If the government genuinely want to see an end to long-term unemployment, the most effective and economical way would be to fire the entire staff of every Jobcentre. Not all of them are terrible human beings, in fact recently I’ve been surprised by the sympathy and humanity of quite a few of them. But unfortunately, this is more than negated by the condescending and supercilious attitude of the few. They clearly believe that since they have jobs, it makes them intellectually and morally superior. Or that everybody should. Whereas the fact of it is that the jobcentre staff should not have jobs either.
The other day I was bordering on rude to an “advisor” (from whom I certainly don’t remember getting any advice), on account of his inflexible and accusatory attitude. I have to pay to travel to my Jobcentre. And for some unfathomable reason, for a six week period I am being made to attend every week, instead of every two weeks. And, yes, that costs me twice as much of my scrounged money (which I’m probably going to spend on crack, anyway), and wastes a hell of a lot of my time (when I could be shooting up with my unemployed friends).
Anyway, I nonchalantly rolled up to my “signing” time 20 minutes late. It having been at 9 am, and my proposed bus of catching being the 8.50. I missed this bus, presumably through its being early, or not showing up. I thought that the Jobcentre would see the reasonable side, and agree that no, there was nothing I could have done about it, and that it wasn’t my fault. Needless to say they didn’t, and to cut a long story short, I was made to feel genuine anger by a civil servant (uncivil servant more like!! LOL!!!) whose job, by his apparent reckoning, is to belittle the unfortunate. I should know better than to let myself be affected by them, but then I’m sensitive like that.
Upon first becoming unemployed, after graduating in June, I was optimistic. In fact, for the first time in my life I felt that things were really going great for me. I had got a First Class degree, through actually making an effort for once, and I had got the work experience placement at the BBC that I had held out no hope of actually getting. Yay, I thought, perhaps I’m not the worst and most useless person to walk the earth after all. Then I suffered three months of visits to the Jobcentre.
It’s called Jobcentre Plus these days. The added bonuses must be the free dream-trampling service, the complimentary feeling of being insulted, and the gratuitous self-esteem-lowering provision on offer. Because I’ve certainly never know these people to go above or beyond their own job descriptions to actually assist you positively. No, their remit consists of stretching their workload out to fill as much time as possible. I know this is the case in many jobs, but in the current economic climate, and especially in a week when a drastic and far-reaching benefit shake up has been announced, one cannot help but feel that the government should be looking at the administrators of, rather than the recipients of, social security benefits.
Politics aside, though, the culture in Jobcentres is one of oppressing the scrounging and workshy. Their regime fails to realise that there are better ways of helping people to find jobs than depressing them into submission until they voluntarily become people of the streets, just to escape being called before the existence-justification panel at least once every fortnight. Of course, on top of this biweekly ordeal are myriad unexpected tortures. The rules will suddenly be changed, leaving one’s seminar of soul-destruction rescheduled at the last minute, just to make sure that you can’t successfully make any plans with the remaining bit of your life, and the pitiful amount of money so graciously bestowed on you.
As you can see, being unemployed has started to make me feel a little depressed. Not the actual unemployment, I can handle that. There is no end to the inexpensive, self-bettering ways with which one can fill one’s time. I feel no embarrassment in telling anybody that I don’t have a job – because I have plans, and I have back-up plans. Trying to force me to get a full-time job at Iceland (this is a budget supermarket, not a country, for my foreign readers), is not going to be helpful to me, or to society, at this point in time.
Injuring people’s sense of sense worth, leading them to be convinced that they are not even worthy of being employed, and generally revelling in the fact that you have a job and they don’t, are not psychologically sound ways of getting people back into work. For this reason, when I’m in charge of the country, all civil servants will be the first to be rounded up and put in the gulags. And that includes my brother. You see what they’ve done to me? They’ve turned me into the type of person who makes plans for their hypothetical dictatorship.
In fact, though, I have a motivation in writing this lament. It may be depressing to write, and it’ll be depressing to read back. But I have to go to the Jobcentre tomorrow, a visit obligated by the aforementioned seminar re-arrangement (by an external agency), and necessitating some complex explaining of the situation on my part, and a tiny degree of flexibility on theirs. So if I’m rude about them today, they’re bound to confound me tomorrow with their reasonableness.
I did, and they weren't.
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