Or, the only things I hate more than being unemployed are a**hole recruiters, and living in Richmond VA
Yesterday a 17 year old girl in a wrinkled white skirt told me I was too smart to do the job that another office-bimbo-emptyheaded little Fothermucker had contacted me about at the weekend, gooing syrupy nonsense about an 'interview' Monday (yesterday) and being 'placed' by Wednesday (tomorrow). Despite my firm intention not to allow my hopes to be raised by these parasites (the contract I would have signed was not with the company wanting a CAD operator - CircuitCity - but with the staffing agency) I fell for the same tired schtick again. They need someone (if the opportunity ever really existed) to convert their paper-based floorplans to digital format. The only thing less challenging than drawing floorplans in AutoCAD is drawing empty boxes. It was the perfect foot-in-the-door opportunity and, despite my resolution, I found myself thinking of all the things I could do with that kind of position - especially as the first bimbo had told me I would be the only CAD person in the office. I found myself thinking, again, of eventually being able to set up my own little CAD team and running it as it ought to be run.
Oh yes. Despite my determination not to hope I found myself doing just that. Hoping and dreaming. Again. What I now think happened is that some bright spark at CircuitCity decided the previous Friday afternoon to get their floorplans transferred to digital format in order for him to crawl even further up his boss's ass; then he commissioned Bimbo Inc to find a drafter, only to have the idea shot down by the Accountants on Monday morning. That kind of sh*t goes on all the time. I knew someone once who turned up to start a job, only to be told that the job no longer existed. Working for Transco, in the UK, I was shown a wall along which were stacked boxes and boxes, each one stuffed with field engineers drawings of gaspipes that had been put in the ground but not entered into the mapping system. Seven years worth of work, that the Accountants wouldn't pay to have digitized.
Does anyone other than me think it's criminally dangerous for there to be unrecorded gas transmission lines in the ground, pipes full of explosive gas, without there being any indication at all of location, depth, extent, contiguity? The UK is teeny, and other than extremely high voltage transmission lines and towers all the different utilities have their networks underground. It astonishes me that there hasn't yet been a catastrophic explosion in an urban area as a consequence of this neglect. But there will be, eventually. It's simply a matter of time.
Less than a month later they cancelled the project I'd been hired to work on - searching for and recording the position of decommissioned asbestos-clad pipes that had been 'replaced' with plastic pipes but which were still in the ground. It was meant to be a six month project at minimum; there was talk of extending it to a year or even eighteen months. A little less than three months in and the Accountants decided it cost too much and had to be shut down - with Christmas a week away.
Unemployment benefits are organized much differently in the UK, and are not nearly so simple to claim and receive. Getting everything sorted in the week before Christmas is rather more difficult than squeezing blood from a block of granite. I lived on my mother's generosity over that one, much though I hated to do it, because I'd already exhausted my meagre surplus in the period between the completion of my previous contract and gaining the new one with Transco.
But I have to say that when I worked for Transco a second time, a couple of years later, they treated me well - as did the company that supplied them with my services and with whom I ultimately got my last job in the UK before leaving to come to the USA. I worked in Wolverhampton (which is a cool town) and stayed in an excellent hotel at the company's expense, travelling home with a co-worker each weekend.
Recruiters.... I hate them. Only rarely do they know anything about CAD or GIS, they parrot job descriptions, and then have no idea even of what type of software is being used - let alone which version. In general they have absolutely no interest in the contractors who work for them beyond their turning up to work; they almost invariably side with the employers they service in any dispute; even more rarely do they offer medical coverage, and I've yet to hear of one that offers paid time for statutory holidays. Which means that if you can't afford to lose a day's pay you have to work ten or twelve hour shifts (when you're allowed to that is) to make up the difference over the days preceeding the holiday. Or you take the loss and grin and bear it.
I've never been good at grinning and bearing it and it gets harder and harder to do with each passing year that I remain a contractor. I'd be willing to take a serious drop in the hourly rate if it meant I could get hired permanently - because I know I'd work so damned hard for whoever gave me the chance (if only out of simple gratitude) that I'd make the loss back again.
Contracts... contracts... and those goddamned recruiters. If I hadn't proven 'too smart' for the job I would have signed the damn thing, but it would have made me a virtual bond-slave of the agency to do so. Apart from the rage I fell into after my experience with these buffoonettes(my 'interview' consisted in nothing more than sitting in an office for more than two hours, waiting for the bimbos to present me with forms to be completed or waiting for them to come back to take the damn things away, during which time I discovered that the agency has absolutely no experience in dealing with CAD-based employment) and the foul night I and Sabrina spent in consequence of that rage, I'm glad now that the job wasn't offered and I didn't sign my soul away to a crew of incompetent devils. I didn't mind that they were devils, all recruiters are, but their incompetence, their abominably fixed plastic smiles through which every word any of them uttered was forced, and their utter indifference to the fact that I wasted two hours in their repellant company, finally brought me to the limits of my self-control.
I went home, got horribly drunk, and behaved like an utter prick for the rest of the day and the whole of the evening. I had days like that in the UK, only I lived alone then so there was no one else to be afflicted by my vile moods. There were occasions, close to the end of my time there, when I'd stand in the kitchen of my apartment and bang my head against the wall till my forehead was bloody. It was do that or go out into the streets and start fights. Others would have started fights - but I've worked in a prison and never want to see the inside of one again - unless I can be certain of being held in perpetual solitary confinement.
It wasn't simply the indignity of being told by a teenager with a plastic smile that I was too well-qualified and experienced for the job. There's the ongoing indignity of living in this filthy ghetto, having to keep one eye on every car that passes to be sure I'm not about to find myself in a drive-by shooting (it's happened here before); it's the indignity of being told by the useless-ass bitch that now owns this hateful little duplex that she 'wants to take the building in a whole new direction' and that in consequence, despite the fact that we've never been so much as late paying the rent, despite the fact that I paid $250 to improve the fencing and that much or more again to redecorate the filthy mess this place was when we took it on, we are persona non grata and must leave, because we and our dogs don't fit in with whatever she imagines she's going to do with her property.
I can't imagine what she thinks she's going to do with the place - unless it's to rent it to Section 8 cases. No young upwardly mobile Black couples are going to rent here. Crazy Kathy next door would be enough on her own to make sure of that. She plainly doesn't want Whites renting, as she's already seen off the only other White guy on the street, our ex-next-door neighbour Paul - which was no loss as the crazy faggot hated my dog Franky, tried to kick him once, and raised his fist in Sabrina's face. But add to Kathy's craziness Pinky our gun-toting neighbour across the street, the gangsters on the corner four houses away, the drug deals made in broad daylight for anyone to see, the cars that either screech by at breakneck speed - or crawl along really, really slowly, while the occupants give you the evil eye (those are the ones that creep me out) and the general air of degenerate dilapidation that the entire neighbourhood is soaked in, and I guarantee you that no one who had any other choice at all would live here.
I lived in some deprived areas in Britain, or so I thought, over the 43 years of my life there. But in all of those 43 years I was never once propositioned by a whore while buying from a store or pumping gas. I'd been living in the South Side of Richmond for a week when I was propositioned by a whore as I pumped gas at the 7/11. It's happened twice since then: once at the Shell gas station (where I've also been offered anything and everything from Crack to my pick of any of the girl's working for the pimp that used to hang out there), and once as I sat in the Cougar in the parking lot of the Dollar Store. I've also been asked to dispense paper towels to a beggar so he could wipe his ass after taking a shit behind the car wash at the Shell station, too.
What kind of uncouth slob walks up to a complete stranger to beg for paper to wipe his ass with so he can take a sh*t in public?
But then, this is Richmond, the only town I've ever lived in that constantly reeks of sh*t because the City burns human waste (a pity I can't burn the human waste that walks by my yard gate every day); the only city I've ever lived in where the roads are in worse condition after they've been repaired than they were before; the only city I've ever lived where I can stand in the corner of my back yard and watch a man get robbed at gun point in broad daylight, where beggars hang around gas stations and sh*t in public and toothless crack-whores dressed in filthy rags ask if you want to take them back to motel rooms. I'd sooner f*ck ten day old roadkill, thank you.
Richmond is filthy and stinking and decay is everywhere you look. And even though it's obviously still inhabited it feels derelict, abandoned and lifeless - but it's the living who are ghosts here, or if not actually so, then who look and act as if they are ghosts -when they are not acting as malevolent thugs, that is. Perhaps there's something in the water here, a consequence of the ancient, decrepit pipes it flows through, most of them well over a century old.
The city is senile, incontinent, oozing filth and corruption from every orifice; run by incompetents; populated by crazies, thugs, whores, pimps, and dope dealers.
I DON'T LIKE RICHMOND.
Can you tell?