Out of the blocks

Today I came off the benefits. Went to the job centre as per usual and informed the lady I see that I would like to be taken off of the care of the state. She responded with usual indifference. She gave me a nice "good luck with it" and a lovely smile at the end but I shall not miss her in the slightest I fear. She was snappy. 

"How many hours do you volunteer?"
"Well I do 3 days at the moment..."
"No how many HO-urs..."

When I first went there I was told not to lay around at home watching Jeremy Kyle. Yes I'm sure the MA on my CV just screams lazy benefits scammer. Gah. She was good at heart.  
I can afford to keep up with the masters loan now as I'm working an extra day at the internship handling their social networking side. I get paid £65 for the day to blog, facebook and twitter. Joy! Still I'm on the lookout for other things, I went to the standard job agency near me on Thursday. I went on the first big day of snow which impressed the lady working my case no end.

While at the agency I had to do MS Word and Excel tests and a small spelling test on the sheet. I was told about (and prepared for) the Microsoft tests and got decent above average scores for them (28/30 for Word and 24/30 for Excel), but the spelling test was a bugger, got 13/20 and 15/20. I dislike spelling. Thank God for computer spell checkers. Now because of the bad spelling test, I can't be put forward for admin work at the Ministry of Health. Frustration!! GCSE's, A-Levels, three years on a BA degree, slaving over a hot MA degree and Finally!! - I can't get into my chosen field because I spelt Prejudice "PreDjudice" in a job agency. I'll never make that mistake again I tell ya.

Still its never that set in stone. This Christmas I'm going to be working damn hard on getting up to date with Spanish and French, two things that keep my hopes alive that someday I will be hard at work in Europe, or somewhere else in the world. Just writing about it makes me want to work on languages, must write more when my motivation is low.

I'm quite a left wing guy but one policy has occurred to me and it is quite the righty. Why, depending on how much a person has taken in job benefit, do we not have those who have taken a certain amount pay a portion back when they start earning over a certain amount? I've been on benefits for about 4 months, £51 a week (51x16) = £816. Now granted that's quite a bit (more then I thought before I started making that calculation), but after I start earning 20k a year, I should be fine paying back £5 - 10 a week for a while. Surely if we're not paying back anything now, an even smaller figure would be acceptable. Granted its another loan, just like tuition fees and we all hate tuition fees. Tricky one.

One things for sure, I'm not going to miss having to prove myself to the job centre every week by staying up late night job hunting.