Graduate Myth #7: Everyone Else Is Better Than You

When a group of graduates get together, you'll find they often start to play a form of one-man-downship. One may be pleased about their new job, and another will express admiration for their progressing career. The first will respond with a variant on “but you have a better job/house/children/dog” and thus does the spiral continue.

The thing is, all graduates are basically failures now, right? Our degrees aren't worth the paper they're written on, we are all spongers off the state and we fail at being adults. As such, when someone makes any kind of progress it merely serves as a reminder that we are all such miserable failures as human beings that we should just lie down and die and stop taking valuable resources away from people that need them.

You will be pleased to hear that this is a myth, and one of the more common ones at that.

I am consistently amazed at how much better than me the vast majority of people seem to be. Wanda and Terry have just bought a house. Doris has just had a baby that she was actually trying for rather than an accident with contraception. Maurice is an area manager. These are not real names (I wish I did know people called that) but these are real examples of people exactly the same age as me. As I sit here in a t-shirt with the Cookie Monster on it and debate whether it is acceptable to eat toast for the second meal of the day, I casually glance at Facebook and despair at my existence compared to all of these amazing people I seem to know. Seriously, I am clearly a wreck masquerading as a human being.

But then, I do have a job. I am sitting in a flat that does not contain my parents. Admittedly I don't own said flat, but who does these days? Plus, I'm getting married in less than four months which freaks even me out, let alone the gasps that the information elicits from fellow graduates.

Going to university, for many people, is a deferral of being a Real Adult. Yes, you go and live by yourself and manage your money and study and love and all those good things, but no one expects you to make commitments. You are not required to buy a house, or have an amazing job, or push out babies, or get married. In fact, people will look at you funny if you do manage any of these things. Contemporaries who didn't go to university, however, tend to manage these things faster. As such, you come out of university, hit about 23, and then panic because everyone is BETTER than you and why haven't you ACHIEVED and OH GOD OH GOD and the cycle starts again.

As such, I'm going to let you in on a secret:

If you're reading this, and you're a graduate, then congratulations! You have achieved something massive in your life! You worked hard enough in school and college and whatever else to get the requisite qualifications to enter a respected institution,where you knuckled down for the requisite amount of time and managed to achieve a recognisable qualification. Dude, you rock!

So there.

The Disorientated Graduate's Guide To Winter

The nights are dark, the days are cold and the high street is pushing Christmas like it's going out of fashion. It is, of course, winter, and this presents a new layer of problems for graduates. I am now in my third winter since graduating and feel I can now guide the average graduate through the terrifying world that is the coldest season and the surprising bright sides it can bring. No, really.

The Heating

There are not many times in this blog I'm going to write this, but when it comes to the heating: REJOICE! FOR YOU ARE NOT A STUDENT ANY MORE!

Like so many students, I lived in a houseshare. As energy companies are bastards, we couldn't afford to have the heating on all day. I lived in Scotland. As such, days at home involved waking up and having a very hot shower. When you were out of the shower, you put on your underwear. Then – and this is a knack I am proud of – you put on the wooly tights, then the vest, then the t-shirt and the pajama bottoms. After this came the thin jumper and then over that a hoodie. Add another pair of socks to the equation, and some slippers. Make a hot drink, and then sit in front of the computer with a blanket over your knees. Add a hot water bottle when appropriate.

That, you see, is SURVIVAL. Heating takes away money you can spend on important things, like vodka and cheese, and my student priorities were very clear indeed.

Living with your parents as a graduate is often pants, but it does mean that the heating is on during winter. Remember going home during Christmas, and sweating as you sat in your t-shirt? Well, it's like that ALL WINTER ROUND.

Moved out with people with a job? Possibly not at parent standards of heat, but I am currently sat in a flat with the heating on and it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Sure, we can only afford a few hours a day, but as we work roughly equal hours it means we can time the heating around it.

… and if you are unemployed and can't afford to put the heating on? Well, see my tips as a student for keeping warm. Let me tell you, they're cast-iron.

Time Off

Summer holidays are no more. Spring break is not for you. British laws and customs, however, mean that Christmas represents more of a chance for a little time off. Within reason, of course; many graduates work in businesses that do not shut over Christmas, or only shut for a day.

TIP: Many people do not celebrate Christmas which is all good. However, if you celebrate Christmas find someone that objects to Christmas. Not the type that just 'don't like it' but people who really, really hate Christmas. Jehovah's Witnesses are particularly handy for this, and frankly it's revenge for all of those times you get woken up by missionaries.

Okay, it's not the big amount of time off you had as a student, but at least you don't have to revise for Christmas and/or write a dissertation. Christmas dissertations are rubbish, although asking a drunk father to edit it on Christmas Eve is quite good fun. I don't think he even knew who Charles II was.

… and work

Winter can bring new opportunities for work, through an increase in seasonal labour. Sometimes this can lead to new longer-term opportunities, although I will be the first to admit that being a Christmas retail temp can be soul-destroying.

The weather, however, presents new and exciting challenges. If you are travelling by anything other than a transporter, prepare to add more time on to your journeys. Travelling by train? Buggared. Travelling my car? Buggared. Travelling by foot? Buggared. You will need to get out of bed earlier without a doubt, which is frankly pants.

And yes, it's dark ALL OF THE TIME. Wake up? Dark. Get out of the office? Dark. I cope with this by way of eating more cake and taking more baths, two of the pleasures of winter as far as I'm concerned.

Now wrap up warm and attack the winter! Or hibernate gently. Either way.

Dilemma

I went to Blackpool the other night. This is generally something of a mistake at the best of times. The Illuminations were switched off early, we got lost trying to get there, even the trams weren't running. It was, basically, fail, and by the end of the evening when we returned to the car we were almost laughing at the sheer despair of the place.

At which point we overheard a frankly appalling conversation on the other side of the road, as a burly man attempted to tell a passing gent about why “Come with me, mate! She'll look after you really well, I'll give you a good price for her, you'll have a good night!” The man he was cajoling walked on quickly. The burly man had a drunken man following him. It was with a sinking feeling that we realised that the burly man was probably a pimp, and lady of which he was talking was probably a prostitute.

Cue my liberal heart bleeding all over the pavement. Oh, god, the poor woman.

As I have discussed before, I am a feminist. I am, overall, not in favour of sex work in an area where it is not legalised. I absolutely think it should be legalised, and self-policed, which would make it safer for all concerned. As the law stands in the UK, it is consistently the women who suffer. I fully understand that there are those involved with sex work that do so voluntarily and enjoy the work.

Perhaps the woman (women?) they were discussing were fully and completely engaged with their work and did so out of choice. Not the kind of choice where it's that or starve, or the kind of choice where it pays for the drugs. The kind of choice where it's that, or be killed. That's no choice at all. Blackpool has, shall we say, a reputation for the kind of women who have no choice at all. And frankly, I really don't like the idea of a man selling a woman like you might sell a potato.

So all I could think about was the woman, and that by watching the interaction all I was doing was facilitating her abuse.

There are so many things wrong with the above sentence. Firstly, I have no idea that what I thought I saw and heard was really what was happening. I have no idea of the state of the woman or women even if my assumptions were correct. And even if it was all of my worst fears, what could I do? I could confront the man, who might have been armed. I'm a short woman with the physical strength of a bowl of noodles. Even if I had over-powered him, how would that have helped the woman in the long run? I couldn't describe the man, and I don't know where they eventually ended up, so I couldn't get the police involved – and indeed, I'm not sure how helpful the police would be.

Finally, my feelings of guilt mean that I am taking away the attention from the women involved and making it about me, and even using it for blogging, which is maybe the worst thing of all.

Comedy review: Sarah Millican

Sarah Millican: Thoroughly Modern Millican, 27/10/11, Southport Theatre and Convention Centre

I got tickets to see Sarah Millican on my birthday. In these innocent, halycon days (well, August) I did not know the grim truth that she was a panellist on Loose Women. That was a horrible shock courtesy of a sick day, especially when I realised it wasn't a co-hydromal inspired hallucination.

As such, I was still looking forward to seeing Sarah Millican, but when we got to the venue and realised we were possibly the youngest people in the audience (well, at least in the bottom 10%) the alarm bells started ringing. Plus the plastic glasses of wine, although this is, to be fair, now standard across the board.

In the end, I didn't need to worry. It was a fab night indeed. The comedy was like the stuff off the telly, i.e. homely, relationships, weight, and so on. Although I like surreal comedy as much as the next person, it was something that I could absolutely identify with. “You can absolutely have breakfast in bed if you're single. Leave a Twix by the bed before you go to sleep.” Plus, she was completely filthy, so the two things together, personally, made me snort with laughter. She was very good at dealing with the audience of, yes, mostly middle-aged women. (You think that that sort of audience doesn't get drunk and heckle a lot? Clearly you didn't see Take That this summer.)

It's not comedy to set the world alight, and I suspect that although the audience was probably a little older due to being Southport, Land Of The Pensioner, the comedy probably does appeal more to older people. That's okay. I'm basically a pensioner at heart myself. But all in all, it was a very good night out, for a Wednesday in Southport. My main quibble? The bar was out of wine by the interval. I have never been so outraged. I still enjoyed the second half, though, even without a glass of wine in my hand. That's fair praise, right there.

Graduate Myth #6: Work/life balance

When I was a student, one of the things I really looking forward to was not having to 'take the job home', as it were. Being an arts student, the vast majority of my time was taken up with reading. It was, in fact, an endless reading list. Whatever I read, it wasn't enough. I would sit at home/the union/the cinema/etc fretting that I had many things to read. After eight hours of reading and then a shift at my part-time job, there would still be reading to do.

I flailed a lot, but looked forward to the fact that even if I had a horribly high-powered job I would still be able to go home most nights and not worry about my job. And if I had a medium or indeed low-powered job, this would still make life significantly easier because at least the rest of my life would be my own.

Sorry about that hollow laughter in the background there. That's present day me cackling at student me.

I have, at best, a medium powered job. I have a small amount of responsibility, but generally I seem to finish at about 5pm and saunter home. Recently, however, my workload has increased massively, and not the the extent where I can now ignore it. Though a forcible reshuffle of my working habits, I am now more efficient in my day to day tasks, which has helped, but I've still left late every day. More problematically, I'm still drowning in work when I get back in every morning. And it is playing on my mind. Quite dramatically, at the moment, which is why blogging has dropped off a little. I dreamt about a major customer last night. Not in that way, obviously, but in a faintly anxious way.

I enjoyed the reading. I really, really do not enjoy my job.

(Damn, that hollow laughing is getting louder.)

Youth unemployment

I have had the kind of fortnight that makes me fantasise very seriously about quitting my job in dramatic high fashion. It veers between telling arsey clients exactly where they can stick their increasingly high pitched demands for immediate attention or alternatively just throwing a shoe at my boss and flouncing out of the door. How exactly I will flounce with only one shoe on I'm not sure, but it's important not to over-analyse such fantasies.

Only once in my life have I quit a job without another one lined up. I was, for all of a day, working in a cleaning gang for a Pontins contract. The gangmaster was a twat is a suit who was there for all of three minutes before 'leaving us to it'. Never trust a bloke in a suit running a cleaning company,in my fairly considerable cleaning experience. We spent all day cleaning out room after room after room, with no lunch break and then we ended up working an hour longer as some of the other gangs didn't do their rooms fully. The supervisor at Pontins was the most awful person I've ever had the displeasure of working with, and as one of the few women in the gang to speak English she took out a lot of her anger at me. I finished the shift, went home, burst into tears and didn't go back. I wasn't paid for the extra two hours.

The point of all this is that I managed to get another job reasonable swiftly, this time as a carer in a nursing home, which I have relatively good memories of and still pop in occasionally to see the surviving residents. I had enough money to see me through the summer and set me up for another year in uni.

I don't think I could manage that again. I am hyper-aware of my financial responsibilities, mostly because I pay the rent and also I have a wedding looming, and that shit is expensive. My fear of poverty is higher than my loathing of the job, and poverty and unemployment is a very real fear right now.

Youth unemployment is, roughly speaking, when someone between 16-24 isn't in employment, education or training. This is charmingly referred to as being a NEET. I have never been a NEET, I say with some quiet pride, but my sister has. In less than a year I am no longer a youth in employment terms, but I still worry about the future.

Youth unemployment in Britain has now topped one million, and if you think this isn't a graduate issue then you have your head in the sand. It is equally an issue for school-leavers and college-leavers, but crucially it means a generation is being screwed. It's being screwed by short-sighted policies, by increasing unemployment across generations, by the economy. It means I worry about spiralling into the situation in Spain. I look at the protests across the Middle East, where a major factor for social change and unrest is – you guessed it – youth unemployment.

I worry that I am stuck in this job, which whilst paying tolerably well has no chances for progression or training. Worse, though, is the worry that if I quit it I will have no chances for, well, anything, and will eventually just take a worse job in order to fill up the days. I don't exactly have what you might consider a strong work ethic, but I like to have a structure to my day, and to feel that I'm doing something at least tolerably useful.

So, for now, fear of the unknown will keep the image of throwing a shoe at my boss a fantasy.

When push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love

I have always thought of myself as a generally organised person. I am the Queen Of The Filing System at work, keeping it alphabetised and everything in correct folders. My desk at work was organised according to fairly sensible rules.

Slowly but surely, the desk system has fallen apart in the last six months. I've taken on a frighteningly large range of responsibilities, all of which come with ridiculous paperwork. The office was reshuffled as well, leading to a reduction in overall desk size. As such, my desk filing system has slowly altered to a state of being in which it has four categories:

1.I'm Dealing With It
(It's currently sat on my desk and I'm ignoring it.)

2.I've Filed That Away
(It's in the bin under an apple core.)

3.That One Is Dealt With
(It's been shredded.)

4.I Have No Idea What You're Talking About
(No, really, I don't. I might have eaten it.)

As such, I finally plucked up the courage to ask for some filing trays. Normally asking for stationary involves producing a spreadsheet in order to prove it will increase your productivity, a small blood sacrifice to the pagan gods and bowing to the full moon over a period of six months. Astonishingly, though, my request was immediately granted, possibly because my boss is out of the country and the office manager is a little laissez-faire about such matters.

I now have a desk with some lovely coloured filing trays on it, and I am as happy as a clam. I can even see some of the wood on my desk. It's a very satisfying feeling, and frankly their arrival represented the bright spot of my week.

Make of that what you will.