Strange situation

It's hard to write about looking for a job in 2015 without sounding a) more than a touch defeatist, and b) like a whiny "millennial" with a raging sense of entitlement. The trouble is, the whole job-seeking process - from firing off application after application, to the cold-sweat awkwardness of interviews - is the most evil of all necessary evils, and everyone has to go through it at some point. There's no way round it, but it is soul-grindingly bleak.

And the most frustrating part of it is the fact that once you've got a job, and are happily tucked up at a desk with a computer and a phone and a stained mug, you realise how easy it is to have a job. All you need to be is 1) not a psychopath, and 2) able to follow instructions. And if you're aiming to be CEO, I wouldn't worry too much about the odd psychopathic tendency, tbh.

When you take a moment to think about it, it's a strange situation we're in - and by "we" I mean those who've graduated since around 2008. We spent most of our academic lives being told "you're bright, and you work hard - so keep doing that; do well in exams, go to university, and you'll be able to choose what you do with your life". It's strange, when you've done pretty much everything you were told to do - you've done almost everything right - it's strange for it to not be enough, not even nearly enough. In darker moments, it makes you think - well, I wish I had gone off the rails a bit. Had myself a proper teenage rebellion. I don't think I'd be any worse off. When you've had some sort of employment since your early teens, you've got a degree and maybe a Masters, and you want more than anything in the world to be starting to put some sort of career plan together, knowing you should feel lucky to have a job at all is a little jarring.

I remember it so clearly: watching the news in halls in the early weeks of first year, seeing the financial crisis unfold. I remember thinking, so naively, "it's fine... I've got three or four years before I have to deal with the rest of the world; they'll have sorted it out by then. We won't be utterly fucked." And then coming out of uni after doing an MA that put the love I had for the intricacies of language into a pretty serious coma - that it's only just coming out of now - and trying to find some kind of employment. Taking a couple of stop-gap jobs because I wanted the money and needed a reason to get up every day - even if it was to go and sit in a tanning and beauty salon - and on days off, sending out applications and CVs and cover letters, only for my mother to tell me on a weekly basis that I wasn't trying hard enough. (Mind you, she still says that - maybe that's just mothers. Or just her.)

But how many times can you explain that yes, you're applying for retail/waitressing jobs too, because no, you don't think you're too good for jobs like that, but potential employers know fine rightly that you won't be sticking around and will subsequently take a 16-year-old over you, because they'll get at least a couple of years' work out of them? How many times can you explain that trawling round the town centre with copies of your CV is, largely, not the way it works anymore? How many times can you summon all the enthusiasm you possess, channel that into an application that makes you cringe yourself inside out, only to not even get a "we have received your application and will be in touch in due course" email when you do submit it?

At the moment, I don't know what to do. I don't know what I can do. I really don't - I think I'm quite good with words and writing things, but at this point, I'm not even sure, because my life is taken up with an admin job that's turning out to be more stressful than it sounds when I describe it. And that's OK - I can deal with being in a busy, pressured workplace - but it's not quite what I want to do long-term, and I feel that at 25, I should be thinking long-term, and making big, grown-up plans. I want to move out - to Bristol, as you're probably sick of hearing by now, but God I adore that city - but how do you find a job in a city you're not in? If I were more of a free spirit type of person, I'd just go. I'd hand in my notice, find myself a little flat in Bristol and take it from there. Start temping to pay the bills, and then figure things out. But I'm more of a caged spirit, really - I like the routine and structure of work, if not the actual job itself - and let's be honest, I like the money. You can't do much without an income, and I've never been good at doing nothing. The general consensus is that it's rather silly to give up a job without anything to go to, and I agree. Especially now, under a Conservative government - I do not trust there would be much in the way of support if things didn't work out for me. I might be wrong, but I'd rather not have to test the theory.

I'm not expecting it to be easy - of course not. I know that a lot of people dabble in and out of a few things before they find their niche, and having a "not thrilling but it pays the bills" job is pretty much a rite of passage. I'm just scared that by continuing to believe that something better will present itself, I'm setting myself up for disappointment. I know I'm still young, but time only marches on.

This woman couldn't sound more perfect if she tried.

This is a song I should probably take to heart.

And I've just stumbled across this, seems pretty good. That voice. Damn.

This is precisely why I don't write topical stuff...

This post constitutes my application to one day appear on Have I Got News For You. I have a major soft spot for Ian Hislop, and no, I don't know why. He just looks sort of cuddly. Just me? Yeah, thought so.

It's all been kicking off recently, hasn't it? The news has been better than a particularly tense episode of Homeland over the last couple of weeks or so. The Pope's resigned, Oscar Pistorius is on trial for murder, people are bridling at horsemeat making it into the food chain, and Iain Duncan Smith has put his foot in it rather spectacularly. All we need now is a meteor to - oh, hang on.

I'm usually kind of loath to write news-centred posts - I'm not great with politics, and as His Lordship Dylan Moran puts it, there's nothing like the news for both enraging and boring you. Simultaneously. Like most people (I'm guessing; maybe you're not all as relentlessly self-involved as I am), I'm really only interested when it's directly relevant to me. So when I heard that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, had been generally quite insensitive and ignorant about people on Jobseeker's Allowance (it involved Cait Reilly), I was intrigued.

I'm not going to go into the details now - partly because I am in the middle of a very hectic week and am too tired, and partly because I'm presuming you know how to use the internet - but it's at the end of this interview here that Duncan Smith comes across as a callous Tory knob. A Times journo - can't remember his name, sorry - subsequently wrote a piece that was admittedly pretty tongue-in-cheek, but also reasonably supportive of IDS, detailing all the menial jobs he'd done in his time, and what he'd learned from them. His overarching point was that if nothing else, you soon learn that you don't want to be stuck doing menial, badly-paid jobs for the rest of your life.

The point that callous Tory knobs and their supporters seem to be missing - and you'd think they'd have noticed this one, being the ones in charge of the country, and the economy, and whatnot - is that shit still needs to be paid for. Take both freshly-hatched graduates with not enough work experience, and those who aren't super-educated and therefore have perhaps a more limited set of career prospects available to them - these people still need to eat. They still need something to put on in the morning, they still need transport, they still need to be able to let off steam, and try to have some fun so that the tedium and sheer bloody frustration of being turned down for the umpteenth job doesn't drive them mad and/or kill them. And those things cost money - it doesn't matter where you shop. It's not the government's responsibility to provide their people with clothes, food, transport, et cetera, but it is their responsibility to ensure that everyone can afford the basics. Yes, this is where benefits come in. But to use the case of Cait Reilly, making someone work for free while threatening to cut their benefits if they don't comply, when they're already doing relevant voluntary work they've sorted out themselves, doesn't. Make. Much. Fucking. Sense.

I'm one of the lucky ones, I know. On good days, I manage to remember this. I live in a nice bit of the country, my parents don't mind having a [massively-opinionated, overly-fond-of-wine, convinced-she-will-one-day-change-the-world-with-her-words] 22-year-old living with them. They make it very easy for me. I have two part-time jobs that occupy nearly as much time as a full-time one. I could jack them both in, sign on for JSA and devote all of the resulting free time to looking for that elusive career-starting job, but it would drive me insane. I still take "not tonight, wench, I'm knackered" as personal physical rejection, so I'd hazard a guess I'm not much fun after rejected job application number 15. Or 56, or 435. So I'm going to carry on as I am - working the two jobs, fitting applications for "proper" jobs into the slivers of free time around them, and trying not to get dragged down into the mire of doom and gloom that tells me I'll be proofreading and tanning-salon-minding for the rest of my life and won't be moving out of my parents' place until I'm well into my forties. Not that there's anything wrong with either of these jobs, I hasten to add, they're just not central  to my ultimate life plan.

About the worst thing you can do in life is decide you're too good for something, or indeed someone. That tends to be when life decides to take a run-up and kick your arse back into touch. So I repeat, I know that I'm lucky. Some very clever, able, wonderfully-qualified people I know are struggling to find any work whatsoever. I'm not expecting anyone to hand me a nice little writing job on a platter (though that would be awesome, world, if you could? I'd be ever so grateful).

All I'd like, really, is those in power - specifically, the man in charge of Work and Pensions - to apply a little understanding, and to look at the finer details, instead of dismissing people as "job snobs" or "workshy" or whatever else, because they simply can't afford to work for free. Especially if they are already working for free, as I might have mentioned. It applies to unpaid internships as well - if you want to get into a certain field but the only "in" is an unpaid internship, then seriously, what are you supposed to do? I don't know exact benefit figures but they're probably not going to cover much more than say, two-thirds of the transport, if current train fares are anything to go by. Oh hell, I don't have any answers - I don't know if you'd guessed - and I'm not looking for sympathy, a pat on the back, or anything more than blog page-views, if I'm honest. Frankly, I think we need a few more Cait Reillys - people who are quietly unafraid to say to those in charge, "what you're doing isn't helping. We'll work with you, but we need to know that you understand what's really going on here". Right now, that doesn't seem to be happening. Which is a worry.

On a brighter note, I bloody love this song.

And this one.