| Home | Profile | Gallery | Archives | Friends | ||||||||||
A little adventure at the employment office
First of all, I would like to start off with something compleeeeetely off the subject: I managed to set up the wireless connection. YES! Finally. It only took what..? Four.. five years? Don't think me completely inept, please. In the last two years, for example, I set up four working wireless connections, all of them well under half an hour. So the fact that this one blasted thing took this long was extremely frustrating for me. It was partially because I wasn't 'home' much for four years, having studied away from home at that time, but mostly because the adsl connection is so damn weird and the company didn't give anywhere near proper instructions for how to set it up on their strange connection. I won't go into details - I'd bore even myself. ANYWAY... I had a little adventure today. I went to the employment office again. I'm starting to feel like a regular there! My mother woke me up sometime after seven and while she pranced about getting ready for work, I strutted around naked and watched kids' tv while eating toast with ham and melted cheese on top. Then I threw some clothes on and meandered all the way down to the other bus stop. Some guy about my height with the same earthy green colored clothing showed up. He also wore glasses, and made up for the lack of messy hair by having dreadlocks. So we sat down, put-putted along, and then I realized he got off at the same bus stop too. Well, nothing weird there. It's a pretty popular place. At a leisurely pace I started making my way to the office. Everyone else rushed by.. except.. the dreadlock guy of course. I wondered if he too was a freshly graduated unemployed student but almost felt disappointed when I no longer heard his footsteps tagging behind me. I grabbed another edition of the Metro subway newspaper, which was more boring than usual, and sat down on the stairs to wait for the office to open. For some reason they are very very slow there. Today there was So the slightly annoyed but polite mob trudges into the office, everyone asks their questions of the one available information desk person (the others were either on the phone or hiding behind the corner). The dreadlock guy asks where room 310 is. I realize I'm in room 311. We go upstairs. Our interviewers are in the offices next to each other. My interviewer seems to be a very determined, positive person. She doesn't shake my hand, which disappoints me slightly, but I try not to let it show. So anyway, she starts talking at me, asking me a few questions every now and then, feeding me lots of useful information and backing up every fact with a sheet or a bundle of paper. I find myself concentrating very hard to pay attention, but I think I phased out for about five minutes. I start to feel hopeful about actually finding a job or a course or some sort of support, but am brought down by her passing suggestion that perhaps I should educate myself in some other more employable area, and that she can't seem to find any employment offers in my particular area. (I'm officially an 'illustrator' now, you see...) But she gives the great suggestion of doing some practice for a company to gain some experience. The employment office pays the company for taking me under their wing, and then the government pays me for making the effort. In the end, I might actually get a real job from them. I can't wait. I walk out of the office with 1.2 kg of papers! (Yes! I actually weighed them!) Anyway, interview over, she shows me where to find some more papers answering the few questions I had, and then she leaves. She still doesn't shake my hand. I copy down a few facts and start heading back to the bus stop, mildly convinced that the dreadlock guy has probably gone home by now. But no, there he is, waiting. This time I position myself behind him and wait for the bus, wondering if he'll be surprised or not when he notices me there. I resist the urge to ask him, "So, how did it go?? Were you nervous too? What funny job title did they give you?" and we squidge onto the bus. I choose the bench on the other side of the aisle of him and look outside the window, pretending to be a typical Finnish person who has absolutely no curiosity about her fellow passengers. We arrive at our bus stop, hop off, and start to walk home... Funnily enough, we start to walk in the same direction. Again, I quell the rebellious urge to talk to him and instead enjoy the soft footsteps behind me, comfortable in the fact that I am not alone with my struggles. I am not unique. 12:46 - 13.9.2006 - post comment
|
Welcome!DescriptionEclectic blog about art, books, computer things, crafts, and whatever comes into the mind of an Ann-Mi.  DashboardManager Add Blog Post Manage Categories Edit Template Choose New Template Recent Entries- Repetition - All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. - Bowser's Minions - Springfield gets a Mapple shop. - Parrot dances to “Another One Bites the Dust” CategoriesArtBabble Crafts Games IT stuff Links News Photos Recipe Sketches LinksAnn-Mi's ArtThe Tech Report The ADnD Netbook of Sex |
|||||||||
| Designed by me! | ||||||||||
RSS feed
Post Comment