Blogs: Richard's job log: 6

Richard currently works in a Birmingham law firm, after a contemporary history degree. He’s thinking about a paralegal career, but also has media ambitions.

As regular readers might be aware, I am attempting to become a real person with a proper career and everything. In the past month or so I completed the ‘just graduated and renting a flat’ level of my life and moved onto the next stage. I finally purchased my first house. The end of level boss was a series of bickering surveyors, waving bits of paper at each other in silence, seemingly forever. But they were eventually defeated (I used my endless, nagging phone calls amulet to beat them) and I am now a home owner. 

However my job hunt has been put slightly on the back burner. It is rather tricky to search for a new job and/or career when you don’t have an internet connection at home.

Since returning to work, following a short lifting and shifting sabbatical, I have been able to do some job hunting. However, the fact that I am doing it from my desk at work makes the whole process feel unnecessarily dangerous. Having to minimise windows whenever anyone walks by, lying to my boss about what I am up to at lunch and darting my eyes about the office like a baddie from a 1970s Kung Fu movie is all good fun and everything but it is beginning to feel like I am having an affair, albeit, without the handholding and canoodling.

Hopefully when I do eventually get to spend some quality alone time with the internet and its many jobsites there will actually be some jobs left. At last count I believe there were only seven vacancies left in the UK and George Osborne and pals were feeling a bit ‘cutty’.

In the meantime at least I have a job, and although it is far from my ideal occupation, it does pay the bills (I think I have heard home owners say stuff like that before) and helps me maintain my sanity in a pleasant, supportive and friendly environment. Although I do currently feel as if I am in something of a holding patter, at least I feel valued. I will have been in my current job two years come November, which will be the longest that I have stayed with one company.

I recently celebrated the two year anniversary of leaving my old job by getting quite heroically drunk as my time at that firm left me an emotional wreck. My confidence and sense of self worth had been shattered. I had become the plaything of the despair squid, who would pop up every single Sunday evening, blackening my thoughts with frightening regularity. In the end the final week of my notice period saw me off work ill. They had ground me down.

Yet here I am a mere two years later, well on my way to real person world and I have my current job to thank for that.