girl versus unemployment

Image: hellogiggles.com

Have you ever woken up at 1pm only to curse at your misfortune for having just missed Ellen? Looked up from page 229 of your Tumblr dashboard to marvel at Judge Judy’s limitless sass? Zoned out in front of Ready Steady Cook to think wistfully of the routine and order semester will bring when it recommences? Is daytime television programming your sundial and toast your (literal) bread and butter? If you answered ‘no’, you probably have a job.

First, I need to clear something up: I do have a job. The downside of this is that my job employs me one day a week and I earn something like $20 more than rent. So I’m not quite unemployed, but I certainly spent 6/7 days of my summer holidays beached on the couch like a whale, the television and the internet my only connections with the outside world. I was not resigned to this life of apathy; I trawled Seek with a kind of avid desperation only previously employed while combing the racks at Savers for a party outfit. Like Savers, most of the jobs fit bad and smelt funny, but in my needy situation I applied for them anyway.

I applied for admin jobs, retail jobs, an overnight shift at a convenience store near the casino, fast food jobs that came with hats. I signed up with a temping agency who twice offered me jobs ‘with no end date’ and twice called me the day before I was due to start to inform me that their client had ‘hired someone internally’. I was invited to a couple of interviews, and despaired over what to wear because in order to afford a corporate wardrobe I kind of needed a corporate job. I attended in the ratty black pencil skirt I bought when I first got an admin job in 2006 and cinched me in so tightly at the waist that my voice was an octave higher (perhaps that’s why the interviewers all thought I was “peppy”). Finally, I interviewed for a part-time receptionist role with a podiatrist who was obviously my soul mate because she made a cat pun. I knew I was experienced and qualified for the job and during the interview she put down her list of questions and told me up-front that I was her favourite candidate, but she’d have to think about it: I’d let slip I was moving interstate to study my Masters at the end of the year, and she said she needed longevity. When she called and said she’d hired someone else, I wasn’t surprised.

So I returned to the couch. I absentmindedly switched tabs between Seek and Facebook, both of which were now just vague representations of a world I was excluded from: a world in which all my friends were either at work or out spending the money they had earned at work.

Nothing breeds loneliness quite like poverty. There are only so many times you can turn down an invitation to dinner/drinks/gig/other because you don’t have enough money before one of two things happens:

1. Your friend offers to pay for you and you feel pressured to decline out of guilt that they already paid for you the last 400 times; or
2. Your friend stops inviting you to things that aren’t free.

I don’t blame them. A lot of my friends started this year with real career jobs and four-figure weekly paycheques. As a perpetual undergraduate, I just can’t keep up with their baller lifestyles. I can’t afford dinners that require table bookings or drinks that end up with us sharing a bottle of Moët and a platter of unicorn-liver pate. Let’s be real: I can’t afford dinners that don’t have a drive-through option or drinks that aren’t from a brown paper bag.

The upshot of all this? I’m still looking for a job. I’m lucky that my friends are as generous as they are quippy and attractive and that they are quite happy with a six-pack and some Coles hummus on a back porch. And now that I’m back at uni my days are no longer spent spooning the remote control. Unemployment is shitty and looking for work is hard but hey – at least I have Judge Judy.