OK – the world does not owe you a living.
A British business owner (and no doubt staunch conservative) said that to me at an interview in London back in 1971. I am not sure that he was all that interested in employing anyone, and my northern English accent must have grated with him. Maybe if I could have spoken to him in French, my Limousin twang might have irritated him even more.
He did not offer me the job. This was probably as well. Southern money-grubber meets northern work ethic, it does not sound a combination made in the (non-existent) Heaven!
So anyway, after my job disappeared while I was in intensive care in 2008, and I should have realised that it was not in any way possible for people of my age to think straight and logically as IT people are supposed to think (I think that is why people decided that they would rather employ some genius straight of university who has never worked in his life, and has no idea of how business works in Europe), what then?
Well I hate selling things (quiet, shy introverts do not make good salesmen!), manual labour is also not my thing (and anyway my doctor would object), and I will not undertake slave labour at McDonalds or Burger King (and my doctor will not have me standing on my feet all day anyway!), so …. And trying to get referrals etc for various sites? Selling=recruiting=promotion! Equals “Forget it!”.
I have tried all the freelance sites. You spend hours going down Freelancer.com and Elance.com, sending off dozens of “bids” and get three offers in a year (two from the same guy in Japan). This brings in some 450 Euro.
You try writing on Helium.com. Some of the better administrators on the site tell you that you are a very good writer. You spend hours writing articles, and finally get to the point where you earn the magnificent sum of 46 Euro in one month, followed by 35 Euro the next. Then they change the payment system, as they are paying out too much!
Then there are all the freelance translation jobs on the Internet for which you apply and hear nothing more. So the next stage is to try and get a certificate so that I can work officially as a translator in Germany. Actually finding out what to do to get this is difficult enough – even the local employment office cannot tell me what to do! And will it eventually get me anywhere?
Despite this, you get the nonsense from elsewhere that you must be lazy if you cannot find work! Yes I know that such people are idiots who are cocooned in their own world, and do not understand how the world really works, but …..
Eventually, maybe we should look at people’s economic viability. If a person is no longer financially viable, maybe we should find some way of disposing of them – mass starvation, now isn’t that a great idea? It’s their own fault, isn’t it? So who cares?
Or maybe we should resurrect the old concept of full worthwhile employment (and stress "worthwhile"!), and fight like crazy to get it wherever we are in the world. The problem is, given the (undemocratic!) conservative business forces that run the world, we probably would not get anywhere with it. It was not exactly that successful the last time, was it? Or why else would we be in this predicament now?
But somehow we owe them a living.
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