Diary of an up and coming sociopath

A planned trip to the job centre today turned out about as well as yesterday’s dinner. While in previous years, going to a job centre might involve the classic activities of say, “talking to people” and “finding a job” today’s modern job centres streamline the entire process. Upon entering today, we were told by the bitter and apathetic clerk to essentially, go away and phone them up. If this seemed like too much effort, we were invited to use the phones there to phone them. As near as I can understand, this is a government initiative to get the unemployed out of job centres and back into their homes where they can get out of the way. The job centre is now essentialyl a really large telephone box. It’s quite annoying because the reason I hadn’t already phoned them up was because I waned to go in person, and now I’m discovering that it was a total waste of time to expect to speak with someone who could help me face to face. Great.

This leaves me no closer to getting a job, of course, and given that their website hasn’t had any new jobs in the area for weeks, I can probably assume that the issue of “Recruit” we got in the job centre is the best bet for some speedy data entry work.

It’s not all bad news, though. Today our ADSL line was activated, which means we’re well on track for when our ISP account gets activated. I also received a letter from Argos, in which they requested that I phone them about my order to confirm my address and postcode. Quite how it works that they send me a letter to confirm the address they sent the letter to, I honestly don’t know. Presumably if I don’t phone them up, they’d assume the address was not correct, or something. Anyway, having confirmed my address, they let me know the bed would be arriving on Thursday afternoon. That’s a fast delivery time and I’m quite looking forward to it.

While in town, Ian won some money in a gambling machine-based arcade, lieterally tripling his £1 investment, and he bought the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen DVD, a film which really doesn’t beg for repeated watching. I think twice this decade is enough. Yesterday with dinner we watched the pilot of “lost” which seems like it’ll turn out to be quite good. It’s mildly annoying that all the decent TV programs I’m waiting for seem to be starting some time next year, and this season I’m being left with Enterprise, Joey, and the Simpsons, all of which are thoroughly mediocre. Hence having a look at Lost, really. American TV seems to have more scope for the decent original action/sci-fi programmes I enjoy, even if there is a huge olume of reality shite like UK TV. I barely even watch TV anymore, though I am still mildly annoyed that I can only get BBC1, ITV and Channel 5 to tune into my TV Card ’round these parts. I don’t think I’ll want to watch them often, but when I do it’ll change form a mild annoyance to a large annoyance. At least I’ll still be able to get Jonothan Ross, though.