Still unemployed

I didn't get the job I interviewed for on Monday...

...and to begin with I was disappointed but life goes on. I did well to get an interview for it at all to be honest. I was stupidly nervous and I'm not sure I gave the best account of myself, but it's difficult to perform when your mouth is so dry that your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth.

I now have a lot of people to contact and lots more searching to do. I have also restored the post below which took a quick break whilst gainful employment was a possibility.

And now some pictures!!


A cockatoo, these things are everywhere. They screech extremely loudly and strut around like they own the place, a bit like me after the third cup of coffee.


A wallaby. They all give you this look.




Big lizards are very cool and also strut around like they own the place. To be fair, having seen them fight each other, I'm not going to argue.


Sydney harbour bridge at night.




New years eve fireworks from Taronga Zoo.


The view from our front window. It's a tough life innit?!

Give us a job...

The following post is provided for entertainment value and as an indication of the state of mind of the writer. Any similarity to organisations or people living or walking-dead, whether implied or implicit is unintentional, honest. It is also and an indication that you need to find a new job...

Dear [insert bland first name]

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today and answer my standard questions aimed at unpicking the ambiguous and confusing job title advertised on SEEK.com. I have read the role description published on your website and am still none the wiser. I can see from this that you have decided who the role will report to and avoided specificity in all other areas so that applicants remain ignorant of the degree to which they will be used as a dogsbody. Clearly you have no idea what this role will actually entail and have rolled together as many indefinite responsibilities as you can into a single list. I have also noted that whilst your advert states that there are ample opportunities for progression and personal development with the organisation that there is absolutely no concrete commitment to this process in any of your literature and not even a suggestion of it in the role description.

Despite the obvious risks to my career, happiness and wellbeing involved in taking on a role that your organisation is clearly incapable of defining and whose exact nature you are attempting to conceal from applicants, the job title would look good on the increasingly elaborate work of fiction that is my CV and I would like to apply for the role. I have recently arrived in Australia on a four year business sponsored working visa. Since August I have been working for a large boring financial organisation doing something far less interesting and important than I can make it sound.

Prior to this I spent two and a half years working for a UK Children's mental health charity staffed largely by mental children. This was an exceedingly challenging and diverse role where I was made to implement secretive descisions made over my head and against my advice. My major responsibility was to plan, schedule, resource, coordinate, track and report on the complete cycle of training projects to unreasonable timescales and tiny budgets for overdemanding and ignorant clients with the absolute minimum of guidance and supervision.

I also undertook ad-hoc projects which were better suited to the remit of more senior members of staff but were evidently too tedious for them to undertake. These could be as varied as: generating strategically significant marketing collateral that the organisation was too cheap to outsource to a professional service; designing and implementing department proceedures for members of staff to bypass; and coordinating organisation-wide events designed to alienate valued employees or expose organisational weaknesses to competing providers.

I see my major skills as:

• Guesswork - Being able to read my superiors' mind and act on half-impressions in the absence of proper guidance
• Bullshitting - Producing written information given as fact based on targets rather than achievements, constructing budget assumptions based on logistically impossible sales targets and being the point of first contact for clients and customers who have bizarre and frightening questions that no one could have feasibly anticipated
• Manipulation - Strongarming people, cajoling, lying, blackmailing, pleading, bursting into tears and when all else fails asking nicely to get my way
• Panicking - Arriving at interim solutions that somehow are never converted into full processes, working out of hours, completing tasks well outside my job description and taking the easy, expensive option when important tasks become urgent ones

I want to continue to develop and continue utilising these skills in an organisation that has a reputation for incompetence, an atmosphere of buckpassing, belligerence and recrimination.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Summer has arrived...

Summer has quite clearly arrived in Sydney. It hit 40°C here yesterday, even the Aussies called that bloody hot. Thankfully the humidity stayed below 20% so you could still move around in it but it was a bit like being shoved in a tumble dryer. It's on days like that I really appreciate the breeze off the ocean at Maroubra and - joy of joys - the air conditioning in the new flat.

Unfortunately what I really wanted to be doing was not sitting at work in icily air conditioned building. This was however the most sensible thing to be doing. I went downstairs at lunchtime to read my book and made the mistake of putting my bare forearms on the table. The tabletop is was solid granite and had been in the sun all morning. I made a sound like a wounded baboon and found something to rest on.

My mum arrives here for Christmas on Friday morning from the UK, where it is winter - I hope she's ready for it. Christmas is going to be a bit odd I think. We have a couple of friends coming over for dinner and there's mum and Rik and Em and I. That's six people, we have only 5 chairs of various heights, 5 sets of cutlery and 4 plates. Oh well we'll just have to get pissed and not worry about it.

We have discovered that there is a wireless internet connection here, though we can't establish whose it is or why it's here at the moment. I can't say it's troubled me overly. It means I have the internet at home so I shall be spending far more time tossing myself senseless whilst Em isn't around updating things on here and getting some more fiction and other writing done. Of course what I'm supposed to be doing is looking for a job but I've already spent 2 hours doing that tonight and I'm rather bored of it.

I've got to do something productive with my time or I'll go bloody nuts. I recently re-read the entire Lord of The Rings trilogy and it took far too little time. My brain is about to start making trouble for me if I don't find something to do and there's only so much tennis I can play. I have started playing chess again but I'm not too good at it. I guess a proper job is the only solution. I don't want a job I want to spend all day at the beach. It's only accross the road, I wouldn't even have to walk far. Oh well, back to the slog, I'll see if I can find some funny jobs to write about...

work, rafting, giant teddies

Well that was a bastard of a week...

I'd almost forgotten how much of your free time this working crap can take up. I've barely had a moment to myself to arse around on the internet. At least I'm not alone. Charging is so busy that his blog, normally updated at least weekly has slowed to a monthly tickover.

I have been sorting out exams for financial planners all week. It's quite amazing how disorganised people who many trust with their financial security actually are. I had a new candidate for an exam being sat tomorrow at four O'clock this evening. If this idiot is allowed to sell financial advice then there is no hope at all.

In between dealing with people signing up at the last minute, chickening out at the last minute and failing to book their assessment at all I have had to compile 11 feedback reports from other training workshops and man the helpline. It has quite removed my ability to think of anything vaguely amusing to write. Never mind there's a weekend coming up and I am off out for drinks.

We went white water rafting last weekend at the park built to house the canoeing at the Sydney Olympics. Rather oddly it's in Penrith (this is nothing, over here Padstow is on the same train line as Lewisham). This is a rather odd arrangement of raised concrete formed rapids next to and above a lake. Five enourmous pumps remove water from the lake and pump it to the top of the rapids where gravity does the rest of the work and pulls the water back in to the lake. It looks a bit odd when they turn the pumps off and you are left with what amounts to a concrete riverbed covered in slime. Rafts go from the bottom, in the lake, to the top via a 40 meter conveyer belt which is even odder.

On Sunday we went to a free festival with Techno and Drum'n'Bass and people on stilts dressed as giant teddy bears. No we did, honest. I have pictures, I didn't imagine it whilst drunk.

Contracting

I have, as I hoped would happen, got a new job. I have left the Supreme Court of NSW and am now working for AMP which is a large financial organisation that does just about anything you can think of with money. My job title seems to be Operations Consultant which suits me just fine, I can make up any amount of bullshit to go with that! It may even be good enough for me to claim that I am helping them out with a bit of Change Management, which is a half-truth but it might open a few doors.

I am doing the same kind of thing I did in the UK but for a commercial organisation, dealing with Financial Planners as learners, with a bit more client facing stuff and a fair bit more process re-design. On my CV it will sound a lot more impressive than that. I will be squeezing in as many business catchphrases as I can and still make sense. Which is only fair as that seems to be a favourite passtime here. For example I didn't have an induction but "gained exposure to team activities", to me this sounds like walking in on a rugby team in the showers but here it just means being shown what people do on a daily basis. As far as I can tell they don't do very much. The pace of work seems unreasonably slow, sorry that should be measured, and the sense of urgency almost non-existent, a low-pressure environment. The office I work in is right on the front by Circular Quay and from the front of the building there is the most amazing view out over the harbour towards the bridge, naturally I work at the back where there is the most fabulous view of a few stories of the even taller AMP building behind that holds AMP Capital.

There is so much space in this office, the desks are probably 3m long, there are about 6 meeting rooms of various capacities shared between around 70 staff on this floor, there is a large staff kitchen with seating and sandwich makers and...well it's all a bit much really. The environment is so different from anywhere I have worked before I am beginning to wonder what the catch is, other than having to start the job on my birthday, no doubt I will find out in due course. It is so nice to work amongst humans again after the freakshow that was the Supreme Court that I have completely ignored the fact that they aren't giving me enough to do and that I could probably do most of the jobs in the team without too much effort, possibly doing a few of them at once. For the moment I am content to relax and earn my cash doing very little, this will all change next week.

temping:2

Okay, it's been a month and I am thoroughly sick of being a filing clerk. Working here is like some sick parody, a bit like The Office but with a darker tone. All the characters are certainly here (all names have been changed to...er...no sod it, they need to know what a bunch of freaks they really are, and if they find this it'll be a bloody miracle:

Liz
Liz is genuinely physically impaired. Through some hideous accident of birth her left upper arm is about half the length of her right. She would normally get my patience and sympathy but unfortunately she can also be loudmouthed beligerent and dogmatic to the point of me actually having to walk away from her. She has an idiotic high-pitched laugh which she uses every three minutes without fail on items of conversation that would not elicit a chuckle from a nervous hyena. Liz's nose appears to emit a strong gravitational field which has, over the natural course of time, sucked the features of her over-wide face into it's middle and elongated both eyebrows.

Patricia
Patricia has the most deadpan sense of humour I have ever witnessed and takes great delight in saying the most miserable possible things to you without a flicker of emotion passing accross her face. She would be very hard to read had I not caught the slightest most momentary upturn of one corner of her mouth when she does it. She also gets the hiccups at least twice a day, very loudly.

Gail
Gail is a great person and very easy to work with but English is very much her second language. She flits around the office in a very businesslike way and generally gets the job done. Her favourite trick is to jab me in the ribs with a biro and say, "You mean to me Tom, you saying me a bad girl!" and giggle maniacly.

Lynette
Lynette is of Italian descent and is very pretty. She also knows it and can be an unbearable flirt. When Andrew, a typical Aussie of the 6 foot sheap shearing rugby playing type, joined the office she melted into butter. "Andrew's a country boy, aren't you Andrew? I'm a country girl, I like country boys, don't you like country boys Gail?", all this whilst fluttering her eyelashes in the most cartoonish possible way. I could have punched her were it not for the fact that she is the only thing of aesthetic value in the entire building.

Renee
The biggest mouth of the section belongs to Renee, as does the widest arse (it's funny how often those two go together isn't it?). Renee is going nowhere and doing it fast. She is a genuinely dead-end person, unfortunately the end that is dead has her head on it. Renee has the work ethic of a primadonna celebrity hooked on strong painkillers. Renee likes to act the boss and she's crap at it. I subtly started suggesting tasks to her so that she wasn't anywhere near me for the larger part of the day. She is engaged to Tim, who I can only assume, was roughly chopped, Pinochio like, from one of the branches of the ugly tree, one of the the long thin knobbly ones near the top.

George
I can't for the life of me work out what is wrong with George. He looks vaguely simian and indeed walks like a chimp that has had the idea of life on the ground explained to it and is doing it's best to fit in. George likes to talk, Christ George likes to talk. Unfortunately he is one of the least interesting people I have ever met. He warbles incessantly about the infantile processes going on in his head. He talks about the ridiculous amounts of yoga that he does, he talks about global events from his own, far from unique, perspective: "...both sides think they're fighting evil". If you try and walk away from George whilst he is talking to you he will follow you around as you work until he has finished talking. Eventually all you want is this well-meaning chatter to stop and you are quite prepared to tie George up in knots to achieve this, which is probably why he does so much yoga. I have come to the sad conclusion that George is just a fuckwit.

Thankfully I now have my long-stay business visa to stay in Australia and work as a resident until 2009. I have registered with a whole bunch of recruitment agencies and will hopefully not be working there much longer...please God.

temping

I have just got a temporary assignment working for the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This may seem like a rash decision by our antipodean cousins as the phrase "The law is an arse!" - ass being too weak a word, and seemingly some kind of American donkey - has been heard to escape my lips on more than one occasion (probably more frequently than I'm letting on, particularly if beer is invloved).

Just consider, if the pattern of my work history continues as it has for the last few assignments I will be taken on full-time, promoted and end up running half the day-to-day operations of the place. I can almost feel Sydney, Canberra and the rest of the state shivering at the prospect.

Un-PC thought: Just how do you have a justice system for a country that was colonised by criminals (allbeit people that were branded criminal for stealing things like bread to feed their starving families)? Drumhead trials? Some kind of code of conduct a la pirates? Or just a damn good thrashing behind the courthouse?

leaving

For reasons that will shortly become apparent on this page I am about to leave my job. This is an event that brings with it its' own set of anxieties and problems, most of them a bit embarrassing.

1. Writing and handing in of the letter of resignation, which is probably the easiest part of the whole process. It's such a formal thing to do that that it needs little or no attention other than to remember to put 'Yours faithfully,' at the bottom instead of 'Yours sincerely,' (something my last minion did on his rather unceremonious departure).

2. The bit when people start to find out before you've told most people in the office. You are from this point until you leave the building on your final day going to be asked the same questions again and again. Culminating in the inevitable 'so why are you leaving?'. This question is always asked with a slightly searching look no matter how content you have been in your job. At this juncture I intend to try bursting into tears and quickly leaving the room. That should raise a few eyebrows. At this stage in the leaving process it is wise to invest in a small tape recorder which you dictate your plans onto in detail. Whenever anyone approaches you with the 'so you're leaving' look on their face you simply press play.

3. The announcement that you have to make by email to everyone you work with. This is something I am not looking forward to at all. My natural tendency with things like this is to be a bit too...er...frivolous. The temptation to misbehave is just too great. For example what on earth do you put in the subject line of that email? My current personal favourite is 'So long suckers!' but I'm not 100% convinced that will go down particularly well with the Chief Exec. It is still better than 'I am rid of you all at last!', or 'Fuck this, I'm off', but none of them look like they will go over at all well. I have had 'The mother ship is calling me home...' suggested to me which I quite like. Any and all suggestions considered.

4. The agonising leaving gifts presentation an