Status

My five years of Hell continue.  I have no job and no chance of ever getting one.  In June I applied for a position at the Post Office.  It took two months to get through the aptitude test, the security check, and the various scheduling delays.  When they finally granted me an in-person interview, it turned out I never could have done the job, which involves 8-hour shifts of tossing ten-pound boxes into bins by province.  It's "part-time" in the sense that it's only October through Christmas.  So the interviewers begin by telling me that the job has only one task, done over and over, and *then* they ask if I need accommodation for my physical infirmities.  What's the point if no accommodation is possible?

I checked through Indeed recently.  If you can't do full-time work, or heavy lifting, and don't have teaching or nursing certificates, and have no aptitude for customer service, then there is simply nothing available.  I don't mean there's nothing GOOD available, I mean there is NOTHING available.

Last month the Government of Canada announced that the Canadian unemployment rate had fallen to 6.3% (corresponding to 5.3% in the American way of lying about the economy), even though there were 2,400 fewer full-time jobs and 24,300 fewer part-time jobs.  This statistical legerdemain was accomplished by treating self-employed people as if they were full-time, even though self-employment is more work than full-time and pays less than part-time.  If I don't have the stamina for full-time then I certainly can't do the "gig economy" which is even worse.

I asked my family doctor if I could get myself declared disabled, but she didn't think that would go well (it's been 15 years since the triggering event and you're supposed to apply immediately).  She suggested I go to Lutherwood; I am currently in the middle of scheduling delays with them.  It remains to be seen what they could possibly do for me, since they cannot create jobs out of thin air.  There are government programs to assist disabled people, but I'm not eligible.  There are other government programs for down-on-their-luck oldsters, but I'm not eligible because my house hasn't been foreclosed yet.  There are programs for able-bodied people who need a new career, but I'm not able-bodied.  There are programs for people who never got a college diploma, but I have a master's degree.  Here in Socialist Canada there are programs for everything — but none of them are for me.

This post has been brought to you by Wifey, who complains that I never write anything here anymore.  The last comment I posted was to deffox on April 18th.  The next day I received a reply from whitetail, who refuses to accept that his computer's inability to display 𝕌𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖 is his problem, not everyone else's.  (Hint: what you need is a software upgrade so you can read what everyone else is writing 🌶 in 2017).

A month later I received a query from rain_gryphon, which was very nice of him.  (In a previous year, when he had stopped writing for awhile, I had sent him a nudge.)  So here it is, four months later, and it seems time has stopped.  The front page of Dreamwidth hasn't been updated since April 14th.  rain_gryphon hasn't posted anything since July 8th.  frith has many posts of his drawings but none of the animals at the zoo he works at.  loganberrybunny has only one post in the last 14 days, which is all DW will show me.  Over at LJ, sabotlours is still posting (I wonder if he's retired yet), as is porsupah (good to hear things are going better for him) and whitetail (I wonder how his eye is doing.)  There's some posts from mejeep (whom I haven't seen in person since 2005).  That's it.  It's dead, Jim.

Astute readers will note that this post begins and ends with 𝙎𝘵𝘢𝘳 𝙏𝘳𝘦𝘬 references and that none of the Unicode glyphs in this post were truly "necessary".