Holes on the dole.

Good morning. I'm here for the interview for the receptionist job.
(Picture nailed among the wonderful collection here).

Okay. I work in a lab with dangerous bacteria. If I were ever to employ someone, I'd be looking for someone who is likely to take such things very seriously indeed. It's not just their safety that's at stake, it's mine too. No fripperies, no distractions. No deliberate cuts in their skin. I have no tattoos or piercings, not because I object to them, but because the things I work with need only a little hole to get in and if they do, I'm in trouble. So I would be wary of employing someone who lists 'self-perforation' as a hobby.

In many other jobs, it really doesn't matter if you hammer nails into your head as long as it doesn't affect your ability to do what is required of you. Especially in politics, where the entire removal of many politician's heads would have no discernible effect on their performance and might even cut their expenses bill a little.

Then again, first impressions count for a lot. I have a suit for serious business meetings but I never wear it to the lab. If there is a risk, however small, of becoming coated in pig or chicken shit then I'm not going to be wearing anything more expensive than a Tesco clearance sale outfit. Besides, I work alone and see few visitors because the smell drives them away. There is no point in worrying about my appearance.

It does, however, matter at certain points. If you turn up for a job interview looking the way I look when I work Sundays (when there is absolutely nobody else around) then unless you are applying for the part of Rab C. Nesbitt, you have no chance. No matter what the interview is for. If it's a job cleaning sewers, you want to look smart for the interview. Turning up covered in shit will not be regarded as 'being keen to get started'. At an interview you need to impress someone you've never met before and their first impression is formed as soon as you walk through the door. If you look like something out of Hellraiser, and the other candidate doesn't, you lose.

It really is that simple.

I'm afraid that if this woman turned up for an interview, those cheek piercings would make me think of this. The piercings are in the same places. I would see no other image throughout the conversation. No, it's not fair to her but that image would be inescapable. She wouldn't be likely to get the job and in the end it would be her own fault. Holes in your cheeks are not on anyone's list of job requirements unless it's a job that requires the ability to perform peripheral sneezing. She has the right to poke holes in herself anywhere she likes but there are consequences to that, and one of them, in this case, is reminding me of a series of films I have here on DVD. I'd be tempted to hand her my replica of the little puzzle box and ask her to solve it.

That last paragraph is, in these days, enough to produce a collective hiss of disapproval from all the professionally offended but it's the truth and as Subrosa says, sometimes the truth hurts. The tattoos are irrelevant. A normal interview suit would cover them all and in fact, any job that required contact with the public would most likely also require a dress code that would, incidentally, render the tattoos invisible anyway. It's the Borg implants in her face that will put off employers. It looks as if she's been hit full on with a shotgun, but is impervious to bullets. Really, it doesn't work as an employer-impressing device.

If you look beyond the metalwork she's actually quite pretty. Okay, not in the modern anorexic with plastic boobs and fish-lips style, but in the old-fashioned down-to-earth reliable woman style. I like women with a bit of substance to them, myself. Those Cenobite pins would put me off though. Without them she'd have a far better chance of landing a job.

Yet I can't agree with Al-Jahom's and Devil's Knife's assessment. Yes, we are paying her benefits but she is trying to get a job. Sure, she is giving herself an unnecessary handicap and then bleating about someone telling her she's done that but is that surprising? I read the other day about a university student who graduated with a 2.2 Honours degree, and who is suing the university because they didn't do better. (Update: Fear and Loathing has that story) That attitude of 'someone else's fault' is widespread now and while I can agree that the individual should be slapped into sense and told to grow up, the attitude was ingrained into them throughout school. Do what you like, the world owes you a living.

Yes, she is wrong to bleat that 'The nasty man said I won't get a job because my face looks like an explosion in a ball-bearing factory'. The nasty man is right. She will find it hard to get a job and those piercings are why.

Yes, we are paying her benefits but we are not paying her to be this way. She didn't derive that attitude all on her own. She wasn't born with it. It was instilled into her.

We paid the people who did that to her. She, at least, is showing some sign of resistance in that she wants to work rather than relax on benefits. Yet even then, there remains that 'world owes you a living' indoctrination in her head. She cannot see that landing a job depends on the employer's impression of her at an interview. She will have ten minutes to half an hour to convince an employer that his first impression of her as a walking scrapyard was wrong. She might be extremely capable and intelligent but that first impression is a killer.

So why does she think the world, and employers, must accept her as she is, silvery warts and all? We didn't pay her to think that way.

We did, however, pay the people who taught her to think that way. We paid for the 'progressive' teachers and the political correctness enforcement officers and the 'cheeldren are the future, and it is horrible' diversity outreach timewasters and all the rest of the infrastructure that created far worse than this proto-Pinhead who is actually trying to get into the job market. She is not the enemy. She is a creation of the enemy. She is trying to free herself from the Righteous but she doesn't know how.

She is not the cause. She is a symptom.

The cause is what we are really paying for. If we can break that, the symptoms vanish on their own.