job shmob
so the job situation here in london has officially pissed me off.
i know i haven’t talked about much of what i’ve been up to, because it keeps changing and i keep thinking i will get to the Final VersionTM soon. but no. so here’s the quick rundown:
on arrival i applied for four christmas season jobs, one of which was at harrods, the uber huge department empire for whom christmas is a Serious Business. they called back, i jumped through several hoops (along with hundreds of other christmas hires), and two weeks after i got to town i was offered a full-time job in the meat and poultry section of the foodhall for £7/hr. not bad, really, but i had also been talking with a guy at an office temp agency that had postings for part-time presentation formatting positions that paid £25/hr, which sounded much better, albeit a bit less… festive.
at first, the office job guy had not been impressed with my CV, which made sense because it had been geared towards getting restaurant kinds of jobs and i had forgotten to change it. i changed it, he still said he was worried because i didn’t have experience using Office in a corporate environment, but i told him i could handle it and he was impressed by my enthusiasm so he agreed to meet.
that was where things stood when i went to accept the position at harrods, whereupon i learned that they weren’t going to pay me for a month, and suddenly the thought of leaving my flat at 6 every morning to pay to sit on the tube or a bus for an hour so that i could sell people lamb chops didn’t sound very appealing. i decided to risk it and declined the job so that my time would be free to pursue other things.
then the office temp agency guy didn’t reply to my emails, and it was a week until christmas, so nothing was going anywhere.
at this point, i realized that i should have signed up with hospitality temp agencies immediately because i was frittering away the two or three busiest weeks of the year waiting for a job when i could have been earning money pouring wine at paul mccartney’s christmas party.
seriously, i met someone who did that.
i went to a temp agency and they said they were done with holiday recruiting, but i made them take my cv anyway, and as a result they let me fill out the forms and gave me two jobs – selling concessions at a football game and bartending on new year’s eve.
both of those were fun, and they kept my spirits up while i continued to hope that an office job would materialize in january.
meanwhile, bruce put me in touch with an IU grad who lives here in london and works for a big firm that does temping, and after talking with him a bit, he referred me to a place where i could take an online Office test. i passed, it said that someone would contact me, and my hopes were renewed. i emailed the other temp agency guy to ask again about whether anything would be available in january and to tell him that i had been talking to this other firm, in case that impressed him or allayed his doubts.
today, both of them called me back. the first one – where i passed the online test – was very friendly and wanted me to take another test on monday, but after talking with him a bit more it became clear that it would take a few weeks to finalize things and most of the jobs want someone to stay for longer, so it’s probably not worth it since i’m leaving soon. ditto for the second guy when he called, except that he was still careful to say that not having corporate experience would probably put me in for an uphill battle with his clients.
so now i am having to admit that i probably won’t get anyone to pay me £25/hour to format their powerpoint presentations, and also that i will probably have a very hard time finding any other job for only a few short weeks, and that makes me sad… :(
on the upside, i have greatly enjoyed the time to read and work on other things over the past few weeks. that was really what i wanted to do with this time, which is probably part of why i was not wholly motivated to take any job that came along.
at the same time, however, i have started putting things on my credit card, and some of the things i hoped to do and see before crossing back over the big blue may be impossible this time, and both of those things suck.
the hospitality temp jobs aren’t over, so they should lead to a few more gigs at least, but all in all the whole experience has made two things clear to me:
- i am going to have to keep traveling because the thought that i might get it all out of my system in this go and then feel ready to settle down is kind of silly.
- i want to be more creative about finding ways to earn money while i’m on the road.
as for the second point, i’ve already had a few ideas about cooking for people and building websites for hostels, and i’m going to think on it all some more as i make my next plans, but in the meantime, i refer you to the next post.
and thanks for listening to me vent a bit. :)