Unemployed vacuum...

It has been so long since my cell phone rang - I actually forgot which ring tone I had switched on. This due to the fact that the only ones who should be calling are future employers - during the day, friends and family use the landline (seeing as they know I am home, being an unemployable loser) - and at night, my cellphone is on vibrate. Get your mind out of the gutter right now, I do not want the phone to ring when I am eating a romantic take-out with my husband.

So - in bringing everyone up to speed: I quit my going-no-where, NLP-cult-boss, deranged company structured job as a complaints handler. I liked the job for a long while - then my boss came back from maternity leave with aaall new ideas - including plastering the cubicle with NLP learnings... "You don't see the world for what it is, you only see your own model of it." Ahaa. Apparently, as far as my boss was concerned, the model my coworkers and I had been living in up until that point, was faulty. "Show respect for other peoples' model of the world" was apparently boss-NLP for 'now do like I say'. Being in a complaints department means that one develops a some-what significant bullshit detector - not to mention, an severe rash-inducing allergy to being lied to. Whereas we had previously been ruling the department with impunity, my boss now decided that the customer was very much almost always right, and since "A person is not his or her behaviour" it did not really matter how much they lied to us. I managed to put up with it for 4 months - then my boss upped the ante. She decided that we spent too much time in dialogue with our customers, and in order to shorten the average handling time, we had to call each and everyone of them, instead of responding in writing. Now, occasionally, we received email or letters that were so deranged, demeaning or diluted, that we did not want to speak to these people, which was a call we were allowed to make based on our own judgment. That was now revoked. My day became filled with hateful exchanges and the word 'no'. So I quit. Yes, that is right, I am a quitter. Trust me when I write - the alternative I was looking at was worse.

I have never been unemployed before. I do not like it. I cry-on-the-couch-cannot-get-out-of-bed-my-life-is-an-empty-void do not like it. I LIKE working! I am GOOD at it! I am ridiculously loyal - as when I stayed in the above mentioned company for 2,5 years - and I love learning new things and meeting new people. Where I fall short is apparently in writing applications. It has now been a month, and I have applied for a countless number of positions - and I have not gotten a single interview. I have a freakin' MA! I can answer a phone, turn on a computer, have figured out the intricacies of the Office-package, I am willing and able, flexible and competent, and I want to work!

But alas, all I hear is 'no'. I don't like 'no'. 'No' upsets me - maybe because I am an only child, who was used to be able to negotiate a 'yes' if my logic was sound. Maybe that is not why at all - my MA is in English and Rhetoric, not Psychology.

Turns out, my cell phone ring tone is 'The Bare Necessities' from 'The Jungle Book' . Poignant. In a stupid way. No, no potential employer called - it was a telemarketer. Of course it was.