(no subject)
11 months down the line and I am still saying something similar. It is August 2009, a whole year since I graduated from university and arrived back from lovely sunny Rome to settle in London and find a J.O.B. Proper, real employment for the first time in my life.
That was the plan, obviously.
As it happens I'm sitting in my single-bed room, in my ex-Local Authority flat, tired out from my West End bar job, trying to work out what exactly went wrong. Is it my years of over-achieving that have led me to expect too much? Or my Oxford education that has made me so definitely unemployable? It's easy most of the time to be philosophical and accept unpaid internships in the hope that it might perk up my CV and tell concerned relatives "but that's just the way the job market is at the moment", but tonight I am angry. I know tons of people who've managed to bag, blag or beg jobs in one industry or another - plenty of whom have got little to recommend them - and are quietly making a happy living, so it doesn't make sense to me that I'm left on the employment shelf. I have now reached a stage (maybe just for this evening, maybe for life) where I resent almost everyone who has a job, and secretly list all the reasons why they can't POSSIBLY deserve the no doubt enormous salary they're on (for the record, I'm on less than £10,000 a year). I have one friend who complains every time we meet that her company (which is in such dire straits that 6 months ago had to make half the office redundant) won't up her wage to £28,000 a year, and another fellow reject who, when I told her I had applied for a job at £16,500, said (mightily relieved) that at least she felt confident applying for jobs in the mid-£20s!
This evening I've veered from looking at jobs in publishing, to teaching, to consultancy, to accountancy (Deloitte, for fuck's sake! They represent everything I hate!) and I'm still no closer to knowing how I might get out of all of this with an enjoyable or even bearable career in sight. I would be happy quietly pottering around at the auction house where I'm currently working (for free, totally illegally, and supported by a full-time job elsewhere, but there's a recession dontyouknow, and who gives a shit about me working 70 hours a week or employment laws when there are profit margins to guard?) but they're about to go under or perhaps be bought out, so I suspect that's not to be. I'm being driven from my place of sanctuary, satisfying employment, into the harsh world of graduate recruitment and, best case scenario, a job I couldn't care less about. Assuming anyone would give me a job I couldn't care less about, which of course they haven't.
I'm not sure what my complaint is, or who I blame. The place I work for being unwilling or unable to offer me a proper, paid job. Myself for not being able to find anything I'd rather do, but full of frustration because I can't even get jobs I don't want to do. The whole sorry state of things for slashing growth and putting every company in the country on the defensive. The bankers.
Now I've complained I'm going to watch Property Ladder on 4oD, which I do quite a lot. I used
to watch it because I liked seeing houses rejigged and nobody listen to Sarah Beeny. Now I think I watch it to see smug people with assets lose all their cash. Idiots. Don't they know there's a recession on?
That was the plan, obviously.
As it happens I'm sitting in my single-bed room, in my ex-Local Authority flat, tired out from my West End bar job, trying to work out what exactly went wrong. Is it my years of over-achieving that have led me to expect too much? Or my Oxford education that has made me so definitely unemployable? It's easy most of the time to be philosophical and accept unpaid internships in the hope that it might perk up my CV and tell concerned relatives "but that's just the way the job market is at the moment", but tonight I am angry. I know tons of people who've managed to bag, blag or beg jobs in one industry or another - plenty of whom have got little to recommend them - and are quietly making a happy living, so it doesn't make sense to me that I'm left on the employment shelf. I have now reached a stage (maybe just for this evening, maybe for life) where I resent almost everyone who has a job, and secretly list all the reasons why they can't POSSIBLY deserve the no doubt enormous salary they're on (for the record, I'm on less than £10,000 a year). I have one friend who complains every time we meet that her company (which is in such dire straits that 6 months ago had to make half the office redundant) won't up her wage to £28,000 a year, and another fellow reject who, when I told her I had applied for a job at £16,500, said (mightily relieved) that at least she felt confident applying for jobs in the mid-£20s!
This evening I've veered from looking at jobs in publishing, to teaching, to consultancy, to accountancy (Deloitte, for fuck's sake! They represent everything I hate!) and I'm still no closer to knowing how I might get out of all of this with an enjoyable or even bearable career in sight. I would be happy quietly pottering around at the auction house where I'm currently working (for free, totally illegally, and supported by a full-time job elsewhere, but there's a recession dontyouknow, and who gives a shit about me working 70 hours a week or employment laws when there are profit margins to guard?) but they're about to go under or perhaps be bought out, so I suspect that's not to be. I'm being driven from my place of sanctuary, satisfying employment, into the harsh world of graduate recruitment and, best case scenario, a job I couldn't care less about. Assuming anyone would give me a job I couldn't care less about, which of course they haven't.
I'm not sure what my complaint is, or who I blame. The place I work for being unwilling or unable to offer me a proper, paid job. Myself for not being able to find anything I'd rather do, but full of frustration because I can't even get jobs I don't want to do. The whole sorry state of things for slashing growth and putting every company in the country on the defensive. The bankers.
Now I've complained I'm going to watch Property Ladder on 4oD, which I do quite a lot. I used
to watch it because I liked seeing houses rejigged and nobody listen to Sarah Beeny. Now I think I watch it to see smug people with assets lose all their cash. Idiots. Don't they know there's a recession on?