Job Search: Midnight Mayhem

If you are a passionate accountant, this might work.

Twenty minutes ago I thought it a rather decent idea to send the below email to a potential employer. I would like to emphasise that I am not drunk, and do not intend to get drunk, even though I have every reason to do so. (Please note that the addressee has been blacked out, as I am still a bit embarrassed, and God knows they might offer me a job)




'A Clouded Morning XXXXXX Team!


For it will be a clouded morning when this email reaches you, I checked the weather, the rain only starts mid-afternoonish.
I - currently unemployed, with too much creative energy - am looking for a job to keep me from writing email opening lines such as the above. I read that you are looking for individuals with sparkling personalities to join your team, and I am confident that I am such a person (think RPatz in Twilight for sparkling equivalent).


Other than in sparkling, I am proficient in 'out-of-the-box'-thinking, I have a passion for grammar, and I look extremely good in a hat (for reference see the hat picture attached to my CV). Pretty soon, I will also be the proud holder of an MA in Cultural and Creative Industries, which means that there is some substance under the hat too. Over the course of the last year, I busied myself taking courses on Fashion and Society, Visual Culture, and working as a XXXX at the XXXXXX (just round the corner), where I have picked up one or the other party trick in marketing, customer services and event organisation. I am far from being the perfect Renaissance woman, though, and this is where you come in: I need a place to start a stellar career in Marketing. So, if there is an opportunity in your office for a brilliant (yes - in addition to sparkling!), determined, and inspired postgraduate, I would be more than happy to accept. What I have been thinking about (fantasising, really) is a paid Intern/Assistant position, where I would have room for growth in my ambitions, as well as headroom to wear outrageous hats.


If you think that the person writing such a weird email at midnight could be the ideal addition to you team, please get in touch. I live around the corner and could come in for an interview at a moment's notice.


I spare you the boring end of all cover emails.



My best wishes,'


The world's biggest twat. 



I am not sure whether it is the copious amount of antibiotics I am consuming presently that has lead me to send this piece of pretentious muck, or whether it is just my true twat-nature shining through. The company will forthwith delete all their contact addresses from the website, and return to the good old Royal Mail for all their communication. Because of people like me. Self-important idiots like me, who think that their midnight scribbles will make tuppence of a difference to the lives of professional creatives, who probably won't even read beyond the second line. But how, how do I know? With all the applications I have written, I might as well apply for the post of Prime Minister (memo to myself, check with No. 10 website if there is a vacancy), and feign interest for politics and people and shit. Like, totally my thing, right, people and stuff.

I would make an impeccable circus tent designer.

I am aware that this is me on repeat, yesterday's re-run, available on iPlayer - forever. I have seven different versions of my CV saved to my desktop, and counting, including a semi-fictional version for very special occasions (say, the application for a Time Lord position, or an internship with Ray Bradbury). I have even made an Excel sheet about myself that I have then turned into a 3D pie chart. Pathetic. Nobody cares, do they?
 It is hard to say, since most replies I receive are generic HR answers, 'Dear Please Insert Here, we regret to inform you that on this occasion, you just sucked and we're like soooo not gonna hire you, because nobody here gives a shit about your experience, because we can't stand you anyway. But do keep an eye out for further vacancies. Regards, HR Copy Paste Template'.


Anyone for dessert? 

(again I accidentally tagged Tom Hiddleston, so he has to get a mention too)

Reviewing the comedy that is 'Online Job Applications' - a new play by Samuel Beckett

My last post made me think about the arbitrariness of reviews and critiques you read wherever you go. Even if you're not going, but reading the Evening Standard on the tube. Can an opera about a musical survive the critical assessment of the harsh ES critics: I say yes. If they write it pre-release. Which is where my ingenious idea comes in: what we need to do is pitch them ideas and concepts, infiltrate their brains before they have seen a single act, show them ridiculous drawings of costumes, props and sets and make them believe it's the greatest show this planet has ever seen - it's called marketing.

Chris Bracey via Daniel Poole in Redchurch Street

Right, now apart from stating the obvious, another week has passed without progress - in any way. I am contemplating my mother's default way out: getting married. Even in times of great despair, lodged between historical chronics and aspiring lawyers in the library, I would not concede to getting hitched. Unless one of the pre-lawyers obliges. Yes, the bleak days of dissertation writing are descending upon me in their dreariest, most boring outfit. Stats of the past two days: cake, two film rentals, no shower, library, youtube. And that is just the prequel. Wait for the methodology chapter - the most futile chapter in every dissertation where you present, not what is interesting or important, but how you got to the bits of information that you can't write about because you need the word count to write about how you found it out. It drives me crazy. I don't even want to find our anything anymore.
What I am doing now is watching The First Knight on BBC, with Richard Gere and Sean Connery, both of whom have appalling British accents. And having one of the quarter-yearly life admin sessions, where I am going through piles of Excel sheets all labelled 'my life', to find that my accountant abandoned me ages ago. Ok, sooooo, back to BBC.

(The protagonist turns to the audience. She is wearing an old t-shirt; in the background we hear some of the dialogue of The First Knight)

I would want to complain at this point, so I do, unless ITV rolls the credits midway through my speech, or Audi drives their latest steel monster into the frame. On the subject of: job seeking. You should know, dear audience, I LOVE to work. In fact I love working so much, I had to capitalise it. The only problem between me and my love for work at the moment are these awful online applications, awkwardly formatted PDF documents and descriptions over descriptions of coffee-mate positions advertised cunningly as 'assistant' or 'junior so and so'. And it's not even the case that I don't like writing an application, because I like writing about myself. It's the writing part that these generic application forms get wrong. They don't want a cover letter where I can express myself in a clear grammar, with illustrations of my working life - no, they want Twitteresque joke-elaborations of no more than 28 1/2 characters about me, my previous jobs, my aspirations and my references. These applications are processed by a computer tracing keywords and eliminating everybody who writes without using those. It reminds me strongly of my old Biology class, where points where gained if certain words appeared in the text of your answer. Needless to say, I nearly failed the class. I am just not very good at using standardised, formulaic prose to express myself about....myself. So, I probably fail to get a job. Despite one and a half degree, some half decent work experience and a serious need for money.
Every time I start one of the online applications now, I feel like crying, because I know that the same questions will litter the way to the final, relieving sentence: 'Thank you for submitting your application. We will be in touch shortly'. Well, who is we? He? Who is that 'we' who tells me time and time again that they will be in touch with me and really, they never are?

(Curtain. No re-entrance of the protagonist. The audience is violently pushed out of the theatre)

Metro: 29th February 2013

Samuel Beckett, the author of 'Online Job Applications' strikes again. The play is a masterpiece on the confusing nature of the digitalised world of the current employment market and its weaknesses. He manages to highlight the unnatural relationship between employment seeker and computer, and the attentive critic spots technological determinism as a recurring motive and background of the play. The jobseeker, played brilliantly by a job seeking unknown, manages to convey real despair and confusion in the tradition of Beckett's plays. One does recognise elements of 'En Attendant Godot' and 'Molloy' in the character, but it is the first time that Beckett focusses on a female lead in search of an unknown, unreachable goal. The confusing nature of the online system, played by an exquisite Bill Nighy, fills the audience with doubts about their own careers, and it is not by any chance that Beckett included into the stage directions the presence of a psychologist and a motivation trainer. We feel that this is not the last we have seen of the anonymous jobseeker; we hope that Beckett will again use this character in a series of plays or novels, and built up on the confusion we experienced in this first encounter with the jobseeker.
It is an honour to see this play.

(Curtain again, a second one. Enter Beckett, in knickerbockers. He remains silent)

9 months later....

The first post in nine months, talk about wilting..... But there was just sooo much going on (excuse No. 1), I wrote two dissertations (excuses No. 2), moved house (excuse No. 3), started a new school (you get the picture) and had to do lots and lots and lots of socialising (and there is of course Downton Abbey, Nigel Slater and QI for the less social days). Well, I suppose a lesser known philosopher in a bathing gown once said 'What matters is getting there in time, not getting up early'. So getting back here nine months later is still early enough to write. I initiated this blog to publish my efforts in cooking, but taking pictures of what I eat and adding rubbish recipes does not count as proper food blogging, so I resign and do what I do best: complaining. I recently read that the 'agony aunt' had been reinvented - online - so as to take professional complaining on to another level in the 21st century. Great, but in truth, the solutions to my problems are obvious (and involve more often than not the eradication of most of the human species), and I don't want to complain publicly to get solutions. Part of the joy of complaining is that there is no immediate solution, or no easy on for that matter, it is about the art of complaining - complaining for complaining's sake - to get a touch of Baudelaire into the equation. Complaints are the soul's little 'Great Escape'-s; means of letting of the steam, without extinguishing the fire; they are not meant to be answered, they need stoking and salt-in-the-wound-rubbing, not handy solutions before moving to the next, possibly bigger issue. No, no, no, no, as a semi-professional complainer, I advocate the non-searching for solutions or alternatives, because they defy the very essence of the complaint; dilute the issue; or worse, make you aware of other people. Yes - complainers often complain to ignore the fact that there is a world around them that needs attention, and that possibly, needs help that little bit more. By the way, it is really cold here, in my minuscule bedroom with the awful Victorian sash windows..... 

Tea, the new Champagne

The obviousness of most issues is to do with the less serious nature of the complaint: it's the small fry that really warms the complainer's heart, for it is not important enough to give reason to complain, but not unimportant enough not to give reason to - we're talking the grey area, the twilight of importance and neglect, the ferry on the way to hell, where complaints are made or break in tidal movements, following the makers whining and eye-rolling lamentations. True, this is self-justification, but on the other hand, I never complain about really important things. I am too proactive to do so: any problem is tackled offensively, and not a thought is wasted on its problem-ness. Real problems is what I thrive on, because they create the exact opposite tension of the small fry: whereas I as a hobby complainer create cases around nothing, I, the professional solver, act to overcome problems as fast as possible (to be able to return to my lamentations). In a way, the small complaints are the matrix in which I live, the background noises, the annoying crickets in front of my window. I need them to be able to think clearly, and possibly also as test runs for the essential problems in life. Without problems, my life would be flat, uninteresting (it is sometimes, even WITH problems), and I may add, completely senseless. Studying, the very nature of, is the finding of solutions: without problems, King's would be empty, utterly useless and it's costs unjustifiable (some people argue that it already is all of these things). 

Mankind (and I, as an egocentric complainer rarely use that term) needs its problems just like it needs air and food and water and Oyster cards. Aristotle, Hume, Foucault, Grass, Cowell - they ONLY exist through and within their complaints! Had they not continued to bleat about stuff they really, really thought important, we wouldn't know them, at all. (in Foucault's case, it might have been more agreeable that way) Man should be renamed, I think, into 'moan' and 'Moankind', which are, by far, more appropriate terms to describe our species. One should think that the rise of new technology would facilitate life of 'moan', solve problems instantly, and reduce the number thereof altogether. But no! New technology has not just amplified the voice of moan, more over, it has given moankind more platforms where it can whine and make life a misery for others. The iPhone - the megaphone of hell - is designed to allow for the highest number of parallel complaints possible. You can update your twitter, Facebook, Myspace and blog, whilst chatting on the phone to your best friend, writing an email to your mother and scratching pre-pubescent rubbish into the plastic of the bus seat in front of you. It is fantastically appalling how much you can ramble on the 55 to Leyton, if you get on at Tottenham Court Road and leave at Old Street. Especially if you're a bit weak on grammar, and your vocabulary is limited to the words 'f*ck' and 'like'. I was a-mazed..... Not that I would want to complain....