Last Easter I was made redundant. It was a bit shit.
I’d only been back in work 8 weeks after being made redundant at Christmas.
Welcome to my Easter Redundancy Diary – I’m Hopping Mad!
Echoing my Christmas Redundancy Diary, this was how I coped at the time. I used my personal Facebook page to vent my spleen and pour out my bitterness so that it didn’t corrode me from the inside out.

CHAPTER FOUR
MOOD; SHIFTING. VIOLENTLY.

So there we have it. Unemployed again. But due to being a social services claimant after my Christmas redundancy, I didn’t even have any value as a statistic. There are rules about this stuff. No help for the unlucky. Difficult to feel full of the joys of Spring when even your country’s welfare system doesn’t want you.

I shall interlude here with a funny story. I say funny as it had to end in laughter, because it could’ve so easily ended in murder;
Were you with me as I battled with Human Resources just to get on the payroll of this very short-lived job? You may recall the Harpy. The most incompetent, unfriendly, obstinate barbarous battle-axe I’d ever had the misfortune to cross paths with. When I filled out my initial ‘Very Important Employee (We May Lose It Twice) Paperwork’, I was asked for my email address, which I dutifully supplied. My manager was also asked for it a few days later. Dutifully supplied. During my HR battle, I used that very same email to correspond back and forth. After my experience thus far with the Harpy, I shouldn’t really have been surprised when a couple of weeks later, a rather disdainful request arrived for that same email address. Which I had apparently not supplied. But eventually it was embedded into their records somewhere because they used it to send me my Redundancy Notice.
And my Final Payslip.
And my P45.
And my End Of Year Tax Form.
And then, 3 weeks AFTER they’d made me redundant, they used it again to invite me to join the work’s Pension Scheme.
Un-fer-fer-fucking-believable. I dispatched a strongly worded email. Not even pausing to get Boudicca and her Chariot of Fire on the case. I may have included the word Cabbage.

So, once again down that Rabbit Hole. A very sickening place to be. But the world moves in mysterious ways. The remotest encounter, micro-second alignment and a throw away comment brought me to the attention of someone looking to fill a vacancy. Despite the crushing defeats so far, I was (absolutely bloody necessarily) going to have another go at employment.

Retail is a 4-letter word. You might think it’s 6, but trust me, it’s spelt wrong. It had offered me another crumb of hope even though I was starting to suspect that retail didn’t really want me. If it spat me out again, at least this time there’d be nothing left to chew up first. Of course, 10 minutes before my interview, I was thrown a curveball and slammed headlong, face-first, spread-eagle across the floor of ‘Superdrug’, having skidded on some spilt shampoo. Wearing a skirt. I took this as a sign that the interview would go well, because little could humiliate me more than being sprawled full length, just inside the doorway of a busy city centre shop in the middle of an Easter Bank Holiday afternoon.

I hobbled, with my bruises in tow, to my interview. An informal affair that bagged me some work albeit part-time and a little ad hoc. Feeling so utterly dejected, fragile, vulnerable and defenceless, it allowed me the physical and mental space I needed to restore my battered being.

And one year on, I’m still there. Regular readers will know that slap bang in the middle of all of this we moved house. We’re still there too. We live for the day. We expect the unexpected and we don’t try to second-guess what’s round the next corner. Like anyone, there was also everything else that life throws at us woven in. No rollercoaster in the world could equal it for highs and lows. Sometimes we can throw our hands in the air like we just don’t care and sometimes we hold on super tight and close our eyes.

So. Universe. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!

And thus the tale is told. The Rollercoaster of Life rattles on. Who knows what dives and turns it may take? It’s definitely still ‘Under Construction’, but I don’t see any blueprint. For you and me now though, the next section of track is a recap, a thankyou and a ‘what’s next’.

If you are employed or otherwise content and stable with your work/life/domestic situation, please pop over to Wanted. Not Wanted. where you can have a smug, self-righteous, cosy giggle at my crumbling self-esteem. You’ll find my self-initiated Job Club, my ridiculous misguided applications for ANY kind of work and my redundancy diary, a revealing look into the day to day life of the lowlife worthless pits of humanity the unemployed. If you are not content and stable with your work/life/domestic situation, then let’s hold hands and stick our tongues out at the rest of the world. But you still have to go read all the stuff.