My laptop is my prime source of information and
entertainment. I was enjoying excellent
internet service for three weeks, watching television (with a licence) and
playing those online games that I had been unable to indulge in while living
with my parents because they only had internet to one computer and that was a
very old one with stronger defences against downloads than the Pentagon. Then one Thursday morning I woke up and it
had gone. I explained this to the
landlord and his wife explained it to him again in Lithuanian. He rooted around but nothing changed and now
I am left bereft. Yes, there are other
things I can do. I still have games that
run off disk and do not need me to log on to Steam or Blizzard. Living with my parents I built up a good
range of DVDs from charity shops which can last me a while. To some extent I can still write
fiction. However, I find unable to apply
myself to any of these things.
I discussed this problem with the woman who used to live in
my house. She had no internet connection
for three weeks when a worker cut through the telephone line near her house. Getting this resolved proved a nightmare as
her provider has no control over the physical provision and even BT’s abilities
to repair it were hampered by what work the council would permit. This loss of internet affected her even more
than me as she was unable to pay her rent or apply for housing benefit or a
motorcycle licence and certainly found it impossible to apply for most jobs she
is qualified for or to find property to rent in order to restart her
business. However, like me, she also
found that there were mental effects, she found herself unable to concentrate
even on activities that did not require the internet; she would go to bed
earlier so that the evenings would not seem so long and dreary. I am suffering these precise symptoms and
cannot write even though, in fact, I have fewer distractions than normal. Partly I have become so used to checking
facts online that now I do not trust myself to write without making grave
errors that I might not spot. This sense
has been fostered by online reviewers who see a book as completely contemptuous
if it gets even very minor facts wrong, or indeed, diverges from the ‘accepted’
viewpoint on a topic.
It is incredible how mentally an internet connection has not
only become necessary in order to carry out various activities, but we feel
somehow debilitated when it is not there.
I am going to see if I can buy some add-on to enable me to link to cloud
provision as otherwise I see my life suffering because I have lost my
connection to this mental umbilical cord.
The only benefit seems to be that I am now in a better position to
understand the feelings that teenagers feel when they have lost their
smartphone or have not checked it in the past ten minutes.
3 comments:
"There do not seem to be loads of UK people waiting to fill these posts..."
In the two years I was unemployed about a quarter of the jobs I applied for were these sorts of jobs - burger flipping, office cleaning, petrol dispensing, vegetable picking, shelf stacking, etc - but I never heard from any of them. Maybe I should have added some 'z's to my name and removed my qualifications from my CV.
I think you do not realise that for the bulk of those jobs your application would never have been considered. Companies receive so many applications that a large portion of them are binned without even being looked at. You were entering a lottery for a job.
The other issue is the sliding scale of minimum wage, so that once you are in your mid-20s you are more expensive than someone younger.
Securing jobs like that it is about contacts, turning up at the store and knowing someone already working there. That even applies for big stores like Asda.
This an aspect in which immigrants excel. One or two may get a post then recommend others that could also work there, from the same nationality group. You would not have that inlet. British people do not work this way, bar for a close family member. They do not get a job and recommend their neighbour or the man from the next street and so on. This is why there do not seem to be 'loads of UK people', literally as in a 'load'.
British society has been fragmented so no-one is looking out for their neighbour or people in their neighbourhood. However, if you were in Berlin or Abu Dhabi, there would be a degree of different behaviour as you would be the foreign community there. However, even then, having associated with Britons abroad we tend to still be more fragmented and less likely to help others find work even than Irish and Americans.
Yes, you might be right to conceal your qualifications if they are academic ones. Conversely you need the right set of NVQs and other vocational qualifications. Even to work flipping burgers or waiting tables you should get a hygiene certificate. You can do this online. Put that high up your CV and conceal the GCSEs beyond Maths and English. Having worked in a Job Centre even in the comparatively prosperous 1990s people were doing it back then and it is all the more necessary now.
I concealed a number of my qualifications from my current job and invented a whole story of my life (partly encouraged by my current boss) which bears little resemblance to what you would see about my life outlined here. People do not want to employ losers. This is why it is so hard to stop being long-term unemployed as you have that label on your head.
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