I found this on YouTube and it made me smile – the story of the Nativity through social media (Twitter, Facebook, gmail, Amazon, etc). (I can’t work out how to embed a YouTube video here – the normal coding doesn’t seem to work – so I linked to it instead.)
Had my last ‘signing on’ appointment today. Being on the dole has been an interesting experience. At my very first appointment, back in September, I had to sign an agreement saying I would take three positive steps per week to finding a job, and keep a record of these. When I said I was looking for part time work, I was met with a frown and a rather accusatory ‘Why do you want to work part time?’ When I explained about my Aspergers, it was recorded in my notes that I have ‘Assburgers’ – yep, found this out a couple of weeks ago, when I had an appointment specifically with the disability person to gain advice about disclosure. She said to me with a confused frown ‘Um… my colleagues seem to have written that you have … er … ass-burgers.’
‘Er … they must have spelt it wrong,’ I said. She showed me the screen and then I got to correct their various other spelling errors too!
Oh, and at my second appointment, with a different person, I had taken many, many steps towards getting a job, and had recorded them all in a Word document, in a very detailed table of dates. I was quite proud of it, totally convinced I had done exactly what they wanted and more – but no. I was scolded for not having actually applied for any jobs – ‘You’re supposed to be applying for two jobs a week! You can’t claim Job Seekers if you’re not doing that.’
‘Er … I thought I was supposed to be taking three positive steps per week. Look – that’s what my agreement says. I’ve taken way more than that. Look. I’ve been taking many steps towards applying for HPC registration – can’t apply for a job until I’ve got that.’
‘No, you have to apply for two jobs a week.’ She sounded quite cross with me! ‘And while this thing you’ve written here might be useful for you personally, you’re supposed to be using the booklet we gave you.’
‘What booklet? Here are the booklets I’ve been given.’
’No, there’s another one you’ve been given.’
‘I wasn’t given another one. These are everything I’ve been given.’
She didn’t believe me. She was convinced I’d been given a booklet and lost it. I asked for a new booklet and she discovered there were no booklets (hence, no doubt, why I hadn’t been given one!) and gave me a photocopied page instead.
Then came a week when I had two interviews, one of which was on my dole appointment day. Gosh, what a palaver that was! I thought they’d be happy – surely the point of being on Job Seekers is to get interviews, so that one can actually get a job! But no. When I phoned to reschedule my dole appointment, apparently it was a huge hassle for them.
Me: Hi – I have a Job Seekers appointment on Tuesday, to sign on, but I have a job interview on that day, so I want to reschedule to another day.
Woman: Okay, let’s see. Well, what time is your interview on Tuesday?
Me: Well, it’s actually a five-hour train journey away, so I’m going to be unavailable all day. And I’ll be going up the night before.
Woman: Okay, so you can’t make the day before either. So you want the day after.
Me: Actually, I’m applying for another job which has interviews on the day after, so I was wondering if I could have my appointment at the end of the week.
Woman: Hmmm…. no. We try not to reschedule appointments too far from the original date.
Me: Er… okay, how about the Friday of the previous week?
Woman: No. We can’t do that. Otherwise you’d get your job seekers money in your bank account too early.
Me: Er… okay.
Woman: Can I call you back?
Me: Okay.
I’m guessing she needed to verify that it was acceptable for me to have two interviews! But that isn’t what she said when she phoned back.
Woman: So sorry about that. My computer crashed so it wouldn’t bring up your details, so that’s why I asked to ring you back.
Me: Okay.
Woman: So, you have an interview on Tuesday.
Me: Yes.
Woman: Can you come in on Wednesday?
Me: Well, the thing is, as I said before, I am applying for another job, which has interviews on that day.
Woman: What time?
Me: Well, I haven’t been given an interview yet – the ad just says the interviews are on the Wednesday.
Woman [sounding disgruntled]: Right…
Me: If you like, I won’t apply for the job. Then I won’t get an interview, and I can come in for my Job Seekers appointment on that day. It would be a shame though, as it’s a job I’d like, and I think I have a fair chance of getting an interview.
Woman: No no – don’t do that. You must apply for the job. You must always apply for jobs.
Me: Okay.
Woman: So how about I reschedule your appointment for Thursday?
Me: That would be great.
Woman: But when you come in, you must provide proof of your interviews.
Me: Well, er, the interview on the Wednesday is only a maybe. I still have to apply for the job and then hear if they want to give me an interview.
Woman: Well, just provide some kind of evidence.
Me: Shall I print off the job ad?
Woman: Yes, that will do.
I didn’t print anything off. The dole money really isn’t sufficient to pay for printing costs! If they wanted to check, they could always phone the places I applied to. They didn’t check. I told them that if they let me log onto my gmail on their computer, I could show them the emails, but they said not to bother. They don’t check anything. I realised this, actually, on my third appointment, which was with yet another person. When I was clarifying that I had to apply for two jobs a week, I actually asked.
Me: So just to get this clear – as I need specific instructions here – these appointments are literally just box-ticking exercises, where I turn up with a piece of paper that says I’ve applied for two jobs per week.
Him: Pretty much, yes.
Me: How do you know if I’ve actually applied for these jobs?
Him: We don’t. We take it on trust.
Me: So I could lie. I could just pretend – I could write on this paper that I’d applied for two jobs when I hadn’t really, and you’d never check??
Him: Well, if someone was consistently not getting any interviews, we would eventually give them an extra session where they have to fill in an application form in front of us.
Daft system. Seems more suited for people who don’t want to bother looking for a job than for those who are actually trying to get one! I tried to explain that sometimes the best way of getting a job is not to apply for two jobs a week, but instead to concentrate on one job for a couple of weeks and to do research and preparation for the interview. But no – I was told the rules were that I had to apply for two jobs a week.
Another interesting thing about being on the dole is other people’s reactions when you mention it.
There’s the shocked: ‘You’re on the dole??’ Generally asked by people who would not actually need to go on the dole if they were unemployed as they have a partner who earns sufficient money that they would get by quite nicely. ‘Um, yes, I’m on the dole,’ I reply, ‘because I don’t have an income, now the £4,000 a year bursary I got from my course has now ended, and oddly enough, that amount wasn’t enough to accrue any savings to keep me going after it finished. And I need to buy food and pay bills’
And then there’s the patronising: ‘Well, it’s good that you’re not too proud to accept government assistance’. Again said by people who have a partner who also earns money, so being too proud to accept government assistance would actually be an option for them! But for me, it’s nothing to do with pride or lack thereof! It’s to do with necessity.
Then there’s the… not sure how to describe this one, but it’s what my dad said: ‘You’ll want to get a job soon so you can stop being on the dole and regain some self-respect.’ This one stumped me. Obviously, yes, I wanted to get a job soon (didn’t need him to tell me that!) but I wasn’t aware that being on the dole was supposed to make me lose my self-respect.
I tried to figure out where self-respect came into it, but it didn’t make any sense. I’ve worked all my life when I haven’t been a student – low-pay public service jobs where I’ve been taking care of people and thus helping society. I’ve always paid taxes. I’ve always been part of the system that has helped people who needed help, and so it just seems a natural part of the cycle that I can also be helped by the system when I need it. And gosh, I hardly think the measly £67.50 a week I receive is going to bankrupt society! The bursary I got as a student was higher than that, and no one suggested this should make me lose my self-respect!
So I said all this to my dad, and he quickly told me that he didn’t mean to offend me. But I knew that. I wasn’t offended, as such – just rather bewildered. It’s odd, the assumption that being on the dole is somehow a shameful thing that makes you lose self-respect. When I start my job in January, I’ll probably feel more structured in my life, and hopefully I’ll find the job rewarding and enjoyable, albeit tiring, but I am really not envisaging a sudden boom in self-respect!
I have decided to return to this blog. I deleted all my old entries, because I get a bit concerned about privacy. And because I like to make new starts. And because it feels a bit messy to have years of the past emblazoned on the internet permanently, when I am no longer in the past. Blogs are strange things. I like to write them, but I like them to disappear after a while, because in real life things disappear, and we are only in the present at any given moment.
So I am here again, and in a new phase of my life. I graduated – finally – from my degree course. Sometimes I think that if I were to live my life over, I wouldn’t have moved here to study – I would have gone to a different uni, a better one, and one that had more understanding of disabilities. I know now that the uni I chose is pretty stone-age when it comes to disability awareness! A lot of students with disabilities had to leave the course because the staff were so unwilling to make any reasonable adjustments. I had to fight to get reasonable adjustments, and it was exhausting and demoralising to fight, and to be considered a difficult student as a result. Realistically, I probably would have had to leave the course too, if I didn’t happen to be very strong academically. The lecturers wanted to keep me on the course, because it looks good for them when someone gets good grades. I would have got a first class degree if the degree classification had been based purely on the final year, when I was allowed to be a part time student and get disability support. As it was, I got a 2:1, but that is still considered a pretty good grade.
So yes, knowing what I know now, I would have totally avoided this uni and chosen a different one. But then, if I were living my life over, I’d do lots of things differently, and may not have even done such a course in the first place. It’s pointless, I guess, to think in terms of alternate realities. As it was, I did this course, and I learnt from it in ways very different from what I expected.
I had expected it to be academically challenging and stimulating. Other than the reading I did by myself, I was disappointed in this regard.
I also expected it to be an opportunity to make some close friends. I haven’t made any close friends – but then, this is always a difficulty I have, related to my Aspergers, so I can’t blame the uni for that. Although perhaps it would have been easier if I hadn’t been so stressed and unhappy.
I also expected – and this was a major reason for doing the course – that when I graduated I would be able to get a part time job in the field. I wasn’t able to work part time as a health care assistant, because the pay is so low. Quite simply, I get exhausted from working full time. Again this is related to the Aspergers – everything is such an effort, to be always consciously, intellectually processing things, because the brain doesn’t do this automatically, and to be so often confused. And also the sensory hypersensitivity issue. This is a huge difficulty for me, and as a result I need a lot of time alone, in silence. I didn’t know these reasons before the course though – although I vaguely knew I had Aspergers, I had no idea what that meant in terms of how my brain processes, and I had no idea that it caused fatigue. I was just aware that working full time was exhausting for me, and so my plan was to study for a professional qualification, so I could get a higher paid job and be able to work part time.
In fact, I’ve been unemployed for a few months, and have only now got a job, to start in January, which is simply a teaching assistant job, which is even lower paid than health care assistant jobs! This is common in my field though, and especially now in the recession. I hope at some point I will get a job in my field. But there is always the uncertainty factor.
So what has my course done for me? I really don’t believe it’s been a wasted five years, even though not a five years I would have chosen. It’s taught me about myself, and about Aspergers, and I have developed a lot in self-awareness and self-reflection, and I wouldn’t want to undo that. But still, a cynical part of me thinks what practical good is that, as I’m still back to square one, and with the additional baggage of an Asperger diagnosis (to which, realistically, most people react negatively and impose a lot of stereotypes)? And I am now less confident than I was before. Considering that I was never brimming with confidence to begin with, I’m not sure that loss of confidence is a good thing. There is always the ‘It is teaching me to trust God more’ aspect, and yes, that is a valid aspect, but there comes a point where I get frustrated with that and I think ‘Okay, what exactly am I trusting God to do?’ I mean, I can trust that he’s there and that he will take care of me, but that is incredibly vague, and it gets frustrating having no idea of one’s future at all.
When I was applying for lots of jobs and most applications were not replied to, and the few interviews I was getting were leading to rejection, I decided that maybe, after all, it’s about expecting life to be shitty. To anticipate maybe a whole year of being on the dole, being constantly rejected in job applications, and simply expecting that applying for jobs and attending interviews will be my full-time occupation.
Well, it’s not been a whole year – when I start my job it will have been four months. I think I will enjoy the job, but I imagine it will be exhausting too. And there will still be the uncertainty – the ‘How long will I be doing this job? Will I ever get a job in my field? Will I be doing this forever?’
