it. The ones that you will almost always hear from are those connected with public bodies as they are open to public scrutiny - however as the closing dates for these jobs are usually three years hence and they really, really like to consider all the candidates very, very carefully just in case you can sue them for discrimination, they tend not to make a decision for about 8 years and by that time we've all moved on and forgotten what is was we applied for.

Bill Bryson says that the only way to start a trend to actually get a response from organisations is to encourage random shooting of those slackers who just don't get back to you. I have to say it's a very compelling argument. Imagine how we'd all be if the emergency services worked that way. Make a 999 call and get a 'We might come, we might not'. That'd be fun.

So rant over for the week. If you have any comments post them below and I'll get back to you. Yeah right.

Present times

2007-09-20T14:37:00.000+01:00

We have saved, we have reduced spending to priority goods, we have cancelled holidays, we do not go out. We have paid all our bills. This is what you have to do when you have a much reduced income.

But we are heading into a whole new expenditure minefield, other than the eye watering bill I have just had to pay the garage for a service and necessary cam belt change on our little car (If it had been a slightly bigger bill I could have paid of most of our remaining mortgage instead and bought a timeshare in Spain).

I am talking about Christmas and birthday presents.

The EoTP household is now entering that time of the year when much of the family have their birthdays and, of course, there is Christmas. Now Mrs EoTP and I are not great fans of Christmas and the resulting consumer binge but we do like to buy the family some gifts, as you do. I am always amazed at the figures quoted by the press on the average spend per child at Christmas because it far exceeds the amount we spend. Some kids must be getting some huge presents. We have a simple maxim about money which is 'if you haven't got it you can't spend it.' So we now find ourselves in the dilemma of working out how much we dare spend.

I have to pack in my part time job in mid-December otherwise I won't be able to claim my mortgage protection insurance for 12 months. Yeah I know this is daft but them is the rules. So the much reduced income we currently have will be much reduced again. I asked my kids the other day what would it take for them to feel poor. We had been discussing the impact of redundancy on the family and how we had all coped so far. 'Not having a Christmas' was their answer. Note not holidays, going out, designer clothes and all the other consumer items their friends have but not having a Christmas.

So what do you do?

Basically we do not have the money to splash out or even disturb the surface of the water much. The kids have coped really well over the last 7 months but this looks like one of those totemic events that may be just a little upsetting. As for the rest of the family we really have no choice but to say sorry but this year we just can't afford it.

I'm not looking forward to 25 December at all.

Now another related topic which I feel I have to share to demonstrate the labyrinth difficulties of job hunting .

I applied for a local job about 6 months ago, one that I would have liked to do. As you will have noted from this blog I clearly was not successful but got the rejection letter that stated 'The response to our campaign was overwhelming and the general standard of applications has been very high including a number of applications which were very close matches to our requirements so sling your hook matey and take your pathetic loser butt elsewhere.' Well most of the sentence is accurate anyway. The result is the same anyway 'Nope, not you, go away and go away quickly.' Anyway despite this overwhelming response and this clutch of people who were just fine and dandy for the role, 5 months later it has been re-advertised. So much for those highly qualified, just right people then. Of course I have reapplied. I have to find out whether I must sling my hook again.

On that theme I applied for another job about three months ago, this time based in London. Same response, same sort of words but who wants to work in London anyway? (Wasn't it so much easier in the old days when someone tapped you on the shoulder, said come for a quick bite at the Frog and Spawn, said 'I like your style, you're in.') . Anyway, same thing happened, eight weeks later job is re-advertised, but this time I don't apply as I really wouldn't want to commute to London. This time I get the same rejection letter (same words, different signature and date) for the second time even though I didn't apply. I mean, they really don't want me do they or is this a case of kicking me when I am down and then twisting the metaphorical knife? I feel that now they will be writing to me regularly just to confirm that I really, really, wasn't the right person.

Sometimes you laugh and sometimes you cry.

'I'm busy doing nothing working the whole day through', Bing Crosby

2007-09-18T15:59:00.000+01:00

I've just celebrated, though that really isn't the right word, 6 months unemployment. How about mourned the last 6 months of unemployment?

When I lost my job I know that getting another would be tough but I think I believed that after six months I would actually have managed to get another full time position. Well so much for that belief then, another delusion I have been under. And I believed in Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, snow at Christmas and Al Gore becoming President of the USA. And nothing imminent either so it is going to go on for some time to come. In fact it is quite easy to see how a year can go by without securing another full time position. Anyway the part time job still brings in some cash so, as I may have said before, it could be worse.

The thing is that in the last two weeks I've been busier than any other time during the last 6 months. I have had to work every work day for the last two weeks, plus a Sunday as well, to meet deadlines. In fact I even managed to get past the boundaries of the county on a number of occasions. Sometimes it feels like those scenes in Star Trek when Kirk says 'Shields up' and there is an invisible, impenetrable electronic sort of condom around the Enterprise stopping the aliens getting close. Recently there has been a reverse shield around the county seemingly stopping me get out to talk to the aliens (when you are restricted to a small area of the country you begin to think everyone else is odd, bit like they do in Yorkshire), but out I have been, as far north as Blackburn and to London twice. Marco Polo think on't.

However something odd happened. I started getting grumpy about going out. 'Look to get to Blackburn by 11am I am going to have to leave at 0700 in the morning and to get to London I'll have to catch the 0645 train to arrive on time for my meeting at 0930.' This would be followed by 'I'll be late home tonight, possibly as late as 6pm.'

6pm? When I was working I'd still have hours left in the office at that time and as for early starts, well I would laugh in the face of dawn and tell anyone daft enough to listen that this was my favourite time of day and that I had seen dawn rising all over the UK you layabeds you and didn't you know there were two 5 o'clocks in the day?

But now, now I find myself thinking 'Well I was going to mow the lawn' or 'I was going to go for a walk in sun whilst the weather was still fine'. This Friday I have to be the wrong side of the M1 to travel home and, even though I claim my fee by the hour, found myself thinking that this can't be right I should be home for a Friday afternoon and not fighting my way across the UK at the busiest time of the week.

I put this down to Darwinism as it can't possibly be anything wrong with me. I think it is a sort of adaptation to the circumstances and now, after 6 months, find adapting to work as much as a change as adapting to not working. A survival mechanism has kicked in allowing me to deal with the lack of things to do and with the pressure of work being, largely, removed. The pressure is still there but in other ways like not being able to spend on anything but necessities with the odd (very occasional) luxury item being bought.

We are still dealing with it, we have to, but as the song goes "I'd like to be unhappy but I really don't have the time.' If only it were like that really.

'I still haven't found what I'm looking for', U2

2007-09-10T14:59:00.000+01:00

‘So that’s it, your benefits stop at the end of this week Mr Featherstone and you can no longer claim unemployed status.’ The manila folder was placed precisely on the desk lining up with the pen and pencil holder, telephone and picture of a Yorkshire terrier with a red bow around its neck.

Martin looked up and did a double take. He’d only been half listening to the conversation with his ‘Personal Advisor’ in the Job Centre. Every two weeks, since he started signing on four months ago, he had to turn up on a Thursday morning at 9.30 am at the Job Centre and sign several forms to confirm he was still unemployed and actively searching for work. Martin had been working on ten different ways, in his imagination, to deal permanently with the Yorkshire terrier. So far that morning he had considered using it in a rugby match and had idly been considering what was the maximum possible trajectory that could be achieved by Jonny Wilkinson. Usually all he had to do was confirm he was looking for work, sign four forms and leave the building, 5 minutes at the most.

‘What do you mean my benefits are ending?’ said Martin ‘I’ve only been out of work for four months and you made me wait the first month before paying me anything. I know it isn't much but you can see from my records what my financial outgoings are.’

‘It’s new rules Mr Featherbrawn’ said Mrs Fillet (for she was Martin’s Personal Advisor at the Job Centre) ‘Brought in by the Government to discourage slackers...I mean encouraging those searching for work to look that little bit harder.’

‘Yes but’ said Martin ‘I have been looking for work, you’ve seen the CVs that I’ve been sending out. And by the way it's Featherstone. You can’t change my status just like that. If I can no longer sign on as unemployed then I can’t claim my mortgage protection insurance. I’ve got a young baby and a pregnant wife due to give birth again in three months time. I need the money.’

‘Not my rules Mr Featherbrain, just applying them. I see you haven’t applied for any local jobs at all.’

‘Well of course not’ said Martin his voice rising just a little ‘We’ve been over this. I am not a sous chef, or a builder and cannot work a CNC auto lathe with monobloc controls which you suggested I look at last time we spoke. My qualifications are wrong for those sort of jobs. And it's Feather STONE.’

‘Mr Latherstode if you do not apply for these local jobs it’s out of my hands’.

Martin took a deep breath and said ‘Look, I have a degree in particle physics with an MA in molecular biology at a nano level. I then went on to do PhD in nano particulate technology using carbooxylates at a porosity of .00005% to assess their reaction at absolute zero Celsius in zero gravity. I then held a research position at Rutland University for 6 years with one research assistant, who had one GCSE in kitten care, in their research labs working for the world's largest pharma company who then pulled my research grant because they decided that they wanted to develop a world-beating self-heating, pot noodle. I was the only person in the world doing this research. I can tell you anything you want to know about the actions of carbooxylates at absolute zero but I could not lay a brick or make a bloody omelette to save my life! I cannot afford a car and don’t have a driving licence anyway. I am computer literate on Apple Macs only and then provided they are not running an OS later than 7.5 So there is absolutely no point is asking me to weld, lay bricks, or use a CNC what ever that is. I’m applying to every University as it is but they only recruit at certain times of the year. And it is FEATHERSTONE.’

‘Well nothing more I can do. After tomorrow you are off benefits as I said’ snapped Mrs Fillet and got up to leave but then stopped. ‘There might be one thing’ she said ‘it’s brand new, introduced just today, hasn’t been used at all yet anywhere but…’

‘Well what is it?’ demanded Martin, ‘I’ll try anything.’

‘It’s a brand new system just introduced by the Government – based on the American military missile guidance systems used by their fighter pilots in combat apparently. It’s called the Super National Apparatus for Fixing Unemployment or SNAFU for short. Guaranteed to find a job. It is designed for the long-term unemployed but you could be a guinea pig if you want. However there are conditions to its use’ Mrs Fillet added darkly.

‘And they are?’ asked Martin.

‘SNAFU absolutely guarantees 100 percent to find you a job and guarantees the employer a person with exactly the right qualifications to do the job. It costs nothing to use and therefore saves everyone hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of pounds, in recruitment costs. But as it is so expensive to maintain, once a job has been found you have to take it and the employer has to give it to you. No interviews required it is all system based. Now the job could be anywhere but the Government gives very generous relocation grants or meets travelling costs for five years. However, I must repeat, you have take the job and you have to sign a contract first.’

Martin considered this. Shouldn’t be a problem at all. All the research labs were in places that he and his wife would happily relocate to especially with a generous grant. Might even be overseas…

‘Right I’ll do it. Where do I sign?’

For the next four hours Martin sat at a computer, monitor and keyboard in a separate room in the job Centre entering his qualifications, life history, salary aspirations and requirements, work experience and, truth be told, pretty much all of his life into the SNAFU system. He felt exhausted, as if he had had to complete 100 different public authority CVs in one day.

‘Right’ said Mrs Fillet, when he had completed the task, 'Now for the result.' She and all the other members of the Job Centre crowded into the small room as Mrs Fillet hit the ‘submit' button on the screen.

Martin stood up and walked away from the monitor where the hour glass icon continued to spin and rotate.

At last, after ten minutes or so, there was a loud ping and the screen changed to a new window. Mrs Fillet, smiling broadly, pushed her way eagerly to the front to read the message saying, as she moved, ‘Right Mr Botherstroud I will now announce your new position.’ Then she became very still and peered at the screen closely.

‘How odd, how very, very odd’ she muttered.

‘What?’ shouted Martin, ‘what does it say?’

‘It says ‘We have found a position that matches your requirements but we have received a good response and a number of people appear to match the specification more closely. Thank you for your interest in SNAFU and we wish you every success with your future applications.’

Brownie points

2007-08-29T19:50:00.000+01:00

Peter pushed open the door gently. Although the hinges creaked loudly in the silence, the door swung open easily enough.
'Professor', Peter called out into the poorly lit parlor, 'Are you there?'
There was no immediate answer, only the noise of traffic passing the Victorian house on the road at the bottom of the garden and the hum of electrical motors from further in the house coming from what seemed to be the entrance to the cellar just down the hallway. The interior of the house, rather like the garden that Peter had walked through to get the front door, was neat and tidy, clean and decorated though with a little too much use of pink emulsion for Peter's own taste. No one had come in answer to Peter's knocking and ringing of the door bell. Still the Professor had been very insistent that he come when they had spoken that morning in the public library.

Peter had met the Professor for the first time today. There had been one of those momentary embarrassing tussles as they both reached for the Daily Telegraph in the paper racks in the reference section. After a few 'I'm sorries' and 'No, no after you' they had determined that they had both wanted different sections of the paper. Peter wanted the jobs section and the Professor the obituaries section, 'To check that I am still alive dear boy' he said smiling. They sat at the same table and it seemed natural to continue the conversation. Peter explained that he'd been made redundant yet again, been unemployed for months and just couldn't get a job no matter how hard he tried. 'I don't know what to do,' said Peter, 'I'm very well qualified, have retrained more times than I can remember but no one seems to want you when you are in your 50's. Even my wife says I'm like our elderly Fiat car - that never works either, she says. I chose the wrong career all those years ago. I had a chance to do something else and blew it on one decision. The thing that really depresses me is that I could have been so successful with my life but I just never got the breaks. Now I'll never achieve all that I could have. ' The Professor tut-tutted sympathetically. 'It is a problem' he agreed, 'look at me, I'm in my 70's, all my best work in quantum physics in Cambridge now behind me, still working on my big idea but no one pays attention to you once you pass into retirement'. He paused then looked directly into Peter's eyes, his own eyes now serious.

'I have an idea, a machine I've been working on. It might help you. Come to my house tonight at 8.00pm and I'll show you what I mean. No, don't ask questions now, just come and you'll see. Promise you'll come.' And with that he left the library. The librarian smiled at Peter, 'Such a lovely gentleman, comes in every week and orders the most wonderful books on quantum physics, worm holes and last month, temporal displacement and probability, very different from the usual requests for the latest best-seller.'

Peter walked down the hallway and jumped when the voice of the Professor shouted out from a speaker mounted on the wall next to a video camera.
'There you are! Jolly glad you came, now come down into my workshop in the cellar and I'll explain everything.' Peter closed the front door behind him and walked down the stairs into the cellar. 'Marvellous things security cameras' said the Professor, 'means I can keep working and decide whether I want to be interrupted or not.' He tapped the screen of the TV on his work bench. Peter looked around the room. In every conceivable space were cables, wires, screens, monitors, all leading to a large well-padded armchair in the middle of the room itself in front of a console containing two levers.
'Professor er... I don't actually know your full name' said Peter.
'Brownie' replied the Professor and then Peter remembered. Professor Brownie the world famous quantum physicist who had retired 15 years ago - he remembered the interviews where the Professor had claimed that time travel was more than theoretically possible it was a fact but a fire had destroyed his laboratory in Cambridge and he could not replicate the experiment. 'Time Crank retires' - Peter remembered the tabloid headlines.

'I see you remember me now' said Professor Brownie noting Peter's expression, 'and what they said about me. Well I can show you tonight it wasn't all made up. You really can alter time. I have found a way of sending you back through time to one specific moment and letting you alter one fundamental decision.'

Peter stood and looked around at the equipment. He looked at Professor Brownie and then he made to leave. That was all he needed during this unemployment, a lunatic offering time travel. The Professor waved in the direction of the door. 'I understand Peter, go if you want to, but this morning you told me you made the wrong choice of career. What if I could give you that choice again? What have you got to lose?' Peter thought quickly - what else was he going to do that evening, it wasn't as if he'd have to get up early in the morning to work was it? It would make a good story for the pub anyway, goodness knows he had little else to talk about these days. 'OK' Peter said 'let's try it'.

The Professor sat Peter down in the armchair and placed what seemed to be an iPod on his lap and connected several electrodes to his head. The iPod and electrodes were, in turn, connected to the other machinery by a further cable. 'Hold this and watch the screen. Now tell me the date and time where you had to make the choice of one career path over another. The machine will then scan the temporal streams and show you what has happened with your choice that has brought you here today and what would have happened if you had picked the other career path. It doesn't show the future, only what has happened up to today, this very moment. What happens in the future is still your choice it has not yet been determined. You will then be given the opportunity to pull one of the levers in front of you and either go back in time to choose the other career path or pull the other lever and confirm your life so far. Now this is important Peter. The way temporal streams work everyone has one chance and one chance only to go back and make a choice. Think of it like a railway and coming to a set of points. You set the points one way or the other. Do you understand? You can't go back and reset the points if you don't like the new outcome. Once you have chosen your track you will follow it until it loops back to this exact time and place. When the temporal stream has finished processing you have just two minutes to pull one of the levers. The white one to stay with the choice you made and black one to choose the other life. You have to make a choice, you can't mess with quantum physics you know.''

Peter nodded. 'Barmy old fool' he thought, 'let's get this over with. Bit of a laugh when it all fails to work.' 'Right then' Peter said out loudly, 'July 15 1977 at home in Cardiff. I'm with my Mum and Dad. There are two letters, one from the head office of the world's biggest supplier of computers offering graduate entry and a clerical post in London following my degree in languages and one from Consolidated Holdings Inc. offering me a graduate entry post with their sales team in their head office in Manchester with a company Ford Escort. I took the car and, well, here I am.'

The Professor pressed a number of buttons on the console at his desk and then stared hard at Peter and spoke again softly 'No going back now Peter, shall we start?' Peter sat still, nodded his assent and, at that, the lights dimmed and the machinery starting humming very loudly. In his head Peter saw lights passing, like the windows of a train carriage in the night. Vague images started appearing on the iPod screen and then there it was, like a security camera looking over his shoulder, Peter at 21 in his front room with his mother and father smiling broadly. 'Two offers son, both great, which one to take?' said his father. The Peter of 1977 looked at his parents and said 'Computers of course.'

The screen changed and then Peter saw, at high speed his other life pass on the screen - the big offices in central London, the too-smart suits and neat haircuts, blue shirts and tie, promotion, travel to the head office in the States, moving house because the company expects it, bigger car, bonuses, stock options, girls, the girl, marriage, meetings, working late every night, networking, evenings with people you don't like because the company expects it, wife gives up career to keep up with company moves, bigger houses, fewer friends (you never have time to go out with them), wife leaves with ex-best friend (he always lacked ambition just wanted to live in the country), no friends, promotion to head of South Americas, divorce, company censure (our senior team are expected to be married), new house gated community Sao-Paulo with armed response, marriage to petite blond wife with teenage son who loathes you, promotion Head of Sales Pacific rim move to Beijing, divorce (we really expect our team to be married is there a problem?), promotion to Head of Servers for Baltic region, moves to Finland, firm sold in reorganisation, sorry have to "let you go", "retirement" at 55, escorted off premises by security no time to empty desk, move to UK, very good pension and excellent stock options intact, bachelor flat in Notting Hill, feel lonely, looking for partner in Daily Telegraph in library, meets Professor tells him he's lonely looking for a soul mate, Professor invites him around this evening

And then the screen blurs and it's 21 year old Peter in Cardiff saying to his father 'Are you kidding, I want the car.' And then night school, monthly pay checks, promotion, travel abroad, bigger car, staff, bonus, girls, girl, marriage, her career, holidays in Cornwall and Devon, decide to have children - present at birth and birthdays of beautiful baby girl, wife resumes career, first redundancy, fight back, retrains, small salary increase, another baby girl , present at birth and birthdays, holidays with family every year girls sleeping in the back of the car on the long drive, friends some doing better some doing worse some are with same partners some have new ones, another redundancy a new job a few rungs down the corporate ladder work no longer so satisfying, 25th wedding anniversary, 30th wedding anniversary, MA in Fine Art from the Open University wonderfully satisfying (should have done that instead of languages at Uni), friends celebrate 50th birthday with surprise birthday party one girl comes back from Uni especially and they both want to be with their dad that night, wife starts own business starts to thrive, another redundancy (sorry we've been bought out we are going to have to let you go) out of work for eight months so far money worries, goes to library meets Professor, Professor invites him around this evening.

The screen goes black, the background electrical humming falls silent.

The Professor says 'Peter you have two minutes to pull one of the levers and make that choice again. You must pull one of them.'

Peter lies back in the chair and closes his eyes for a minute and then sits up. He looks at the Professor, winks and then leans forward to pull a lever. 'Thank you Professor, I know which lever I want' he says, smiling, and pulls it.

Banned on the run

2007-08-21T09:12:00.001+01:00

I made three resolutions at the beginning of the year.
They were:

Never go to the company Christmas party again as it was so dire and the fighting every year was getting boring.
Be able to run 3 miles by year end.
Get my weight down by 4 kilos by year end.

On the basis that you should be careful what you ask for (I've never forgotten the story of "The Monkey's paw") I seem to have achieved the first one though not in the way I was expecting. And there were fights every year at the party, such a tasteful organisation with charming cultured people though clearly none of them ever made the mistake of going to the Christmas party like I did or even turning up for work now I come to think about it.

Run 3 miles. Well I used to claim that at 50 I was as fit as I was at 30 which was technically correct even if in practice this meant that walking to the car park and back was the limit of my fitness programme. Every time I went to see the doctor with some malady he would glower at me and mutter such words as "you're a bit porky Mr EoTP so why don't you get some exercise and save me a lot of NHS paperwork when you are in your 60's and wonder why you need a fork lift truck to move you around?"

Hence resolution 3. See it all fits together like a wellington boot.
So, as we all now know I achieved resolution 1 unaided. Resolution 2 started like this. After coming home from work (what a strangely outmoded concept that now seems) I started going on a determined walk of several miles each evening. This led to thoughts of "I wonder if I could run to the next lamp post?" I couldn't. Well not without a significant loss of face as I gasped for oxygen, then went very red in the face and had to hang on to the lamp post so as not to collapse. Good job this was in January and during the hours of darkness so no one could see how pathetic I was. However I kept on with the regime and by the end of March could run the three miles. No one was more surprised than me and now I felt I could come out of the shadows and run in the daylight. So this is not "Chariots of fire" with the theme tune by Vangelis playing as I run around but it ain't too bad.

Of course this is where it starts to become a consumer buying opportunity. I start seeing other runners and they have watches with timers , blood pressure and heart beat monitors so that you can optimise your exercise heart rate and stay in the "zone" wherever that is - no where near where I live that's for sure. I've still to find it. They wear tight spandex shorts and lycra tops so that their air resistance is minimised and they have the most amazing running shoes so they glide over the road and pavements. In the newsagents you can find specialised running magazines that can sell you even more wonderful performance enhancing equipment. I want these accoutrements. They are necessary for serious running. Of course with limited funds but lots of time I have a dilemma. How can I look like a serious runner and not dress like a footballer from the 1940's with shorts that you could hide several people in each leg and football boots that look like deep sea divers boots. The answer is Tesco (again). For £9 I bought a running shirt, shorts and jog pants that may not be at the cutting edge of fashion, or even in the same country, but they will do. The local sports shop had a sale and I bought cheap running shoes so job done. As for the watch timer thing well I discovered that if I look at the clock as I leave and then again when I return I can work out the time - amazing. If I can't see the clock because of a film of sweat then I must have had a good run. If I'd have been working I would have bought the "correct" equipment and would I have run any better or faster? Of course Mrs EoTP snorted with derision when I declared my need for the serious running equipment - she must get tired with being right all the time.

As for the weight loss, 3 kilos achieved so far with 3 months still to go to the end of the year. By then I will have reached the weight that I said I would never exceed and which became known as the "horror weight". I can't work out how therefore I managed to exceed it by 4 kilos. Must be a gland thing.

There is a sort of camaraderie amongst runners, a nod of recognition, even a cheery "hallo" from most though from me, unless it's about 5 metres from where I've started the run it is more of a croak and exhalation than a word, like a teenager's response to any question. But there is one running item that, when I am declared King of the World, I will instantly ban. And that is the silly little water bottle that women runners for some reason like to have with them. You know they can't be real runners equipment because Tesco don't sell them.

'I'm free', Mr Humphries, "Are you being served?" BBC

2007-08-15T08:24:00.000+01:00

It's August and everyone is on holiday, going on holiday or just returning from holiday except, of course, us. Even with my part-time job it has become very difficult contacting people "Yes I will see you...in September after I come back from my week in Rio, followed by some late skiing in a darling little hidden valley in the Hindu Kush and then some well earned rest in L.A. Such a good exchange rate don't you think? Where are you going?". Of course friends are in the West Indies, Greece, France, the Indian ocean (on an island of course) or, considering the money in this area where I live, their very own island in the Hebrides for all I know.
I walked to Tescos the other day: a two mile walk and it was sunny. And we drove out into the countryside at night to see the meteor shower. That is the extent of our holiday. No, we borrowed a carpet cleaner as well. No end to the excitement in the EoTP household.

Anyway we are here for the summer and of course people know this. That is why we are getting asked "Are you free?".

It used to be the case that if we were asked about the Dog and Duck it meant a clandestine under age trip to a pub buried deep in the folds of the hills in the Forest of Dean when we were teenagers, followed by much drinking of the foul (but cheap) brown ale brewed in that area. Neither the landlord or local police seemed terribly bothered by this as long as we didn't annoy the locals. We couldn't for long anyway as we passed out after two pints. Now things have changed.

1. We are looking after a duck. Friends up the road found a stray duckling some months ago and have adopted it. They have gone on holiday and asked us to look after it. This means two trips a day for the next 10 days to their house to let the duck out for a paddle on their pond, feed it worms (Mrs EoTP is digging worms from our garden to deliver to the duck) and generally let it have a walk/waddle/pit-pat-waddle-pat around then chase it back into the hutch. Our friend's wife called us from the airport on Monday (three hours after they had left home) to check on its welfare and then from France twice yesterday. We have a website (pun intended) so that they can see daily updated pictures. Heaven help us. Oh and we have to be careful not to feed it too much chick food in case it gets crumb bum. There is NO WAY I am wiping a ducks bottom, that's a step too far. And what are we going to do if the duck flies away during the week? It is exercising it's wings regularly every day. Deeply worrying.

2. We are looking after a dog, a cocker spaniel. Other friends are having a few days at home to recover from their 10 hectic days on holiday in the West Indies or somewhere local like that and, because they are having a few days out locally, "could we just drive up to their house and let the dog out for a run, feed it, and play with it." Well of course we can and happy to do so.

3. Teenager watch. Another friend is in Greece but has left their 18 year old at home - intentionally I should say. This time it's a sort of "Mummy Watch" as last time he was left alone he went out and left a gas burner on the cooker on and unlit for several hours. Mrs EoTP (and three others also on Mummy Watch) have to check regularly on his state and report back to Greece via text. He was called upon yesterday at 11am, had only just got up (natch). Mrs EoTP and friend arrive at the house, flash their Mummy Watch warrant cards and demand to search the house for contraband girlfriends. Well perhaps not, but chummy knows he's been fingered by the Squad (must stop watching "Life on Mars"). Of course we had a call from Greece last night to check on his status. Maybe time for a website for a teenager? Look house not burnt down, police not called to rave, evidence that clothes have been changed at least once in a fortnight.

4. Minke Whale Watch. The local council have found that a pod of Minke whales have mistaken the sound of an ice cream van chimes for the sonar equivalent of open water and have found their way into the nearby canal and could we look after it during August for them as it is a good tourist attraction and the official swan upper is on holiday?

5. Prime Minister Watch. Gordon Brown wants a few days away with his family and the rest of the Cabinet would also like a few days in Tuscany/USA/Maldives/all three and could we keep an eye on the country for a day or two, send us a text if there is a problem?

6. Mrs EoTP is also looking after a holiday cottage and the arrivals and departures of holiday makers. It's like the equivalent of being an air steward "On the right you will find three good restaurants, at the rear of the town you will find two supermarkets with comprehensive facilities, on the left of the town you will find a river full of Minke whales and a friendly (but confused duck), a swimming cocker spaniel and a teenager who though this might be a quick way to wash his underpants." Sound of running as Mrs EoTP realises that the whole thing is unravelling and how can she put this in a text?

So this is the summer of 07. Mrs EoTP sent several texts last night after a bottle of wine. I think in the cold light of day she will have found that the teenager was put in the hutch with no sign of crumb bum, the duck was in its dressing gown when woken at 11 am and no sign of any girls and the Minke whales are back in Downing Street.

"We're all going on a summer holiday", Cliff Richard

2007-08-06T15:44:00.000+01:00

We are not going on a summer holiday. We decided that it would be prudent not to in the circumstances of not having much money. We left it until the last thing to decide, well sort of last thing, as we cancelled it with a month to go. That way at least there was a fighting chance that the holiday agency could re-let the property. Everything is insured, so financially we will get everything back by 2010.

We had intended to stay near Venice as I'd promised the kids that when they were old enough (moves pipe to other side of mouth and puffs furiously) then I shall take them to see the antiquities of yore. Sits down and brushes small tails of tobacco from cardigan. Of course as soon as I'd cancelled the holiday, images of Venice are everywhere I look, lists of the best family restaurants in Venice, how to have an utterly fabulous time in Venice on £2 per day and "Venice - the best bits that tourists never see". The kids look at the pictures, then at me, then at the pictures again. Hey! but it will still be there next year subject to floods, tsunamis and so forth.

This is not helped by friends going/coming back from holidays in far flung places and saying things like "You should have seen the sunset over the Yangtze river and pandas in their natural habitat are sooooo adorable. Look some genuine dried panda pooh for you. Good for the complexion and so tasty sprinkled on soup." And "The Maldives: so exotic yet you can still buy a good single malt whiskey and Kit Kats." Sound of EoTP cocking AK47.

But what are we missing by not going on holiday? Here's my list of things I won't miss:

Waking at 2am to catch the ferry in Dover because if you travel after 0830 the cost quadruples. Trying to get the rest of the family to wake up. Mrs EoTP is like a bear when first woken -scary.
Food on the ferry. Pain au chocolates made six weeks ago and now so hard they are capable of mooring a boat to if necessary. And the prices all seem to to be in multiples of £5.
Finding the overnight accommodation using the instructions sent by the French B&B. After a twelve-hour drive one's sense of humour and ability to say one word in French goes straight out of the window. I demand a SatNav next time.
Food from motorway service station of any nationality.
Eating food at a motorway service station of any nationality.
Finding a restaurant where we all like the look of the food on offer. Try finding a traditional French restaurant that serves cheese and tomato pizza.
Airport departure lounges. I flew from Luton airport for the first time a few weeks ago. It was manic. I've seen much worse in the Far East. Of the world not the UK; I didn't mean Ipswich airport.
Getting back to the UK at Dover, knowing the holiday is over and yet there are still several hours of driving ahead. Then unpacking.
Cleaning the car. I have tried so hard to get the kids to get in and out of the car without them diving in head first and out by climbing on the seats. Their footprints go all around the back of the car including the roof.
Sick bags. We can be driving on the smoothest, arrow straight autobahn with the minimal of sideways movement and there will be a "Dad you have to stop I feel sick, bwaggghhhhhhh" moment. Or they will want to be sick at the point in the journey when you just cannot stop and then "bwaggghhhhhhh" again. Then there is the cleaning up, the "that's the last pair of clean shorts", the stained car fabric, the smell. There again we can be going around the most vertiginous mountain roads and they can eat ice cream, sweets and fight each other without any side effects.
Mosquitoes. Have to have the windows open it's so hot. Mossies love EoTP and ignore Mrs EoTP. Why?
Going back to work, 5000 emails, 14 days of post, things have happened that I don't understand, customers have left/joined, half the staff have left/joined and it's 11am, time for my espresso and croissant and still 8 hours before I can go home.

So you see I won't have any of that this year. No wonder I feel so relaxed. It's just too tiring going on holiday.

Working to rules

2007-08-02T09:57:00.000+01:00

I was feeling very positive earlier this week. No, I hadn't been offered a full time job, nothing that exciting but as one three month contract came to a close at the end of July several more appeared on the horizon. I have a further 20 days on one project starting now, some confirmed work in early September that will also pay quite well and it looks as if a new contact can also give me 12 to 20 days work from mid August. There's also a possibility of a further 3 months work from mid September. No full time job anywhere in sight but there is some income still coming in. Money is tight but we are still surviving. Networking is working it seems.

Great news. Or is it?

The thing is mortgage protection insurance (MPI). I've been paying for this for years and have finally got to the point where I could claim it. Of course it is worth quite a lot of money and will cover the mortgage payments for 12 months. You have to be registered as unemployed to claim it though. And this is where it gets complicated. Stay with me as I am still trying to get my head around it.

You can defer your MPI claim for up to six months after becoming unemployed if you have, as I have, part time work that takes up more than 15 hours per week.
You can sign on as unemployed and take on part time work as long as, yes you are ahead of me, do not work more than 15 hours per week.
You have to register as unemployed to claim MPI.
After 6 months the MPI provider assumes that if you still have part time work then you must be fully employed and therefore you cannot make a claim for insurance cover for a further 12 months from that date. Their rules not mine.

So here I am. At the end of September I will have deferred my claim for 6 months. I have work, it seems, that will take me into October and perhaps further. However this is only part time work and the income barely covers outgoings. We'll ignore taxes, pension payments, shoes for the children and so on for the moment otherwise my head will implode. So it looks as if I will have to turn down some part time work to claim the MPI from October onwards even though the amount that will be paid will be less than I could have earned working part time. And the MPI company will not change its rules. Because I've asked. And they said NO.

Bummer.

This is a dilemma as there may be a full time job with either organisation eventually. Eventually.
And I don't want to go self-employed again because I cannot be sure that the work will last much beyond October and then I really will be stuck if it doesn't.

Right now I really don't know what to do.
I'll have to think carefully about this or, of course, I could ignore it and see if all goes away but that probably is not a likely option. I dunno, doesn't life get complicated sometimes?

A slow emergency

2007-07-23T15:31:00.000+01:00

I went on a First Aid course a few weeks back, something I'd been meaning to do for some time. Not a First Aid course for a career in crisis more's the pity, but one for what to do if someone has cut their finger and a Winne-the-Pooh plaster will just not solve the problem. But if it had been for a career first aid course just think what I could have done.

Defibrillator for a career attack.
Mouth to mouth for interviews.
Putting the career into a recovery position until the Paracareerists arrive.
Putting the CV into a splint to hold it in place until we can get some professional work done on it.

Well that's worked that metaphor to death, in a manner of speaking that is.

Anyway one of the big messages from the course leader is don't rush. Take things steadily and methodically like the paramedics as they descend from the ambulance and assess the situation before getting out the plaster of Paris, Savlon and machines that go "beep, beep, beep", like moorhens do.

This seemed to me like a good way to think of unemployment which is really a slow emergency in many ways. I mean you don't have to turn on the blues and twos for unemployment. The adrenalin pumping as you race to the scene of the incident shouting in the radio "We have a 10-15 in progress with an RTC involving a bravo india kilo echo and a whiskey alpha lima lima alpha bravo yankee. Or something."
No this all unfolds slowly over time. No wailing sirens and blue lights with a message over the airwaves saying "We have a 4th redundancy in progress, call in the tactical CV writing teams and forensics to go over the corpse of the career - no it's not dead we can rebuild it better than ever, just need to airlift it to the UK's finest career consultant." Nope don't recall that at all. You just have to take things methodically, assess the position and continue to apply treatment and eventually someone with a big clipboard will declare you well/employed again.

What you have is a slow burn heading slowly towards a disaster of months out of work, more rejections, the desert of jobs that is August as most of the rest of the world goes on holiday so decides not to recruit. Though who would want a holiday on a canal boat in the UK last week? The real emergency is many months away though it is still a gentle slide downwards towards it. However the emergency does slowly evolve around you - company car goes, stop spending money, cancel holiday, only buy clothes if necessary, do not go out anymore for meals/theatre, buy cheaper foods.

I continue to pick up small amounts of work here and there so it could be a lot, lot worse. Could have had the house flooded like so many people in the region where we live. Outgoings exceed incomings but not by a huge margin. We've just cancelled our summer holiday, a prudent move as Gordon Brown might say. We couldn't face being abroad but afraid to spend money - abroad will still be there next year anyway and we'll go somewhere then.

So 10-4. Roger and out.

The canal boat holiday of unemployment

2007-07-09T14:27:00.000+01:00

Acquaintances of ours have just come back from a week's canal boat holiday.
They took their sixteen year old son with them.
It has been the wettest June since records began.
I am a patient man in many ways but I would have been driven to a frenzy of boredom on a canal boat within, oh about three minutes. When I knew they had departed on their holiday with the rain so heavy I couldn't see the space on my drive where my company car used to be parked it seemed to me that, for once, my lot at home was better than someone else's in so many, many ways.
I tried to imagine their conversation on board. "Look a moorhen. Look another one. Look another one." Occasionally it might get really exciting and become "Look a duck. Look another one. Look another one."
Then, "Dad I've left my iPod at home."
"Well, walk back home and get it because we've only moved .3 metres in the last three hours at the maximum cruising speed of 0.1 kms per hour and even if it takes you five hours we will only have moved 0.5 metres and that water vole has just overtaken us".

Imagine the relentless chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug of the Perkins diesel engine like a fiendish form of Chinese water torture, the dripping of water from the decks and the moorhens making their awful moorhen racket. And then, because of the rain, the descent of mega-boredom. No sitting on the warm, sunny English canal banks with a pint of the landlord's foaming Best Badger's Piddle - no it's slightly warm tomatoes and butter that is not quite solid from the fridge that isn't quite cold enough with bread that might just have a touch of mildew whilst being cooped up in a floating pencil box. Then there would be the excursions in the relentless rain. "I'm just walking to the other end of the boat. I'm back". "I'll walk to the other end. Oh I'm back". The most excitement would come from the wash of big motor crusiers that snarl past with their 40000 hp engines bubbling away at minimum revs but managing to achieve 45 knots and a bow wave that looks like a particularly spectacular Severn Bore. And then the evenings, oh God the evenings. Fitful light from two 40W bulbs that glow intermittently with the pulse of the engine, card games with the sixteen year old who has just discovered that he can't recharge his iPod from the boat's electrical sockets and bedtime at 9pm because there is just nothing left to do. And still the bloody moorhens will not keep quiet. And there are still six more nights to go. And it won't stop raining.

Well unemployment is nothing like that except it is. I was never too hot on logic and syllogisms. Unemployment is about being patient, stoic and knowing that there are six more metaphorical nights to go in this floating shoe box in the rain and the maximum speed you are allowed is 0.1 job rejections per day. Still no moorhens so that's a good thing, a very good thing. I find it hard some days to find things to do because of the restrictions on money and travel but there are ways and means to keep going and keep interested without going to bed at 9pm. It could have been worse, they might have gone camping. Let me tell you about the time we went camping in the Dordogne, oh you have to go do you, so soon? I'll call you shall I?

"Nobody said it would be easy no one said it would be this hard", Coldplay

2007-07-04T14:16:00.000+01:00

Well, a difficult week with three rejections in as many days. That tests your sense of humour I find. Anyhow the Prize family dusts itself off, picks itself up and carries on but this time with a new strategy. Mrs EotP will get a job. Not a strokey beard job for a multi-national manufacturer of vital bits and bobs made from colourful plastic but a local job that fits in the school term and our lifestyle. Our intended lifestyle post unemployment that is.

Easy of course. But is it?
Read on. Be amazed by Mrs EotP's account of the search for a job.
"To slow the passage of family finances down the plughole I must get a job outside the home and away from my own computer. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem I thought. I’m not too fussy about what I do, after all, I did some temping a few years ago which involved hour after hour of filing and photocopying and I managed that without my cerebral cortex boiling over.

Four applications, one interview and no jobs later I realise there is no skills shortage locally and I’ll be lucky to get a cleaning job.

I applied for a part-time clerical post and was told that the organisation concerned had been ‘inundated’ with applications and that there would therefore be ‘tests’ before one could get through to the interview proper. Yikes! Might there be an outdoor assault course or providing samples of bodily fluids?

On the day of the interview I was ushered into the reception area where other candidates (who looked worryingly confident) were browsing through personalised folders containing the tests. I was handed one, given two minutes to read it and then penned in an office with a senior member of staff who invited me to make a telephone call to a person mentioned in a case study. Whilst I explained the made-up scenario to the person acting on the other end who was pretending to be a difficult customer, the accompanying member of staff fixed me with a steely glare and ticked things off on a clipboard.

Afterwards I was taken to a large computer-filled room where numerous other people were typing away (I found out later that about a dozen candidates were undergoing the test). We were given a long handwritten letter and told to type it out and format it in a certain way within a time limit. All around me were the blurred hands and manic clacking of typists who could probably do 140 words per minute. I can do a hundred words less than that, don’t work with a PC but an Apple Mac, hate using Word at the best of times and was feeling that all knowledge about anything had just left my head. Managed to do it in the time available, although it wasn’t the loveliest piece of work I’ve ever produced, and got up to leave. Unfortunately there were two doors in the room so leaving involved going out through one into what looked like an unfamiliar corridor (thanking my lucky stars that it hadn’t been a stationery cupboard) coming back in, being looked at curiously by everyone still in room, trying knob of other door, finding it locked, laughing in a ‘ha-ha I meant to do that’ kind of way and going out through first door again feeling a complete plonker. I think it was this last bit that meant I didn’t get the job. My typing was phenomenal, my inter-personal skills second to none but I was crap with doors."

Now Mrs EotP has more qualifications than most, is a whizz on the PC and has held down very demanding jobs in the past. And all this malarky is for a part time clerical job. You can imagine how I feel trying for more senior positions. SAS survival course, trapping deer and eating raw flesh, weapons training? It does bring into sharp contrast the difficulties of getting any job.

And finally, to round off the week, met an acquaintance yesterday in town. "You are looking very well" he said "must be this unstressful life you are now leading."
Yes he is of course right, being unemployed for 14 weeks with no imminent end in sight is indeed blissfully unstressful.

"You never write, you never call"

2007-06-27T08:19:00.000+01:00

I don't know whether to send this email or not. It won't make the slightest bit of difference but let's treat it as an open letter to all you recruitment consultants out there who act like this - and there are many of you.

"You may recall speaking to me about the above position suggesting that you may be interested in me as a candidate and also giving me some feedback on my CV that I had submitted. You suggested that I use a professional CV writer and resubmit the CV which I did.

I have heard nothing from you since despite a further email asking for an update.
Perhaps you will now let me give you some feedback.
You queried the structure of my CV for a senior position. You suggested I spend £400 having my CV rewritten and, having done all that, you do not have the courtesy to let me know what the status of my application is. I am querying your professional courtesy and processes when conducting searches for senior personnel.

I find your sort of attitude amongst recruitment consultants sadly widespread. In my experience there are very few recruitment consultants that I would rate as excellent - you are not one of them. You would not, on the basis of this experience, even merit a mediocre score.

Compare your dilatory approach with this response I had recently for another very senior position.

"Thank you very much indeed for your expression of interest in this position. If we are able to include you on our short list, we will try to get back to you by July 13th to discuss the next steps. If you haven't heard from us, say by July 27th, please assume that on this occasion your name will not have been put forward: we will have received, in those circumstances applications from others who match the profile more closely."

See the difference?

I now know that the CV has been received, when I might expect a response and the final cut off date after which I can forget all about the application. What has it cost? A cut and paste from a template and an insertion of the name into an email. Two minutes? And you do not have 2 minutes for a potential candidate?

Please do not claim workload for the lack of response either. I ran an operation comprising 400 people moving 3000 cars a day and I always responded to all my staff, clients and suppliers. I did not have a PA either.

I read this statement about your consultancy - "{name} has a strict ethical policy with business procedures to ensure our service to clients is exemplary." Shame that doesn't extend to the candidates.

I do not expect a response from you. You have already displayed your lack of courtesy."

So do I send it? Do you recognise yourself?

And an update. After almost three weeks sitting in my email drafts I sent the note. Within one hour I got a reply from the consultant's PA. "He has sent you details to the client and he's on holiday until the 12th of never." Sniff.
So I replied:
"Thank you for neatly proving my point. You clearly have access to his email and you haven't replied to me when I requested an update two weeks ago. Even if you missed that email you clearly know his movements, know what he has done with my details with the client and still and haven't bothered to let me know what is going on after 16 working days. I wonder how much longer it would have taken you to contact me."
It will achieve nothing but it feels so good to fight back against this shoddy behaviour.

"I was taught to fight, taught to win, I never thought I could fail", Peter Gabriel, Don't give up

2007-06-25T09:09:00.000+01:00

Oddly enough it really brought home to me unemployment last week when my company car was taken back. That marked the end of my three month's notice period and the day when I broke my previous record for being out of work - exactly three months before I started a new job. Now I'm on my fourteenth week and, to be honest, it's getting tougher. In fact I am hacked off this week.

I like to keep a sense of perspective on all of this. No one has died, we have still got reserves of money to survive for a while, the house is not in danger of being repossessed, Social Services are not assessing the welfare of the kids and so on. But.
It is harder to remain positive some days when you get knocked back yet again or even wonder what to do during the day to pass the time.

So what emotions are thriving here?

Guilt. I remember an episode of the Simpsons when Bart is struggling in school to pass an exam - he says plaintively at one point something along the lines of "this is the best I can do". I feel like that. I've networked, sent in CVs for jobs, revised my CV several times, targeted likely looking organisations, put my CV on the web, signed up to Linkin/Monster/Total Jobs, contacted recruitment consultants that specialise in my industry and...nothing. I feel there is more I should be doing, must be missing something and it can gnaw away at you in the background trying to find that extra angle. Maybe this is the best I can do. That is worrying as it not getting me a job to support my family - that brings in large dollops of guilt when you have to say "No we can't afford that, go there, pay for you to do what your friends are doing" and so on. See why I feel guilt?

Tension. Tension? But you are not doing anything how can you be tense? Try this. Clench both fists and keep them like that all day and release them at night. That's the best way to describe the tension. No, it is not like a demanding day in the A&E at your local hospital, or fighting in Iraq with the British Army. But it makes you tense and, like guilt above, can work in the background to slowly bring you down.

Desire to consume. We are not starving, we are paying the bills, we have a small car. This is not poverty. In the context of what we could do in the recent past, what everyone around us does, we are no longer able to afford to do very much. Not having much money drastically reduces your choices. Mind you I am walking a lot more these days and my bike sees a lot more of the town than it ever used to. Now my wife and I discuss what we will buy this month. Priority purchases, secondary purchases and an entry in the WIGAJ (see an earlier blog for a fuller explanation) ledger.

Rejection. Let me tell you I've been rejected from better jobs than yours - I feel like saying that when the rejection letter comes through the door/email - if one even turns up at all. I am still being selective when applying for positions. There is absolutely no point in applying for a job that you are not qualified to do. I broke this rule recently when a vacancy came up in the town where I live about a mile from my house. I was, shall we say, tangentially qualified for the role, so sent in a CV anyway. What the hell, nothing ventured nothing gained and all that; got rejected. Anyway, I had to do it, you understand. Be prepared for rejection as, for most of us, there is a lot of it about.
My part time job comprises a lot of telephone research calling senior people in organisations to ask their views on something that is considered important by the client but not by the person being researched. To get 30 telephone interviews took calls to over 150 companies and involved about 300 telephone calls in total (they were out/not available/busy and so on). That's about a 1 in 10 success rate which (blush modestly) is pretty good apparently. Except that the 120 organisations that said no rejected me. A psychiatrist friend opined that this was like the Caesars taking small doses of poison deliberately every day to build up their resistance to being poisoned. Her theory was that small doses of rejection on a regular basis help me build up a large scale resistance to job rejections on an irregular basis. Nice try but I clearly need to be rejected more often then as it ain't working very well.

Boredom. Remember as a child those long Sundays in Winter with the rain streaming down (much like June so far this year) and being totally bored to the depths of your soul? The only entertainment available was the radio with "World Wide Family Favourites" at lunch time and "Sing Something Simple" in the evening"? I feel depression coming on just recalling those days. Anyway you'd say to your Mum "I'm bored what can I do?" and she would reel off 25 ways to creatively pass the time that sounded just as boring as the "I am so bored that I am no longer able to find a way not to be bored" form of boredom. It isn't quite like that but motivation does become harder as unemployment goes on. It is a sort of learned helplessness that you have to fight to avoid inertia.

Moaning. That is what you end up doing, moaning, and it makes not the slightest bit of difference. Except friends try and gauge your mood before they talk to you and edge away nervously if they suspect a tirade of "It's not fair, we can't go to the USA for a month this year and please do not park your SUV gas guzzler next to my 1985 Trabant as it raises the tone of the neighbourhood."

Catharsis. I feel so much better for all of that so onto another subject.

Is this a scam? I was contacted by a recruitment agency in London the other day. "Interested in you for this very senior position, like to do a telephone interview...like the sound of you...may put you forward... but small problem. Your CV is not really what we would expect for a senior position, needs some professional work and I suggest this CV writing agency (names name). Have them rewrite your CV and send it to me". I look at the CV writers web site - £400 for a professionally written CV! Sorry about the ! but I felt it really needed one at that point. Naturally I did not pay £400, rewrote the CV with some free professional help and sent it in. Naturally I have heard nothing since. If the recruitment consultant has a deal going with the CV writer and takes a commission every time he successfully recommends a client to them (who he may have no intention of recommending them for the job in the first place) then this is a nice little earning opportunity. And who could ever prove otherwise? Perhaps that is too cynical of me but, in retrospect, it just didn't ring true. Logically my original CV must have worked to the point that he could see that my background and experience might have been suitable so why would I need another?

Mustn't grumble. As Fred Astaire sang I have to "Pick myself up, dust myself down and start all over again".

"I'm in love with my car, gotta feel for my automobile", Queen, I'm in love with my car

2007-06-18T09:19:00.000+01:00

She's gone. There's just a blank space where she used to be. We spent so long together, so many experiences, so many places and now she's with another.

My car that is. My company car. It went on Friday, collected from me, after the end of my three month's notice period, along with my mobile phone, fuel card, epaulets and with my sabre broken in half in front of me. This is quite a defining moment. Now that really does draw a line under the last job and totally cuts me free from them. I had intended to use the car on the last day of use and drop it off at the HQ (that would have felt very, very weird) but plans got changed so I got them to come and collect it. Well the HQ is in the middle of nowhere and it would have been easier to escape from Alcatraz than find public transport that actually went somewhere you wanted to go to at the time you wanted to go there. "Well we do go through Much Deriding at 0600 to get to the ewe tupping market and then onto Little Caring for the 'stare at the stranger in the village' morning at 2142 if that is any help me love?"

You have to be careful with company cars though. At my last company it went through regular financial crises, like once a month. At one board (bored) meeting the Financial Director suggested scrapping company cars, as a cost saving exercise, and replacing them with a monthly cash allowance. You could have heard a pin drop when he announced this. I mean, for most company car drivers you could reduce their salary by 75%, take away all fringe benefits, make them work 24/7 and sell their family into slavery and you would get less fuss than if you tried to take their company car away from them. We didn't change the car policy and he never got invited to any company social event ever again.

It's only a car after all so I'm not getting maudlin about it (or should that be too maudlin, leather seats, aircon, central locking, cruise control - I miss them so much.). We'll manage in Mrs EotP's little run about for the time being. However it is 10 years or more since we were without two vehicles and, in just two days, I'd forgotten about our new status and went to go out today - except my wife also needs the car. So we've had to arm wrestle for it and I'm staying home. This also means a very close co-ordination in diaries for the first time. When do you need it? Can I have it then? Shall I get a lift? I think there's a bus route (I haven't been on a bus for decades, how do you work them?).

Because I've worked in the automotive industry cars have become blase. A quick calculation reveals that I have had more than 50 company cars in the 27 years I've been working. Yes folks, a new car at least every 6 months on average. Now for the last 7 years my company car has been changed every 3 years (positively vintage) so you can see that at some periods the changeover must have been very frequent. One company I worked for changed company cars at 5000 miles - as I was commuting 1000 miles a week I would be ordering a new car at collection which caused the HR department to go into melt down trying to keep up with me. The car never required a clean inside or out whilst I had it as I never had long enough. I also had a fuel card and could never remember the registration number when I went to pay for fuel always tried to park the car at a pump where I could see it from the cashiers. I'm sure the local petrol station thought I was mad, going "errrrr" in response to the question about the registration. Every car was silver, the same model and spec so to them they looked exactly the same.

On the basis you don't know what you've got until its gone the first redundancy was very traumatic. The company I worked for then had such a liberal policy on company cars that everyone in my family had one and I could go down the street pressing car keys into surprised neighbour's hands and insisting they have one too. However the car(s) went. And they wouldn't come and collect it. On the last day I had to make my way back from a place that, though well connected North and South with the rest of the world, saw going West (where I lived 26 miles away) as unnecessary so I could walk for all they cared. And they didn't care. Fortunately a colleague thought that being car-less with a three month old baby in Winter at a time when unemployment was rocketing was a little tough. So he pressed the keys of his spare car into my hands with the proviso that I insured it myself. No problem, except that as a company car driver I had no record of insurance. "To insure you will cost £2.3m - £5m if you want fully comprehensive" the insurers said. Well, to be truthful, £700. This for a 1.6cc standard new car. "But" I blustered, "I can go to a daily rental car hire place and get insurance for 3 pence a day with their cars and I can prove that I have had an accident free driving period for at least 7 years." They were unmoved almost to a broker. Except that I found someone at last that covered me for a more reasonable sum. When I found a job a last with a lovely company car policy, we decided that we would buy a car so that, should the day come again when I had no job, we would not be without transport. Three redundancies later that decision has proved fortuitous.

Are there any upsides? No company and private fuel tax for the time being so that will cause me and the Inland Revenue much hilarity trying to work out who owes who what at the end of the tax year.
What am I saying? I always owe them something.
A lot more space on the drive for...nope working on that one.
No that's it - less convenient but we'll work around that one.
I don't need a big, grand company car a Trabant will do me- until of course I get my next job with a company car and then spend hours working on the optimum brand/colour/spec/tax/combo before ordering it.
And then there is always that wonderful smell of a brand new car.