Employment agencies are the bane of the jobseeker. Love them or loathe them, anyone on Jobseekers Allowance sooner or later must do business with them during their search for work.The problem is that these agencies aren't interested in finding you work - you're just not that important - but instead need to shove you into the first convenient role to fulfill their contractual obligations and profit margins.
Unlike employers, agencies always do things at the last minute. There's always a sense
According to the BBC, ten million of you watched the Dr Who special marking the 50th year of time travelling mayhem and alien invasions of Earth. I strongly suspect far fewer of you are going to be reading this, but who knows, perhaps one day this blog will survive the ravages of time and become an indispensible guide to how life in Swindon really was before Professor Cox was proved right.
I do note however one aspect of Day Of The Doctor that most people might not have noticed. The good Doc
Shopping? Done. Interview at the job agency? Done. Gas account cancellation? Done. On my daily checklist I had only the obligatory online job search to do, so off to the library for another struggle with Microsoft's worst.
Balloons? What's going on here? It's usually excessively warm in our local library but there seemed to be a much livelier atmosphere, and evidence of small scale partying. Worse still, as I ascended the stairs a jazz band started up, creating a very genteel background nois
I woke this morning from my slumber as the rat made a loud plop exitting the house via the toilet. Not that I'd gotten much sleep - my computer has once again succumbed to the vagaries of electricity and fizzled out. There I was, working away, when the monitor went blankl and I could hear raw current arcing somewhere. With such a strong smell of burning I even had an electrician out in the middle of the night to check I wasn't going to burn the house down. Sadly it appears the rate escaped elect
You're the worst kind of propagandist who thinks he knows better than everyone else
Guest private messge (some-1-better-than-u)
Wow! Praise indeed. But Im not entirely sure what I'm propagandising.
However, lets for the moment ask a serious question - Do I think I know better than everyone else? Of course I do - just like everyone else does, including my crtitic quoted above - it's a fundamental part of human self worth to believe your opinion is as good as anyone elses. Even when it is
Must be a rainy day. The library is half empty. Oh well, at least the early morning rush for a computer isn't the usual death before dishonour charge up the stairs. I see a certain youngster has been released from prison (he was jailed for drug dealing) and even he isn't bounding up the stairs the way he normally would.
Actually most of the familiar characters are somewhere else. The guy who likes to threaten me every time a I say anything, the woman who thinks the library is her personal se
There it was again - Another flicker of light. What on earth is going on? Curiosity got the better of me and I opened the back window last night to try and see what was causing that phenomenon.
It was a pretty ordinary evening. Not too cold, perhaps a bit damp, and apart from the odd swish of a passing car, or the flitter of a bat to and fro, nothing stirred. The local cat was making its way home across the yard, a sign that the foxes were coming out to play.
Then I realised what those s
Times may be a'changin', but Swindon carries on going its own way. Or is it? Just recently I notied our local HMV store has re-opened after falling victim to the terrible economic Black Death that stalked the towns and cities of England not so long ago. Not only that, but just the other afternoon I spotted the first white metal frames at the Old College site. As if I could miss them. They tower above the surroundings and make the assurances of the developers that the buildings wouldn't be any hi
Just one of those days I guess. All of a sudden everyone wants to talk to me, everything has to happen as soon as possible, and poor little me has to rush around like an overstressed gibbon trying to get through it all.
I have to point out of course that most of you do this all day every day. I don't. Being unemployed for a long time rather reduces your pace of life. For me popping down to the shops is an event. A phone call? For me? I didn't know this thing actually worked.
Anyway, I wa
Poor old badgers. They do seem to be getting in the neck right now, with a government authorised cull in progress. As it happens badgers have always had a difficult existence what with rural baiters and the like. A couple of years ago I headed out into the countryside for a hike and by the roadside was a dead badger impaled on a stick, clearly left for someone to see. I wonder who?
I must be honest, at the time that gory sight left me unmoved. Hard to understand why. Witnessing the natural w
As a jobseeker the vast majority of vacancies I find are pretty mundane. So dull and boring, I suspect, that these companies need to advertise for desperate jobseekers to fill the role. For a country with a National Minimum Wage, it comes as a suprise to see so many advertised for
Switch on the television today and chances are a car advert will appear. Not sure why they're so frequent all of a sudden but it might have something to do with the daft names they give cars these days. Go? Ka? Cee'd? What's all that about? Now I see one for the Vauxhall Adam. What next? The Nissan Nigel? Toyota Terence? The Ford Fred? God forbid someone should build a car called Eve. That will bring new meaning to a warning sign for "road humps".
I can't help thinking that the use of 'fun'
Britain was never intended to be this warm. Could someone do something about that please? Or does that mean I have to pay more tax?
My Big Mistake Of The Week
I made a huge mistake. I admit it. Sometimes it happens. There it was on the television schedules - Doctor Who Live.
pardon? My curisosity was aroused. I don't paricularly care for the childish and hyped up modern Doctor Who (it's just Harry Potter with a sonic screwdriver instead of a wand, a tardis rather than a Nimbus 2000) and
Well, I'm laid up again with a nasty foot injury... strange how disabling that can be, due to it's location rather than the severity. So I thought I would reflect here a bit. I just put on some background video of a Bocelli concert in Portofino, which makes somewhat sappy music in a pretentious location quite magical... is it the Italian touch, or maybe my memories of hiking the pretty hills in the background (better than crowded Cinque Terre!).
I recorded it off cable tv and was about to fl
The rain stopped. As if to sound "All Clear" the bells of Swindon's old town hall made seven dull clangs in the distance. Almost immediately an excited little bird settled on the telegraph wire across the back yard, chirping happily. People began to appear, pedestrians trying to carry on as if nothing had happened. Shortly after the insistent sirens and flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles barged through the traffic that had dared to continue their journey.
The price we pay in Britain
The last few days have been quite warm, a typical British summer, and that wa quite enough for me. Luckily the nights cooled things down. A bit. Before the weekend however, the weatherman on television was beaming with malicious delight. Watch out for the weekend - it's going to be a scorcher. Okay. yawn.
I got up late this morning having been up all night. As usual in summer, the air within my home was a little stuffy but I had things to do, so the atmosphere was of little concern. As soon
I recently came the closest ever to being hit by a car when crossing the street, with the walklight. I remember calculating whether I should jump on the hood or try to bounce off the side. I was too exhausted from a gym session to jump, but was saved by their last minute screech to a stop. Lucky, because the driver was accelerating fast to turn into a gap in traffic.
Now I know why pedestrians so often leave their shoes behind when being hit and smash in the windshield. If you don't jump way
Those sweaty summer nights are with us again. I blame America - we always get our weather secondhand from them. Hiowever I can't blame them for the behaviour of the locals. As soon as the warmth kicks in they start behaving like they're on a mediterranean holiday, shouting, throwing, or generally hitting each other. You might not be suprised to hear that happened last night. Again.
Clearly the way to improve social behaviour is not by fines or visits to a magistrates court, but banning summe
Can you believe I got a sunburn purely in the SHADE!? A slight injury kept me away from outdoor activities except reading in the shade. So for some "light" reading I checked out about 1500 pages worth of Goebbels diaries from 1939-1945. They were kind of yellowed and fine print, so I used bright outdoor light, but kept religiously under shade of concrete overhang.
I started to get brown in a strange kind of tanning-bed omnidirectional way, where ever my swimming suit didn't cover. I wondered
"Our house!"
For a while now I've been hearing that phrase. Usually I hear it from young males in the street outside. I must admit I thought it was just kids being silly with some kind of catch-phrase. On one occaision however a shiny black car pulled over to the side the road as I wandered on my way to a local supermarket. It was driven by a youngster, which was unusual in itself. How many eighteen year-olds in Britain can afford any car insurance whatsoever? Kids drive bangers or their par
Another day, another jobsearch. My claims advisor doesn't like me doing anything other than seeking gainful employment and is trying to force me to waste more of my time looking for jobs I applied for last week, but you see, all work and no play makes Caldrail a dull applicant. So my claims adviosor can... well... off.
As I write this I'm entertained by the efforts of a young man to woo the pretty young blonde sat next to him. He started quite well - she liked the attention - but he hasn't g
How things are changing outside my window. For some time now the Old College site has been no more than a mountainous lanscape of crushed college, but now that work is ubnder way to develop the site (at last), the hillside is being cut into and levelled. It's extraordinary how much gravel and dirt has been removed. Even more extraordinary are the metal bolsters that are used to shore up the alleyway at the back of the site. They must be something like fifty feet in length or more and each is bei
If you remember, last time I left you on a cliff-hanger: Did I go to Bottom Pub with the crowd, or did I respect my 25 year old ban, and stay away? Sorry, you�ll have to wait until next time for the answer to that. I have something topical to discuss this week. That is to say, it was topical when I wrote it. Subsequently, the UNRV website fell into its long coma. It�s no longer topical, but you can read it anyway:-
I�m not sure just how much this news has filtered into other countries, or ev
