Saturday 25 September 2010

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.

17 comments:

JuliaM said...

"...but she is trying to get a job. "

Is she, though? She's had jobs in the past. Has she steadily and stealthily worked herself OUT of the job market by increasing the amount of ironmongery in her fizzog?

joe said...

You have hit the nail on the head,again Leg Iron.

But surely she could get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket, sweeping the roads or at some S&M outlet.I'm basing my assumptions on that she has no other training or qualifications.

The knobs down the job center should do what they are meant to do and find her a job,not judge her on the way she looks.

KenS said...

I have no tattoos or piercings...

Me neither. How can one improve on perfection?

What's the Point? said...

"...unless it's a job that requires the ability to perform peripheral sneezing..."

:)

RantinRab said...

Fraser, She would not get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

Her piercings have elf 'n' safety consequences.

I have interviewed many people over the years and it would be a cold day in hell before I would hire someone like her.

Whilst I, sort of, admire her individualism, as far as I am concerned her decision to do this to herself tells me she is an attention seeking fool and would struggle to fit in with a close knit team.

gladiolys said...

a: 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'.

May I say - that is brilliance?

b: She should come to London. No one gives a shit down here - you get served by people with all sorts of piercings in pubs and record shops and clothes shops etc and no one looks twice.

c: what if she is a Borg? (Would Seven of Nine would try to disassimiliate her?)

joe said...

Rantin Rab,

Street cleaner?

At the end of the day there are loads of people with tatoos and piercings who have jobs.

Anonymous said...

Its always some else to blame. They are trying to do away with all glasses and bottles in pubs now to reduce the amount of glassings going on.
No attempt to blame the morons doing the glassing just take everything away from everyone is always the answer.
Only a question of time before front doors are not allowed due to the infringement of burglars rights.

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

I had a glimpse of this marxist experimental nonsense in our schools back in the seventies, when my sister was considered illiterate by her new school and had to have extra reading lessons. She now has a degree and an extremely well paid job in advertising. The new school was considered by those experimentalists to be very old fashioned, traditional in their teaching methods.

All this dumbing down in education and whipping up of talent shows of the Simon Cowell type, has left our youngsters ill equipped to face the real world.

A friend of mine who has been benefits for over ten years blames everyone from her parents, her teachers to God (He must have let it happen!). She has never once thought how, with the right application of her energy and need to survive, she might be able to turn her life around, or at least have a job she might actually enjoy. It's just not in her thinking.

I can hardly blame her as she has been educated to think like this.

Hexe said...

EXTRA EXTRA!!!

LOCAL WOMAN HAS TONGUE PIERCED, BUT IS STILL BORING!!!

---
Telling her what she already knows (and hoped for) was a stupid thing to do, not only did it cause a lot of pointless noise, but nothing changed for anyone either.

The entire point of this type of beautification is to gross other people out so that you can wallow in self-pitying victimhood.

I would not want to employ her in my backroom either because then I'd get to look at her, and I am so not into Freddy Kruger chic.

But diving down the rabbit hold to find the cause, why we're getting involved in her personal drama: we're being forced to bankroll her life. If it were not for that, we'd not care what she'd inflict on her tissues (tho, burka looks nice...)

So, lets keep our sore eyes on our money in her pockets... a time limit on the dole will go a long way towards sorting this for everything else, there is the free market.

Anonymous said...

I think your analysis misses the point, Leggy.

Sure, she's the product of her experiences, but aren't we all?

Don't we all, upon adulthood, have to accept autonomy and responsibility for our actions?

And really, although facial piercings are a relative novelty in our culture, how is it really any different from a skinhead or pubk who tattos his hands or face?

The 70's fool is not fudamentally different from the 2010 fool.

Plus ca mongs.

Anonymous said...

This will be the sort of person wishing to express their "individualism" who will be quick to have the microchip implanted since they already have everything else foreign to the human body stuck into them as it is. And everyone in the MSM will promote it as the "next big thing" so others will leap in and follow. Already I know of a subway system that "requires" you to purchase a microchip ID card in order to be "tagged" if you want to ride their system and how long after that will become "cool" to have the damn thing embedded is hard to know, but can't be too far off given implanting foreign devices is such an expression of "freedom" these days. Makes me kind of sad, really, but I can imagine a direction this sort of thing might be headed and exactly why it is being popularized by those in the "individualism" and left-wing "freedom" movements, as the subway system requiring ID tags is also in a city reknown for imprisoning the citizens under left-wing ideologies of more taxes, more bans and less freedoms while calling anyone against it "intolerant". I imagine Visa, Mastercard and American Express will also be at the vanguard of advertising the "efficiencies" of the microchip implant, when it shows up soon, once all of Europe has been conquered and the New Roman Empire is in its full glory, soon.

Anonymous said...

Generally agree with the tenor of your piece, Leg Iron, but feel I have to provide you with this link (http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/blackburn/8405445.Blackburn_woman__humiliated__over_way_she_looks/) so that you can reconsider your position vis-a-vis her looks.

The photo of her on the link I have provided was published in the local paper the day before the story hit the nationals, by when it would appear, she'd had a shower and washed her hair in preparation for her introduction to a wider audience...

By the way, isn't it also a little odd that a twenty-three-year-old woman took her mother along to a job centre interview?

Anonymous said...

Rantin Rab, can she really be tagged with the "individualism" label, when she was probably following the crowd?

It seems to me, that people like her bought into the "individualism" sell of body 'art'. More fool her.

I wouldn't hire her, either.

banned said...

I was going to say that it is all very well for you to parade your piercist & tatist prejudices Leg-Iron when I remembered a mate of a mate some twenty years ago who had not worked in his life. That "life" revolved around a relativley small amount of hashish and his weekly dole cheque.

He used to pretend to want to become a trainee teacher but any time that he managed to come across a bit of extra cash he used it to get yet another tattoo on either of his forearms thus denying himself that possibilty yet further.

(His actual survival technique was to get himself a job picking turnips thus rendering himself a victim each year as the turnips all got picked and he became "redundant", yet again).

Leg-iron said...

Al J - yes, she's the product of her experiences but her experiences have been of those above telling her over and over that nothing is her fault.

In my younger days, we took the blame for the things we did wrong. We weren't encouraged to blame anyone else and if we were caught trying, the punishment was doubled.

Now we have a whole generation, perhaps two, who think that they are never to blame for anything. They didn't do that to themselves. They are the product of their experience but their experiences were managed and followed an agenda.

Sure, we're paying for her ridiculous idea of individuality but she's not the one coming round and demanding the money.

The faceless ones in the middle are the real enemy. Those who steal from us and give to her, those who have encouraged her to see the proceeds of theft as 'her right', those who told her that no matter how much scrap metal she bolts to her head, she can expect a job as director of a major industry.

She's lucky I wasn't the jobcentre guy. I'd be sending her to every job involving heavy duty magnets I could find.

There is no nice way to tell these people thy have been duped. I don't blame them for being duped, it started at school after all, when they were young and teachers were those they trusted. However, the only way to show them reality is to throw them into it.

It's not really fair to them, they didn't create themselves, but there is no gentle way to do it.

Leg-iron said...

Anon 19:03 - yes, she looks like the greasy blimps I see hanging around Cash Converters and the Pound Shop in that one.

She scrubs up okay though. If only she could do it without Duraglit.

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