Furthermore

Jobhunting

Well, some progress today at last - Simon at Start Resourcing phoned me to say I will be having a phone interview with Trayport. I also got a call from Phil at Lime Tree to say another chap - Nick, I think - would be phoning me to talk about a position in the City. Not heard back yet.

The other thing I did was to brave the Job Centre. Not an experience you'd really want if you didn't need the money, but I suppose that's the point. After I got a ticket for the DSS office, and they explained to me I had to go to the Job Centre which is next door, I then had only to take another ticket (it's like those supermarket Deli systems) from a machine merely wait for an hour or so until someone could talk to me.

It then took about 10 minutes to go through the various forms (which I could have worked out myself), enter me onto the computer (could have been done remotely) and book me an appointment to come back next week. It's not at all clear to me why it was necessary for any of this to require my physical presence when phone and post would have sufficed, except possibly that the government don't want you to claim unless you really have to.

You could argue that I don't really have to - I have some money in the bank (for which I am penalised by not being able to claim certain benefits) and I am not in imminent danger of destitution. I still like to think of these benefits as something to which I'm entitled however, and moreover that if people like me think that benefits are only for "other people", then it creates a similar effect to the withdrawal of the middle classes from public schools and public healthcare - ie what you don't have a stake in, you don't care about.

When that's the case, you come to see the benefit system as something that should be tightened up against scroungers, rather than something you may need to fall back on at some point in your life. As more and more of us are going to have patchy careers, that seems most unwise.

Posted by MFreestone at October 22, 2003 08:27 PM