Gi'us a job

Today

I've just read Becky's blog on being unemployed. She & Lizzie seem remarkably calm about it - as well they might be as they have many skills and we aren't in a time of serious unemployment.

Becky made a comment about how strange it is not to have external demands made on one and I sympathise with this. Retirement brings this sort of strangeness too. I know that I owned and ran my own company (and remember one very crass friend who thought that, as MD I simply "made it up" as I went along), but there were still a lot of pressures, many of them external. And there were a lot of people whose lives depended on my decisions.

In My Day

Once we were married, I found out that this instantly affected my grant entitlement (as though being married meant that I was now a kept woman) and I no longer received even enough to cover my bus fare to college. We struggled on for a while, with the overdraft mounting up. Then one day, while I was working at home on some sewing project, the man from the rates dept turned up. Seemed we hadn't paid any.

Something had to give and that was my college (and with it teaching) career. I got the paper and applied for the first job I could find - as an auxiliary nurse in an old people's home. Well, I'd spent one summer cleaning in an old people's home so was qualified, surely?

They weren't very exacting in the interview and the job was mine. Day after day of blanket baths, cleaning up old ladies' poo and serving meals. It was rivetting. I did it as well as I could.

The a friend of mine told me that the Inland Revenue were recruiting temporary staff to deal with the early redemption of post-war credits. Just as rivetting as the old ladies, but cleaner and more money. So off I went and was duly recruited.

This actually led to a career in the Inland Revenue which led to my joining Flare which led to my owning it which led to my selling it which led me to where I am now.........

Which just goes to show that things you don't plan sometimes work out the best. It's just a question of seizing the opportunity.