A Fully Qualified Layabout

Being unemployed is ass, but the upside of it is that everyone and his dog is out of work at the moment (misery loves company)--even if the dog has a double degree in something smart, like architecture, and not something stupid, like Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

Berlin also happens to be one of the worst places a retail-slave-turned-pretend-intellectual-with-a-very-limited-visa could be while on the job-hunt. There are a crapton of English teaching jobs, but just like salmon or airline tickets, you have to snatch them up at precisely the right moment, or else both the quality and quantity are either faltering or outright lacking. But even salmon season lasts longer than a couple of weeks. In Berlin, because everyone is certified to teach English (and usually with much better/smarter-sounding certifications than mine), you have to be bam! front and center, some time between July 29th and August 1st, in order to be not too early and not too late to sign contracts, get basic training, and a full class schedule. Otherwise you're up shit creek in early March, applying to companies whose total vacancies comprise of three classes twice a month but if you'd like to sign a contract binding you to them until July, and don't need to eat or pay bills until the next school year, maybe they'd have a few more classes for you in September?

No thanks.

Since September I have been "retired" from the Berlin English-teaching scene. Too many fishermen, and just not enough fish. I've done a seminar, and worked in a kitchen, but for the most part I've just been... gainfully unemployed.

Fast-forward to March 2, 2009. I am no longer gainfully unemployed. I am now gainlessly unemployed. So when I'm woken up by some yahoo in a vertically-striped shirt, blue jeans and brown loafers on the other side of my phone, asking me to interview for a €400 job washing dishes part time, I practically oozed with enthusiasm.

Went there today, didn't get the job, cos I'm illegal. That's life.

When I got home today from not-working, I thought to myself, "I ought to just go up and stand in front of the shopping center and stand around drinking cheap beers and smoking rollies. But because I'm not German, I, as an able-bodied, childless person, cannot apply for welfare and stand around all day getting drunk and eating pommes with tiny plastic forks."

But--as I so often do--I digress.

The job listings here are something akin to madness. There are--literally--thousands of jobs available in the fields of which I have pooled most of my expertise (haha). Retail, waitressing, bartending, barista...ing. I can do all of that.

The catch? To do any of those things here, most employers wanna see a certificate of completion. Not like, a mixology diploma, but like, a piece of paper that says you worked for three years at half-pay "learning" how to make a fucking latte. That attests and affirms that you are now a professional and therefore worthy of being hired on at €5 an hour and no tips in their establishment.

Wow. And I could have sworn I learned how to make everything on a coffee-shop menu in under eight short hours.

I could have sworn I learned how to use a cash register in five minutes, and had perfected it in a week.

I could have sworn that even a monkey can stock a shelf, and a polar bear can count change.

Three years? Three years of your fucking life, gone, to prove that you are now a professional juice-presser? Apprenticeships are either for jobs with no official regulation (like tattooing, body piercing, and shamanism) or which just really require a lot of hands-on experience in order to get right on the first try (like plumbing, carpentry or electric work). I may also say that I feel that jobs which genuinely require apprenticing are usually good, honest, humble careers--note that word, career. Bussing tables is not a career. Working the cash register at the grocery store is not a career. I mean, even a bank-teller is not a proper career. You are just doing a job that any monkey can do. Or polar bear.

I don't mind my job requiring only slightly more skill than can be offered by zoo animals, nor do I mind commanding half the respect afforded to said beasts. It doesn't matter to me if I scrub toilets or flip burgers. I'm not too proud for that. But I'm also not planning on doing any apprenticeships to prove I can do it. Not any time soon.

A friend of mine recently applied to a small hotel for a position as a chaimbermaid. The owner of the modest inn was doubtful that the girl would like working there very much, because the pay was only €800 before taxes, and with only €620 take-home, most people would rather just collect unemployment. My friend, being German-born but Canadian-raised, found the idea of staying home doing nothing for doing-nothing's sake distasteful and told the lady so, but the lady wasn't buying it. She'd confessed that she'd actually rather find a Polish or Czech immigrant to work for her--someone not so well provided-for by the social system.

Everyone likes to shit on America and our social services system ("Did you know a baby dies of AIDS every three seconds in the States? It's true. It's the highest cause of infant mortality in America, right after high cholesterol and gunshot wounds"), but at least when healthy, childless Americans are out of work, they, like... look for a job. No 18-year-old with "too much of a conscience to work at McDonald's" is going to fund his kind bud and used-bookstore habits from his welfare check.

And after all this complaining... I still don't have a job.

Time to head up to the shopping center and knock back a few lukewarm ones.