The Joys of New Deal (warning long and rambling story)
I spent the best part of a year scrounging off the state, mostly due to the fact that having reached the end of my degree I found I didn't actually want to follow it into the work place where long hours, lots of unpaid overtime and high stress levels were common.

Salvation was at hand as a flier landed on my doormat from the very university (or jumped up polytechnic as some people would have called it) that I was currently preparing to leave to face the perils of the real world. Stay on and do a Masters they said, study an exciting topic in a growing field they said, we'll pay all your tuition fees and give you £40 a week to live on they said (it was the last one that swung it for me as that pretty much covered my rent at the time).

Fast forward 1 year and there I stand, new diploma clutched in my sweaty hand ready to face whatever the world could throw at me. (I think perhaps I had somehow grown MORE naive in the previous twelve months having swallowed my lecturers assurances that our field was a growth market and I would have no problems finding gainful employment hook line and sinker).

Rather than head back to my parental abode a flat is found in a rather studenty area of town, (the rent is reasonable but the bathroom is unheated which is a nightmare in the winter) and off I trot to sign on, collect my housing benefit and generally continue enjoying being able to sleep till 2pm and watch dvds all day (I eschewed daytime TV on the grounds that it was hazardous to my health).

I think my first job centre interview ran along the lines of "So you have a degree and a masters, you're far more qualified than most of the people we get you in here, we'll put you down as looking for admin jobs" Why they thought I wanted to do paper shuffling when both my degrees had been in computer related subjects I never figured out but i thought heigh ho anything with a pay-cheque is a start, so after promising faithfully to check the newspaper job sections every week off I toddled happy that I could now afford to eat again even if it was Morrisons value beans on toast.

6 months in and having had no luck finding work in my chosen field and a few dozen companies evidently looking at my CV and thinking blimey we cant employ him he'll either a) decide he can do better elsewhere and quit or b) take our jobs and filed my CV safely in the rubbish where it couldnt scare them (I tell myself this so as not to get depressed that I am apparently completely unsuitable for photocopying jobs).

Then the rumblings started, dark looks about how I wasnt getting work despite being offered the finest data entry jobs the JobCenter could provide. (I did get one interview but despite my thinking it went ok evidently did so badly that when a second job with the same company doing the same work came up they didnt even bother to respond to my application). Enough was enough they declared, you're obviously doing this wrong doing this wrong, I hereby sentence you to sit for 2 weeks in a classroom full of chavs and listen to somebody alternately pretend to be your best mate and talk down to you as if you were a 4 year old with learning difficulties, there you will be made to eat stale sandwhiches and you will learn how to contruct a CV and write a covering letter.

The first day of my sojourn in hell dawns and wearily I trudge through the streets to the office where I was to spend the next 2 weeks. I find a spot on the desk with the people who least look like they would stab me then drink white lightning while sitting on my slowly cooling corpse and rifling through my pockets.

In bursts the first of our two tutors, he's everything i was dreading, loud, chummy and determined to make our time here as enjoyable as possible (we looked at him with contempt), in shuffles the second tutor, quiet, grumpy and bored with life (he was to disappear by the start of the second week with rumours floating around saying he slept with either the bosses wife or one of the pikey girls from one of the other classrooms nobody ever got to the bottom as to which if either were true)

We soon settled down and they quickly got on with insulting our intelligence (well those of us that had intelligence) by handing out literacy and numeracy tests that would have embarassed a 7 year old child if they got the answers wrong.

The rest of the course passed slowly being based mostly around group based discussions of the type "what are good/bad things to do in an interview? discuss then make a poster" "make up a job description then make a poster" "list the good and bad things about being employed and make a poster" all that colouring in took me straight back to GCSE geography class.

I have only 2 good things to say about that course, the first being that because all the people with some modicum of intelect clustered together for safety we absolutely slaughtered the other teams in the daily quiz, and the second because of all the hard work put in (I suspect largely by my group again) in actually trying to find work we won the most sucessful class competition and got treated to a free breakfast of crumpets, croissants and pastries on the last day of the course.

The reccurring theme of these posts seems to be don't expect the job centre to find you work and mine is no different, approximately 2 weeks before i was due to start this course i responded to an ad in the local paper for the public sector company i currently work for with an interview slated slap bang in the middle of my 2 week new deal course (do you have any idea how much a target, not to mention a prick, you feel sitting in a nice clean suit and tie while everybody around you in wearing tracksuits and gold earings large enough for a parrot to use as a swing?)

Despite being incredably nervous and stammering my way through the interview then assuming i'd shot myself in the foot by arguing with the questions they set for the practical test I made it through the day relatively unscathed although i did need to sit down for a while after some malicious prankster had apparently swapped out my shins without looking and replaced them with quick set jelly. As I was leaving I was told if you dont hear from us in 6 weeks you havent got the job. 6 weeks came and went not a peep from my prospective employers, 7, 8 I was just about resigning myself to having exausted every avenue of doing the job I was actually quite interested in when a letter landed with a thump on the mat informing me that I would start in 2 months time.

Hooray, hope was in sight, I marched down to the JobCentre with a new spring in my step, even the cluster of stripey topped malcontents lurking outside the doorway and attempting to immitate the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant didnt dampen my spirits.

My JobCentre handler (makes them sound like the CIA doesnt it) gave me a hearty congratulations then dropped a bombshell onto my carefully constructed facade of cherryness that I wouldn't have to keep coming back and signing on. "I'm sorry Banjax but you're going to have to keep looking for jobs if you want to keep claiming your benefits up to your start date (the logic behind this stil escapes me), infact because your startdate is going to be more than 12 weeks after your last new deal course we're going to have to enroll you on another course where you can learn some skills that will make you more employable (WTF? I was already practically employed) you start in a month in an area of the city that would have been the armpit if the armpit hadnt complained.

With a heavy heart (and light kidneys) I start making the daily commute to my new place of education where I'm to learn everything you need to know about being a computer technician in 13 weeks (the fact that I was only going to be there for 4 seemed to pass them by).

I walk in and start being introduced around by the leader of the course, "Banjax this is Steve, Stephen, Steven and another Steven (yes 4 out of the 7 people on the course (including myself) were called Steve (a 5th was to join us halfway through my last week there).

"So Banjax do you know anything about building computers?"
"Yes I've built my own computers for the last 4 years"
"Right well umm, there are a load of spare parts in the back room there, just rig yourself up a test machine so you can get to work"

I was to spend the majority of my time there being given tasks that I could finish in 5-10 minutes but would take the rest of the people on the course an hour minimum so I spent a lot of time browsing the internet (sadly at that point i had never heard of b3ta or i might have actually enjoyed my time there). Eventually I was paired up with another student there in the hopes that I might be able to get through to him and actually get him to do some work rather than just sitting at a computer talking on yahoo messenger all day.

There was something about M as I shall call him that was just not quite right, possibly it was the fact that you had to practically yell to get his attention or possibly it was the fact that throughout the course his personal history included being a liutenant in the US army, having just come out from jail for overpowering 3 men who broke into his home and raped his wife by grapping a knife and cutting the dick off one of them then slicing open the shoulder of a second, all the while holding a crying baby, and that he was currently engaged to the daughter of a russian oil magnate who he had met over the internet.

My last day there was filled with a heady air of relief (and more than a little second hand smoke) as I worked out my shift explaining how to install windows to M for the third time that week and I walked out of the classroom sure in the knowledge that I was walking into a secure job with a good pension (should I stick it out for the next 40 years).

Now all I have to do is make sure i stay here and dont get fired for gross incompetance or wasting time by reading b3ta all day...crap
(Banjax, Wed 8 Apr 2009, 11:24, Reply)