Christmas, Paint and Work Experience!

So it’s been a while since I last posted almost 5 months… and I would like to say that my lack of posts for those 5 months were due to me being too busy… well for 2 and a half of those months I can say that, but for the rest I can’t…  but I do have a lot to say about the past 5 months.

Christmas!   -  You can’t leave the UK while on jobseekers without signing off, which became a problem for me since my parents moved out there, and this meant that I couldn’t spend Christmas with my family so this was the first Christmas I spent not with my family. I wasn’t a bad Christmas though, it wasn’t the same but it wasn’t bad, if fact it was good. And it made me appreciate what I have here (I spent Christmas with my flatmate and her family) and isn’t that what Christmas is supposed to be about.

And it also meant we got to decorate the flat :)

 Uh-oh, Oh shit! – At the start of January I finally put some of the paint that I’ve had since September on my walls the day was pretty much full of us constantly saying “uh-oh” and “Oh, Shit” as we painted ceiling and made other small slip ups.  For some unknown we decided that midnight was a good time to start painting the bathroom – this was filled with considerably less “uh-oh” and “Oh Shit” ‘s as by 1am we just didn’t care.

Work Experience, Yay! – So half way through January I started do an 8 week work experience with The Works (done through the jobcentre), this is the scheme that got a fair bit of publicity recently as someone took the jobcentre to court about it being slave labour.

Firstly this is yet again something the jobcentre managed to cock up as I got woken up with a phone call at 10:30am on a Monday from the jobcentre asking if I had gotten a phone call over the weekend – which I hadn’t…

“Oh, because you were supposed to start work experience this morning at 9. You weren’t told you’d got the work experience?”

“No”

“How soon can you be here?”

Oh how I love being messed around by the job centre.  And you know what I can see where that woman how sued them is coming from the work experience consists of 40hrs a week and has to include Saturday, that is a lot of hours for nothing but travel expenses. In fact doing the work experience actually cost me money as I had to buy stuff to make up lunch with, since when I’m at home I don’t really eat lunch I just have some toast.  While doing my work experience in a shop I wasn’t allowed to actually serve customers (is that not a key bit of experience in retail?) and I don’t really think I gained any skills from my work experience. The only thing I gained was not being in the house and a grain of social interaction.

So do I think it’s slave labour?  I don’t think it’s slave labour but I do think things need to be changed to make it fair – like maybe the option of quitting the work experience without them stopping your benefits, and possibly less hours 40hrs seems excessive to me just for work experience. (and of course it would have been nice to get a little money from it even if it was just a £5 extra.) But it was a voluntary thing I signed up to do… it just would have been nice to also have the option to leave.