Well it’s been one the worst weeks I’ve had in years.  So bad that I haven’t had the inclination to write here at all.  I’ve been holed up in my house, thankful I have a roof over my head but miserable having no money.  I’ve been stretching out the tiny income I have, trying desperately not to run out of food for the dog, chickens and ourselves.  The Teens are sick of me buying cheap bread and finding the fridge empty and sick of me going on about having enough petrol.  It’s one thing being poor when you only have yourself to look after, it’s quite another when you have children.  Both lads need clothes and half term is next week and is looking pretty dull.

Of course, I haven’t just suddenly become poor.  I’ve been on a tiny income for some time, it’s just that The Elder Teen is back home and is another mouth to feed, some of my income has been reduced and I’ve had to extend my overdraft at the bank which means they have been busily charging me huge fees, taking me further into debt to the point where all my money goes to pay them back the minute I get it and then I start borrowing off them all over again.   It’s a vicious circle really.  When you live on a small budget, you notice when the price of food goes up which it has done so much recently and I’ve only just recovered from the appalling price of petrol in the summer.

My efforts to find a job started out quite hopefully.  I thought I’d get another office job and went off for a couple interviews.  I got neither job and in some ways I’m glad.  Both jobs, one a trainee vets nurse which I would have loved were highly demanding and thoroughly inconveneint.  I would have made it work for the vet job as that is really a vocation but the doctor’s surgery, that was a disgrace.  For fractionally above the minimum wage, I was expected to arrive very early in the morning on some days, go to another surgery miles away on another, have to work Saturdays at the same wage and generally put myself out in every way for a pittance.

One of the things that has always infuriated me is the low pay for admin work.  It is usually around minimum wage, full of responsibility, requires numerous skills – all apsects of secretarial work, sometimes basic accounts, smart dress code, good telephone manner and there is usually too much work for one person but companies are too mean to employ another one and yet the wage has remained the same for the last 15 years.  Why?  It never changes, year in year out, the same poor pay.

So then I lowered my expectations and I looked at other type of work.  I looked at ‘home’ based work and found myself entangled in the world of the rip offs and scams on the internet.  There are thousands of them, all claiming to be ligitamate but all requiring money up front for some wonderful way of earning hundreds of dollars (aways dollars) in minutes.  Where are the real home jobs or aren’t there any?  I became completely despondant looking at these fake jobs and looked again on a dozen employment agencies for anything I could do.

I conclude that there is some sort of conspiracy going on.  I thought I might offer myself to old people, maybe cook for them or drive them somewhere or clean for them or something.  But it seems even for the lowest of low jobs you have to have various certificates, ‘food handling’, ‘care giving’, taxi licence, criminal records checks at your expense, cleaning, must have previous experience and so on. And as for working with children, forget it.  It seems we are all potential child molesters.  It is seriously difficult to find anything to do at all these days. Anything to do with the county council requires endless forms and checks.  I was interested in a library assistant job on a saturday, just five hours a week and the form was 22 pages long and CRB check.  This country is in such a state of over protection that it is nigh on impossible to get ordinary jobs what with health and safety, child protection, elderly protection, germ protection it’s a wonder anyone has a job. 

On top of all this The Other has been incredibly ill this week.  It started off last weekend when he accidentally picked up a bottle of surgical spirit and drank it mistaking it for some other medicine.  He was in agony but wouldn’t let me take him to hospital.  I was worried it would kill him, but it didn’t.  He then developed some problem with his throat where it swelled so much he couldn’t swallow anything, not even water.  I took him to the doctors and he has antibiotics but he’s been very ill all week.

I’ve just about had enough one way and another.  I’ve now put up a notice all over my town listing all the things I can do and am hoping someone out there will give me some work.  This is not a life.  This is an existence.  Something has to give.