#oneaday, Day 165: I’ll Job You In A Minute

The astute amongst you will have noticed from the frequency of my tweeting, Facebook updating and the fact I had time to draw several cack-handed Paintbrush portraits of a few friends today that I still am not in possession of gainful employment. The supply teaching seems to have dried up, too—and yes, I am chasing them up before anyone even thinks about nagging me about it—so there’s not a lot to do each day except do the rounds on the Internet desperately trying to see if there are any jobs worth doing.

Job hunting, as I’ve said before, is a distressing, depressing experience. Jump onto a jobseekers’ website and you’re confronted with the possibility of “OMG THOUSANDZ OF JOBZ 2 CHOOSE FROM!!” and only then do you realise you have absolutely no idea what sector you’re qualified to work in. A huge list of job types appear in front of you, and not one of them seems to quite fit with what you want to do. Am I interested in “Printing and Publishing”? Or “Media”? Or “New Media”? Or “Web Content”? Or “Information Technology”? God knows.

So you tick all the boxes. Then you get told you’re only allowed to tick three at a time. So you pick the three that you think are most relevant and tell it to search. It soon becomes apparent why you’re only allowed to tick three boxes. That’s because ticking just three boxes gives you roughly thirty-two thousand listings to look through, the vast majority of which are miscategorised. That’s not a word, according to the spellchecker, but I’m officially coining it here and now.

I digress. The fact is that there’s a ton of jobs listed that have nothing to do with the categories they’re listed in. How is an “IT Sales Executive” anything to do with the “Travel and Tourism” sector? Answer: it’s not. Bored or underhanded recruiters simply inserted the job listing into EVERY category to ensure it gets seen, thereby making the whole category selection process in the search procedure utterly meaningless.

“Use the keyword search!” you may say. But the truth is, I have no idea what keywords to search for. I look for “writer” and all manner of unrelated nonsense comes up. I look for “journalist” and all the PR jobs which say “this post is not suitable for a journalist” come up. I look for “KILL ME NOW” and a job in Asda comes up. I may have made that last one up.

It occurred to me today that a lot of the work I’ve done recently—paid and otherwise—has come about via social networking. My current regular gig writing news for Kombo came about through a friend who worked on the side – the fine and hairy Mr Jeff Grubb – and my past work on promotional materials for Good Old Games also came about via responses to tweets.

Are we getting to the stage where the traditional job advertisement is becoming meaningless? It’s entirely possible. They’re already filled with nonsensical jargon that is presumably designed to sort out the people who can do the job from the people who can’t. But in these days of easy connections between people online, that personal connection is much more important, it seems.

So with that in mind, you have over 165 days of material with which you can get to know me pretty well. Who wants to hire me?

No? All right. Here’s a video of a cat.

#oneaday, Day 164: Healing The Mind, And Flying Spiders

Sometimes, whatever else is going on in your mind, it’s good to sit down with a friend and talk things over. Even if you’re not a big “talker” for the most part, there’s bound to be at least someone out there that you can open up to. Some lucky people can open up to pretty much anyone. Though that often leads to the whole “too much information” problem I alluded to some time back, when a former music performance partner decided to announce at the dinner table to my then-housemate whom she had never met before that day that she was suffering from considerable vaginal dryness and was there anything she could do about it as it was a little concerning?

No. Talking with someone you respect and trust is always good. So that’s what a friend (who shall remain nameless to spare her blushes) and I did today. We spent most of the day (well, afternoon) sitting and chatting over various beverages and sandwiches, starting with an enormous caramel latte (which my companion added at least three sugars to just for that “extra kick”, making a smiley face from the sugar and then stabbing it in the eyes because it “didn’t deserve to be happy”) and eventually moving on, having harassed our AV salesman mutual buddy at his place of work, to a large pitcher of delicious, summery, fruity cocktail atop the roof of Vodka Revolution.

We also saw a flying spider. This little dude, whom we christened Harold, had been attempting to crawl up the side of our pitcher in an attempt to get at the cocktaily goodness within, but was failing miserably. By about the fourth or fifth time he’d slipped down the side of the pitcher, he was obviously ready to give up. So imagine our surprise when he floated off the side of the pitcher and then whistled past my head at high speed.

We both blinked and looked at each other.

“That just happened, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“That spider just flew.”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck?”

“I have no idea.”

There’s probably a perfectly rational explanation for it. Harold was only a tiny money spider after all, so it’s entirely possible he was just blown away by a passing breeze. Or perhaps there was a thread leading far away that we couldn’t see. But it’s a much nicer story to think that Harold was the one spider in the world who had learned to fly. I don’t normally like spiders, but I have plenty of time for a tiny little one that has learned to fly.

Anyway.

The day was technically completely non-productive, but after a few days of feeling something of a decline in my mood, it was exactly what I needed. I wouldn’t dream of speaking for my companion, but I certainly hope it helped her too. By the time both of us went our separate ways at the end of the afternoon, both of us had pleasant smiles on our faces; something which neither of us were sporting when we met up with each other around lunchtime.

So if you’re feeling low, take a day out. Call up a friend, perhaps one you haven’t seen for a while. Meet up. Drink coffee, beer, cocktails, whatever. Sit in the sun. Chew the fat. Set the world to rights. And you’ll find that things will feel much better. For a while, at least. And sometimes, that little perk-up is all you need to keep going a little while longer.

So a hearty thanks to my companion for a lovely day.