Perspective

The last couple of weeks have been, on the whole, horribly depressing.

Given my lack of success with finding work, I finally found that my local branch of Sainsbury's had an opening on their nightshift. It's a job I did at that store before I got into website administration, and had generally felt that when in need of work they'd be happy to take me back on board. Unfortunately, as they've now got a centralised system for all of their stores' recruitment, I had to wait until they had an opening on their website.

Week before last I finally found they had an opening; irritatingly it would be doing the weekend run of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, thus knocking out most of my opportunities for social life, given all my friends do weekday jobs, but work is work and I'm not in a position to be choosy, so I went for it, and within a week or so I was told that I'd been accepted for interview.

Had the interview last Wednesday evening. I'd had some concern over how things would go as I didn't know the person who I was told would be doing my interview, but when I was taken up to the staff area I was extremely pleased to see that my old boss was still co-running the nightshift staff, and he was equally pleased to see that it was me who'd applied for the job, and he was eager to get me back onto the team as he knew how good a job I'd been able to do in the past. Of course, the the intervew itself wasn't so much of an interview as it was a standardised test on company skills - some of which I'd say only vaguelly applied to a job where you'd be spending over 90% of the time outside of store opening hours. Still, test was done and I felt confident about it whilst being honest in my responses. After the "intervew", my old boss and I talked while he led me out of the store, and he said he was willing to try and fast-track things to get me back in the store and working on the team as soon as possible.

Two days later, Sainsbury's head office emailed me to say that I'd ben rejected as "others were a better match". As you could imagine, it was a soul-crushing response. Contacting them later revealed that I'd failed on two out of four sections of the ruddy test, but they couldn't elaborate further. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd failed on things that were barely relevant to the role.

What really, REALLY irritates me on the matter is that it seems that past experience, proven demonstrations of my capabilities and the opinions of the senior staff relevant to the role mean absolutely fuck all when such an overbearingly bureaucratic attitude to situations is in place. It's Nokia all over again - when I was doing work for them in my last job, I showed I was a dedicated worker with eagerness and enthusiasm to getting things done and getting things done right, and the people directly involved with the work I did - some of them in fairly high positions - knew I was a great person to have on board. Hell, I was even directly contacted by one of their senior web people to be one of the few people in the know about a TOP SECRET campaign and product launch they had going on - that's the level of trust and dedication I was seen to have. But when Nokia decided to change their whole approach to organising their web tech services, the folks at a higher level felt they'd rather get the work Id id to be done on the cheap and nasty, and so I was made redundant; depsite efforts to get me an opportunity to be transferred to one of their new teams (as others I'd been working with were offered), they pretty much told me to go f' myself. I was a ten-a-penny pleb to them, despite the blood, sweat and tears I'd put into their sites.

And that's what I hate about big corporations. When they have to take such a heavily systematic and bureaucratic approach to how things get done, then little guys and unique situations get the raw end of the deal and are left feeling unrespected. A holistic view is a great thing when you're trying to control something big, but you need to make sure all the individual parts are properly accounted for; you can't just have one perspective or the other.


Anyway, going back onto my current situation the news from Sainsbury's has left me not even back to square one; my backup plan and safety net has now crumbled, and I'm having trouble making out the bottom of a very black abyss. I feel like I'm at the juntion of two pathways - one marked "will drop pants for money" and another marked "you're wasting your effort bothering" - and I'm vainly scrabbling to find a third option.

Then this all got put into perspective when I spotted something on Facebook. One of my old workmates had posted a message to let friends know that his wife was extremely ill in hospital, and they were waiting to find out which one of the serious conditions it was that she'd got. Since then they seem to have had some postiive progress and it seems she's got the lesser of the evils, but even so it made me feel pretty guilty that I'm angrily moping about my job situation when a friend's partner (who I'd met on a couple of occasions) was facing a life-disabling situation in hospital. If I haven't got much else, at least I've got my health...


Time I gave a bit of positivity, seeing as at least some good things have been happening. I finally sorted out a new host for kyantol.com on Monday, and once the transfer's due to be finsihed at the end of the week I want to start making headway with the site content, including getting some sort of "trial forums" set up to see what it's like to run them, an whether or not I want to make it a permanent thing. Driving's going rather well - I'm now doing two lessons a week in preparation for next Tuesday's test, and I managed to have a really good drive in my lesson yesterday; if I can pull of the same standard of driving during the test, I should hopefully be walking away with a licence.

Still, would be nice to be employed. I was in town yesterday for my jobseeker's appointment, and while waiting for my bus I had a look round Game. While browsing (or more specifically torturing myself over stuff I can't afford to spend money on), the customer assistant asked if there was anything I was looking for in particular, to which I half-jokingly replied "well, a job would be nice..."