During eighteen months of unemployment, I try to figure out new ways to increase my chances. I get a lot of generic advice from people around me, like, “Look beyond the qualification list!” and “Try every possibility!’” and “Why don’t you just do [something that doesn’t make money at all]?” You get it. Getting desperate, I try some of this advice after all, only to find out that they are completely useless.

One piece of advice I see on several websites and hear from several people is, “Making a phone call still is the best way!” This seems a bit outdated to me, but it also isn’t a good combination with my shy personality and autism. At some point, I decide to try it anyway. In the case of a few vacancies, I try to call the person who is mentioned as a contact for questions. The problem is that I am not very good at finding real questions about the jobs, so the phone calls feel forced. After some time, I realise it isn’t working and I quit making forced phone calls in the hope of making more personal contact.

There is, however, one very interesting case. I call the contact person for a vacancy at a museum.

Me: “Good afternoon, this is [My Name]. I want to ask you some questions about the vacancy for [job].”

Contact: *Somewhat mockingly* “Really? That’s a bit strange. The text is quite clear.”

Me: “Well, I still have some questions. For instance, it’s a bit vague on salary. It says—”

Contact: “Right, hang on. For questions like that, you’d better contact our financial department.” *Gives contact information* “Anything else?”

Me: “Ehm… No.”

Contact: “Okay. Goodbye, then.”

Me: “Yes, goodbye.”

I felt baffled. Why is there a phone number for questions if you don’t want to answer them in the first place? At least I learned two things from this phone call. First of all, I need to have real spontaneous questions instead of calling in for the sake of contact. Secondly, I learned that I didn’t want to work at a place where a stranger is treated so rudely. I became unemployed after years of working for a rude, ungrateful man-child, and I was not about to make the same mistake again.

So, to some extent, the phone call served its purpose after all. I came into personal contact with the people there and might have dodged a bullet by doing that.

One of the most annoying things in the army is the inspections. You have to shine your boots, cut your hair, iron your clothes, wash your clothes — you do NOT want to know how many soldiers don’t wash their uniforms — mop the floors, sweep the floors, brush your teeth — again, you do NOT want to know — clip your fingernails…

Long story short, there’s a whole laundry list (literally) of things to do, and because we’re guys, we never do anything until the last twenty-four hours or so before inspection.

My platoon made it out okay. But then, after we were done, our commanding officer came in.

Commanding Officer: “I have good news for everyone. Our order for new dividers finally came in. I need Section 11 to go outside and bring it in. Section 9 will remove the old dividers. Section 13 will assemble the new ones.”

You know that old joke where the military always goes for the cheapest bidder? It’s true. Our computers are secondhand 2002 models. Our chairs are falling apart, and instead of getting replacements, we’re forced to cannibalise broken chairs for parts to repair the dwindling number of less broken chairs and dig up cheap plastic ones from storage. And instead of actual cubicles, we have styrofoam dividers between our desks, held over the gap between them by ice cream sticks stuck through them. We’re even so cheap that once we ran out of ice cream sticks, we used old pens instead.

Finally, after an eternity of putting up with disintegrating styrofoam, we have new dividers.

The new dividers that we got are plexiglass, which means that they have an adhesive paper covering stuck onto them for protection. Which means…

Commanding Officer: “Section 13, what’s the holdup with the dividers?”

Me: “Ma’am, none of us have fingernails right now. Did you really have to schedule the inspection today?”

Commanding Officer: “Uh, oops. Right, in hindsight that was not a good idea.”

Me: *Sarcastically* “You think?”

Commanding Officer: “Sorry.” *Sighs* “Pass me that. I’ll peel the paper off.”

We eventually got a system working. The people with fingernails, pretty much only our superior officers, would peel off a corner before passing it to one of us, where we would peel off the rest.

Commanding Officer: “Good work, everyone. Again, I apologise for the inspection this morning. As was pointed out to me, it was a very foolish timing. As an apology, I will give you all one hour to smash up the styrofoam boards.”

Platoonmate #1: “Really? We’re not recycling them or something?”

Platoonmate #2: “Who would want them? They’re all falling apart.”

Officer: “And a lot of them have classified information written on them, so we will be destroying them anyway.”

Commanding Officer: “So go destroy them, boys!”

Everyone shrugs and starts smashing stuff. Section 9 carved up the most intact boards into weapons and tried to murder each other. Section 11 balled up the adhesive paper into a ball and used the boards for target practise. Section 13 embraced our inner Kung-Fu and made a game of smashing them apart with the most absurd martial arts moves. Even the officers joined in on the fun and acted as “judges” for our impromptu events.

Commanding Officer: “Did everyone have fun?”

Us: “Yes, ma’am.”

Commanding Officer: “Was that sufficient apology?”

Us: “Yes, ma’am.”

Commanding Officer: “Good.” *Pauses* “Because you now all have to clean up the mess.”

She then walked off with the rest of the officers, leaving us behind, smirking as we all protested and complained about betrayal.

While job-hunting, I read about many kinds of vacancies. There are a few things that make me critical about them. Many of them seem deliberately vague about the salary, for instance, by calling it “in line with the market,” as if that means anything. They don’t realise that this makes them seem unreliable.

Others try to overcome their fear of not being professional enough by using typical poor buzzwords like “early adapter,” “career tiger,” etcetera. They don’t realise that a good professional doesn’t need this over-the-top language.

The worst offenders, however, are the ones that try to be cool and hip in the hopes of attracting young people. They do this by describing the job in a very joking fashion in the hope of making their workplace seem funny and exciting. In the end, they make themselves come over as some kind of David Brent; i.e. someone who desperately tries to be funny in order to hide their lack of professionalism, while actually coming off more unprofessional.

One of these I will never forget. It started with a typical, “What you are going to tell about your job when you’re at a party?” as if I am not capable of deciding what I tell myself, followed by, “What your job is actually going to be.” Right… And of course, there was a description of the typical workday, filled with clichés like, “In the morning, you join the team for a talk about today’s business, while enjoying a great cappuccino!”

This was followed by a list titled, “What do we offer you?

– Every week a Friday afternoon drink

– In December there’s Ugly Xmas Sweater Day!

– A salary – not too unimportant, either!”

There was more, but I stopped reading. While a Friday afternoon drink is nice, it’s not a reason for me to apply or not, let alone an Ugly Xmas Sweater Day. I decide based upon hours, distance, required qualifications, and… salary! It’s bad enough that you put salary after two quite unnecessary items. But if you’re not mentioning any amount and try to hide that behind a weak joke, you seem worse than a little bit unprofessional. It makes you seem unreliable. Good luck finding someone who is unwise enough to fall for it.

This was a job I shouldn’t have taken, but I was desperate. It started showing red flags when I was told to come in and interview when the girl I was replacing was off so she wouldn’t know. Normally, I would just say no and move on, but the job I was currently at was absolutely toxic, so I was desperate.

This new job was with a small company that had about eight employees. After I had been there for about two months, I noticed that my paycheck was wrong. It turns out that the owner’s wife did the paychecks and she miscalculated. Thankfully, they got it fixed, but then I started seeing other problems.

They offered paid holidays, which sounds great, except for the fact that they were also closed around those holidays but wouldn’t pay you for them, so you had to use four of your five Paid Time Off days so you weren’t out so much money. And speaking of payday, they only paid us once a month, and the boss would conveniently “forget” to pay us — no direct deposit — until after five, so our check wouldn’t go in until the next day, or sometimes until Monday.

The boss’s wife would come in several times per week and tell me that I should be exceedingly grateful that they even thought of hiring me.

After I was there a year, the supervisor decided she was going to move back to Texas, and I thought that they were going to offer me her position. No. Instead, they expected me to do her job without any extra pay. I started looking for another job, right before 2020 became what 2020 did.

Then, in March of 2020, I was working seventy-plus hours a week, at least till the boss’s wife decided we shouldn’t be paid overtime. That is when I conveniently decided that I wasn’t going to work over my forty hours if they were going to pull that.

The boss’s son — who was a piece of work and treated me like I was stupid — was getting ready to take over the business but his dad wasn’t ready to let go. So, I would get told different things each time I spoke to one of them and then get yelled at for not doing what the other wanted first.

During this time, we hired a friend of the son’s to help out, and while I was trying to help train him, the boss’s son screamed at me for trying to take his position of training. The boss stood idly by and let him scream at me.

After they left for the day, I went into the bathroom and cried for forty-five minutes and decided I was getting out of this job. I also found out that day that the guy who had just been hired was making $2 more than I was an hour.

I ended up finding a much better job and I gave a short notice because they were notorious for not letting people work out their notices. They had me train the new guy for my last three days, but he kept telling me, “I already know this,” and didn’t look at so many of the training examples that I printed out and made special for him.

So, on my last day, after I tried to train him and he went back to his desk, I shredded all of that and all of the pertinent information that I had obtained during that time.

I’ve been at my current job for nine months, making almost triple what I was making there, and I just got a promotion. My former employers called me last week to see if I would be interested in coming back because the guy they hired just wasn’t working out. I took great pleasure in hanging up on them after telling them I was very happy in my current position.

Part of my job is to get the company through its annual audit, which means working with all the different departments to ensure that they are working to the standard, to suggest fixes, and to help them achieve compliance. It is a thankless task. Everyone assumes it has nothing to do with them, and no one wants to make any effort to change something they see as “not broken.”

Every year is the same. I spend months chasing owners, while they won’t do nearly enough or they just ignore me. The audit is painful and embarrassing, and I receive many, many non-compliances. I always get a major lecture from my boss, no matter what I do. It is never enough for him.

It’s exhausting and humiliating and I feel like I am wasting my life, getting nowhere, for a boss that doesn’t see any value in me or what I do, despite the company not being able to legally function without a passed audit.

Enough is enough, and six months before the next audit, I hand in my six months’ notice. My boss does not seem to care.

I finish my last day like this.

Me: “All previous audit failures are here, and I have a report of the work we said we did to fix it, signed by you and the owners.”

Boss: *Not looking up* “Yeah.”

Me: “I have made the auditors aware of the changes but not who will be the new contact person.”

My boss is still not even looking at me.

Me: “The changes to the standard are here, so these need to be looked at.”

Boss: “Yeah, yeah, sure. I’m sure we will be fine.”

Me: “Great. I have nothing more to do today, so I will be at my desk until the end of the day.”

Boss: “You may as well leave now.”

Me: “Great. Good luck on the audit.”

I packed up my things, said my goodbyes, and left. I kept in touch with several of my old coworkers there. I found out that a month before the audit, they still hadn’t hired a replacement and began to look at the audit. They were not at all prepared, hadn’t done any of the monthly work needed since I left, hadn’t addressed any of the changes I showed them, and hadn’t checked the last year’s audit to ensure that they are still compliant.

They had their worst audit in history with major failures all over and they nearly had to withdraw the certificate, stopping the site completely.

Because of the seriousness, an additional audit had to be planned at a cost of around £25,000. The company hired an expensive specialist to basically do everything I used to do and tell them everything I said.