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.
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