Good Morning Job Seekers

I signed on today, well I registered with the Job centre. I should get my dole money next Wednesday, that's £55 to spend on fags, booze and betting. Plus they'll pay my rent which surprised me. I may not need to get a job for a very long time. The trick is to keep applying for jobs, to show good faith but fail to get them, as in Train Spotting. The Renton option: I could pretend to be a junkie which would be quite hard considering I've been in work for 3 years. The Spud option, take some speed and turn up to interviews spangled . My only real hope of being able to continue to sign on and avoid jobs is to go for jobs that I am either far too qualified for or for those (the majority) that I don't have a hope in hell in landing. There was one job that I thought I'd be particularly suited for - Afro-Caribbean hairdresser.

The good news is that if you have been made redundant you are entitled to Job Seeker's Allowance and Housing Benefit. Even if you been given £100k, you can still claim because redundancy payments are classed as savings:

http://www.redundancyexpert.co.uk/how-your-redundancy-package-can-affect-your-benefits.html

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/protect/redundancy-help

Call 08000556688 to arrange an interview with your local job centre.

Bath Time

I had a flash back before about when I was first unemployed back in 2005 and 2006. In summer 2005 I had quit some shitty runner job I got straight after graduating. I left under a massive cloud after I found out they'd all been slagging me off behind my back because I was so awful at my job. My generous parents were still paying my rent and I had overdraft facilities and a credit card and a second one (a month in). The fact that I was still paying this overdraft and credit card debts, 3 years later shows how I treated being unemployed. It was one massive f-off holiday.

I was living on Brecknock Road in Tufnell Park with a neurotic ex-model from my old English course. When we moved in together in summer she was umming and aaahing over whether she should do a masters. When she wasn't frantically questioning her future in academia she lay in Regents Park for days on end reading the complete works of Milton. It was a hot summer, surprisingly, and by the end of it she looked like she'd been Tangoed.

To fill my time I read Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels and had lots of baths. If you've got nothing to do, a bath is a great option. It gives the day the some structure. When you looked back on the day, it was if I had achieved something tangible instead of just sitting in my pants scanning the Reed website.

I was drawn to crime novels, Rankin, Chandler and Simenon. If your life's in a rut and days seemlessly run into one another, there's nothing better than crime fiction. Reading about a dynamic, proactive individual gives the lethargic home-dweller a vicarious kick. Philip Marlowe would never sleep in, or put off chasing down a suspect because he didn't want to miss Deal or No Deal. For the aimless, wasting their lives in an indulgent daze, crime fiction is so satisfying. The protaginist always get what they want, they investigate the mystery, they get involved and they solve the crime. They don't just stagnate, going mouldy in 3 o'clock baths.

I found myself today in Bethnal Green library, scanning the shelves, enjoying my right to possess any book there (although only for the loan period). By the theology section a girl in a head scarf was almost knocked out by a book on world religion which fell off the shelf onto her head. There's some sort of symbolism there. Local libraries don't have an amazing selection, there's lots of Dean Koontz and Stephen King but none of the writers I was looking for - Martin Amis, Nietzche, Burgess or Pinter. But the crime section, my god, it was huge, bigger than the (celebrity) biography section. I had a quick look and then under the S's I saw 10 or so Simenon novels neatly stacked together, 120 pages each and I knew what I'm supposed to do. Pass me the loofah

Chris De Burgh Day Time TV Killer

Chris De Burgh is stalking me. Every time I've turned on the TV in the last two days, there he is with his demonic smile and those soulless eyes. He is truly one of the most repulsive looking men on TV. He's worse than Alan Titchmarsh. As he's aged he's begun to look like a shit Jim Henson puppet - think Dark Crystal or something from the Labyrinth. If it wasn't for him I would have happily watched Loose Women yesterday all the way through. Just hearing that he was going to be on This Morning today made me turn off the TV and sprint upstairs.

In my humble opinion, the only way to get people back to work is to make day time TV less appealing by making sure horrors like Titchmarsh and De Burgh are constantly on the air between 8 and 6, when decent people come home. Hell, make them broadcast naked, wrestling eachother in jelly that would definitely make you turn off the TV and do something productive.

The Ideal Job

It's been staring me in the face everytime I cross over Shoreditch High Street in front of St Leonard's: the perfect job. There's no commuting, it's quite sociable and it involves something I really love. That's right I'm going to become an alcoholic hobo. I can grow a beard, I can let my hair grow. I never really liked washing much, that can go out the window. Being drunk all the time, I can do that. I just need to work on my Irish acccent and it's a shoo in.

Now where do i sign up?

The Redundancy Blog: Welcome

A spectre is haunting Britain — the spectre of redundancy.

So what do you do, you're mid-twenties, you've been working since you graduated then wham, bam, you're pushed off the career ladder to freefall?

Well, that's a tad dramatic. In my personal experience, my redundancy experience was like a dream come true. I would voice the hopeless desire of a fat pay-out without the obligation to work, to everyone who would listen. I had reached a point in my professional life that had become utterly untenable.

My job was as a copywriter but in reality due to bad management, a lack of direction and any true organisation I had ended up on a failing project, writing uninformed posts on a mobile phone blog. X, oh X you were the great white hope. You were the site that would revolutionise the mobile phone industry. A price comparison site for mobile with a web 2.0 sensibility. But most people don't need to buy mobile phones online as they are tied up in contracts and upgrade when they need to and there's about a gazillion mobile phone shops on every high street. Failure was inevitable. After a million pound investment, the weekly 1k in revenue was enough of an incentive to keep the company backing this wounded beast.

But it wasn't just X that was failing, out of all the web publishing projects my company started all of them failed. It was like the anti-midas touch, everything we touched turned to stinking human excrement. It was such a shame, considering the other part of the company was so lucrative, so successful. It was if the publishing division was the dead, rotting corpse of a siamese twin attached to the vital healthy brother. One needed to be amputated to save the other. Publishing had to go. Well, not all of publishing but the crap projects were shut down and investment was severely scaled back on others, meaning yours truly, another writer and a front end developer were canned.

I'd been there 3 years, my boss felt guilty and the company was making average 100% profits each year, meaning I got a fat, and by fat, I mean an obese settlement. I may not need to work till at least September. If I was more frugal I could extend this period of no-work till the new year.

When he told me the "bad news", I tried not to cry out in joy or come in my pants. My dream had come true, but now what? I don't need to work, I can do anything really. This level of freedom rarely comes in anyone's life and my head is swimming with possibilities.

Today is my first true day of unemployment. The last week have been spent in a beer soaked, ketamine-tinged blow out. It is a week since I've been made redundant and the first day I've not been suffering from a severe hangover, or drug-induced stupor.

Anyone else out there who is in a similar position please email you your own stories. Also what the fuck should I do?