Almost getting a job

Hmph, on reflection that blogpost a few hours ago about not being to get a job wasn't quite an accurate reflection of reality. I did get an interview and half a day's trial work quite early on in my unemployment, but I walked out of it.

It was for a face-to face marketing company, the folk who go door to door getting people to sign up direct debits to charities, the Red Cross and Oxfam and so on.

After spending four hours ringing doorbells, my mentor chap managed to sign up one person, an old lady who gave up £5 a month out of her pension. Her memory wasn't so good so we had to rifle through her kitchen try to to find her bank details and something with her postcard on. It was however remarkably easy to get her to sign off the disclaimer that we'd explained everything clearly.

I felt sick to my stomach and couldn't face having a job like that.

Admittedly the whole face-to-face charity direct debit thing did sit comfortably in my mind. The charities get better return on investment for their marketing activities. They get three times as much money donated from face-to-face marketing than from TV advertising and collection tin rattling. So they waste less money on marketing and have more to spend on their charitable activities.

But that was months ago, and its not so clear no more.

See the government seems to think that its goal is to extract as much money as possible from the people of the UK. They seek to take ever more of our money. How the government spends it is unclear, somewhere in Whitehall there is a furnace which all our taxes get chucked into.

Not all of the money gets incinerated in the furnaces of Whitehall, some of it is redistributed to charities, or fakecharities as some would have it.

Don't get me wrong, I honestly believe that the government do need to redistribute some money to charities. Prostate cancer charities get far less money than breast cancer chairties, despite equal numbers of deaths, tits have better PR, government needs to be blind to this.

But maybe too much money is being taken out of the control of the people who earn it, they have no choice how its spent. The government chose or the charities chose.

Spending money is a really cool thing. Its a concrete transaction. When you spend ten pounds you're getting something in return that's worth exactly ten pounds. You might just be buying a whole load of marketing bumf and a really cheap artefact, but its still spending, and its your choice.

But when you give money to charity or to the government, its not spending. You don't explicitly get anything back. Maybe a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and a bit of security, and the knowledge that somewhere at the other end of the charity 'good' is happening.

But then when you read stories about the RSPCA sending staff on loads of junkets, or the BBC's excessive staffing of Glastonbury, or this business with infertility therapy, I'm thinking, perhaps too much money is being handed over.

Too much money is extracted from people who earn it, and then used for 'excessive' purposes. This isn't quite what we had in mind when we handed the money over.

But in a lot of cases, we have no choice, they money gets handed over. Taxes, licence fee, and bullying old ladies into signing up to direct debits.

Its not quite that the money is being wasted, or the idea of furnaces in Whitehall burning it all, but just that the earners aren't quite getting what they thought they were for all the money handed over.

Anyhoo, me I pay no income tax right now. What I mostly pay is VAT and petrol duty. My credit card company takes a big chunk of money from me every month in interest, which is fair enough, I am in debt to them.

Have I even made a point here?

Taxes should be cut, charitable spending should be cut, the BBC should be downsized, the retirment age raised to seventy-nine years and eight months, and building planning permission rules slashed.

Houses cost about £60,000 to build, maybe £100,000 for a nice one, anything you pay more than that is marketing or supply and demand problems. Costs purely in bureaucracy and admin.