How to whip up a frothy frog nest

Another week.  I apologise unreservedly for the lack of updates here recently and the lack of comments on sll my favourite must-reads -- I don't often get the chance to read or post from work, and by the end of the day I rarely want to spend more time at the computer.  Rest assured, I am still around and grabbing my reading while i can.

So, what's new?  Work continues to suck and blow in equal measure.  I am hitting somewhere around 50% of my sales targets currently, and while I have days of lucidity where it will occur to me that if I work really, really hard then there is almost no limit to my earning potential, I quickly get disillusioned and would rather do something I enjoy for a decent wage.  But hey, at least I have a job -- that's a step in the right direction.  I recently interviewed elsewhere for a marketing role, and though I got on famously with the interviewer who was very senior in the company, their client didn't want to meet me and that was the end of it.  I am choosing to think this was maybe a blessing in disguise, since the location was horrible.

Speaking of locations, the girl and I have been looking online for places to live in London.  Reluctantly, we are having to admit that Greenwich in all its bohemian and center-of-the-earth wonder isn't going to happen, and that we can get more bang for our buck elsewhere.  Somewhere with easy access to rock climbing as well as central London and road links to where my parents live are all top of the list -- and with reasonable property prices, it is Canary Wharf that is looking the most attractive.

I feel bad, though.  I'm not particularly great at my job, and so my earnings are still quite low, and in turn this is causing us problems in finding somewhere in London -- the girl doesn't make bad money, but my half isn't quite measuring up; so sometimes I feel like I'm holding us both back.  All isn't lost though.  It's a quiet period in business almost everywhere so I can reasonably expect things to pick up there, and to get better at my job -- I can only get better at my job, right?  Not least because we are being sent on a sales training course.

Sometimes in ym work I feel like I have a toolbox, filled with various useful things, and yet all I am using out of it most of the time is one screwdriver.

In other news, my beginner's climbing course is complete, so once I have taken an official safety test I will be free to climb without an instructor.  I joined a rock climbing group on Meetup.com, but it seems their preferred venues at the moment are London's biggest and most popular indoor climbing centres.  I might just try and find people to climb with at the wall where I've been going -- it's quieter, though obviously much smaller, but also open to the air.  In time, once I've got the practice and gradually bought some equipment, I'll start finding outdoor excursions -- but one step at a time.

Maybe that idea isn't so unlike work?

And on an entirely unrelated option, I was thinking to myself early Facebook needs a "hell no" option as a response.  "Do you want to be friends with this person?" Let's see, you never liked them when you were at school together and that was something like 15 years ago -- this isn't just a "yes" or "no" decision, it's a "hell no".  Do you want to join the group for a Big Brother Reunion in Australia?  Hell, no.  So let me ask you -- what options would you like to see?  Or maybe you would like to make the real world more like social networking, making it easier to hide or ignore people who annoy you, or just maybe you would like to live in the Ukraine with an adopted penguin, as I have been wondering this week?  I encourage everyone to read Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, one of the most darkly brilliant books I have read in a while.

When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails

...Or so I'm told. But what does that mean, exactly? Right now, it feels a lot like my job hunt.

I had the opportunity to meet a renowned Marketing writer/blogger last week, grabbing the chance to meet him while he was in London for a couple of days. Unfortunately, however much I think he and his blog are awesome, I can't link to it in this post as if he followed the traffic back here I don't think he'd dig my tales of girls and boys and marsupials, nor the old Serial Killer Sunday posts.

Anyway, I'd filled him in on where I am professionally -- some good experience but now "between jobs" and asked for his advice on how better to market myself, and get that awesome job with it. As part of my ongoing personal development, I have also set some objectives for myself -- working towards them involves in part asking people I admire how they got to be where they are.

It seems that there are two ways I can approach looking for work. The marketer summarised my position quite well, when you're out of work for a while you start casting your net wider and applying for jobs you could do, and maybe even do well, but aren't necessarily what you really want. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. The other approach is to hold out for what you really want, and accept no compromise. He suggested volunteering to work without pay for somewhere awesome, so long as I would be doing real work and not stuffing envelopes.

He has also stressed that I should be writing -- by way of submitting guest posts to relevant blogs, or writing a blog of my own. I tried setting up a new blog the other day just for writings on the PR/marketing industry, but I fell at the first hurdle -- I couldn't come up with a good name for it that wasn't already taken.

This week I have two interviews coming up: a second interview for a job as a sales and marketing exec, that seems to have little marketing to it that isn't actually sales, and a communications role that would be a significant promotion from where I was before. I was informally interviewed on the phone the other day for another sales position -- although it was described as management trainee or something, I think that was just clever marketing on the part of the job ad. It seemed to go well, I was told some of my answers were good, and that I'd here more if I was to be invited for the two-day selection process this week. I didn't hear anything more.

The trouble is, sometimes it seems like applying for jobs that aren't what I really want but I could probably do is treating all problems as nails. Do I actually want to work in sales? Would I be any good at it? And come to that, when did what I do for a living become so damned all-important anyway? It does not define me as a person, and should not be what my life is about. But it's easy to say that when you actually have a job -- getting one first is key, the rest comes afterwards.

A couple of my friends have turned to teaching. One of them has had several other careers to date, including being a police officer, a lorry driver, a petrol station attendant and a media sales executive. Will teaching finally be what they are looking for? The other friend has been treading water for the last few years, not really knowing what they wanted. I can more readily see them staying in teaching. They have suggested it to me as a career path, too, but I'd only take them seriously if they had already been doing it for several years -- but like social work which has also been suggested, I really don't see it being for me.

Finally, a friend posted this video on my Facebook the other day. It made me laugh, but I'm not sure what they were trying to tell me...

Courier for the day

With no sponsorship licence in sight for her this week, the girl's company suggested she become self employed and work for them freelance from Australia. It wasn't a great solution, but the girl needed the income, and so I got in touch with some people from her office about taking them her work laptop. The idea was that they could then get it sent to Australia by courier.

And so it was on a grey and rainy London afternoon I set off in my best suit, with my portfolio and the girl's laptop, to an appointment I had in the city.

I was already tight for time, the meeting had been set up at the last minute and I'd had time only to get home and change my clothes in a Superman-style whirlwind to catch a train. A train that as I waited at the station was getting further delayed every few minutes. Periodically, freight trains would come storming straight through the station, but my train was delayed without explanation -- and I had to get to the gleaming towers of Docklands.

While I was waiting I got a text from the girl asking me very nicely to call her. I didn't have our spare mobile with the cheap overseas calls, but something about the message told me it was important. The girl got to the point quickly -- it might not be necessary for me to take the laptop to her work after all, since their licence had finally arrived.

This means that after advertising her job for a couple of weeks, the girl will be able to apply for her visa and get all her biometric data recorded, as well as a GPS tracking chip embedded under her skin, as I am sure is now standard procedure in a surveillance society such as ours.

Thanks to the joys of internet access on my phone I was able to buy a little time before my appointment so I didn't turn up breathless and rushed, so that went well. I wasn't expected at the girl's offices any particular time, and I think I shared the lift with her Swiss colleague. I was curious to meet some of the people I had heard so much about, and the few I had emailed, but I got no further than the receptionist. I handed over the laptop, and was off again.

Soon now, the girl will be returning, and I am already mentally making plans for fun tings to do -- I won't talk about any of my ideas here and now, but if there was one thing my visit Down Under showed me it is that surely nowhere in England is beyond reasonable driving distance.

Macaroni art

I will return to my regularly-scheduled "Inca Trail" scribblings after this brief segue.

Things have been tough for the girl and I in recent months.

Losing my job to redundancy in July was unfortunate, but I immediately started claiming "job seeker's allowance" to try and keep the wolves from the door when it came to rent and bills. The fight to get housing benefit out of the local council has sometimes felt like an uphill struggle, however -- particularly when we were told the girl earned too much for us to claim benefits.

The girl had to return home to Western Australia several days earlier than she had planned, missing out on a trip to Paris with her Mum, when her grandfather died. Even at that time, we hoped that her work visa would come through in no time, and it would only be a short time before the girl would return to merry old England.

We hoped the setbacks would only be very temporary, but it's October and I haven't yet found gainful employment, and the girl's company still don't have their licence to sponsor her, so she is in unpaid limbo on the other side of the world.

Next month we don't know if we will be able to pay the rent. I have already borrowed sums of money from my parents to help make ends meet in previous months, but we are now getting the housing benefits we were previously denied so I hope to be able to hold the fort a little while longer.

On the positive side, the logic would follow that every day that passes without the girl hearing news on her company's licence we must also be one day closer to her joyful return. I also have some promising leads on jobs that I am interviewing for.

I don't spend a lot of time in the house I share with the girl now that she's not here. It makes sense to visit my parents more and take advantage of their hospitality to keep the running costs of our house down, but most of all it doesn't much feel like "our" house when I'm there alone.

I won't lie, emotionally I've had a bad time since I lost my job. Never having been the most stable of people in the past, losing the security and income of a job I (mostly) enjoyed set me adrift a little.

In a dramatic break with tradition, however, things have taken a turn for the better there -- and it might even seem in years to come that being made redundant was a good thing to happen. For a start, if you're out of work you can access government-funded training. And I'm not talking about basic maths or literacy, but more or less anything you want.

Granted, I am still trying to get someone to commit to the details, but in theory at least there are options open to me if I want to learn things like digital marketing, graphic design, web design because it will make me more employable -- those three could all help me make a move into roles like web content editor.

Not directly related to work, but sort of related to government funding, I have been in therapy, which was probably overdue. I think because of the recession, money has been freed up for what is being called "talk therapy", a combination of counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy. While it hasn't exactly set my world ablaze, it has helped me to recognise and address some errors in my thinking. Which neatly leads me onto the next point.

Personal Development. A local college is currently a 10 week personal development course for people a bit like me -- it's not solely for those out of work, but being held twice a week on weekdays probably means it's not very accessible for anyone in fulltime employment. The course is led by a certified Psychotherapist who also makes a decent living in areas like Hypnotherapy, as well as coaching and training.

It's all making for a good combination -- the course provides me with something to do other than look for work, I can tell employers about it when I go for interviews, and it is giving me useful tools for managing my own thoughts and behaviour. Mixing that with my cognitive behavioural therapy I have recently learned to treat myself better and be more objective, feel more positive, and have identified some goals and objectives. I won't go into details of the techniques I have learned today, but it's enough that it is doing me some good.

I visited the girl for a few weeks in August and September, which should have been longer if only we'd known there was not going to be work waiting for me on my return, and no firm return date for the girl in sight. But that's how these things go. I will be blogging about those adventures -- under the title of "Tales of Girls, Boys and Marsupials" (something I have considered renaming my blog on occasion) -- when I have exhausted my "I trekked Peru, yo" posts.

We aren't too clear where we go from here right now, except that today is one day closer to the girl's return and another day closer to finding a new, incredibly awesome job for me. And people will probably be getting macaroni pictures as Christmas presents this year.