Fat Finger Job Application

I've been putting this off, and got depressed today. I went to the Job Centre on Thursday, and was given four jobs to apply for. I managed to write a job application on Friday, and got it corrected by Sunday. I spent the last two days trying to muster up courage to send it off. I kept putting it off, surfing the internet, walking around randomly, standing on stairs, drinking coffee and juggling. I tried to learn lots of juggling tricks with the left hand on the right and the right hand on the left.

By this morning I was depressed and confused. Everyone I met today commented how awful I look. I slept 9 hours, but was worried the whole time and woke up tired. My coordination is bad today, and in the cafe they laughed at my attempts to fill a cup with coffee from a thermos flask, with the saucer getting in the way.

I decided to break out of this depression by doing stuff. I ate lunch, drank a coffee and set about sending off the application. I checked the last job application that I'd sent off, and saw that I'd included my PhD certificate twice. I renamed the file from MCT0025x00001.pdf to something more sensible. All the time I'm fighting with the thoughts "you can't do this job", "your application is useless", "your letter is cringeworthy". I joined the files together, found a plausible email address, wrote a subject, then my finger slipped. Somehow I found the keyboard shortcut for "send", and sent off an email without any body or attachment.

I then sent the real one, and hope that they take pity on me.

Bewerbungsmappe

This is the German word for a folder containing documents for a job application. Apparently there is no equivalent in English, as

In the US, when you apply for a job, you send a one or two-page resume and a letter. You don't send all the other crap unless they ask for it.

I have found all my old 'A' level certificates, and am off to a copy shop to get copies for my Bewerbungsmappe. I'm finding all of this rather tricky. My psychologist reminds me that every new thing will be difficult. Every step towards getting a job is hard, and I find myself blocking myself.

The process of buying a Bewerbungsmappe took about an hour. It started with me writing down what I was going to buy, where I was going to buy it, and when. I planned a cup of coffee and a sticky raisin bun as a reward for a successful purchase. Everything about this mission was carefully planned.

I then walked into the stationary shop, found the shelf with Bewerbungsmappen, and bought three. It took less than a minute. If I had to do it again it would be very easy. A Bewerbungsmappe is just a piece of folded cardboard with a clip inside and "B E W E R B U N G" on the front. Buying one is no more difficult than buying a ring-binder, or a hole puncher.

Borussia Mönchengladbach 2 - Alemania Aachen 1

Well I got my mobile back. I still don't know whether to thank or curse the guy who took my phone on a round trip from Bochum to Mönchengladbach via Dortmund, but at least he was honest and gave me my phone back, so I probably was a bit harsh in the last post.

After leaving the grotty internet cafe (see post below) I needed to pee. As their toilet was broken, I went into the pub next door. Peeing there cost 50 cents for non-customers, so I ordered a beer. After a few minutes, some Mönchengladbach fans had returned from the stadium and joined me to celebrate their victory. I left and found the guy who had acquired my phone, got it back, and went for another beer to celebrate, inwardly singing

Ohne Handy fahre ich nicht nach Haus, ohne Handy fahre ich nicht nach Haus. [1]

I returned to the pub and bought a round of drinks, and the Mönchengladbach fans said that they would get me home, seeing that a couple of them lived in Essen, which isn't far from Bochum. We drank the way to Düsseldorf, visited a pub next to the station in Düsseldorf (a guy said he knew the landlord, Pedro), and then drank the way to Essen and Bochum. Right now I'm back in Bochum and drunk. Borussia Mönchengladbach are top of the league and aiming for promotion.

[1] Translation: I will not aboard the train to Bochum without my mobile phone.

Mönchengladbach

It could have happened even if I was feeling well, but these things seem to happen more often when I'm feeling down anyway.

I ate lunch at a chinese restaurant, famous for it's chicken meat courts, and left my mobile phone there. Someone found my phone, and claims to have taken it to Mönchengladbach, which is over an hour from Bochum by train. Leaving it in charge of the restaurant owners was obviously too simple for him, so I'm off to Mönchengladbach, in full expectation that this guy will mug me for my wallet and keys when I get there.

Today I have slouched, cried, retched and despaired, and that was even before I realised that I'd lost my phone. I'm starting to wonder if I can live an independent life. It all seems so complicated.

Update 20:21

I'm in Mönchengladbach, and the guy is nowhere to be seen. I rang him up, and he explained that he is in Dortmund, and had an accident. Apparently, someone broke his mirror, and he had to wait for the police. He hoped to be in Mönchengladbach in an hour. Quite why the cunt has sent me to Mönchengladbach I don't know, as he will be driving his silver fucking BMW through Bochum to get here, the wanker. Top quote from him so far, as I frantically shove money into the pay phone: "Can I reach you by telephone". Sure, just call yourself on my fucking mobile!!!

If this is a practical joke, be 100% sure that I will use violence when I find out. And if this fucking arsehole doesn't turn up at 9, I will call the police and accuse this verdammte Drecksau of stealing my phone. It's OK picking up lost items, but you really should remember to give them back.

By the way, this internet cafe is a piece of shit. They have old cathode ray tube monitors, the toilet is broken and they don't clear the memory of the web browser. The last sites visited include www.sexrelax.de, www.gina-wild.de and www.nightparc.de. The keys seem slightly sticky, too.

Train Connections

I'm back in Erlangen from Bochum. On the way I tried to comfort a girl who failed to get off the train at Hanau because the doors didn't open. This meant that she had to take a round trip to Wuerzburg and back which took a couple of hours. I pointed out that it wasn't that bad, there was no need to cry and this kind of thing happens to me all the time.

And just to prove that I wasn't making this up I then got on a train in Nuremberg that went straight through Erlangen and out the other side. I didn't know that any trains did this (duh!), so I took an hour long trip to Bamberg and back.

Bochum

My life had slowly been drifting into a totally lazy nothingness, so I packed a toothbrush and five juggling balls and got a train to Bochum. I hoped that things would become a bit clearer being there rather than in Erlangen.

I nearly missed two trains, the first one I only caught because the guy selling Bratwursts helped me buy a ticket. My last remaining screwed-up five Euro note kept being rejected by the ticket machine, despite receiving a good kicking. Luckily the Bratwurst guy was able to give me change.

This gave me five minutes in Nuremberg to buy a proper ticket, some breakfast (it was only 1pm) and a magazine. I then sprinted to the platform sidestepping lots of little people and was able to sneak in the door where the guard was waiting. The train left literally 5 seconds after I got on. After walking around Bochum for 20 minutes I gave up and booked into the Hotel Ibis.

That's the good thing about being completely disorganised: it gives you something to write about. The journey was quite nice, a little old Austrian women gave me a ham sandwich and the train went down the Rhein valley past lots of castles and the Loreley rock.

Tutorial

I held a tutorial for some students who aren't studying physics, but need to take a physics course. Of the 20 people only five turned up, but the five who were there were friendly, quite well prepared and happy to complete the exercises on the blackboard. This is good, as I tend to get rather confused when writing things on the blackboard. My main problems are that I can never quite decide which symbol to use to represent a physical property (there are just too many options), my rho looks like a p, I randomly drop symbols and I sometimes say something completely different to what I write. I also have a habit of losing the piece of paper with the answers on, and slowly taking all the pieces of chalk and depositing them randomly around the room. I think that I could have a long career as a lecturer in front of me.

As I say, it turned out very well, as the students rapidly gained in confidence and were quite happy to complete the exercises themselves, which is the point of the whole thing anyway.

If you want to read a more interesting blog than this one, I would suggest the BBC political editor, Nick Robinson. Tony Blair today effectively sacked his under-fire home secretary, Charles Clarke, after a some rather disappointing local election results.

I’ve often interviewed resigning ministers, but this was amongst the bizarrest. When I was called to be told the news, I was naked in bed in a Westminster hotel hoping to get at least an hour’s sleep, having stayed up all night covering the local elections. The interesting discovery I’ve made is that you can go from being in bed to attending a resignation statement in exactly seven minutes.

Absent-mindedness

The Deutsche Bank knows a lot about me, presumably. Of course they know a lot about all their customers: how much they earn, how much they withdraw for a good night out, how much rent they pay, where they go on holiday and so on. I suppose it is quite unremarkable that a bank knows about my finances, and there is no reason to worry.

The odd thing is that the Deutsche Bank also know very much about my state of mind. In addition to losing two bank cards (could happen to anyone) I managed to forget my PIN (must happen to loads of people) and enter the wrong PIN three times in a row (I knew the numbers were 8-3-6-9, but had forgotten the order, and still have). Twice I took the bank card but left the money, and once I took the money and left the bank card. In fact I thought that I had managed to make every mistake it was possible to make with a bankomat, but today I found a new one: I transferred some money and left the bank card behind. The odd thing is that three hours later I could suddenly remember exactly what I had done and where the card was. In any case the staff took pity on me, opened up the machine and gave me my card back.

Of course they made a note of what I'd done. So in addition to knowing the inside of my wallet, the Deutsche Bank knows quite a lot about the inside of my head.

More Testing...

I made a very nice post, published it, saw it as preview, published it again, but it doesn't appear in the blog. I have the feeling that I screwed up somewhere. Maybe this one will appear?