the rosemoirs

Looking for a “proper” job is something I’d happily do without. I’ve been trying since 2004.
It’s not like I want to walk into some £30-40,000 a year position that involves plenty of meeting people for coffee and producing wonderful things. I don’t apply for massive long shots, those jobs that you see and think “yeah, that’d be good” and fill out the form even though you have no experience or qualifications. No, won’t waste my time on those.
Instead I concentrate my efforts on things that are a little more achievable. If I can’t tick off the essential criteria I won’t bother, but I look to have the desirables as well.
I have essentials and desirables of my own, too. Somewhere not-for-profit, or in the arts essential, Galleries, museums, libraries, desirable. Enough money to live off is essential, any more is a desirable. Something that doesn’t involve money is essential, creative is desirable. Able to get there on public transport essential, City Centre desirable.
So I’m not exactly looking to be the person that deals with moons on sticks. I’m happy to stay an admin monkey, I just want to do it somewhere interesting.
My experience? Well, I’m ridiculously good on word, powerpoint and excel. I can build databases, query databases, produce professional documents, write, proof read, edit text, take minutes, manage diaries, build and update websites, knit cute toys, deal with difficult and lovely people on the phone, bake (and bring baked goods into office, e.g. Monday Morning cake), be organised, fix printers, come up with scarily good solutions in a crisis, ensure there are always post-it notes, fastest googler in the west, 90wpm and all this WHILE cracking jokes and keeping everyone happy.
So why, being the exceptionally useful bringer of cakes and solver of MS Word problems that I am, do I never get interviews?
Well, here is where I say something, gasp, incredibly un-pc, but here is my problem:

I am an able-bodied white person.

Euw, I feel a bit dirty saying this. And before you say anything, no, I have not been hypnotised into believing in the daily mail. But I’m filling out these application forms and I get to the disability bit, which is now a Guaranteed Interview Form. The wording is different from form to form but the most recent one says this:

To demonstrate our commitment to the employment and career development of people with disabilities, an interview will be guaranteed to those who meet the essential job requirements

If you are disabled, and have the experience they ask for, you will get an interview. I am not disabled, I do have the experience they are looking for, but I do not get an interview.
And, without wanting to go further down Littlejohn Avenue, a certain proportion of interviews have to be given to ethnic minorities.
The last job, which emailed me today to say I had been unsuccessful, are holding their interviews tomorrow, and had limited slots. So before us have-it-easy white abled bodied people can get a pop at an interview slot they first root out those that ticked Yes on the disability form and next their quota racial minorities.
If the job attracted a high number of people with disabilities then it’s possible that people like me don’t even get looked at. Just no time left to interview, fire them off an email saying they’re unsuccessful.
I wont rant about PC gone mad, it’s not that; it’s over-caution, and probably mis-interpretation of the guidelines.
But, in their efforts to avoid any accusation of discrimination, they have discriminated against me.
Recruiters, should you read this, please consider this: I can’t help being born able-bodied and white. If you could possibly look past this you will find that I am skilled, clever, and ever-so keen. So before you take a cursory glance at my application form and put it in the “majority” pile, think for a moment about the person behind it. Take a look at the interests listed and recognise that although I work in boring day jobs I put my evenings into creating. Think about how just because I do not have an obstacle to overcome it doesn’t mean I don’t have ambition.
Try to look past equality forms and guaranteed interview forms and consider, who do you think would be best at the job?

I got an email from a friend the other day, “will you look at this story”, so I open the document up. The plot and structure are all there, but, naturally for a first draft, it needs some tightening up.
I roll up my sleeves, turn on track changes and hit the comments button in word. Time to edit this guy down.
My friend, who admits he is not the bravest editor in the world, makes the most common mistake of all: he’s become attached.
“That was my favourite joke in the piece” he says, “and you made me cut it”. I can feel the sympathy rising up in me, that familiar feeling of “I know it does nothing, but I do like that line”.
There’s a bit of a pouty lip in the email correspondence, and I can tell he wants me to back down, say “what the hell, put it back in” but I don’t. Why?
Well, it’s up to him, essentially, and I think if he doubted what I was saying at all he’d stick it right back in there and say no, Rosie, that line IS staying. But deep down he knows what I’m saying: you can’t get too attached to the words.
Brigadoon is a lovely word. I could say it all day: Brigadoon, brigadoon, brigadoon! I could come up with wonderful passages for all my work incorporating brigadoon, just for the sound of it. Brigadoooooon! But I wont, because what would that word add to a piece? How would it bring the story along, what deeper understanding can a reader take from Brigadoon?!.
The answer is they can’t. It means nothing and is, at best, a nonsence word. It will distract the reader as they wonder why the narrator decided to take them down that route. It’s a literary red herring.
Ok so I might have gone a little overboard, the odd surplus word here and there isn’t going to dramatically damage the readers enjoyment, but can you trust yourself to stop there? With that one word, or line, simply because you really love it?
Because there will be others, and you’ll want them too. It’s that packet of biscuits staring at you from the shelf. You could open them, just have one, put the rest away. Just one wont make you a biscuit addict, right? Just one. But by the end of the week you’re sat there, biscuits by your side. “Just one” you say, this minute, and “just one” again, the next.

As a kid my mum was always trying to force cross stitch on me. Old fashioned patterns of blocky little people in their cross cross home sweet home cross cross.
I’ve always had this urge to make and create, to take something, scrunch it my hands, and slowly uncurl my fingers to reveal an astonishing impossibility.
But when I desperately wanted a Take That book for my birthday and was given, instead, “100 Cross Stitch Patterns” (somebody get Childline on the phone…) that I knew I HAD to act grateful for, I automatically rebelled against the urge and, more importantly, my mother.
There would be no learning to knit. There would be no hours with embroidery frames, no careful constructions of crosses or hours at a sewing machine.
I wanted guitars, drums, and fanzines.
I listed to loud bands, I attempted to play the guitar (I reason that my fingers are too short), I cut and pasted the fanzine and made the html marquee websites.
I decided that what I really wanted to do was write fiction and gained a degree in writing. We drunk, took black and white photos of each each other, generally felt like the chosen ones, and retreated into the writing students world of Alcohol, Ego and Chekov.
I still felt more creativity in me though, waiting to get out, so I got acrylic paints and boards and made whatever art I felt like.
University ended, like it tends to do, and blinking in the bright realisation of MUST EARN MONEY I stumbled into the first place that offered to pay me.
Leaving University is like a desert filled with quick sand, except that the holes are actually the safe bit: the good, interesting job, and everything around them is the quick sand. The longer you spend trying to trudge around finding a safe spot the deeper you go, until you get to the where you realise that, actually, instead of hoping to find one of these safe spots you’ll have to put the work into creating one yourself.
So I tried to write more, and I did, but I also learned to knit and made colourful scarves, hats and floppy rabbits with button eyes.
And I found a £1 cross stitch set of a duck, which I did for a mothers day card.
I got a sewing machine for Christmas and started to figure that out.
And the stash of wool behind the sofa grew. The knitting needles got their own holder and now came in a variety of sizes. A stack of fabric found it’s way to the sewing bag, an easel took up residence in the corner and and a book on amigurumi parked on the bedside table.
I still have two guitars, spend too much on alcohol (“a women should never have more than one drink”), shelves groaning with books (some of which mother would be most upset about if she read), and change my hair colour more than mother washes the curtains (which is a lot). But being me, my own person, also means that yes, actually, the Mother was right, knitting is Jolly Good Fun.

Life doesn’t want to give me any time out at the moment. As soon as I get past one thing another comes along, sucking up time, energy and patience and chipping away at my sanity.
At the moment I’m stuck playing some kind of NHS version of Monkey Island. What I want is actually quite simple (simpler than a glass bottom boat), my next months prescriptions.
It’s not even that I want them- but they make life easier.
So here’s where it gets like Monkey Island: my old GP has removed me from their books because I moved (5 years ago).
I go on the NHS choices website, compare some surgeries, pick one and call them up. They’re waiting for new forms to come in, I’m to call back another time. I call back a few weeks later, they’re waiting for some forms to come in… I explain that by now I need some prescriptions within the next few days, is there anything that can be done? I should go back to my old GP they say. I think back to the phone call I received out of the blue, “we will not give you any more prescriptions, you are not to contact this surgery for anything, we wont treat you, I’ve looked at your records, you don’t need anything for a few weeks, that’s plenty of time. We’ve told the health authority about you”. Oh Penny Lane Surgery Receptionist, you’re such a charmer. I remember being made to feel like I had somehow cheated the NHS out of treatment, or as if I’d walked into the surgery one day and threatened to slap them all. She spoke to me as if I hadn’t always spoken to them politely and meekly. No, I think, I do not want to contact them for help, that last phone call was far from an isolated incident. She suggests I call another doctors surgery and see if they will help me, is that an admission that really she should help, but can’t be bothered and would rather I would call someone else that does the same job as her and get them to do it instead? Her next idea was to turn up at the hospital and ask them for a prescription. I don’t see that getting me anywhere, except maybe labelled as drug seeker. Ok, I think, this is obviously not the right number to ring.
I call NHS direct, they offer me more numbers where I can speak to more doctors receptionists. I’m fairly convinced that speaking to receptionists is not the strategy I need to win this.
I was never very good at Monkey Island, I always ended up asking my brothers to help me instead when I stuck at Mardi Gras, so I arm someone else with phone numbers and information, and ask them to call the old surgery for me.
I am no longer on their books (we knew this) and I have now registered somewhere else, and they’ve sent my records there. Unfortunately they don’t know where they have sent them, and I haven’t registered anywhere else, or given anywhere permission to request my medical records.
I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some kind of code that I must crack. Maybe I need to call certain numbers in a certain order and then you unlock the special phone number, the one where there is someone on the end that actually knows what they’re doing, and can give you some vital piece of information. Like whether or not I am registered at a doctors surgery, and if so which one it is?

So, a final plea, if you reader are my GP please get in touch, tell me what your name is and where you practise. Because if I’m honest I never finished playing monkey island, I got bored and gave up.