Jobcentre (Plus)
Firstly, don’t trust anything that re-brands itself by adding the words plus or new and improved. Secondly, if someone asks you "Have you been looking for work this week?" and you have, you are likely to respond with more than just "Yes."
Mission:Getajob
As I proceeded to talk my jobcentre employee through applications, background research and short-list hopes she stared at me blankly.
“So, yes, then,” She ticked a box. “Have you filled in a ES77-QX.1 form?”
“A what?”
“A record of your job-searching?” She smiled.
“Oh sorry, no, that’s all in here you see”. I waved a well thumbed notebook bursting at the seams. It had been my project for the last few months. Mission Getajob. It was what got me up and at it in the morning.
“It needs to be recorded here, sir”.
“Sorry?”
She pointed again at a piece of paper which had a badly photocopied table: “Where, When, What will I do next”. There was barely enough space to write ‘looked in local paper’.
“Just put that you looked in the paper…and sign it”. She smiled again.
Perspective
Last year I took a break from it all, left my job and the country and returned with a kind of new perspective, looking for work. Despite living in a capital city where competition for jobs was intense, I felt optimistic - for about a week. My partner and I didn’t have children, or a mortgage, so compared to some people, we had it easy. Even so, the months I spent unemployed reeked havoc on my self esteem.
Highlights would include:
- Being offered a job in interview and turning it down because it wasn’t right, only to feel like kicking myself afterwards (pride alone prevented me from ringing up and begging).
- Opening countless thanksbutnothanks letters (personally, I’m a rip it open on the doorstep band-aid kind of guy. Get it over and done with.).
- Seeing guys in their fifties in suits at the jobcentre and realising that picking yourself up after redundancy is what takes real guts.
Don’t go it alone
My partner tells me that I was hard to be around during this tough patch in my/our life. But I’m grateful for her quiet support (most of the time it’s not about finding the right words). I also learned to let people off the hook who would say the daftest things, but not because they didn’t care. My advice is:
- Find at least one person you can be totally honest with - someone to catch you before you get too down and celebrate with you when it all goes well.
- Don’t lose sight of what really matters. Your values are what make you who you are not the job you just left or the one you end up doing.
Happy ending? Well, I am happy where I work now. Ironically, my job often takes me back past the security guards and the dole queue, as I try to negotiate the many hurdles that the most disadvantaged people in society face. I have learned to keep things in perspective but still haven’t discovered what the plus at the end of jobcentre stands for.
Written by S.Laurenson.
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