Shall we have a new thread "Ghastly Job Centres I Have Known"?~ Sounds like a real winner to me ...... but then the oldest among us who had to visit such paces back in the 60s will be able to tell tales that you young 'uns would think we got from old black and white films.
It's hard, it's tough but believe me it's better now than it used to be and a glance at the Sits Vac both on the internet and in the newspapers shows it ain't nowhere near as bad is it was ~ there are jobs out there and a lot more help in finding them than ever before but you have to be prepared to be flexible or have portable skills. If you don't have the portable skills then there is help to obtain them and that was not the case when I left the RAF and the airlines of the day laughed at my qualifications so I joined, quite literally, a very long queue at the "Labour Exchange" in Swindon. On the grounds that as an ex-serviceman I was fit they sent me for a job interview at a builders yard where I spent the next 6 months humping bricks and bags of cement 10 hours a day for the princely sum of £9 a week. Compared to my RAF pay of £16 per week that was a considerable drop but it was work. From qualified tradesman with stripes on his arm to cement humper in one easy stage.
From that I graduated to working for a coal merchant in the office as Wages Clerk for £11 a week plus a free hundredweight of coal once a fortnight. Since we had a baby that increase and the heating the coal provided was very welcome I can tell you.
Here endeth the lesson.
