Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Just got back from quite a long day out, poking about Ealing. We have narrowed down the choices of houses somewhat, by which I mean, I know there are definitely 2 houses in Ealing which we won’t be moving into. That could be considered quite a significant reduction (if you are a blinkered and insane individual –ed.)

The first we saw was quite cool, it had a huge lving room/dining room/kitchen area, and a garage, and 2 decent double rooms. The problem was that the small rooms were damn small. Like, uselessly so. No-one could reasonably be expected to live in the larger of the two smaller rooms, and it was an expensive house, so we had to pass it up.

While in the Agency, we had seen another house. We eventually go to visit it, about 5 in the afternoon, but it stank quite badly of mould inside, which is never a good start. This time, the biggest double room was huge. Utterly cavernous. You could’ve probably fit St. Paul’s Cathedral inside it. The other two bedrooms were both adequate, but again, the smallest room was uninhabitably tiny. Oh, and the “living Room” area was pretty much just a sofa propped up next to the kitchen.

It’s quite frustrating, having to find a decent comprimised between the various aspects of a house. What we’re looking for is 4 adequately sized rooms, all of similar dimensions, and then we can work from that. As it is, we seem to be getting houses designed for 2 parents, a teenager and his baby sister, which leaves one room far too small for Al, who would be in the smaller room.

So anyway, the plan is to go back on Tuesday and figure that one out…

Something we can’t figure out, however, is getting a job. I nkow that Job agencies must emplo some people, simply by virtue of the fact that they exist, but I can’t fathom how we can go into so many job agencies and be flat out rejected by them. Ian and I had planned to spend an hour or so investigating the agencies and signing up, in about 15 minutes were done, having been turned away. They want 9 months experience, they aren’t taking people on, they think you’d be better off looking at the website. Just what do these peopel do all day? The first one we went to didn’t even have any employees visible, and eventually one strolled out of the back and dealt with us in an annoye manner, as if we had perhaps interruped her hanging around not doing any work time. At one point, someone suggested we go to specific graduate recruitment agencies. WELL DUH. COULD YOU PLEASE LET US KNOW IF ANY EXIST? Gah. I would very much like to find such agencies, but it seems nigh-impossible.

The short of it is, I’ll be sticking to applying directly to companies and/or through online agencies. I did find 2 excellent jobs to apply for, which pretty much asked for my exact skillset. PHP, XHTML, it was so good, I sent the application mere minutes after finding the job. It’s almost too good to be true, which suggests I won’t hear jack shit back from them.

And, speaking of rejection, I did finally get that confirmation of failure from SPG. Ah well, better late than never, I admit.

I’m trying to figure out if the day was wasted, really. On one hand, we developed a sense of what we didn’t want and how to go about things in the future. Unfortunately, we didn’t make what you could describe as “forward momentum” with the house or jobs. We’re still more or less in square one, homeless, jobless, but now with a better idea of what shape the next step will looklike, perhaps.