2432: Still Not Doing Great

I’m still not doing all that great. And I really don’t know what else I can do.

The thing that is making me feel most shit and useless is the fact that I don’t have a job, so I am trying my best to sort that out. I’ve revamped my CV multiple times, tailored cover letters to job specifications in various ways according to advice I’ve read and discussed with people, attempted to put across my desire to be a valuable member of someone’s team, but… nothing. Nothing at all.

All this is conspiring to make me feel like a complete waste of space. To be perfectly honest, I’ve felt like this ever since USgamer kicked me to the curb with little warning the day before my birthday in 2014. Nothing quite makes you feel valued like being booted out of a job you loved and seeing your replacements half-arsedly covering the things you were passionate about in a way that is both frustrating and upsetting. (And not just for me; I’ve had numerous messages since I left USgamer expressing their sadness that I was no longer the site’s resident Japanese games specialist.)

I’ve had dribs and drabs of other jobs since. My longest ongoing gig, if you can call it that, is my current semi-regular freelance work for an e-learning company, which I can’t complain too much about aside from how sporadic the work is. At least I get to work from home.

My next longest position was with energy company SSE, and if my ejection from USgamer made me feel bad, this just made things all the worse. SSE is a company that doesn’t value employees as individuals in the slightest — a common complaint with large corporations, I’m sure — and patronises everyone with primary school-level presentations and activities on Health and Safety. In the meantime, their spectacularly inefficient working processes meant it took absolutely forever to do the most simple task. It took them over two years to launch a new website thanks to their adoption of the most cumbersome, shitty piece of content management software I’ve ever had the misfortune to get hands-on experience with. It would often take several days to get a simple spelling mistake corrected on the existing site. And I ended up getting punished because I worked quickly and efficiently and ended up with nothing to do, which made me look like I was twiddling my thumbs doing nothing. I guess that’s not how you do things in corporate culture; should have worked more slowly.

SSE tried its very best to drain the individuality out of me — people weren’t people there, they were “resource” (singular, which always bugged me almost as much as the word itself) — but I figured I should try to stay on for as long as I could to get some experience with being a content editor. That’s an actual job title that I can search for, and indeed I’ve been applying for a number of positions in that vein.

Nothing, though. Nothing at all. Not even a rejection in many cases. And so it is that I’m sitting here at half past eleven on a Friday night with £10 in my bank account, utterly despondent and completely out of ideas as to what else I could possibly do to make things better for myself.

Nothing is springing immediately to mind. I guess I just have to persevere for the moment.

That or win the lottery.