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New job, new house, new friends, new enemies

Well, the new job has started and I’ve now moved to Cheltenham and alot of the people I’ve met here have been not unfriendly just very cold shoulder-ish. Cheltenham so far is pretty shit, the only thing it has going for it is that it’s kind of pretty (think Bath or Edinburgh) but it’s full of people with a chip on their shoulder about living in Cheltenham.

I don’t live in the nice parts of Cheltenham (mind you, after having gone for a short drive around the other day I can confirm that I don’t live in the worst part either.) I’ve got a houseshare next to the airport and close to GCHQ. Which is good and bad really, if GCHQ ever find anything incriminating on me then I can quickly fly away.

The job is not really a job. It’s meant to be some sort of learning experiance. So I’m supposed to follow people around for two years and learn how to do their job so that the company can sack them and replace them with me whom they pay far less. There’s also a hell of a lot of courses to attend. TO put into perspective just how many courses there are I officially moved in on 5th September and since then I’ve only been in Cheltenham four weeks. Not whole weeks either that’s most of a week. Otherwise I’m on a course or training. I’ve been into Cheltenham itself three times and I try to avoid it becasue the traffic is pretty terrible and I haven’t figured out where I can park for less than 4 quid. I’m about to spend the next five weeks on further training, then two weeks holiday for xmas then I have four more weeks of training.

Amongst this training I’m supposed to stay in touch with my line manager and the guy my line manager has assigned me too…and the guy that guy assigned me too but I can’t access my email outside the office as I’m in a special branch of the company that behaves very differently.

Enough moaning. The perks. I get paid every month a pretty good wage. Not ever being at home kind of saves me money. It’s in a roundabout way however as I get my expenses paid back to me so I havn’t seen the saving of eating in hotels all the time yet but I’m sure it will come. I get free gym membership so hopefully I won’t be fat for too long…although hotel food for weeks on end is probably going to counter act that. Other perks…nope that’s it.

I need to buy a chair for my room though as I’m on my knees at this desk the landlord supplied. I could write a book about the faults of the landlord. But I’ll stop here as my knees hurt and I’m going to attempt to learn some german before bed. I’m hoping maybe lightning will strike the cd player then strike my head resulting in that old cliche of (yup, you guessed it,) severely damaging body and psyche meaning I can have tomorrow off work to recuperate.

Fun fact: If you get struck by lightning, there is a 95% chance of you going deaf. I never checked that fact I find it makes them less fun.

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Bill Hicks had it right, he was just an under-achiever

Been watching, reading, listening to a lot of Bill Hicks and George Carlin lately. It’s making me more anarchistic than usual, but I was reminded today of something Bill Hicks famously ranted at a heckler at one of his gigs. For the curious amongst you it can be found on youtube, just search for Bill Hicks Hitler had it right rant.

Essentially Bill is heckled unimaginatively and goes off the deep end (I’m not sure if he was under the influence of anything during this gig, he was generally more tetchy during his period of non smoking), he screams about how whenever someone tries to do something the peon masses rise up and drag them down. He then proclaims Hitler had the right idea, but he should’ve killed everyone.

And it’s horrible to admit but he’s right. Humanity appears it’s own worst enemy. What’s recently brough this on is further aggravation from neighbours. When we were building a new roof, the neighbors complained to the council. It didn’t block out their light, some of the comlaints were from five houses down. When we built an annex in the garden, properly put through planning and under building regs the neighbors complained and then later said it was built above regulation height. None of this was true but its the hassle that comes with it. The council send people round to investigate and then they have to verify everything to sastisfy the complaint. And what I find annoying is the annonymity of these complaints, regardless of how many incorrect accusations someone makes their identity is kept secret. And I’m sure they have every right to that annonymity. But if I find out who is it I feel I have every right to beat the living shit out of them for the hassle they cause.

My uncle was building a garage, again with planning permission and again under proper building regulations and a neighbor complained, said he was erecting an illegally constructed building larger than building regs allow. The remarkable thing here is that my uncle’s nearest neighbor lives half a mile away and was spying on my uncle with binoculars.

Today I don’t feel so good and I despair at the human race. It’s amazing how much I love people and being around them and yet can’t stand the species to which they belong.

Ho hum. Those of you who haven’t heard the good words of Bill Hicks should look him up. He may not be your cup of tea but you don’t know if you don’t try. He was an american comedian who died at 32 from pancreatic cancer in the nineties (1994 I think). He was strictly anti authoritarian but he was very cynical of the US government, he was pro smoking (although he did attempt to quit), pro drugs, he was into his conspiracy theories and above all he was incredibly funny. I would suggest listening to ‘Rant in E minor’ a collection of his best bits. It’s on youtube just search for it and remember to put ‘part 1′ in your search so you don’t just get an excerpt.

The election race has started in the UK now and I’ve been lead to believe that if a hung parliment comes about then Her Majesty is going to make the country suffer another election until a majority winner comes about. I am actually looking forward to going to the polling station this year. I’ve never voted before and I’m not going to this time, I’m merely going to the station so that I can say I made an effort not to vote as I get pissed off with people quoting old government slogans at me ‘if you don’t vote you don’t have a say’. This is bullshit, everyone has a say, every racist, bigot, nazi, sheep, Eastenders viewer, child, criminal, beatnik, normal person has a say. Voting is just a way to force the population to view the world in black and white. Do you agree with the left or the right? There’s no compromise available. I don’t vote becasue I don’t agree with the system so I refuse to partake, however now I have to partake in order to not partake so the next time someone says my opinion is invalid I can cram the words back down thier throat and hope they choke to death as I explain I did everything they did on voting day and I thought outside the box, and I was content with that because I understand the difference it will actually make. I won’t go into my opinions any further, at least not in this post but I dare say election fever will grip me in some way.

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You said it Seasick Steve, I am happy to have a job.

Well I got a job. I will be joining the the npower team in September. I was holding out to go to an interview with another company called J+S. That would have been working on sonar systems which has been my dream job for a few years now but I turned it down as I figured I’m just going to be an automoton paying taxes and watching televsion like everyone else so I may as well earn more money while doing it.

I know that sounds stupid but the work with sonar wasn’t precisley what I wanted and my ideal job doesn’t exist, it’s an idea born from too many movies and books. Me, eventually on a ship working sonar systems would lead to an awful lot of seasickness, an inability to scuba dive as it would hurt my ears and pretty much every piece of electronics I touch f*cking up as per usual. Also I figure your interests probably shouldn’t be your work. Maybe then it wouldn’t be interesting anymore. I’m sure I’ll be happy enough living for the weekends, watching ‘x-factor’ or those ‘strictly come’ programmes in the evenings…

Fuck that. Punk doesn’t die and it doesn’t use * shapes to represent letters in swear words for fuck sake. What difference does that make to a word. We all fill it in and those who don’t know the word (children for instance) just curious about it and ask or try to figure it out because that what we’re supposed to do. We figure stuff out. Our minds go at puzzles like cat to catnip. That’s why we’re the top species, we’ve got mad problem solving skills. And if we all know what the word is, why hide it? And what’s wrong with a word? The word isn’t offensive, the context is offensive. I could call you a gentlemen but if I inflect it the right way I may as well have called you a cunt. It’s all about context, for every word. Words only get scrutinised by lawyers and barristers and that sort in courts when it comes down to accountability. For some reason those people don’t possess common sense. Common sense does not exist in a court room (Holy books do exist though, how curious), what counts is words. Meaning doesn’t come into it. Courts look at words and wordings and definitions to decide if a law has been broken. And the better a person is at interpreting words or the more creative they are at interpreting words then the better soliciotors they become. They’re able to bend the words and twist the law. The actual event becomes irrelevant. Take disabled parking spaces for instance. It is irrelevant whether or not a person using a car parked in a disabled space is disabled. All that matters is the presence of a licenced blue badge. The only cars allowed to park in those spaces are cars with that badge. You can be as able or unable bodied as you like but you can’t park there without a blue badge.

Well only disabled people are allowed blue badges! you cry. Yeah, well, where does a disabled person park when their going to the office to pick up their blue badge? What happens to the car with the blue badge when a  non disabled friend needs to borrow their car?

The law is very maleable and needs a much more common sense point of view applied to it. But then the current system does make sense. People with money make the rules and the rules say that people with money have a better chance of getting away with things.

That makes perfect sense to me.

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Missing posts

These are old posts that were removed in case they jeopardised my job search. As I now have a job I feel I can safely voice my opinion again. I do feel a little less manly for not having them up for the duration. Because at the end of the day ‘f*ck what other people think!’, right? But I really needed a job. Cash buys toys for enjoyment and really that’s all that matters.

Who do you know?

There’s no real topic for this one. More of an update on my job situation. My father, with only good intentions, called my cousin and asked him to get me a job. He works at npower and the deadline had already been and gone for their graduate recruitment. It now seems they’re tripping over themselves to get me a job. My cousin is a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory it would appear. I then got a call a week later saying they had found something in their nuclear sector but now I have to fill out the application form and do all the tests and what not.

So I now have to take time out from my other job applications to apply to this one.  So after struggling with the question ‘why do you want to work for npower?’ for about four hours and writing five different answers I finally got the form submitted. The next day (today) I get invited to take their online test. Now I have come to the conclusion that I do not test well at all as I have failed every other job application just after the test phase.

npower’s test was the toughest to date. I thought BP’s was hard but it was just difficult to do within the time period. GCHQ’s was quite a  doodle but I must have f**ked up somewhere. This one I couldn’t finish. I completed 15 of the 20 questions before running out of time. I just could not do the last few in the time and I got thought 22. Where all you can think about is thinking about how your not thinking about what you should be thinking about and then you begin to think about that. It’s a very tautological thought.

So I was surprised when I recieved a phone call from someone telling me I had done very well on the test and now made it through to the telephone interview stage. I know I didn’t do well, I couldn’t have got more than 75% and surely other people who applied must’ve done better than that. So I’m curious as to how far this whole ‘who I know, not what I know’ is going to stretch. And do I really want it to.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘who you know’ system but then I am to a certain extent. If you cruise through life completely based on this system then I’m against it. But if you had to make that first step to get to know someone then I’m all for it. I’m not too keen on my npower situation, but I’ll go through with it (because I’m British and it would be rude not to) and because I really could do with the money. If you had to do something to get to know that person then I’m for it, you’re still putting leg work in. For instance the media world runs entirely on who people know. You work for sweet FA for people and get to know them, then they give you a break (hopefully). I’m pretty sure I could swan into a materials PhD at Imperial because I personally know the supervisor after befriending him at some other point in life, I wouldn’t feel bad about that.

This whole npower thing, to me, just feels like we’re all lying to each other. Still money is a nice thing and maybe I’ll get another job between times. I’m going to watch ‘The girl with the dragon tattoo’ tonight so that should be fun. Expect a review tomorrow night possibly on Curved Horizon. I’ll add a link to my blogroll. Don’t think I’ll do one for Alice in Wonderland, I’ll just sum up with the character design is fantastic and genius but the film isn’t too great.

March into March

Week 30 something of unemployment now. I am starting to scrape the barrel with ideas of what to do. After inspecting the contents under my nails to see what the scraping has yielded I have cycled through busking (with mad juggling skills), stand up comedy, freelance writing (a process four google searches has failed to explain), graffiti artist and media runner (a job hard to get paid for). Maybe I should try actually applying for a job as opposed to browsing adverts.

I am kidding, I have applied to several, nay many, jobs. I have actually lost count. It’s not a vast number compared to, say, the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, but still it’s got to be more than, like, ten by now. I’m finding the main problem is that everyone hiring wants incredibly experianced people. No one is willing to train me. And those that are willing to train graduates don’t want physics graduates unless they have an awful lot of latent talent in computing or engineering. I’m pretty terrible at online testing which doesn’t help. I can do applications forms and interviews. I can string together sentences, phrases and key words that flow like smooth honey produced by bees that have spent their lives listening to and perfecting smooth jazz and eloquent peotry. This skill is also called blagging and it only gets you so far before someone wants to see some physically useful skill.

Maybe I could be a con-artist (or confidence trickster as the politically correct would say (either way you’re just as mugged; what’s in a name?)).

I got a subscription to the National Geographic at christmas and it’s finally started showing up. I’d never really read it before. It’s quite good. Lovely pictures. Did you know there’s a place in south america (venezuela I think) where there is near constant lightning storms most of the year round. Pretty funky.

Some websites just aren’t clear. I was reading through a website for the company ‘bg’ for a day so I could properly bullshit them on the application form and then just before I start it tells me that their deadline was back in November 2009. Thanks guys at bg, because that’s exactly where I needed that information to be, not on the graduated recruitment main page, oh no, becasue how important are deadlines. I mean if I was going to catch a ferry, obviously I wouldn’t want to check what time it left before I drove up the gangway. I’d just let the water pissing in the windows of the car and displacing the air be all the indication I need as to whether I had made it to the dock on time.

I mean, come on.

So I’m stagnating in North West Kent and going slightly mad. I can’t write anything, well, actually I can write anything but I feel guilty for not applying to jobs and trying to become a functioning member of society. If my dad comes home from a hard days work in an effort to provide a roof over my head and food on my plate and says to me ‘How’s the job search going?’, I feel a bit out of sorts if I reply ‘I’ve not been looking for jobs today, I’ve been holding my dick in one hand and using the other to write a story about an oppressed muslim woman in the middle east trying to start a punk rock band against the wishes of her father. The story encompasses elements of freedom of expression, gender equality, racial prejudices, father-daughter relationships, cultural preservation and the awesomeness that is the punk movement.’

Then he says’ Oh. How’s that going?’ and I respond ‘I’ve nearly written half a page and spent the rest of the day trying to think of the name of a middle eastern female punk rock band.’

Father: ‘Oh. What names have you got?’

Me: ‘The rolling stoned women’, ‘Bhurka King’, ‘MuSlim Shady’, ‘Mohammed Head Shark’ or ‘Western sterotype of the middle East’.

Father: ‘Oh. I built a house today…on my own.’

Anyway. Not much has been happening. I keep finding things I want to buy, so that’s the primary reason for wanting a job. I need to be a consumer and consume things and conform with society. I also want to go to Shanghai as it looks cool. And radio 6 is going to be shut down. That’s a shame. I’ve never listened to it before I heard it was going to be shut down (maybe that was the point?) and it’s pretty good. Not as pretentious as radio 1…but that’s not hard.

On a smaller note I am concerned that with recent global events the myths and bollocks about the end of the world in 2012 could be true. Think about it: earthquake in haiti, earthquake in Chile, earthquake in Japan (not as well reported) Chris Evans replacing Terry Wogan on radio 2, Frankie Boyle leaving Mock the Week, Disney reducing the time between the cinema release and dvd release of Alice in Wonderland. All these events can only be leading to bad things.

And I need to check out this digital econonmy bill. Apparently the british public wont own the copywrite of photos they take and can’t take publish photos of people without their explicit permission. That would end investigative journalism…well it would stop evidence at least.