Will Work, Can’t (Find) Work.

Growing up, expected to do the bare minimum given the budding eggs that came before myself, yet encouraged – half-heartedly – to do better, I have found myself in an odd predicament of having an air of arrogance firmly cemented in my ego. This, you may not be surprised to learn, is why I have found little time to blog as of late. Or, rather, trying to find work has been preventing me from adding to this virtual diary.

I have given up early into the metaphorical day, admittedly, and have realigned my virtues towards the internet job sphere. You know the type: earn money from home; earn money doing nothing; attractive older women ready for you. The latter is perhaps just something that piqued my interest, it was late, I was bordering on tipsy and the way the fluorescent light danced through those silver wisps of budding upper-moustache hair immediately caught my attention. My bad.

Discovering that my favourite broadsheet had a job advertisement section was the best thing that happened, the morning after the night before. Unfortunately, the only jobs that interest me, and that I am adequately prepared for, are those in the Media industry, an unforgiving hound of an industry, which demands previous experience. Frankly, it is experience which is impossible achieve. Every media position available for applicants requires that same very experience, experience which would-be advertisers, PR officers and journalists lust after and cannot find.

One’s only real option is to do, essentially, volunteer work. Write free, for publications that could care less about the individual and more about the quality of work they are able to churn out en-masse, for a false promise of recognition. False, because no one will actually ever find your work, and will most likely be in the very brochures you scoff at in the dentists’ offices around the country.

Furthermore, as previously noted, I find myself in the position of being far too good for that.

So, to sum up, the broadsheets have been of no help.

We have all seen the horror stories of online wanted ads. A service that is primarily used by phone sex lines and escorts, but my own experience was remarkably enlightening.

Craigslist allows anyone to list a service that they have to offer in regards to a specific city or state, and I cannot fault what it offers. For example, it is a most perfect way of finding accommodation if you happen to be on the look for an apartment, or, you know, a stripper with an apartment. I am looking for a job though, and not as a stripper, although that is certainly something I may have to consider, given the way things are going.

Like in the broadsheets, there was a plethora of jobs available, and like in the broadsheets, it was jobs that required that mythical previous experience. However, one advertisement did suggest that freelancing would offer a small, very small, income, and get my name out there – published – in the very same brochures that litter those, previously noted, dental offices.

The moral of the story, as it were, is to bite into a piece of humble pie once every so often.

Otherwise, we will just be stuck in perpetual disappointment: in a town where the majority of its residents are so intoxicated by alcohol and narcotics that the opening of the first ever off-license pharmacy would not garner so much as an eye bat. Perhaps that is just my circumstance, then.

However, the work is there, the people claiming otherwise have, clearly, no intention to work, in a state where they are instead paid to blame their lack of work on honest foreign nationals, doing work that is available because the country’s own is too ignorant and aloof to do it themselves. I don’t want to be like them, and neither should you.

~ by Jamie on June 23, 2009.