No work today – COVID-19, losing a job and living through lockdown
My job went back in April. Unceremoniously. Coldly. I’d been working from home for a couple of weeks in the new lockdown. That morning I’d been working on my proposal for communications plans to keep things going over the lockdown. 13 years of devotion and effort flushed away like something unpleasant on the sole of a new shiny shoe.
More recently, national press noted the company’s statement that the minimal number of redundancies made from its head office had paid shareholder dividends. Charming! To reiterate, all my years of service to them flushed away.
My employer had seen its profits drop considerably when a new face took the helm, as the original Chief Executive retired. Was he up to the job, our audiences asked. It was a massive responsibility and his last company had been sold off. Some longstanding staff left. Some of the longstanding shareholders cashed in and dropped their investments in the company.
As an expected recession loomed like a thundercloud over the big boom year of 2007, I had made the most of pushing the business’ presence in renewable energy options, ecological expertise, and focus on sustainability. At the time, the money was in oil and gas and everyone shouted to say their product was the biggest and the best. The levity of green effort did not sit comfortably with big business yet, but quietly forging ahead sharing the green values of the business brought its own dividends as the markets saw another side to the consultancy’s heavy fuel behemoth.
What did the business have that appealed to a two-bit writer with left-wing leanings? Integrity, and a heartfelt investment in delivering positive results for the end-user. And though it didn’t exactly shout about it, the company expertise included a number of committed people passionate about working towards a world with more environmental care. And although businesses are supposed to be apolitical, I liked the more liberal leanings of many of my colleagues.
New leadership in 2018 shook all that up. Perhaps I had been too optimistic. I had been a little on the rogue side for years – when turned down by the corporate resistance to new technologies, I took my rejected proposals and ideas and supported smaller groups in the business choosing themselves to embrace newer innovations and the ‘hand of no’ be damned. Our team was small and close-knit, and all happy to work under the radar where it suited the company. Nothing shifty, just that we knew social media was a platform, and sharing construction videos on YouTube with our clients attracted audiences, regardless of the policies of our own employer.
Even at an engineering breakfast seminar in London, I found too many people shaking heads and saying ‘It’ll never catch on’. This was in response to my passionate interest in applying virtual reality to engineering design. As a household, we are fascinated by new technology, and had been early adopters of a virtual reality headset – although not until Sony made a more affordable model. With a little fudging you could access the US-public VR section of a major internet provider from a UK machine. Companies were beginning to record heritage surveys in VR … and there were endless ropey videos of family pets wandering round the home all day long. It determined me that there was a future in this and I rang a colleague the next morning blathering about all the possibilities. He pretty much said ‘Whoa, hold up, M_ and I are all over this just now, we’re on that page too’. Better still, this was the Belfast office which had a sea between it and what, by internal jokes, was the dinosaur authority of head office. What that team have done since and are doing now is fantastic.
HQ remained fairly solidly opposed to making any big steps into new technology however. Multiple layers of new management appeared and there was a constant flow of new faces. Independent thought and projects were squished firmly. I didn’t help myself, I just had to keep on digging my heels in and kicking back. Nothing big, but little quibbles.
The big barrier was talking down – I felt that the new policies to simplify the company’s language went too far and would put clients off, let-alone internal readership. The most standout examples were that IT was not, apparently, a familiar acronym, and Information Technology was equally baffling. And then the word ‘ecology’ came in for the chop – ecology services would confuse clients, the word was too technical. Hang on, if the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs tells you that you will need to get an agent to conduct an Ecological Assessment on the land you are trying to build on – surely you’ll be Googling ‘ecology services’?
More time began to be spent brokering calls from colleagues feeling their services were being simplified into a childish idiocy, and communications relations were starting to crack. Everything written whether company image or service promotion had to be tangled around to be passed for print – ‘this should talk about the company brand first and foremost, keep services as secondary’. However, bigging up the brand with monotonous phrases at the expense of what the company did – ‘take a look, it’s super fun’ did not bring in interest easily. Linking to other platforms worked slightly better, but multiple clicks, and getting through several lines of brand narrative as the precedent to the link lost engagement.
Then my father collapsed. My managers were kind, they signed me off on a week’s compassionate leave while he lay apparently conscious but unresponsive in a hospital bed, curled protectively with his knees to his chest. He had never been like that before. The prognosis wasn’t known, and medical obligations meant that when he was felt to be conscious, although still unresponsive, the hospital said he should be sent home. He was medically fit and their duties ended there. Incontinent, not walking, barely moving, unable to feed himself or talk, but medically fit.
Meetings and calls with hospital teams and social services ensued as we struggled to qualify for rehabilitative support. In the meantime, his health deteriorated several times. Last Christmas for him was spent in a hub bed in a care home because of his care needs. Rehabilitation therapy didn’t happen, it was later explained that the region’s budget for that had been axed. He went back into hospital after his medication was dramatically changed and knocked him out for a few days. Then home, then back to hospital after another collapse in late March. This time he was rushed to emergency.
Although COVID presentation huts had been established a few weeks earlier in the hospital car parks they seemed to be seeing little business that day. Accident and Emergency however was heaving – people were literally dragging themselves into the reception area writhing in pain. A small group of tourists were screaming on the floor in the corridor. As we came out of the side resuscitation room two elderly patients by the entrance were having the hospital blankets folded over their heads. Their feet, one minus a slipper, stuck out at the bottom of the trollies. It was one hell of an introduction to coronavirus. Much more so obviously, for medical professionals, and the many others directly affected. One of the earlier staff losses at the hospital was a porter working the short-stay ward while my father was in there. It was in local press, I cried.
My father has been in and out of hospital care since. A few of his fellow inmates from the care home are no longer with us because of coronavirus. I read that the daughter of one man there was planning a legal challenge to how the government handled safety measures with coronavirus and care homes, or rather the complete hands-off attitude to it, pushing care homes out into the dark, beyond medical response and beyond tests. As my father had recovered in the hub bed he was moved to the senility wing, as a room was available there. Relatives often provided as much personal care for the extended family that were the residents of the wing as the staff did.
During that time our small family group extended to include several wonderful people. You couldn’t visit one person at the home, you visited them all. At least three of my father’s closest neighbours during his stay there lost their lives to COVID-19 earlier this year: a retired engineer in a corporal’s beret who wanted to leave the wing and get to work on time, a tall gentleman who often offered himself as wing spokesman, and a frail chap who seemed to have started a trend for removing one shoe. We spent many happy chats with the receptionist there, and with an extremely sharp musician with brilliant insight into politics and history. He was keen to get out for his son’s graduation, sadly I think lockdown impacted how that went.
This year, my father is more stable, in a local hospital, and hopes to get home to my mother for Christmas.
Of course coronavirus had been expected in the UK. The first mentions of it I remember well were a couple of ‘in another country, far-away’ toned nods from the BBC. Meanwhile, a less escapable rumble was emerging through social media as reports from China, then Spain and Italy, then other countries. This rumble had more weight and more considered thinking. Medical experts treating early cases, and/or more studied in the field of coronaviruses began to share their understanding. UK national press began to take its fingers out of its ears. Certainly by the end of September 2019 it was fairly clear that this thing was going to go globally pandemic, and the UK needed to ask when would it hit us seriously. Official reporting continued with safety blankets for the UK – couched in an atmosphere of ‘not affecting us, not even another SARS’.
Even during Christmas that year, the tone from UK press and government was remarkably sanguine about it all. Beast from the East still meant a slightly bothersome storm, and got more headlines. Why let a little virus get in the way of one of the biggest commercial capitalisations in the country?
2020 dawned with the beginnings of rumours that the invader had indeed breached our shores. We returned to workplaces a little unsure of what lay ahead. By the middle of February businesses were beginning to heavily underline and embed back-up plans for operating through coronavirus. The message remained that talk stayed with the government’s official words, thinking beyond anything you really had to was setting yourself up for more than you might want to commit to. An expectation of some working from home in the near future began to be taken more seriously but was perceived as a temporary measure for a few days only.
On the 16 March, returning from work, the news announcement came. It recommended those who were clinically or extremely clinically vulnerable did not come into work in their offices from the next morning. Clinically vulnerable covered a wide range. Having read the horrifying reports of how the virus was attacking the respiratory system and renal functions, it was not a surprise that clinically vulnerable includes asthma and kidney-impairments. Unlike the flu jab, it covers all asthma even if your condition does not hospitalise you regularly. Despite a continuing backlash of occasional naysayers on the coronavirus front, I had studied enough of the ‘leaked’ accounts, fathomed them out as best as I could, and concluded quite firmly that this virus was very real. One of the more comprehensive but still comprehensible explanations is by Hilary Guite in an article for Medical News Today from earlier this year.
When I contacted my director to discuss my actions in the morning, it felt as though I would be working away to protect colleagues because I was more likely to contract coronavirus and thus pass it on. It was also a slightly awkward conversation as the limits of my lung functions were not officially on my HR record – people were aware but I hadn’t committed the information formally. The rare obstacle slung in from my respiratory system has yet to ever impact my working life so until this moment it had been a reasonable oversight.
I need not have worried. Before the evening was out the entire office was under orders to work from home for the next two weeks provisionally. The schools were also to close from the end of Friday, and children expected to be home educated from then. Lockdown officially started the next Monday, 23 March.
Until that point, I had worked full-time then dropped a day after my younger son was born. Home working had always been grudgingly allowed when needed such as when the children have been projectile vomiting all night, you know they won’t get through the threshold of a classroom door without a repeat incident, and no one seems keen to spend a day mopping them up for you. Now I was moving from a fairly new model of home-working once a week to nothing but home-working.
I tried to get a comfortable desk chair. Amazon was all out. Everywhere seemed to be all out. Argos had one budget chair. It looked stylishly uncomfortable. My younger son’s science project for the day was assembling it – not from my own laziness but his enthusiasm. It took him about 10 minutes including making sure the gas cylinder worked properly. With a small folding table I had my own workspace on the landing. It didn’t really work alongside home educating – just further to run up and down the stairs. Furthermore, I discovered there was a chair with more hatred for my back than our dining chairs.
Initially, it was Operation Silent Air. It was dead. Nothing to do. The instructions I had were to say nothing. I worked through all the outstanding ‘long-grass’ pieces, prepped them ready to share in the new atmosphere. Nothing was being said. They went to a dead in-tray. I drafted plans for communication strategies to keep internal networking active, positive and cohesive, for showing clients and audiences the company was still very much there and running. It wasn’t my role anymore. The role was to say nothing and sod the comms. We were warned regularly that cuts would be made.
The April Fools Day trick was on me – I got a short call to tell me the company needed to realise savings, couldn’t pay everyone through the coronavirus problems, and my role was to be made redundant. Individuals would manage their own editorial or use the marketing staff assigned to their own teams. Could I be furloughed? I asked. No, given the company’s new knack for its share price dropping faster than a lead balloon, a financial audit party had been consulted pre-coronavirus. Several non fee-earning roles had been marked for advised removal. I had a week to clear my desk-from-home and then report back to HR on the 8th. I was removed from team meetings and not to tell others I was redundant. A week later I had a brief online call, accepted everything, made no challenges and left. I was allowed to join the end of a team meeting to say bye to everyone. The time allowed barely permitted that single syllable.
At first, the redundancy was an opportunity to take stock. The schools had closed and online/home learning was not as easy on screen as it had looked. The cloud doesn’t always manage the weight of tens of thousands accessing the same parts unanimously. We discovered just how often online secondary platforms crash, and how infuriating their failure to allow refresh (to same screen) or save options truly is … let’s just say maths is not my strongest point whilst my older son streaks ahead in a top set class, but gets extremely frustrated when the online maths paper crashes five minutes from the end of the designated hour losing all his work.
The daily snarl of traffic on the A34 was swapped for online jams. Primary education was links to already overwhelmed Key Stage 1 and 2 websites. Unlike the secondary issue of getting in and being snared in the gridlock, the primary sites weren’t letting anyone in beyond their strained capacities. Cue many late nights devising learning activities, and printing out maths worksheets from a site specialising in locked PDF print-outs. You couldn’t save them, and you had to paste most of them into Word to make them fit on an A4 page, as shrink-to-fit was blocked on the print options … happy days.
My husband’s department with another major employer had been outsourced at the end of the last year – he worked until the end of April knowing his day to day function was just to pick up the pieces for someone else to run his job on a lower salary. He had spent the end of 2019 training his successors. As for the bright young manager fast tracked to take over his team a couple of years back who had recommended the department was axed and relocated overseas cheaply – a predictable pay rise and promotion.
I shouldn’t sound bitter, but I do feel a sadness and a real short-sightedness in quick penny-saves – the driving force of big corporate, and also local authority decisions. By the time I had had my nth text message from my former manager about when I would be willing to come and remove the photograph of my children from my previous desk in the office I had absolutely no love left for my former employer. I cleaned my files from my company laptop, scrubbed the keyboard and monitor with hand sanitiser, even the sluggish HP mouse. They were boxed and returned to the office. It was a nice chance to catch up with a friend and colleague, the partner of my former team-mate and friend. Upstairs was a no-go for Covid-safety, so damn shame that I couldn’t go up and sterilise my old desk drawers and remove the offending picture. I replied to the messages curtly that the photograph could go in the bin.
Back to April anyway – at the end of the month we received our redundancy packages. Mine was the absolute minimum the company could manage legally in line with its policies. I don’t remember receiving the leaving questionnaire it is supposed to issue, but then, after 13 years with them, I have had inside sight of the company system for handling those returned questionnaires. It matches their complaints procedure – everything kept securely in a large metal receptacle, handled only by the cleaners at the end of the day. Bad joke, but unfortunately true.
Any other climate and those redundancies would have meant a new carpet for the living room, hell, maybe even throughout the house, perhaps even a family holiday. Cautious pessimism was required, so we paid off outstanding debts and hunkered down with the remainder to pay our bills while we looked for work. We could carry ourselves perhaps through until August. Four months to secure new roles.
By this point the job market was already deep in the proverbial. Never has been applying for work more depressing than when the job sites record and share the number of applications made so far for each role. Then consider that those numbers apply only to applications made through that posting on that site.
Even with that, for some reason I had expected to be in work by September if not sooner. Come September and we were on Universal Credit and had recently had a mortgage holiday – adding some £20 a month to the repayments. Still no replacement carpet, but the kettle had failed, toaster had burst into spontaneous flames and the microwave had unexpectedly cracked blue lightening inside itself without an added spoon or cereal bowl rimmed with chrome paint. Little things, but I felt financially irresponsible replacing them. If anything, out of habit, I scoured the sites for budget to mid-range with best reviews for stolid reliable performance, and expended frugally. Normally that slight ‘overspent perhaps’ guilt would last a few days, I’d realise I hadn’t destroyed my account doing it, and be more calm, perhaps kick myself for not spending the extra £10 on the next model up that played a tune as the toast popped up. This time, weeks later, I was waking up in the small hours fretting over the money that could have been saved by just heating water on the hob (for the purpose of the guilt, conveniently not reasoning out the extra gas charges this would incur).
I had a few calls with recruitment agencies. They were mostly hopeful, said ‘don’t apply for jobs at a lower wage than you were last on’, ‘realise that ‘overqualified’ means you’re a risk of walking the minute something better comes along, or might feel threatening to a less qualified superior’s position’. For a short while I scaled back my applications and kept to my experience and skill set. Within a few days I was back to scanning the job sites looking for absolutely anything that I could physically reach the geographic location of, and that did not expressly specify that my skill set was unsuitable.
Between April and November I applied for well over 200 jobs – trying to spend a day applying for at least 10 jobs twice a week at the very least. Some days it was just one or two jobs – because that’s what I could find that I hadn’t already applied for. The roles I applied for ranged from eight hours a week cleaning to part-time stock replenishment in supermarkets all the way up to Marketing Managers and academic research assistants. Along the way, I was still holding out for some luck with one of the occasional writing jobs that appeared. There were numerous academic research assistant posts coming up with the city university. Most stipulated a necessity for a minimum PhD in the exact micro-discipline that the post related to, and yet the job sites still recorded 150 or more applications for each of these. Are there really 275 neuro-physio-lymphoblastoma-cardiological medical astrophysicists in the area?
Wave two of mass redundancies was predicted for October and it came – although it was more of an extra bulge on the already steep incline. Many large corporations just kept axing tens here and there throughout to avoid the obligations of mass redundancy.
If a job advertisement didn’t specify, I would apply, then get pipped to the post by someone who did have the precise extremely particular background that the recruiter ideally wanted. Some of the responses felt unnecessarily dismissive. The local supermarkets were extremely quick off the mark to reject my efforts at applying. It seemed as though my mugshot was pinned up in every supermarket manager’s office – somewhere behind the coffee machine: ‘Don’t let this one in’!
One agency stopped a hairs-width short of out and out contempt. Perhaps it was just their customer manner, the abrupt, ‘we haven’t got anything you would be suitable for’ followed by a rather curt don’t-ring-us-we’ll-ring-you email. People can be a bit funny like that – I’ve had a couple of application rejections made at interview in my working life on the strength of having attended a Welsh university. Over ten years ago, mind, guidelines on recruitment are a little tighter now, so if an employer cannot spell a place-name they’re not supposed to deny the existence of an institute there, or bring in the ‘it’s foreign’ card (these being the two reasons I received way back when).
During the spring and summer every job advert seemed to have around 40-60 applicants within the same day of posting, climbing rapidly from there to anything between 150 to 300, even more for jobs in London or other large commercial cities. Sometimes I fell in love with a role, saw something advertised that was such a perfect match, a job that I was desperate to do. You feel like a failure when the rejection comes through, even though you realise that the successful applicant in these times is just as likely to be the former CEO of a company doing exactly what that company does, and is taking a £70k pay cut applying for it. Or the company has reassessed its projected balance sheets and the job has been pulled. That happens more often than you might expect now. There were a number of emails that shuffled into my mailbox telling me that the position I applied for had been withdrawn pending review of financial capacity.
Once, I applied for an Air Traffic Controller role. The advertisement said ‘no experience necessary’. The response was that it very much was – the advert had been changed slightly to attract more applicants. Early in the lockdown I figured I could afford to drop my annual salary by up to £15k – the calculations pretty much included the family living on nothing but value brand bread and the bank allowing me to extend my overdraft facility, plus my husband earning at least the same wage.
When I hit the six-month time limit on Job-Seeker’s Allowance, I notched up from wondering how long we could hold out if I could just get a job paying National Minimum Wage, to nights awake fretting and shaking over it. Realistically, at that point I knew I was unlikely to secure a new job until at least the next spring, and even then, temporary, limited hours and minimum wage were far more probable than another full time role with security and a wage approaching my last salary. Don’t mistake me, I was hardly on the big bucks, and well within basic tax rate limits, but even on a lower wage, you now have to expect a pay-cut.
Mentally, unemployment destroys you, or tries its very best to. You lose your identity entirely. You watch everyone else making their morning commute and feel ashamed that you are skiving. You feel worthless. You feel valueless. What’s more, you feel a failure. A failure that the world has rejected – not even good enough to hold down a simple job. That is neither what you are or who you are, but it is the dark shadow that unemployment takes you to.
When I was safely in a job before redundancy, expecting to be there until I retired somewhere in my 70s or so, believing in my company, living to serve it, I found it hard to understand when the news talked of people so damaged and suppressed by depression that they had walked to the edge of a precipice and just dropped. They had mentally dropped already, this was the physical finality. It was saddening and terrible but it was in another world.
Roll back a couple of years and remember that the recession that massive capitalisation and overspending had staved off until 2008-9 never really went away – the UK had climbed a little further out of the trench by the subsequent big dips but was scrabbling against loose earth. 2013 was bad. 2017-18 was bad again. Watching a neighbour lose his business and family home was terrible. This was a sensible guy, hard-working, caring for his family. People’s money got less, he had fewer customers, the bills for his business exceeded the income. Before the year was out the mortgage company had claimed his home.
It was snapped up at auction with a couple’s spare cash for their son to party in for a couple of years. Cue two years of 24-7 thumping bass and a modern day fillies-welcome Bullingdon style club falling across the street at all hours with eyes rolling and nostrils drizzling white lines. Luckily, something happened, perhaps they finally emptied the opium fields fully, and the whole lot were spirited away almost overnight to be replaced with builders, painters, large skips, and then a family again.
I asked myself, where do you go when your world has been pulled from underneath your feet by the brutality of a complete loss of income. You think that you can go no lower, it can’t get worse. Except that it can. Staving off the final moment when the chair falls away you do all that you can. Sooner or later it becomes debts as you struggle to keep a roof over your head. Sooner or later you may well end up on the parapet of a motorway bridge, closing your eyes and stepping forward.
Sometimes you start to wonder how you could fix it – if you do that you need better insurance. How can you be sure that the insurance will pay out? Then, you wonder: am I just a drain on the family – providing no functional use, running taps, eating food – consuming but never paying.
Your identity changes from that of your work position, having a meaning, a representative role, to okay-days and lows when you are shuffling and self-conscious, weighted down by a flashing sign, glowing with neon lights and a huge arrow: ‘this one here can’t even get a job’.
To begin with, after the initial shock, despair and anger, it was easier to settle into. I was just one of multiple thousands, chucked out by employers to show shareholders a few savings, perhaps to actually attempt to stay afloat. Everyone had funny hours, at-risk or newly severed jobs.
Job Seeker’s wasn’t a barrel of laughs though. You fill in every job you apply for online. After a few weeks, my work coach read me the riot act with a firm explanation that after several weeks on JSA your minimum three per week applications must be outside of your skill set and/or your local region. It sounded bonkers, but you play along – kind of safe knowing there’s no way you’ll actually be offered a job as a specialised eight wheel tractor driver in Uzbekistan. Within another couple of weeks they started advising me that most people made redundant so far had secured jobs by that point, and it was just me left out in the cold it seemed. Perhaps their bedside charm recommended them for a greater job within the hallowed vaults of HMRC, but the work coach changed without explanation a few weeks after that.
For Universal Credit, you still have to fill in the same journal with a dutiful list of each role applied for, each day. On a downer day I found that I had to add a disclaimer to the notes section…yes I know this is ambitious but the advert was for exactly the stuff I’ve done for years, in exactly the same field – maybe no one with a private education, dripping with Oxbridge postgrad certificates will spot the same ad and apply and I might be in with a chance of making it through the first round of curriculum vitae rejections.
Secondary school never mattered much at the time. I began noticing after leaving it particularly, that the school I had attended garnered jokes further than the town it was in. The expectation during school seemed to be that you either dropped out at 16 (ish) or you delayed joining the dole queue briefly by taking a couple of extra years with A-Levels. They brought in a careers advisor to speak to us early in the sixth form. My interview was remarkably unenlightening: ‘So, what’re you studying?’ ‘English, and French …’ ‘Oh dear, that won’t do’ ‘Well, I want to study English at Aberystwyth’ (yes, I had already decided my next step).
Returning within a 15 mile radius of the school to work has meant being on the receiving end of the odd joke ‘remember that school, imagine what sort of sad sack would have gone there’ ‘um, me actually’.
Quite early on, I stopped naming it on application forms or my cv in hope of it not showing up as a bad mark. Likewise explicitly naming the university I attended. It may have been Russell Group at the time, but it isn’t now, and that hadn’t redeemed it from some potential employers before. You have to do what you can to try and get at least past first base in the applications game. Lying is wrong, simple as that. Failing to clearly draw attention to possibly having a poorer education than other candidates is fine. After all, surely years of experience in holding down jobs, being well received and well recommended during that time, is worth just as much?
The slow trickle of rejection letters said otherwise. I started to find that being unemployed isn’t all that dramatically different from working from home in terms of daily routine. It’s just that team meetings have switched to interview, rung two, stage 1 b) (ii.iv) at best, or otherwise a chirpy call with an agency. ‘So what work exactly are you looking for?’ ‘Anything, absolutely anything … except it does need to be remote or within feasible commute of my address’ – so I can actually get there without morning apologies calls to explain that I’m halfway across a pedestrian footbridge between platforms because the departure point has moved at the last minute and I’m expecting to try for a vaguely promised rail replacement bus for the next leg as part of my journey option has been cancelled. Beyond that I’m up for doing anything that brings in a household income, perhaps short of medical guineapig, and then mostly because my family advise against it given my raft of chemicals allergies’.
Context and convention have gained quite a pleasant fluidity in our new modern times. Lack of regular social interaction strips some of the formality from online interviews and agency calls. I found myself welcoming the chatter and chance to meet new faces. There was also a delicious sense of rebelliousness in knowing that I could ignore the suit trousers and just interview in my day to day norm of old jeans and trainers from the waist down. I didn’t – just in case someone called my bluff and I stood up in front of the web cam to reveal my contrasting lower half glaring against the shirt and jacket!
Responding to emails? Yep, was still doing. Monitoring mailboxes? Yes. Spending two hours researching and painstakingly drafting a piece knowing how it is received is absolutely crucial? Yes, except that my enthusiasm for that was more limited as far as personal statements went. I relish the opportunity to write an in-depth study on lesser Himalayan sheep farming in Alaska or the challenges of barcoding the scannable tags for monitoring quolls in the Tablelands. I find it much harder to sell myself. For writing jobs I could indulge myself in my enthusiasm for the company’s activities and industry engagement. When applying for the obligatory roles beyond my comfort zone it can be harder to genuinely sell yourself as a suitable brain surgeon. I have little tolerance for the finer end of estate agency marketing technique and really dislike trying to convince someone my last workplace was an immaculate operating theatre rather than a gloomy open-plan office!
Presumably the single upside of the JSA ending was that Universal Credit has more gentle, or at least more sensible rules about job applications. Again, where the obligations start and end there was now another potentially futile point, given my husband’s recent secure of a new role at something south of his former wage, meaning our status as non-working no longer stood as such and our family entitlements were cut by 60%. Reduced payments don’t actually cover the bills.
So what was the final plan? We live in a purportedly wealthy city. Couldn’t we just sell up and buy a cheaper house? No, an expensive region for most working households means big mortgages to cover the high house prices. The average cost of a 2-3 bedroom house in our city has sat around 12 times the annual average salary in the area for the last few years and moving with no capital to fund said move is decidedly tricky. In a city where hospitality and retail have been the main economy drivers for so long, the trend for zero hours contracts and minimum wage generally drives down salaries across the small number of miles it spans. Hence I previously went from a mid-range job with a key publishing group in the city to a role on the same scale or slightly lower with a business a few miles further out, and got a notable pay-rise. The equivalent roles to my last job, nationally pay on a similar level, but very locally tend to pay around £5-10k less. Yet we complain about the traffic impacts from people commuting in for work. There’s a sizeable weight of traffic heading out of town in normal conditions, to earn enough to pay the bills in town.
Unlike more than half of households in the city, we are fortunate to be on the property ladder. This means that although the loan to value rate of our mortgage suggests we may be paying off the interest on our mortgage until almost our pensionable years, at least we have more affordable monthly payments. House values change across the city (we’re in the cheap seats), but rental costs follow a level high. £1200 per month might rent a two-bed flat, £1400 upwards might mean up to three bedrooms and maybe also a bit of garden. An enormous proportion of our generation (30-45 years) rent single rooms in Houses of Multiple Occupation. It means that the rent generally dips a little lower than a thousand a month, but also means shared kitchenette and bathroom, plus enduring the hazards of varying levels of maintenance. The big issue is security of tenure – you are initially on slightly more solid ground if you are an Owner-Occupier when your income disappears.
Real house prices across the UK apparently increased by approximately 151% between 1996 and 2006 according to a 2016 report by Oxford Economics. By 2008 wages were dropping much faster. The rise in second home ownership and trend for retiring to the country means that rural homes cost far more than urban homes as a general rule and many bus routes to villages have been axed due to lack of demand. As travelling by public transport is currently discouraged, letalone managing the soaring cost and endless delays of train travel I doubt that I was alone in wanting to work close enough to home that I could get back on time to cook dinner before 8pm, or better still fit my commute around the school clubs.
Just as I began to feel very, very sorry for myself and despondent my luck changed. I had very keenly applied for an ideal job with a local company a few months earlier. I had applied through the agency advertising the role, and had submitted my curriculum vitae, then been asked to write a piece on Hydrogen as a power option. At this point, the company name and exact location within the city, had not been revealed. It had gone quiet then. In November, I saw a similar job advertised with a new company just down the road from my home. It didn’t start until after January however, and they wouldn’t look at applications until December. I applied anyway. A few days later, I saw the job I had applied for previously re-advertised, this time posted directly by the company. I resubmitted my previous application, and began a whirlwind of positive interviews, meeting people I really wanted to work with and genuinely feeling prepared for the most nerve-wracking of all interview questions: ‘Why do you want to work for our company?’. Because, at last, I was seriously interviewing for a job where I wanted to work in that role, with those people for that company.
And so my story has had a happy ending. When I began writing it, it was late October, and I frequently returned to it trying to make it less bleak. Now, with the anxiety and stress lifted, it’s pretty tempting to revisit this and strip away the awkward truths, forget just how low things felt at points over the last few months. That would be a dishonesty, however uncomfortable I may feel about it. So many people have lost their jobs, their identities, their sense of self-worth since the start of this year, and it is a number that continues to rise. Let us not be lazy and shrug, saying that it’s a shame it is so many. It is a deep, unfair and painful, long kick to wonderful individuals who did not deserve to have the carpet pulled by our governments, by circumstance, or just by large corporations to better cushion their promises to large business shareholders. Stay strong, we will all make it through somehow.
Christmas Eve update
It wasn’t quite the end, as such. The job is wonderful and the people a really amazing and welcoming team. Where some of my previous colleagues promoted themselves over others, sub-contracted rather than share potential workloads, and would happily take false credit, or perjure to get ahead, I am pleased to say I am now working for a business that talks across all levels, all geographies and all services, stays in touch and is really joined-up. The result being positivity and productivity.
It wasn’t quite the end, as such. The job is wonderful and the people a really amazing and welcoming team. Where some of my previous colleagues promoted themselves over others, sub-contracted rather than share potential workloads, and would happily take false credit, or perjure to get ahead, I am pleased to say I am now working for a business that talks across all levels, all geographies and all services, stays in touch and is really joined-up. The result being positivity and productivity.
Our sons’ school holiday began with the unsurprising but still concerning news that one of them must isolate as cases had been confirmed in his class. He responded with fear, anxiety and tears - terrified that he had brought home a potentially killer disease that would strip away his family. It took a day or two to settle those fears and help him to sleep through the night again. We say it’s just a small bug for many of us, we’ll be fine. He’s seen the news reports, he knows we can’t be 100% on that. I don’t believe in tempting fate or risking psychological distress further down the line by rose-tinting and hiding bad truths where they are outing themselves in the clear light of day, but it is hard to tilt the scale convincingly into the light when the shadows are so ominous.
My father was discharged from the community hospital a little hastily as hospital admittances with coronavirus soared once more and smaller units were asked to clear beds to cope with the rising demand. We cannot support my mother in person for fear of potentially carrying the virus itself, we cannot see others for the same reasons. Christmas presents have been dropped carefully, wiped down and from gloved hands, at gates – preceded by a text to arrange a mutual drop and collection.
All Christmas dinners between households will be conducted via Zoom, and after some minor date dithering, the UK government has announced not just our city, but entire region is in the new Tier 4 – rules as per the spring/summer lockdown but more rigorous. This time, no parent can join their adult children in the garden so long as they do not go indoors, keep at least two metres apart and bring their own flask of tea – everyone keeps indoors, only exiting to collect something dropped at the gate, and that swaddled in face mask and disposable gloves alongside the winter coat and scarf.
Amazon has had a field day, lasting the last few weeks at least. Royal Mail is broken and exhausted, and supermarket delivery drivers are at their wits end. Healthcare workers and our front line medical staff are barely surviving on the thinnest hairs-width of sanity remaining in the chaos, forced on through the grim determination of sleep deprivation and that THERE IS NO CHANCE TO STOP – enough people worldwide are stopping for a moment when hell itself roars open ahead of them, and falling into the abyss. I really hope that everyone can pull through isolation this season, and manage to somehow smile and look after themselves and their loved ones as best they can. We all need it.