JerryChicken wrote:
I watched a Billy Connolly video on Youtube last night where he ranted about checking in at an airport and how "Back in t'day" you turned up, bought your ticket, they gave you your ticket, asked you where you wanted to sit, you pointed to a plan and they tore off a sticker from the plan with your seat number on it, stuck it to your ticket and that was that, no-one could sell that seat again because there was no sticker for it !
His point was - it worked, it couldn't fail to work unless all the stickers fell off the plan.
Yeah I've seen that!
of course that was before airlines were allowed to over-sell flights!
JerryChicken wrote:
The JobCentres used to have a similar system, they got job vacancies rung into them, they wrote out a card, they described the job, the pay, where it was and the hours, they had lines to fill in on the card so they had to give you that information, a person took the call and asked those questions and if the employer said "I don't know" to the question "How much per hour are you offering" or "Dont know" to "Where is the job located" then the card was binned - those cards then got displayed on boards and when someone wanted to apply fot he job - well you know the rest.
Do things work better now ?
Lol. No, no they don't! At least not from my albeit limited experience of the jobcentres. I help a friend of mine who's currently unemployed. She struggles with her hearing and isn't the most confident of people so she likes to have someone with her when she goes to the jobcentre etc so I help out when I can.
She's required to apply for 10 jobs per week. Which isn't a problem, anyone who's saying they can't find 10 jobs to apply for per week really isn't trying, but she's required to use the Universal Jobmatch website, which is just useless. It has some decent jobs but the vast majority are from agencies which don't tell you the name of the employer, where the workplace is and often don't tell you the hours of work. Which is off-putting when you're applying for a job that you know very, very little about and especially so when the jobcentres are desperate to find any reason to sanction a persons benefits. Also it's difficult to change the CV you use on the site, so it's difficult to tailor your CV toward a specific job.
Unfortunately she gets very little assistance from the job centre. Calling it a job centre is the wrong description really, it's a benefits eligibility checking centre. They don't help you find a job they just make you jump through certain hoops so that they can say you've done this, that and the other and then you can get your benefits.
For instance, she has A-Levels in both Maths and English yet was still sent on an English & Maths Functional Skills course for 4 weeks. A complete waste of time and money for everyone involved, when what she needs is courses that help her with interviews etc to get her confidence up.
Whilst I'm on a rant about jobcentres I might as well say how ridiculous it is that any money she earns from small jobs she gets is deducted from her benefits. Which doesn't really encourage you to take a low hours job or one-time job because you're not going to be financially better off, in fact probably worse off when adding in travelling costs.
Oh and the amount of jobs that are zero hours or low guaranteed hours (say 8 hours per week) that require you to be available every day of the week is ridiculous too.
