Will Dance For Food

Well my birthday came and went. It was a fairly good weekend - had a really good night out on Saturday evening and did a pretty good impression of a tour guide on Saturday afternoon, showing my southern friends around Manchester. One of them remarked that she had no idea how big the place would be. That alone kinda brought home to me the sort of image most of these 'Southerns' must have of the North. Flat caps, whippets, gravy flowing through the sewers like that glowing pink sludge in Ghostbusters 2...how wrong they are.

My actual birthday on Monday was a little less exciting - I pretty much spent it doing the same shit I've been doing for the last few weeks: trawling the interwebs looking for jobs. Y'know, when you get offered a job, you'd think it would be a given that you'd actually get to start it within two fucking months of receiving the offer, right? As alluded to in a previous post, I was recently (well a few months ago) offered a job and gladly accepted it...but I still don't have a start date and any emails to the recruitment department are simply met with "we don't know yet." Doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. It'd fill you with even less if I actually revealed who this proposed employer is. But I'll continue to hold off for now. And even though I've resigned to the fact that I'll probably never start this job, I've still got a slight glimmer of hope...but this hasn't stopped me applying for maybe a hundred others.

And so that brings us right up to date: all I do, every day is search job sites and send off applications. It is beginning to get a little tiresome, I won't lie, but surely something's gotta give soon? I've had a few interviews and even a trial day delivering UPS parcels (seriously, I will never complain about having to wait all day for a delivery ever again after that!), but this whole job searching thing sucks on your soul like nothing else in modern life. I'm not one of those people who bases my opinion of someone on the job they do, but sadly not everyone is like me. This is a very fickle world and opinions and stereotypes rule everything we do as humans, so not having a job tends to sap your sense of self worth after a while - I know because i'm living proof of that theory. But I'm trying to stay positive, still running, cycling and keeping fit, still trying to be sociable and get involved with friends' events etc. The thing is, how much longer can I keep it up? I'm pretty sure I'm not eligible for any form of benefit because I left my last job of my own accord (even after working none stop since 2003), and I speak fluent English so there's no way I can blag any freebies off the government...so I suppose I'd better stop writing this and go and have another look at the Jobserve website - y'know, the one provided by the DWP that has broken 'apply' links at the bottom of nearly every page? What a goddamned clusterfuck.