I've not been at work this week. The job requires me to come in and pick up the slack on a 'when needed' basis, and they've run out of things for me to do. So I'm supposed to be proper-job-hunting and sending off applications - something I've not had the energy to do when I have been working because, after all, the process is a 'full-time job' in terms of effort and time. This may be true. It's just that there's not a great deal of job satisfaction.

The thing is this: no-one is looking for anyone with my particular qualifications, experience, and me-ness. Furthermore, on the past occasions when by some happy cosmic coincidence my credentials and job preferences have matched a job on offer, they just don't want me: either at the general first stages of not being picked from a towering pile of applications at random, or at the later, more specific and more personal stages of 'there was a better person on the day of interview', which is a priviledge extended to me only twice in over a hundred sundry applications.

Knowing that this demoralisation is the reality for graduates everywhere is... well, there's certainly a feeling of solidarity somewhere, but in substantive terms it doesn't really cheer me up that much. Add to this malaise the worry that The World is, for want of a better phrase, in the process of launching its rubber dingy off a pier into a mucky brown creek and has fecklessly chucked the oar overboard (shortly to be followed by common sense, human decency, lessons learned from history and various other oxymorons)...

Well, it's a bit of a downer. At these times, it pays to look over the edge into the void and ask the question: would I be better off there? As long as the answer is still "no", or for preference "not bloody likely", one can probably afford to cheer up a bit.

It also helps to know the name of the void. In my case, it is called Clapham...( (Rantage continues) )