Do You Pay A Balance Off Every Month?

Well after several months of hating the world and generally everything in it, I have emerged from the other side unscathed, kind of..

But anyway, life is better. A hell of a lot better. I was just a bunch of cracked eggs, now I am omelette with extra cheese in the middle and everything.

I have left my job at the 'Well Know High Street Bank' (I am not allowed to give their name as I signed a 'Secrecy' Agreement meaning I can't go around telling everyone how shit aforementioned bank is in the public domain. But it is safe to say that everyone knows who they are because they seem to make the news every other day about something or other). It was, quite frankly, the shittest job I have ever been in, even beating my first job as scummy fitting room person at 'Well Known High Street Store' at the back end of 2005. The only saving grace being the colleagues, most of whom were a delight. Apart from that it was pure torture. A soul destroying, energy zapping, mood crushing pile of shite. Customers were either rude, obnoxious or thick, or a potent combination of all three. Shop workers were undeniably idiotic, especially weekend staff whose IQ hovered dangerously low towards single digits, and vastly unhelpful. The managers, bar a couple, were a bunch of halfwitted slow pokes who liked nothing better than to sit at their seats pretending to type or make important phone calls, when they were, in fact, on the phone to their parents/babysitter talking about bringing some fish and chips in for later.

I would have gone mad if I had stayed there. Mad being certifiably insane, and with a slight possibility of murder thrown in for good measure. I'm not a homicidal maniac, but some days I would sit and glare at my manager and wonder whether it was worth jabbing a pen into the side of his head, at least then there would have been one less oxygen thief in the world.

But I digress, I am out. Jumped ship. And now I have a month off before I start my new job at 'Well Known Insurance Company' in October. Probably be another banal and mind blending job, but it's better than sitting and picking my nose for the rest of my days. I think.

I just want a job in a fucking bookshop. That's my dream. A dusty old bookshop ála Black Books. But with a sober manager.

Being single has been odd to adjust to after over four years of seeing someone nearly every day. But alas, the dust has settled. I'm comfortable now, I've adjusted, admittedly still a little annoyed that I wasted so much time for nothing, but I am being all zen about this shit now. No point in being angry, just take a deep breath a carry on.

And on that floaty, somewhat meaningful note, I'm ending this. Too much ramble is rambly

Time Wasted?

As I sit here lamenting the impending conclusion of my university education, I wonder whether it really has been worth it at all. Was it worth the £10,000+ that i borrowed off the government, ultimately saddling myself for most of my young adult with a sizeable amount of debt? Was it worth the three years of hard slog learning many things that I will probably never use again, unless I go to an inexplicably niche dinner party where word order in Early English and syntax in generative grammar are the topics on discussion, and have my brain stuffed full of intelligent but ultimately useless information?

My timing hasn't helepd my situation either. I arrived at university being one of the first years to pay the top-up fees and I leave in the year where we find ourselves in one of the worst recession in recent memory, with two million or so people unemployment, an over-saturated job market where 20 or so graduates go for a basic shelf stacking job at Morrisons just to pay the bills, less and less gradute employment schemes are out there as companies cut their costs and cast out their driftwood. Bollocks is all I can think.

I have many talented and intelligent friends, most of whom attended university, who are either in unemployment, temping or are in a job that isn't stimulating and they are unsatisfied. I don't have any particular strengths in any particular area, well maybe apart from being able to ramble off some random shite at any moment that pleases me and I also have a party trick of been able to bend my finger all the way back so it touches the back of my hand, but apart from that I got nothing. I am a strictly average 2:2/2:1 student. So what hope do I have of finding a decent paid, somewhat stimulating job in a market where even the better than average students are having problems getting on the bottom rung of the career ladder?

I'm not asking for some sort of high powered position at some faceless IT firm, I wouldn't mind a job in a shop for god's sake. I applied for such a job at a well-known high street store late last year and found that over 50 people had applied for two (that's TWO) positions. I got past the first stage but not the last and thus I remained (and still do) an unemployed student bum.

I look at the past three years and feel nothing. No sense of achievement, no sense of victory, just an overwhelming sense of apathy and a feeling that maybe all this wasn't worth the effort. I should have just took my engineering GCSE (and the rest of course) and ran with it. If i had done that then maybe I would have better prospects than being one of the endless numbers of young adults coming off the university conveyor belt with their average degrees in non-specific subjects. I have learned that when most people discover you are doing an English degree they assume you want to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a teacher. The idea of conducting a class of small/medium/giant children is my idea of torture. I just wanted to do a degree that I would enjoy and would give me skills I could use in other areas and that it has, but I now have nowhere to use them.

What is worrying me the most is the inevitable snowball effect this will have graduate jobs in the future. All those this year who didn't get jobs will, if my assumption is correct, go for the jobs next year along with those who will graduate next year and so on and so forth, creating a graduate jobs market that will be overwhelmed as more and more people go to university.

I have no hope. God this is depressing.

On the dole I will inevitably go. I'll grab my coat.