Something doesn’t add up.

I can’t believe that its proving so difficult to find a part time retail job within the couple of hundred businesses in the town centre. This week there are two on offer. One involves a childrens department and I am not yet desperate enough for that. The other includes Saturdays and I really don’t want to work weekends – I gave up a good career to move back to the UK so that I would see something of my husband after all. Still if thats all thats on offer I decide to go for it. Even if, as the manager said, she has already received fifty applications for it.

Why is there so little work here at the moment? Chasing up again on an application I put in a fortnight ago I find the job has evaporated. Some of the answer must lie with the closure of the local factories. Pub discussion centres on the new build housing which has brought the local population up to 180,000 and the lack to date of new jobs to go with them. And suggests I look at commuting.

Now arithmetic is not my strong suit. Yet even I can work out that eight hours work + 2.5 hours commuting – bus fare = a whole lot less than £5.05 an hour. Like most people I have other things outside ‘part time’ hours to use my life for. This dead end work is supposed to support what I do, not drain all my resources. I really can’t afford the equation above.

Still, I remind myself that I’m only two weeks into my jobhunt. Something must come up soon. After all, we’ve never had it so good have we?

 

Closed shop

Despite the general sense that returning students have already snaffled up whatever jobs were around, I printed up a whole batch of my new CVs and called in at the various retail places around town. Most shops confirmed no vacancies were likely for the foreseeable future but politely took one and at least waited til I was out of view before crumpling it into the bin.

I ran aground in one well known high street clothing store though, with a conversation along these lines.

“Er, hello. I was wondering whether you were looking for staff at the moment.”

“No, you see we have students coming back you see.”

“Well, are you likely to be hiring soon, could I leave my CV?”

“No, as we always have the same people you see. There’s no point really.”

So there it was. The whole point of our senseless conversation was to get it over to me that if you were not a mate or family member the shop was closed. Still thats something that can cut both ways I though as I dumped my CV on a mate who manages one of the smaller shops in town. Apparently someone is on the point of walking out. And he may just be able to give them the impetus they need to quit. And hold the door open for me. I hope so.

 

All frumped up and nowhere to go

I’m finding the whole job-hunting wardrobe thing a bit tricky. Working in Rome for three years means I have a wardrobe skewed towards hot and humid casual or sharp suits. Not a look that really works on Smalltown High Street. I have another problem: meek does not become me. I have been called many things in my time – arrogant and selfish come to mind – but I am not one of those sappy girls who smile dopily at every oaf that crosses my path. My wardrobe has some hard work to do to convince those that hire that I really am a total pushover.

A trip to M&S later and I have a couple of long skirts. I team them with a freshly pressed t-shirt and a sweet little cardigan and I have the most sensible outfit out there. In fact I probably look just what your mum would have said to be a ‘nice girl’. I tie my hair back in a pony tail (as according to Barbara Ehrenreichthis i s the kind of hairstyle most worn by women in menial jobs). Perfect.

Now I have the clothes I need the job to pay for them. I trawl round the town centre yet again, surf the jobs pages, call the agencies and do all the stuff i’m supposed to. But nobody’s hiring. The supermarkets are full of students stacking shelves. The local paper has a fairly empty choice of taxi driving and day labouring. There’s certainly nothing I can do within an hours public transport commute. I guess tomorrow will just have to be another day.

 

A whole new CV game

With a career job, the aim is to puff up your meagre achievements into something resembling evidence that would impress a Nobel Peace Prize committee, whilst excising any sense of person and attempting to squash the lot onto two sides of A4. If you’re female its also good sense to delicately remove any idea that you might ever procreate and thereby rip the poor company off by removing your corporate shackles for maternity leave.

I’d not done a CV aimed at a dead end job before, relying up to now upon calling into the place to make my impression and using my ‘real’ CV more as an explanation for what I’ve done for the past ten years before deciding that minimum wage was the way forwards. And I’d targeted my applications very carefully to include only jobs I actually wanted (three days in one of the bookshops is still a real dream). So I’d tried an variation on a formula that used to net me good career jobs, careful targeting, stalking them in the way that if they were human would be illegal and conversations that run along the lines of “Oh yes, I spend so much time surfing your company website I am practically one of your employees already” albeit without access to the grievance pages. Done it all and still no job.

So, for a new departure: the generic CV. First I stripped out my degree (not much to boast about but rather ott here), removed the detail about jobs I had done and reduced the last ten years to a short list of skills and experience with a chronological work history after it and a potted personality picture up at the top. I asked the advice of a friend who claims “to have done more jobs than there are jobs”. He liked what I’d done but said to include hobbies. Preferably something I did weekly to show that I could managed to organise myself and that I wouldn’t get too pissed to turn up for work. And to mention the fact that I was married. Apparently this is a plus, suggests stability. So domestic slavery with all its conventional attitudes indicates the person they want. I suppose the turn over in these places makes maternity leave another planet.

I turn then to an on spec application form I have from a certain high street clothing chain. This is something that would never get past the door in a real job application. The company monitoring thing – for religion, ethnicity, disability – forms part of the bit the manager that will interview you gets, rather than the thin promise that it just goes to the monitoring people that real jobs assure you will happen. And the first box in the space for interviewers notes at the back is headed “appearance”. OK, so its a retail job and smart looking is important. More important than everything else? Well its a fashionable world out there. I guess wannabe celebrities wannabuy from similar.

 

24 hour success!

Fantastic! After putting in minimum level effort I found a job. I found scanning the small ads dispiriting both in the scant selection on offer and that most of them seemed to think that stressing the hellish nature of the working environment was the best way to attract candidates. So I decide instead to call into shops round the high street and – even after ruling out those with a high chav quotient and large numbers of kids trashing the displays – I still have quite selection of potential job givers.

I choose a pretty dress thats not at all revealing, but is clean and well ironed and set off. Sunday proves to be a good day for job hunting. Shop staff are bored and have time to talk to you. Some of them are even weekend staff, with naive enthusiasm still lurking around the corners of their eyes. They haven’t a clue if there is work but take a pride in knowing where the application forms are kept and giving you one anyway. They eye you up and down to see if you have anything like a skin affliction that might make you undesirable and finding you have the correct number of fingers and clean hair they beam and hand over the form.

After a couple of shops I strike gold. Theres a job going at one of those health food and homewares places. With an immediate start and hours that suit. Can I come in for an interview the next day. I do and they want me to start the next Monday. Fantastic. I don’t bother handing in the application forms for the other jobs I’ve found.

On Thursday I get a phone call from the area manager. Theres been a bit of a problem. After letting her stutter into the phone a little I say “So what you’re telling me is that there is no job”. I give her a bit of a hard time about having turned down another job and we bring the conversation to a civilised close. Apparently they were going to give the girl who had repeatedly called in sick another go. Who knows if this is true or just the usual bullshit you get from employers. Ten years in the workforce has left me a little jaded. Still. When its not your dream job its amazing how little you care. Note to self: don’t let this show in the next interview.

 

The hunt begins

Lets be quite honest about this. I’m not actually depending on a job for a roof over my head or bread on my plate, I have  alternative provisions for this for a while at least. Others have documented in great detail the difficulty of the subsistence existence and I step aside from this to leave it to their greater wisdom.

But.  I think there should be a whole lot more to the minimum wage job thing than just the gnawing difficulty of trying to do to much with too little. And thats where I want to go with my blog for a while. So, let the hunt for my pin money job begin.