In Back to the Future, Marty Mcfly has a photograph. As he alters his past the photo changes accordingly and Marty can see how his actions affect his future. When you are unemployed it is like having your very own copy of a photo from the future. Your future. Only, when you’re unemployed, the picture can sometimes look as though it is your own lifeless body, crusty lipped, glassy-eyed and crumpled in a heap beside a padlocked supermarket waste bin.
The Job Centre, is a foreboding purgatory, a green and yellow halfway house where bureaucracy and paperwork rules all. A Kafkaesque nightmare of illogical questions and accusations coupled with Orwellian doublespeak, designed to confuse and irritate any rational person, until they give up and wander down to the harbour and start offering sexual favours in return for a Pot Noodle and a packet of custard creams. No one there is happy to see you and no one smiles because their boss, is Iain Duncan Smith.
NO DRINKS. NO FOOD. NO PHONES. Keep your eyes forward and your hands where we can see them. Do not show any signs of discomfort or irritation because that is what they want. When you are told that you are to be sanctioned because although you were on time, you weren’t half an hour early, or that you have not been looking for work in a diligent enough manner because you haven’t applied for the job as a forklift truck driver, even though you don’t hold the necessary qualifications or even have a forklift truck driving licence, they want you to react.
Don’t waste time getting distressed or angry about it. When you’re trying to log in to Universal Jobmatch, a website that seems as though it was designed and built before the invention of pencils and lateral thought, let alone the internet, and you want to scream until you burst through the barriers of our own reality into another dimension. Just. Take. A. Breath. Relax.
Think.
Let’s have some fun with this.
Embrace the Job Centre. “Find the work you want”, the phrase is plastered everywhere, in every Job Centre across the land. At your next meeting let your eyes light up, show some passion and tell them you want to be an aerospace weapons designer, a monkey trainer or the 5thEarl of Bradbury-on-Thames. If they’re going to toss you into the gutter at some point anyway, why not spend your time writing cover letters to NASA and MI6. Who knows, you might end up earning £75K a year with a company car and enough air miles to melt a glacier.
Get in to daytime TV. It’s all terrible but terrible in a sort of endearing way, like when elderly people hit loud children with walking sticks. Look forward to seeing what mad bow-tie and jacket combination Tim Wonnacott has gone for on Bargain Hunt. Laugh at the people who turn up to a housing auction without even looking at the property (amateurs!) on Homes under the Hammer. Or, if you’re emotionally fragile, the lovely Holly and Phil will be talking about IBS, knitting and the nation’s favourite colours on This Morning. Just switch off before the afternoon dead-zone when Doctors comes on or they’ll find your body in a cupboard, face twisted in horror, like that opening scene from The Ring.
Remember libraries? Yep. They still exist. I’m sure soon the Government will privatise them, sell them to some market guru, who’ll turn them all into a chain of artisan coffee shops that only sell Margaret Atwood titles but until it does, books are far more rewarding than daytime TV, you will actually learn something and guess what? In libraries they’re free!
I have a job but I have been unemployed before and it is terrifying and debilitating. It sucks the life right out of you and people assume that you are unemployed because you are lazy, incapable or stupid, which often could not be further from the truth. I for one am happy that my taxes go towards that safety net for those who are down on their luck and in need of a bit of support. Keep smiling guys and soon it will all be over and you’ll be miserable and employed instead.
