Jobcentre staff
I had never had the pleasure of encountering the staff of the jobcentre until i lost my job over christmas, i had always thought that they must be fairly decent people, i mean their job is to help other people find jobs so surely they must be friendly, patient and above all intelligent, how wrong i have turned out to be.

the following have all been said to me in utter seriousness and taken place within the last three months:

"Do you have a car?"
"No"
"So you can't work as a driver in Greenock?"
"No"
"Then i take it you can't work as a driver in Glasgow?"
"...No"


"Are you a qualified electrician?"
"No, if i was i wouldn't be here, i would be working as an electrician (nervously laughs)"
"It's just we have a job vacancy for an electrician in Aberdeen"
"...Oh"
"Do you know any electricians?"
"(eyes glaze over) No"

"What about this vacancy, it looks perfect for you"
"(looks at screen) Um...I dont think so"
"Why not, its exactly the kind of job you have loads of experience for?"
"Its just that (points to job description section on screen)"
"In your initial jobseeker interview you specificaly put that you were looking for something in the retail sector and you have retail and supervisor experience, why arent you interested?"
"Because in the job description section it says must have experience in selling lingerie and bra fitting!"
"Oh so it does, (laughs) I don't look at those bits most of the time!"

and my personal favourite

"Are you putting covering letters on your cv?"
"Yeah, to be honest im that bored im writing different ones for each place i hand it into"
"Thats good, just make sure you actually go into places to hand them in rather than posting them if you can"
"I do, i learned that from my last job, the manager used to throw most of the cv's away because we had too many on file"
"Plus it means people know who they will be considering hiring, they dont want to end up with some Filipino (laughs)"
"...Im sorry?"
"You know, people from the Philipines, we had a bunch of them in a few weeks ago, absolutley useless the lot of them! One of them said they would even clean steets if he had to, i mean can you imagine that, people would go mental if a foreigner was working out in the public, wouldn't they?"
"...Im not sure, I don't think they would be bothered to be honest"
"Oh well different times i guess"


and tomorrow i get to go again! hooray for unemployment adventures!

p.s i sent a cv to that lingerie job but didn't hear back
(rocknroll_pirate had a dream involving holly willoughby and custard, Sun 5 Apr 2009, 20:17, 1 reply)

We aren't all bad
I promise.

Mind you I left 8 years ago and haven't looked back...

But yeah, some of the staff I encountered while working in that environment... Jesus.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Sun 5 Apr 2009, 20:38, closed)