Oh, right. I have a job now.
Well, I say job. I have work now.
After seven months of looking for a job with no luck, the British Heart Foundation decided to open up a secondhand furniture and electrical store, like, ten minutes from my house. I volunteered and I now work there unpaid for twenty hours a week.
Work is fun and very fulfilling. Much better than sitting on my arse all day watching Annie May. The volunteers are a mixed bunch (Mostly young just out of secondary education, though there's one recent graduate like me, and one retired sports center manager who decided he just wanted to keep active) but they're very friendly people. The paid staff are a little... not my kind of people, but really, why should they be? Oh, and the manager is a really really cool polite guy who respects his employees and volunteers and I have a lot of respect for him.
I actually started back in the middle of December, but since the opening was on the 3rd of January, the work being done mostly consisted of shifting stock (Which I'm not able to do because disability) and cleaning shit (Which I was more than happy to do). We had a fair few pretty pointless 'training' sessions where the regional volunteer supporter trilled endlessly for hours and laughed at her own jokes. The staff (Especially the assistant manager) dislike her because she earns more than they do by trilling spiel at volunteers and generally gets in the way, but she's alright as long as you ignore the fact she's extremely fucking annoying. Also the regional manager supervised our opening. He was a grumpy Scottish bastard who yelled a lot and commanded respect.
So, we had a grand opening on Thursday and holy shit was it grand. The Mayor and Mayoress were there to cut the ribbon as well as the town crier (Who apparently used to drive my minibus in nursery) and a huge flood of people queuing outside a secondhand shop at 10am. All the volunteers were given areas to patrol with clipboards where we took the details of people interested on delivery dockets, smacked 'Sold' stickers on items and escorted them to the tills manned by managers and assistant managers of neighboring stores who came to help with the rush. We made about £8.5K on opening day alone (Of which ~85% goes straight to heart research, and I personally sold ~£900 worth of stock. I also babysat two little children for about ten minutes while their gran left them to go run to her car to get her card. She bought about £400 worth of stuff alone, while I chaperoned her and her grandchildren for about half an hour. By the end, when they were leaving, the youngest waved at me and said 'Byebye Joe!'. It was very sweet.
Also I shaved off (the majority of) my (seven month) mane and my two month beard before opening day, so now I look like a twenty/twenty one year old young professional again instead of a twenty six year old hobo. Big improvement.
So having work means I need to keep a regular sleeping pattern, build up stamina (I have a naturally weak constitution) and fill my CV full of tasty employability. Actually sleeping 11-7 every night is still a way away (I still have insomnia, and I often go in on four/five hours sleep with only energy drinks to back me up) but I'm at least succeeding at the latter two. I promised myself I'd treat this as a proper job, and my managers have definitely noticed.
So 2013 looks like a good year for Joe so far! Let's hope I can keep it up.
