Unemployment

Expecting you to work on through the notice period when they made *you* redundant is p much them just asking for sabotage.

Do the bare minimum, take two hour lunches, and if anyone complains, just say, point blank "what are you going to do, sack me?"

Not a great idea if you want a reference, tbh.

Is it sensible to work out some kind of daily routine while unemployed? Something like job hunt from 9-12, lunch, go for a walk, job hunting 3-6, dinner, read for a bit, job hunting 8-10?

I still have my self-enforced schedule post-it note here on my desk.

Never been asked for a reference until after the job offer stage.

I've never worked a notice period; but then again, considering I'm in IT, and usually responsible for data integrity, it's p much part of my job to tell them that it would completely irresponsible to let someone with system wide access back on the network after being made redundant. That's just a classic security risk.

The best ways of sabotage are things they don't even find out until after you're long gone. Set up a repeating order for 200 extra batches of blue roll to kick in about 6 months down the line.

idk, education management / university admin is such a small world there's always a chance you'll end up working with some of the same people again in the future, or even working at the same institution, if you want to stay within the industry.

I've been told I'm "very lucky" to have been given a notice period at all. And that my four years of working here shouldn't count for anything because "we don't owe anybody anything". Morale is at an all time low; my ousting has led to several colleagues thinking about leaving. Not sure if they're just saying that to cheer me up though.

NV: I *try* to stick to routines but usually get distracted/frustrated/bored - will really make of a thing of this one though because I've got nothing else to do. Don't think I could take the guilt that'd come with lazing around all day on ILX/Xbox. Having said that, my best friend was unemployed from May-November last year and he tried to do a similar thing but the lack of an actual routine did his head in and he ended up pretty pretty depressed. I wish we - I lived with him - had tried to be more helpful at the time rather than just trying to "let him get on with it". He's a bit more stubborn than I am so would have chosen to downplay any concerns we had. I've asked him to tell me if he notices any correlation between his behaviour then and mine in the upcoming weeks/months so I can be open about things and talk to him properly about it.

SV: Nothing of that ilk was offered, no.

sabotage ultimately feels like too much of an arse. the one time i was made redundant (from my...one proper job ever) i wasn't going to a competitor so there was no reason to put me on gardening leave, but after a week of me half-heartedly coming in for a token couple of hours every day, openly fucking around on the internet then drifting away when i got bored (nb: it took a couple of days of this for them to realise i was behaving any differently :( ), it was quietly agreed that i should just do a handover note and then forget about working the notice period. absolute best thing was being able to let a couple of ongoing huge and awful tasks i was meant to do and was being ostrich-like about just...go. really feel sorry for whoever had to clear up those messes.

if you really have to go in i'd just use the office time to do job searches tbh, or if you come in five hours late/leave five hours early tell em it's for an interview. bare minimum of effort only, and only to avoid overt unpleasantness.

Yeah, OK, I guess sabotage is always better in imagination than in reality. I certainly get a kick out of fantasising about it, but IRL, bare minimum work and half-assing and 2-hour lunches for "interviews" is a much better way to go about it.

Awful that they didn't offer you the chance to talk to someone about your future options. Are they at least giving time off for interviews and stuff?

Do you want to stay in the sector?

My only real advice (which I don't always follow myself at the moment) is:

-do get dressed every day
-do leave the house every day

My sabotage fantasies have been confined to renaming various important Google Doc files.

Lex: Yeah, I'm jobhunting while I'm here. Students want to write a story for SU paper about my dismissal. Would be fun but probably not worth the hassle.

Oh great, now the printer is fucked and I've ordered toner but it wont arrive for the next three days...this is the point where everyone gets stroppy with me.

I'm looking for editorial assistant/junior copywriting stuff mainly atm...I'd like a job that made me feel like doing an MA and writing for magazines/websites for free for the last five years was actually worth something.

'we don't owe anybody anything'??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PztgWdMEJdg

This weeks been a bit of an improvement for me. I've scored some freelance biz already that has me halfway to my salary from my last gig. If another client comes through this week, I'll be back to where I was at w/my last full time job but minus the institutional headaches and dickheads. Yay me!

krugs calls the GOP dumb and mean, which they probably take as a compliment

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/opinion/krugman-writing-off-the-unemployed.html?hpw&rref=opinion

In politics, being mean to some group is taken as a given and being powerful is prima facie evidence you are not dumb, so, yeah, the GOP won't mind Krugman's judgment on it.

Is it sensible to work out some kind of daily routine while unemployed? Something like job hunt from 9-12, lunch, go for a walk, job hunting 3-6, dinner, read for a bit, job hunting 8-10?

The most important part of this is the 'going for a walk' part

But yeah, a routine is helpful, but you know, set up your own one that you actually like doing

Depending on whether you are on any kind of state benefit that requires you to apply to X jobs per period, I also find that quality as opposed to quantity of job applications was the way to go. But I might be full of shit here, I am of course still unemployed

Oh and

I'm looking for editorial assistant/junior copywriting stuff mainly atm...I'd like a job that made me feel like doing an MA and writing for magazines/websites for free for the last five years was actually worth something.

it would seem we're in the same holed canoe

So I graduated with a history degree almost 7 years ago. Since then I've worked a string of crappy jobs (one data entry, everything else retail/restaurant/coffee) plus there was an accident and I was out of commission for almost 2 and a half years. How do I get a decent job that's beyond just 'high school diploma" document scanning or working in a coffee shop. I'm pretty consistently depressed with all these job applications and never, ever hearing back.

So on Friday, I got the written interview portion of a job I applied for (the answers were due yesterday). The e-mail said that those who pass this round "will be asked to interview in-person or by phone" tomorrow. The wording of the sentence is so bad/confusing that it's been driving me crazy as to whether it means that the interview will be tomorrow (I have not been contacted yet, hence why I'm going crazy) or that applicants would be contacted about the interview then.

I think it's the latter because: 1. as important as a job interview is, an employer can't possibly think that all the candidates would be available on the same day, with no indication of what time of the day, on less than a week's notice, right?; and 2. in my experience, whenever an interviewer gives you a timeline (albeit this is my experience in an in-person interview), it's for when they'll contact you, not when the follow-up interview will be.

Oh, never mind, just got an e-mail from them, I'm not even going to get an in-person interview with them. Fuck 'em.

FUCK EM

'14 FUCK EM

Fuck em, yeah.

Cardamon's guilty confessions: I feel jealous of Gukbe's document-scanning jobs and of literally everyone in the stupid annoying co-workers thread

Only been 6 days I know but I'm jealous of my old document-scanning jobs because I've got an interview at a Coffee Chain and I'm sort of desperate to get that job.

The thing that grinds my gears about not getting an actual interview with them is that this is a volunteer-run organization that I've been a member/volunteer of for almost a decade, I have relevant experience elsewhere, and I thought my answers to their questions (first interview round was written, as I think I mentioned above) were pretty good, and they can't even spare me an hour of their time for an interview? I may be coming off entitled here but seriously, fuck them.

xp(Have a feeling that if I got a job I would end up being the stupid annoying co-worker, without realising it. Oops did I say if? I meant when, of course. When when when)

Gukbe, any chance u could throw out some hints n tips for coffee jobs?

well i've only been successful getting one, but i think the trick is to be desperate enough to want it but capable enough to hide your desperation

thoreau, right?

scraping for a job with pay lower than the living wage is what drove him to the woods in the first place iirc

my dream job is now data analysis how do i get it

I know someone who (I think) does that for a bank ... that person has a degree in maths. That's all I've got and it's anecdote, soz

I'm not an aspiring writer, except of emails, but I've heard that if you ever want to get paid for your writing by a given outlet, never write for them for free. It will not endear you to them and make them seek you out with a paying job later; it will brand you as free labor and they'll think if you'll do it for free, they can get someone "better" if they pay them.

I'm assuming this is also brutally true in the entire non-profit world, which may potentially affect me too.

Yeah that's the picture I'm getting too - like internships, it's a pre-recession model for getting into an industry which people have been pushing, but now in the recession it's just going to be exploited and not actually get you anywhere

You there, in your cubicle, the company is pleased to inform you that you are now an Operational Cost that the company intends to save. Be out of here by the end of the week.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Marriage_Made_Elsewhere_Than_In_Heaven

xp There's a whole school of 'Ya gotta be smart – ring the guy! Work for free! Get networking!' job-seeking advice which basically assumes a lot of things about the jobseeker in terms of how much money they have, what their options are, how they were brought up, etc, etc

Like I was thinking about how much I've raised the game of this local newsletter that I volunteer to do, and that is by a VERY LARGE AMOUNT. It could go a lot further and we need to increase our reach and get people STUCK IN as readers and members, and this is my organizational mission for 2014...but even if I work miracles, if for inst it ever became a paying position (which it won't but), they would be pretty justified in thinking, well we got her for FREE, imagine what we can get with an actual salary! (This is also complicated by the fact that I'm kind of a placeholder until there's a non-white person who wants the job, I mean I'm appointed for this calendar year but I wouldn't blame them for wanting to appoint a young aspiring Black journalist possibly who's from the neighborhood, in fact I think they should do that in fact--but if this were the job world, it would suck for me.)

(The way I got into Data Analysis was: get caught hacking the database you've been doing data entry in. For real. n.b. this was like 20 years ago now.)

Brushing up on a few stats texts and a language like R would be a good start imo gukbe (just started a new role in data analysis and these are the things i'll be spending my evenings/weekends at for the next few months)

And previous qualifications?

I'm sort of drifting into it every so often after having 'dabbled' with it, by which I mean understanding how to use Excel when no-one else did, and learning some basics every now and then. I've always had jobs that are data/programming-adjacent and I am often the person going between the user who doesn't know how to articulate what they want and the coding ppl who can't get out of the 'user' what the real issues are.

If yr asking me for mine gukbe, not much more than confidence with excel, tho im currently studying comp science in the evenings- nb i moved internally in a big org so sorry for non-helpful comparison maybe

xp otm

ha I've always felt a bit of a fraud that 90% of what I know about coding is from trying to use Excel as a shortcut, or my ZX Spectrum, but then one of our coder guys explained it as 'basically excel formulae' to a bunch of colleagues who wanted to know what coding was so I don't feel too bad now. I have learned basics of various languages in the past and a fair amount of SQL and still agree with him (and twice today taught one of our senior coders some Excel 'tricks')

I did some actual coding/programming stuff about 12 years ago (C++ mostly) for about 5 years but have since drifted through life as a student and then odd jobs like retail and restaurants with the occasional stint in data entry and aforementioned document scanning. I was hoping there'd be a few classes I could take or something to bolster the old CV.

someone just sent me a message that was word-for-word the bottom scam on this page (with a different name):

http://jobsearch.about.com/u/ua/jobsearchscams/jobscams.03.htm