The Interview Before Christmas

Yesterday I had a job interview. I will hear if I got the job in the New Year. It’s only part-time, but this is really perfect for us if I am to keep up my duties as house-husband and look after the kid once Lynne goes back to work.

Irritatingly, there are many people for whom this plan does not compute. This is the 21st century, the sexes are meant to be equal, gender roles have been flipped, but still we keep meeting people who just don’t understand how Lynne could have a decent job and bring home good money, while if the situation was reversed, and I was working and Lynne stayed at home, nobody would think that was weird at all. The idea of a woman being able to earn enough money to support her family seems to be a complete blind spot for a surprising number of people. I can’t help feeling that people somehow think that I’m taking the piss.

Never mind. I don’t need to wrestle bears to know I’m a man. I don’t have time, I’ve got nappies to change.

The Baby Grew Up While I was Out

I should have known better than to take on the assistant vice principal on his own turf. It was the last day of the survey today, and he played a blinder. I can only shake my head in admiration. What he did was this; about 10am he put a sign on his office door saying MEETING IN PROGRESS. DO NOT DISTURB. Then some time around midday he went home, leaving the sign on his door. I didn’t realise there was nobody in his office until 2pm. I have no way of knowing how many people were in the meeting, when they were there, and when the office was empty. I have no numbers for that room all day.

Ha ha! I salute his raw cunning and if I had to be outwitted by anyone I am glad it was him. But I don’t really care. I am finished, and I will get paid all the same.

They say a watched pot never boils, and my daughter seems to have grown a personality while I have been out. She looks up at me and smiles when I come in, a big toothless smile that transforms her into a little person. When I left for work on Monday she was still an inert lump that would just lie there, staring into space and blinking. It's surprising how much she has come out of herself in so short a space of time. There are other changes too. She has decided that she is no longer willing to sit about in a dirty nappy. She now tells us if she needs to be changed. She also likes to shout; as I was changing her she was grinning, kicking her legs and saying ‘MAAUUGH!’ This is the start of conversation. She is more aware of the world around her and will gaze in wonder at a rattle or a stuffed zebra that squeaks, where she showed no interest before. I can’t wait until she starts to laugh.

But I don’t think I have missed anything. Things I might have missed are her first trip to Braehead, an epic journey on the bus that Lynne took her on yesterday. The furthest I have been with the baby so far is Partick Library, but more on the outside experience in a later post. Today she hawked up her first loogie. Apparently she sneezed up a huge ball of snot and Lynne didn’t keep it for me to see. Babies born by c-section are a bit more mucusy for the first few weeks because they haven’t been wrung out in the mangle of vaginal birth.

Anyway, now that I am officially unemployed again we can get back into the old routine.

Friday Morning

The baby won't really settle in her bouncy chair and while I can pick her up, I can't type one-handed. I have changed her nappy and heated up a bottle for her, but she pushed it away after a couple of wee slurps. I think she just wants to stop me filling out this application form. Have you ever tried to demonstrate a competency for Personal Effectiveness-Collaboration with a crying child in one arm? Its actually not that easy.

The closing date is noon today, and I have done as much as possible by trawling the myriad other applications on my hard drive, cutting and pasting what I could. I was meant to finish it last night but I was too tired and got distracted by the telly. I will make it though. One of the competencies is, after all, Delivering Results-Motivation.

I Am At The Centre Of A Conspiracy To Part Me From My Cash

Another day, another rejection letter. I now have enough of these to insulate the loft. Today’s was pretty sooky, ‘although I undoubtedly have much to offer’ they will not pursue my application any further and they ‘are sorry to give [me] this disappointing news at this time’. They also thank me for my interest three times. Count them. Three. It could be worse; I got one rejection letter that told me sternly that there were ‘other candidates who more fully fit the job criteria’, which I thought was pretty fucking rude. They might as well have told me I was shit and had done with it.

There was also a letter from the bank. Aw, you fucking bastard. My credit card payment bounced and they are charging me £35, plus £28 unauthorised overdraft fee. They don’t say what the thirty-five quid is for, it’s just some kind of generic fee I suppose. That means that the work I did on Friday, the money from that has gone straight to the bank. They did it again! There is a fiddle that the bank runs and it goes like this. When they take your money it happens instantly, a miracle of modern technology. But when you pay money in it takes up to five working days to clear. By this simple mechanism they fuck you.

‘Judas priest!’ I cry. ‘Forget you, you bunch of forgetful monkey-chuckers!’
I try not to swear in front of the kid, you see.

Well, this isn't happening again. I phone up my credit card and cancel the standing order for the minimum payment. The woman asks me if I have thought about insuring my cards against identity theft. I tell her that anyone can steal my identity if they really want it and good luck to them. If I am late with my credit card that costs me twelve quid, but the bank are waiting to sting me for nearly seventy. Twelve quid, thirty-five quid, these are serious amounts of money when you are unemployed, large enough to worry about, but small enough for you to actually do something about. The fact that if you add up my mortgage and everything I owe a horrendous sum of money, thousands of pounds, is of no consequence. It’s an astronomical figure, it might as well be a round £100,000, or a cool million, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it right now. I might as well worry that the sun only has enough hydrogen fuel for another 5 billion years. It isn’t real, its the small numbers that get me worked up. I suppose that's where the banks fucked up in the first place.

That said, I would be even angrier about the sweaty, grasping hands of the bank if any of my tax had gone to bail the bank out, but I haven’t really paid any tax for about a year. I can rest easy knowing that the last time I paid any tax they just used it to buy bombs to drop on Afghanistan, so that’s all right.

I explain all this to the baby as I change her. She has been awake most of the night and now Lynne is getting some much-needed sleep. The baby has managed to poo right through all her clothes and bedding, so I am cleaning it up. I say ‘poo’ rather than ‘shit’ because, even though it smells pretty bad and I get it all over my hands, it isn’t really as offensive as my own faeces, and I have had occasion during my long and varied career to find that in some places that I hadn’t fully anticipated. No, ‘shit’ is too harsh a word. Even 'crap' doesn't convey it. 'Poo' is perfect. For the record, the poo started green at the beginning of the week, like pesto with hints of mustard, but has now settled into looking like carrot soup with crushed almonds in it.

So I tell the baby about the iniquities of the banking system. I tell her about money, the little tickets that everyone agrees are necessary for survival on this planet, and how nearly everyone is sick of this game, but everybody has been playing it for so long nobody knows what else to do. She doesn’t seem bothered, as soon as she is clean and in fresh clothes she falls asleep in my arms, pink and warm. I suppose she is right. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

Demonstrating Bullshit Level 1, with SPECIFIC examples

The job search continues. I am currently wrestling with a Competency based application form for some crappy admin job. Reading the hefty Competency Framework Booklet that comes with the application pack I have reached the conclusion that it is a management consultant’s heaven and a jobseeker’s hell.

Let me explain. In the Olden Days there would be a bit on an application form that said:

‘Use this space to explain how your skills and blah blah blah meet the job spec blah blah. (Continue on a separate sheet if necessary).’

In the modern world this is obviously no use, it needs to be much more complicated. This is where Key Competencies come in. Instead of writing a spiel about yourself you have to identify the Key Competencies for the role and provide an example of a time when you were Competent. There are usually about five Competencies in each job, like Communicating or Initiative, so you have to come up with times when you Communicated or Initiatized (I know that is not a word).

Keeping up so far? Good. Well, depending on the Grade Band of the job, the Level of the required Key Competency changes. This is shown by different Positive and Negative Indicators for each Level of each Key Competency. A Level 3 Positive Indicator might be to ‘understand what might happen if something is not done in time’, so assumedly Levels 1 and 2 don’t need to bother about what happens if something isn’t done in time. See? So if the Competencies are:

Communicating Level 3
Decision Making Level 1

This means that they want a bullshitter who doesn’t know what he is doing. On the other hand:

Communicating Level 1
Decision Making Level 3

Means that they wants someone who knows what to do, but doesn’t know how to tell anybody about it.

Still not sure? Well, here is a handy table from the Competencies Framework Booklet that should make it all crystal fucking clear:

Family Planning

I quit my job in the middle of 2008 to try and do something better with my life. Then the bottom fell of the global economy. Who would have thought that would happen? I have applied for hundreds of jobs, most of the time not even getting a rejection letter, you know the story. I have done bits and pieces of work here and there, but nothing permanent has turned up, and increasingly I have been staring out of the window with a cup of cold coffee in front of me, and talking to myself as I do the housework.

It’s not all bad. Being unemployed is a lot like being on holiday, only a holiday where you never see anything new or have any money to do anything. We are not totally skint though, my wife Lynne has a good job and she is happy to have a househusband because she hates doing the dishes. However, I draw the line at dusting. Dusting is for girls.

We have talked for years about having a baby, but never really thought too much about how it would actually work. Lynne is really happy with her career and I used to work pretty long hours and most weekends, so we let the subject slide by. But after a few months of joblessness we thought, fuck it, if I was going to be in the house doing nothing anyway, I could bring up the baby.

There was no method, no scheduled couplings, calendar watching or maths involved. We are both in our early thirties (though Lynne tells people she is twenty-six), and pretty healthy (though I am struggling to quit smoking). Lynne was pregnant in no time. There was a miscarriage, which I don’t really want to go into. It happens more often than you think, one in three early pregnancies miscarry, but lets just say the difference between relief, disappointment and grief seems to be about a week and a half.

When Lynne was pregnant again, we kept it quiet until after the twenty week scan.