You don't have to be mad to work here...

Because sometimes, sometimes, applying for jobs can be fun. Particularly, if by ‘can be fun’, what you actually mean is ‘how far can I push it before they think I’m just taking the piss?'...

I sent this application letter today. I’ve, of course, obscured the relevant details, so as not to utterly scupper my chances.

Dear *****,

My name is Charlie Farlie and I am writing to you to apply for the position of *** ******* ********* as advertised on ***********.

As per the requirements of application, my three favourite websites are, as follows:

In third place: Facebook
Or more specifically, classic Facebook. Before it became saturated with applications and invitations to become a werewolf, classic Facebook represented the social networking revolution at work and, to a newly started university student, as I was, the key to social nirvana. Never before had organising, documenting and autopsying those hazy uni nights out been so easy, accessible and user friendly. Predictably, with fancy dress being the sartorial choice du jour, and Snakebite being the drink in vogue, the ‘detag’ button became a quick and firm friend...

In second place: Youtube
I’m an English graduate, and as such, have studied many of literatures ‘finest comedies’. It is a truth universally acknowledged, however, that people falling over is far funnier than anything Will Shakespeare had to offer. Youtube is my procrastinating best friend, and I am perhaps not as ashamed as I ought to be to admit that many an hour has been wiled away crying tears of mirth at the Grape Lady. If the Grape Lady reference means nothing to you, I suggest you check her out immediately. Wear headphones, and bring tissues.

In first place: Wikipedia
It was Disney’s Pocahontas who encouraged us to learn things we never knew we never knew but it was Wikipedia that put the idea into motion. As a student, Wiki’ing was always there for me when Starbucks had taken precedent over ‘obtaining and reading the set texts’, and now, as a grad, it’s there for ‘see I told you so’ and ‘holy moly I am BORED’. Wikipedia is very close to my heart, even if it does frequently remind me that I couldn’t finish Lord of the Rings, but will happily waste an hour reading about Conspiracy Theories. Nerdy, no?

So, *****, these are my three favourite websites. I like to think they suggest a thirst for knowledge and a delight in society, as opposed to a thirst for procrastination and inadvertent photo-stalking of strangers...

The more professional stuff, as one might expect, is contained duly in my CV, which you will find attached.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Kind regards,

Charlie Farlie

I’d give me a job. But then again, I think being glib and flippant is amusing.

The Tooth Hurts

Q: What is the best time to go to the dentist?

A: 2:30 (tooth hurty)...

I may have mentioned previously that I am something of a hypochondriac. It’s not my fault – it’s as hereditary as my increasingly expanding hairline and my roman nose (roamin’ all over my face, that is). So it will come as nothing of a surprise to you when I explain that I also possess a rather diminished pain threshold.

So when, last week, the world’s worst hangover™ was unwelcomely and unexpectedly teamed with the toothache to end all toothaches, I was perhaps ill equipped to cope.

I’ve never been a fan of my teeth. They’re bunched and disordered in that typically British way, more ivory than Cowell-brite and due to the excesses of my youth, littered with more fillings than I’d care to publicly admit on the interweb. The offending gnasher, victim of some crappy dentistry in my teenage years and neglected by graduate poverty, was the worst of a bad bunch, and, when the poor blighter was yanked ceremoniously from my gob, it would be fair to say we didn’t part on good terms.

Rattling with ibuprofen, I’d called my dentist and, like calling an old friend when you need a favour, we exchanged uncomfortable, loaded pleasantries. To my horror, and, no doubt, the horror of the immaculately-dentured girl on the end of the phone, it had been five long years since my last bout of chairbound brutality. Five years. My teeth were last checked before I discovered facial hair, that a fringe wasn’t necessarily a good look for me, and I that my ‘hard-earned’ degree was, in fact, useless. Neglect doesn’t really cover it. If I’d been Facebook buddies with my teeth, they’d’ve stopped poking me a long time ago.

I went, then, cap in hand (pun almost intended) to throw myself at the mercy of my dentist, who I of course won’t name, despite the delicious irony of his moniker. We’ll call him Doctor McPain, for story’s sake. Dentists are like plumbers; their assessment of the work needed always reeks of ‘this wouldn’t be so bad if you hadn’t waited so long’. There’s always the tut, the sucking of saliva through teeth and the ominous warning that if you want it fixed properly, it’s going to cost you. Except instead of a dodgy thermostat, you have a blinding, rage-inducing pain in your gob. And unlike dicky heating, you can’t ignore that until winter sets in.

I was presented with two options – lose it, or throw money at it (not, unfortunately, money soaked in morphine) in the vain hope it could be saved. Yet while my rotten little peg of bone had seen me through many a Werther's Original, sentimentality was lost to me. Sentimentality, it seems, comes in short supply when you’re presented with a £450 bill for a porcelain replacement.

£450, you may well cry. I was forced to question: Who was making the bastard thing, Royal Dorchester?

Alas, me and my tooth decided to part ways. And like the best bitter divorces, it promised to be a long and drawn out process. 4-6 weeks on an NHS waiting list, to be precise.

They say that the rewards of being in a relationship are many and varied. Companionship, support, love, and, apparently, a mother-in-law that works in an emergency access dental clinic. Of all the manifold blessings received from The Other Half, a violent and gratefully sudden tooth extraction is up there with the best of them. And, aside from an excess of over-the-counter painkillers, the best pain relief is a surprise to trip to Toys R Us. Trust me; you’re never ever too old for some Indiana Jones Lego and a 2-litre bottle of fat Coke.

Having a grown man yank a molar out with little more than a glorified pair of pliers wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had, but, as with all life experience there are lessons to be learned; seek relationships with those who can benefit you directly, and save up all your grievances for when you’re in physical pain because, it turns out, no one is allowed to argue with you when your teeth hurt. Brilliant.

So, thanks to The Other Half and the mother-in-law, I’m now devoid of one tooth, a lot of pain and about 3 pounds (the antibiotic-enforced detox did wonders for me). But what was most surprising about the whole affair was the absence of any sense of loss. I thought I’d view losing a part of me a little differently, since as a mewling brat I mourned the loss of my milk teeth with equal force as I welcomed a fat pound coin from the tooth fairy. Perhaps it’s something to do with getting older – you lose your hair, and, somewhat more forcefully, your teeth, and you carry on regardless.

For about three seconds I briefly considered forking out for a shiny new porcelain molar. I thought I wanted the tooth. But, in the (now bastardised) immortal words of Jack Nicholson, I couldn’t handle the tooth... *groan*.

A Bitter Pill - or - Johnny Be Good

I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m a real hypochondriac. I blame the internet; my dad’s sister is notoriously health, or rather, sickness-conscious, as is my dad, so medical dictionaries have long been banned from our mutual family homes. The discovery of NHS Direct, or DeathWeb as it could be more appropriately named, then, meant that my every ache, twinge, grizzle or graze could be immediately and falsely identified as either Cancer or AIDS.

Imagine then the fun that ensued when I discovered sex. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive fan of safe sex – sex is, after all a messy, squidgy experience at the best of times (while, of course, being an enormous amount of fun) – but while use of a condom may have kept knob-rot at bay, a flimsy piece of latex was insufficient protection for my hormone-addled, paranoid teenage mind. I was 17, and to this day I am convinced I was too much too young, with too much information and not enough knowledge.

That bout of uninvited sharing out of the way then, I read with some interest this week the growing debate surrounding new plans to allow the advertising of abortion – or pregnancy advisory – services on television and radio, as part of plans aimed at reducing the UK’s high rate of teenage pregnancies and sexual infections. This news came, rather unfortunately, alongside a trial scheme at four Oxfordshire secondary schools allowing girls as young as 11 to ask their school nurse for the morning after pill via text message.

It’s easy to jump on the middle-England, chav-baiting bandwagon and say that most teenage pregnancies are simply the by-product of a generation who see babies as the ultimate meal ticket and should be opposed as such. But, snobbery aside, care must be taken to ensure that in advertising these services, and in making the morning after pill readily available, the safe sex message is still pushed, and pushed more often and with more force. After all, pregnancy is not the only unwanted side-effect of unprotected sex.

Genuine crusties will remember the, frankly terrifying, warning adverts when HIV/AIDS became more widespread in the 1980s. If the sight of that terrifying, tombstone-like black slab wasn’t enough to persuade you to practice safe sex, it was certainly scary enough to dilute your mojo. Nowadays, sexual health ads tend to be a little edgier, a little cooler; more appropriate for the Skins generation.

So one can only assume, if The London Paper’s rather frightening article suggesting that two-thirds of young Londoners practice unsafe sex, believing that they had literally ‘no chance’ of contracting HIV is to be accepted, that young people are simply not scared for their sexual health.

This could be explained by the fact that ‘responsible adults’ are targeting their fears in the wrong direction. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that there can be emotional implications for sexual precociousness; if at 17 I felt I was unprepared for sex, it boggles my mind to imagine that 11-year-olds could be better equipped to deal with it. But rather than impotently wringing our hands at the idea that younger teenagers are finding out that down there’s for more than weeing, perhaps it would be useful reminding them that if they’re going to hop on the bad foot and do the good thang, there can be, and usually are, consequences to this.

Adverts for condoms and contraceptives are, if anything, too few and far between as it is. Currently only Channel 4, that bastion of taboo and general naughtiness, are allowed to broadcast adverts for condoms before the 9pm watershed. Were that not bad enough, those that are shown are entirely too mild. Apparently scaring the bejeebers out of us stopped being vogue, so maybe it's time to get gory. Be graphic! Talk about vaginal discharge, or warty bell-ends! If you can’t put the frighteners on young shaggers, then at least try to put them off their dinner!

Because saying something terrible could happen, and seeing that something terrible in action are two entirely different things: I’d suggest taking a similar approach to the warnings on tobacco packaging; emblazoning bottles of Blue WKD with photographs of seeping, cheesy, gonorrhoea-infected naughty bits and the slogan – ‘Wrap it up, dirty dick’. If that doesn’t encourage you to use a condom (or switch to beer) then I don’t know what will.

And treat adverts for emergency contraception in entirely the same way – a 10-minute clip of a newborn baby screaming its lungs out at full volume, pausing every few moments to show close-up HD-ready images of greenish baby shit and milky sick-up. The problem isn’t that young people aren’t aware of what could happen if they don’t practice safe sex, it’s that the consequences simply aren’t frightening enough.

In the Daily Mail’s report Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship said: 'Allowing the advertising of abortion services is not dealing with the real problem. This is the approach of having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to deal with the casualties.’ That’s as maybe, though his argument seems a little weighted; I, for instance, know that you can get artificial limbs, but that doesn’t mean I’d do the conga through a minefield.

Making the morning after pill readily available, and making young people aware of pregnancy advisory services can, and should be seen as positive steps. It’s too easy to say that the need to promote these things is indicative of ‘Broken Britain’; accidents happen, and people make mistakes. But Mary Kenny’s argument in the Guardian holds weight – contraception should, and must be the norm. Because yes, accidents do happen and yes, people do make mistakes, but in the case of sexual health, and unwanted pregnancy, these are mistakes that are, more often than not, avoidable.

The real concern here is that young people are not left with, much like me, too much information and not enough knowledge. Our high teenage pregnancy and STI figures show that young Brits know what to do with what they have in their pants. The real trick is to make sure they do it responsibly, because if we fail to do that, we’re all going to be screwed…

Changing Faces

Hello there, boys and girls! Like what I’ve done with the place? I should bloody hope so, it took long enough.

So, ahem, without further ado, I welcome you to the new, not necessarily improved, charlie farlie’s boozy thursdays. If you really want to stalk me, you can become a follower on the bar to the left, so do that, ok?

Make yourself comfortable, kids, it’s going to be a grumpy ride…

C x

Gissa Job

And so, approximately a gazillion years too late, the government have realised that there is a distinct shortage of graduate-level job opportunities for the hundreds of thousands of chronically-skint youngsters that will be thrust into the real world at the end of this academic year.

It’s a phenomenon that I am painfully aware of; last Thursday saw the completion of my journalism training, and with it, grim and unwelcome confirmation from my tutor that these were not good times for the recently-qualified hack. With 0% of my qualifying classmates (myself included) leaving the course to walk straight into gainful employment, the fact that previous years had seen at least 60% of her qualifying students had done so with jobs secured was ever-so-slightly more worrying.

0%.

Zero. Per. Cent.

Yikes.

You realise you’re up shit creek without a proverbial when the only bright side to your predicament is that at least everyone’s in the same boat. The problem is, the boat’s still in shit creek, and no matter how shitty our hands get, we’re paddling against the current.

No one ever said that getting into journalism was going to be easy; everyone thinks they want to be a journalist, and a great number of people even go so far as to actually try to become one. It’s a tough, virtually impenetrable industry, characterised by incessant rounds of job application and rejection, manipulation and exploitation.

The ‘state of the economy’ doesn’t help. Newspapers are shedding staff quicker than Mahiki chucking out Big Brother contestants on a particularly busy Tuesday night. It’s not a pretty sight.

And yet, once more, here I find myself, standing before the increasingly impregnable obstacle-course that is job seeking. At its best, it is painful, soul-destroying and utterly crushing to one’s self-esteem. At its worst, it is the sort of sick, sadomasochistic practice that is best saved for particularly nasty internet kink-flicks featuring big-eyed schoolgirls with tentacles.

None of this, I realise, is new information – everyone knows how awful looking for a job can be. But it is the one-sidedness of it all that is most frustrating – the impetus on upwards arse-kissing and downwards casualness. It is estimated that the average graduate-level job seeker must send, on average, 70 job applications to secure a single interview. And from personal experience, one can safely expect that from those 69 rejections, only a very small handful will have the common decency to send you any acknowledgement of your brown-nosing, obsequious scrap-begging.

Is it so hard to say ‘thanks, but no thanks?’ Even a curt ‘fuck you’ is preferable to the weight of being ignored. When did it become ok to treat the achievements and successes of others with such utter, mind-boggling disregard?

I know how I sound. I sound like a self-pitying whinge-monger crying for mummy because no one will see me for the superstar I am. But I’m not! I’m not asking Rupert Murdoch to launch himself around the world to nosh me off, using my own flatulent scribblings as a bib – I’m just asking that when broken, broke young people who have busted their bollocks to get a qualification go looking for work, they are treated with ever-so-slightly more respect than a wet fart in white y-fronts.

Perhaps what is most frustrating is that the most appealing roles exist in some sort of employment half-life, offered as internships where ambitious young writers generate revenue for their publications while receiving nothing in return.

There are literally dozens of jobs up for grabs if you don’t mind trawling through an application process that makes The Running Man look like a nice stroll in the park for the opportunity of working for free for six months.

I’m not such a cock as to call it modern-day slavery – it’s not – but what it is, is an utter pisstake, and amounts to the unchallenged theft of intellectual property.

All that the prevalence of the internship system actually achieves is a financially-weighted tier industry – providing the haves with entry-level opportunities that are priced out of the reach of the have-nots. And while I am not suggesting for a second that those who can afford to take these internships, and in doing so work without pay for anything up to six months are in any way less talented than those that cannot afford to do so, it is a bitter pill to swallow that so many are excluded from these opportunities on the grounds that they simply cannot afford to take them.

I’ve done my share of working for free – building up the portfolio of published pieces that were required to pass my journalism training cost me a small fortune. Some publications offer to pay travel expenses – most don’t – up to the point where it actually costs the worker money to work. And while the thrill of publication is something I hope will not quickly fade, it is small comfort when faced with the fact I can no longer afford to take the tube to visit museums I have reviewed, or buy a pint in bars I’ve recommended to my readers.

A fantastic, talented and pro-active friend of mine, who has worked at some of the world’s top fashion magazines, has, now as a fully-trained journalist, found herself once more slogging her guts out for free. It’s absurd, and it’s unfair. The reality of the situation is that the industry needs a shake-up. It’s taken a battering of late, but the solution is not slamming shut the doors and preventing the influx of fresh talent, opening them only to let in those wealthy enough to not need the jobs anyway.

Something needs to change, or, sadly, the writing really will be on the wall…

[Sorry, boys and girls, I realise that was not particularly fluffy, or indeed funny, but if I read ‘this is an unpaid position for a period of 6 months’ once more without letting off some steam I was going to throw myself off a bridge… Phew.]

There’s no business like Snow Business

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
(Isiah 11:6)

At the ripe old age of 23 I like to think of myself, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a real, bona-fide grown-up. I can tie my own shoelaces, I always pay my phone bill on time and I generally make sure that I’ve got enough cash left in my pocket for a kebab after a particularly heavy night on the Cosmo’s.

I’m also a bit of a bastard. I’m not pre-occupied with rediscovering my inner child, since my outer child resembled a shaved baby chimpanzee and was usually dressed as some sort of epileptic scarecrow. It wasn't a good look for me.

Yet upon opening the curtains on Monday morning and finding that eight inches of all-my-Christmases-at-once had bountifully settled on bonny England, I was all-at-once struck by a peculiar sensation:

I wanted to be a kid again.

It had snowed. And not just snowed, but really, really snowed. So, despite being in possession of the least appropriate footwear the world has ever seen, I determined to go and make the most of it.

There’s something intrinsically magical about snow. Sure, it’s cold, slippy and uncomfortable, but it’s also fun, pretty and, dare I say it without sounding like a right girl, really quite romantic (the new squeeze and I enjoying what will go down in history as the smuggest walk in the snow ever). And despite essentially being the slightly harder sibling of rain, the snow gave London a much needed facelift. Even wheelie bins look utterly gorgeous with a generous dusting of the white stuff.

As a now-trained journalist, it ceaselessly causes me alarm that the industry I am trying so fervently to become a part of is undergoing a worrying transmogrification. What was once an industry driven by the unbiased report of world events is now an endlessly-negative misery-marathon, geared to suck the fun out of every aspect of our lives.

Many publications were quick to report that, according to estimates by the Federation of Small Businesses, almost 6.5million – that’s around a fifth of Britain’s workforce, fact fans - failed to turn up to work on Monday due to the snow. They also say that the three days of disruption caused by the snow will cost the UK economy around £3.5billion. Accusatory nods were, of course, made to those who had said they were snowed in, when in fact they were snowed out.

‘The worst snowfall in 18 years’ was the catch adopted by most reports of the snow. The worst? The bloody best more like! In all my life I have never seen such universal jollity, good feeling and sense of community.

I’ll exemplify: A posh woman nearly clocked me in the head with a snowball, while aiming for her husband. She was, naturally, mortified to have broken that last barrier of class division, physical attack. Did I happy slap her? Or sue her on the grounds of reckless endangerment? Of course I didn’t. I stooped, scooped and threw one back. Turns out all it takes is a well-placed ball of weaponised rain to ease social tension.

News bulletins were peppered with voxpops, broadcasting the malcontent grumbles of those who, unlike all normal people who had seen eight inches of snow as the perfect excuse to escape wage slavery and go outside and play, had struggled on across the tundra to complete meaningless jobs that benefit no one.

And of course, these grumbling whingesocks were utterly indignant at the lack of action from that ever blameable, faceless ‘they’. One grim-faced lady murmered sourly to ITV News that ‘they knew it was coming, but of course they didn’t do anything about it.’

Do what, exactly? Erect an enormous umbrella over London? Switch on every sunbed and kettle in unison in hope that the combined UV and steam power would be enough to thaw the city from its icy prison?

Because the stark reality of the situation is – this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, which goes some way to explaining why London doesn’t have a crack fleet of snowploughs, skidoos and husky-rescue teams on constant 24-hour standby.

And don’t even get me started on the outcry over closure of schools. For one, keeping children inside when there is something as rare and novel as actual, tangible snowfall in the South-east – proper, snowman-building, sledging, ride-down-a-hill-on-a-bin-lid snowfall – is nothing short of cruel, and more, it provided parents with the even rarer opportunity to bond with their rugrats.

There's nothing quite so unifying, it would seem, as seeing how much freezing, wet snow you can stuff down the back of your dad’s jumper.

Despite being a bit of a bastard, it gave me a warm fuzzy to see people so unabashedly enjoying themselves. There’s not a great deal to be jolly about in these grim, ambling times, so an unplanned icing-sugar-coated bank holiday was just the boost people needed to solider on through the humdrum dreariness of it all.

We’re all-too-often too quick to look on the gloomy side of things; our glasses are more and more frequently half empty, and clouds are less and less frequently in possession of that ubiquitous silver lining. So it’s a little disappointing to see the press, and the however-small proportion of the public throwing grit into Frosty the Snowman’s face.

Yes, the country coming to a standstill is irritating. But a snow day is also very rare, and, by and large, very, very fun. And, wanting to continue a trend for arse-achingly bad puns at the end of these rants, all that remains to say is… shouldn’t we all just chill out..?

[P.S - I realise I have been rather lax (read: shitty) in my updating of this blog. I promise to try harder this year... not including January, obviously... bugger...]

Photographs © Charlie Breslin 2009