Chavs, and Jobseekers Allowance

I don't see classic "Chavs" around very much anymore.
They appear to be extinct in Brighton. They have blended in with the trendys and hipsters making them much more difficult to spot and complain about with your middle class friends.

However, today was different. Today proved that Chavs are still around, and are going strong.

I found this out today because today I went to Worthing.

I have fond memories of the Guildborne Centre. Don't get me wrong, I know it's a shithole, but I went there occasionally as a child and we'd go in a shop that was there and it sold Star Wars figures and wrestling merchandise and all manner of sci-fi nerdy stuff that I love/loved.

I parked in the carpark, and despite getting lost upon exiting and going completely the wrong way, I eventually found my way to the "Job Centre Plus". The inside of the building appears to have been designed with a completely incongruity in mind between it and its "customers". The man did refer to me as a "customer".

It's quite a nice environment, lots of bright coloured furniture, as if somehow that is supposed to make up for the fact that it is an extremely depressing place to be.

I sat in the waiting area of "Section A" and the woman gave me a form.
"Now," she said "this form gets printed off with your details. Could you just check through to make sure you didn't make any mistakes on your application"
...
Mistakes? It's a form about who I am. How fucking stupid do I look?
I have the skills to interpret words, remember the correct answer and write them down. I wouldn't get something like whether I'm married or not wrong.
I briefly considered crossing out the "Male" in the gender section and writing "Female", and see how they dealt with that.
But in the end I didn't. As it turned out, ironically, I didn't have the balls.

When they called me to "Section B" I felt like an agent in a secret branch of the intelligence services, but it turned out to be a very similiar seating area.

I was called over to a desk but a middle aged man. His nametag read Dave, and immediately endeared me to him. Unfortunately, he was also wearing a Christ-on-the-cross pendant around his neck, which frosted over any warmth that having-the-same-name had generated between us.
He was a semi-hyperactive type with a habit of elongating words in a Ned Flanders-esque fashion. But we got through the fairly tedious process of him explaining stuff that I could have guessed.

"Now, I'm going to put down 9 to 5 as the hours you would most like to work," he said "you don't want to be working all the hours God sends"
I merely smiled and refrained from telling him that God didn't exist. I have a history of arguing with the religous, but I tend to only argue with those shouting at me that I'm going to Hell on the street. He seemed like an amiable chap.

I agreed to do a number of things per week in order to try to find a job. Most things that I do daily they asked me to do once a week.

So I now have wait for a couple of weeks, and they might start giving me some money, until I find a job.

Potential employers, and why they definitely should/not read this blog.

I have neglected to blog recently. Slightly out of being a bit busy, and slightly out of laziness.

I was thinking, I wonder if it occurs to potential employers to read blogs, or even social networking sites. I mean, the likelyhood is that they will be in Brighton, or close, so on Facebook, for example, when they search "David Wells" my name is likely to pop up early amongst the many hundreds of other David Wells's on Facebook. With the basic information they already have about me they would be able to be sure that the profile they had chosen was the correct me, and then they would be able to look through to get a better idea of what I am like.

This presents a problem.

If this potential employer were to go through my Facebook, they would immediately find a link to my blog. Now, given that a lot of the jobs I apply to are based around writing, it's not unreasonable to suggest that they would look at the blog to see if I can actually write.

It's not so much that I would be ashamed about the skill of the writing in this blog. I mean, certainly I could improve the articulation, I can definitely write better than this if I were to draft and re-draft, but I don't bother, because it's just a personal blog, talking about rubbish like this. But overall I don't mind this blog. It's punctuated correctly and grammatically sound, and it shows my ability to write and blindly assume about many different things.

The problem is the content would reveal deeper personal truths about me.

Reading this blog, for example, would reveal to said potential employer that I become "lazy" when "a bit busy", and also that I "blindly assume" quite often.

Of course, one would hope that the employer would realise that the context is important; that my personal blog is often going for surrealist humour over the truth about my life, or that being a bit lazy about writing blogs would be a bit different if I was being paid to do it.

So if you are reading this, potential employer:

Give me a job.

NOTE: I originally wanted to finish with "Give me a fucking job." but re-reading it, I realised that it looked as though I was advertised my services for the sex industry. Also it had a nasty swear in it.