Aquarionics

Last Wednesday, I did something I hate with a passion I usually reserve for marmite or Mirror of her Dreams, and I resigned myself to the beige inevitablity of registering as unemployed with the Department of Work and Pensions, part of a process which would allow me to claim, to coin a phrase, on my National Insurance.

I hate this, not out of any misguided visions of a socialist or nanny state, but because the entire process is designed to destroy all the last vestiges of positivism that may be lodging in a dark corner of my soul. Also because I fundamentally disagree with one aspect of the benefits system, which is this: If you are living with your partner, the jobseekers allowance claim is joint. No matter whether they’re in work, a full time student, or whatever. Not only do I have to dig though all *my* documentation and history, bank accounts, debts (yes) and creditors (no. Well…), but I also need to get in all the details for her. Hate. (The form. The process. The assumptions. Not, I feel the need to clarify, the partner).

Filling in the form took hours, although it helped that I could do it all online at direct.gov.uk. There was a lot of backtracking (That counts as an income, doesn’t it. Oh, crap. There’s a separate box for it three pages on), and quite a bit I’m not entirely sure on (I own a company, although it doesn’t have any money and it’s not giving me any, which isn’t really employment, is it? Where does that go on the form?) and then the site crashed. Fortunately I could resume from where I was.

A day or two later I got a text message saying I had an appointment to do my claim, and that we both had to turn up and bring all required documents. First, didn’t say which documents. Second, I was booked to go to a job appointment then. Third, SMS is not guaranteed delivery. If you are sending required, unrepeated, unduplicated information over SMS you are doing it wrong. So I phoned to reschedule, and was put though to a line which rang for ages then cut me off, and did so repeatedly.

So today, I went to visit the Job Centre for my appointment. Since I now have a job (I start work for Zappit on Wednesday), this was purely to stop the application process.

“Hi, I’ve got an appointment in about half an hour for a new claim, but I’ve just got a job. What do I do next?”

(Pause. Shuffle shuffle. Think. Aha)

“Come with me.” says the reception at the Job Centre, and makes it someone elses problem with astounding haste and certainty.

The someone else (whose lunch I interrupted, unfortunately) deleted my claim outright. So either I’m safe and everything’s fixed, and I don’t have to go though the rest of the process, or I’m stuck with no claim and also a background check in progress.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve not had a great day.

I’ve got a rotten cold that’s filled my brain with cotton wool, my computer rejected a software update hard enough to require a system restore (Advice: Avoid Catalyst 12.1), I had to throw out dinner when it became obvious the chicken was out of date (which was after I’d spent the time making it), and I’m generally feeling like the universe was waiting for today in order to subdue any optimism I have.

But over the course of the day, starting yesterday afternoon as my Australian friends started the day, I’ve had a steady stream of trills from my phone as people from every part of my life and lives have wished me happy birthday, from family to people I haven’t seen or spoken to since I walked out of the office I worked with them in, though to people from Usenet, IRC, computer games and larp systems. A stream of people who give enough of a care to write two to five words into a text box on Facebook, which is nice.

> Sleep

You sleep. Time passes. Thorin sits and sings about gold.

You have levelled up! You are now level 31. You have one ability point to spend on a feat of your choice.

> Select ‘Gainful Employment’

Processing….

Worlds turn.

I generally have great hopes for the time between jobs. I’ll finish personal projects, clean the flat, get to the holy prophesied state of no laundry *or* washing up.

So in the last month I’ve played some Skyrim, a lot of Star Wars, some Orcs Must Die, and rewatched the entire seven season run of The West Wing.

I’ve done work on Piracy Inc as well, I’ve got a new combat model which is far simplier from both sides than the previous six-axis stat-a-rama, but which doesn’t fit into my tech model very well. I’ve been working on Larp.me.uk, designed as a cross-system character white-pages, event organisation system and gallery. So far it has the character bit mostly working, though I need to play with the interface a bit more. The Story is a few thousand words++, although my attempt at a christmas chapter-a-day thing fell apart distressingly early.

Recruitment continues apace. I’ve got three interviews and a tech test today, which is a bit of an overload, but should work out all right. The first one is in about twenty five minutes, so I’m sitting in a Starbucks a few hundred metres from the office (Top interview tips: Wear clothes you’re comfortable in, have three questions ready to ask, arrive an hour early so you’ll *never* arrive late and also have time to gather calm around you before you walk in) with a Vanilla Spice Latte, an iPad and a 3G connection.

Wish me luck…

I do not, as a cursory glance at my doubtfully worthy physique will inform the reluctant viewer, maintain a relationship with fitness. Tending less towards Atlas and more towards globe, I came to the conclusion that I’d like to buy nicer shirts. This is going to entail complicated things that do not generally cross this journal’s lexicon. Words like exercise. Glutes. Treadmills. Gyms.

And so I discarded my black leather ankle boots in favour of white Nikes, booked a free trial session at my local mass market gym franchise and booked a large cup of detached irony with which I could sup upon while surrounded by dozens of fit bastards, silently judging and mocking my attempts to infiltrate this alien world.

A brief defence: This is for me. This isn’t an attempt to be slimmer to pull chicks, fit into societies norms or fashion, or a desire to uproot trees with my bare hands. It’s a desire for stairs to be less nemisissy, and to be able to play more flighty LARP characters. I don’t know why I feel the need to defend it, but I do.

Anyway, the first trick was to find the gym, which helpfully directed me to the wrong street. After a while breaking in my new trainers, I found the building, and prepared for the judgement of the fit.

I filled in a form that promised that I was neither dead or likely to be soon, that I was aiming to go to the gym for reasons as mentioned above, and that my favour colour of popsicle is lime. Etc. My guide showed me around the gym, here are the machines, there are the changing rooms, that’s the free DVD lending library, this is the spa, those are the tanning booths. She introduced me to a new scheme they’re playing with, where you get eight weeks membership for £50, but if you go 20 times in those eight weeks you get £20 back. A numbers game I’m fairly sure they’ll win in most cases. Then she handed me off to to a bloke with a startling resemblence to Russell Howard, I got changed into my adult P.E kit, and prepared to hate everything, ironically.

I was disappointed.

My surety that this be horrible, that I would hate every moment, that the entire universe would be standing outside awaiting my doom, remained unfulfilled.  RobTheTrainer was nice, enthusiastic and encouraging, introduced me to how to make a treadmill work and not to accidentally reproduce OKGo videos, how to use all the terrifying and complex machines and systems in the weights area, and we went on a basic workout with all of them. 15 reps here, 10 there, a dozen squats, some lunges, now try the squats swinging this weight around, bit of a break, this is how this one works.

During bits I was finding walking hard, but then we concentrated elsewhere while my legs recovered. I eventually left a while later, in a somewhat confused “so there’s a good kind of pain” way, and fairly sure I’m going to try to take them up on their numbers game (Or maybe not, now I know how to use the machines the gym in my block of flats is less terrifying, so I may do some stuff there).

On the way home I attempted to put my workout into Fitocracy, failing to find about half the exercises I was looking for. Nevermind. Numbers go up anyway, and now I can compare against my friends. Incentive and a non-physical positive feedback loop helps my overly analytical brain. Numbers go up! (and, with any luck, one number goes down. Progress reports as they happen)