Coming next: Photos of Santa’s little elves selling apples while standing in a soupline covered in glitter.

1) accept that you will feel like shite for a while, no amount of reading or seeing or hearing on the radio about the other 400,000+ people out of work will make you feel any less “why meee…*sob*” its a normal reaction.

2) Accept that they lied to you in school, the ‘right attutide’ and ‘hard work’ don’t actually pay off, least not when your not in charge of the finances of the country and broader world economies….

3) The financial regulator didn’t do his job, now we are all fucked, move on…complaining is fine, don’t let it keep you awake.

4) You will now empty your change jar contents into your wallet, rather than visa-versa

5) plan out your day, shower, load the dishwasher, search aimlessly for jobs, empty the dishwasher… etc… and then on the weekend take a break like the employed folks do…

6) Accept that some people you know are a bit mean, prepare for the “how hard are you really looking for work” type remarks, not that blunt but it’s there underneath, these types usually still have jobs so they don’t understand.

7) save some money, you are broke but you still need a little pot of “woe is me, I need new item/holiday/night of drinking money to just splurge.

tone down your CV, the local shop wants to know you once worked in a shop, not that were promoted/amazing/uber qualified for other now unattainable jobs. Its goodbye ‘career’ and hello ‘job’ time. If they feel they won’t be able to boss you around then they wont hire you. It’s like your 19 again. Depressing but true.

9) most of your inbox will contain emails saying ” unfortunately you have not been successful…”  If yes, repeat the following :HAH, you say to yourself, fuck you, I was actually REALLYsuccessful, it’s just that the government fucked up everything and my career has ended abruptly - don’t want your stoopid job anyway” Only don’t reply with this, its only for your ears

10) A job is a job, it won’t be your forever job, but if your use to working its hard sitting at home all day, so take what comes along, to hell with your old standards.

Thats it really, times is tough, reallllllyyy tough. You’ll have good days and bad days and sleepless nights, give yourself a break, its not your fault the bank did what it did.

I call your cover letter and raise you: the worst I’ve experienced is applying to a trendy ‘new-media’ zine or even - gasp – maga-zine, trying to pitch yrself as the hottest history of art twit on the block.

Should one write a witty, cocky, arrogant cover letter in the style of the maga/zine in question? Or should one stick to the old formalities: ‘I look forward to hearing from you’; ‘I am confident that I will prove myself capable of: bending myself backwards in order to garner yr favour/faking my way into your self-referential, über-cool Wrld/being as stone-washed, sand-blasted and machine ripped as you like’.

Somehow the former formality and the latter fake-laid-backness just don’t gel well.

The worst is imagining the oversized-glasses wearing, sunglasses-indoors wearing, residue of last nights’ party wearing ‘crew’ in their studio-cum-office environment in mirthfully comparing notes on whatever lame hashed-up mix of formality and attempt at ‘cool’ you spent all last night painfully dragging out – word for word – while the dread-boggle-eyed fear, which even the prospect of cover letters brings about, renders you incapable of spelling or understanding syntax in yr own language.

The words You. Are. Not. Cool. are emblazoned on your mind.

Thank Gott in Himmel that the German language is simply more formal. It’s always okay to start a letter / email with ‘Sehr geehrte’ (lit. Most Honoured ___), one generally uses Herr and Frau (Mr. & Mrs./Ms.) and it’s not a hanging offense to use the formal ‘Sie’ (You) even in addressing the most über-cool people via print.

But then again – and tangentially – it is sometimes difficult when you actually get as far as meeting said ‘crew’ for an interview. Some people hate the formal ‘Sie’- brushing it off irritably like so many fruit-flies, some expect it, and when you and your interlocutor are around the same age anyway, it’s more or less de rigeur to use ‘du’… but then again, whomsoever it may concern is also your potential boss-to-be so maybe the hierarchy of ‘Sie’ still stands. I have digressed.

Marketing and Press work has taught me to always find the name of an ‘Ansprechpartner/in’ (personal point of contact), but then again that’s why everyone hates those fake ‘personalised’ invites with your name at the top.

Further experience has taught me that Dear Sir/Madam is not so bad when you’re writing to your bank to ask them not to sell you, or when you are writing to someone in order to sell yourself.

‘To Whom It May Concern’ (weirdly capitalized, no?): is always so formal and too cold, except for when you want to pour disdain on a company by ‘de-individualizing’ the individual you are writing to. Oh and you can use it in writing to the HMRC asking them to cease and desist in their incessant demand for a documents which you have already sent.

More than anything, this whole thing reminds me of the sweaty nightmares I experience on having to answer even my own home-phone in Germanland. One is supposed to say one’s name on answering (Guten Tag, “Frau M___”..?), which I find weird since the person calling presumably intended to call you. In an office one is supposed to furthermore say the name of the place one is working, followed by your name, which I find pointless when most people who call tend to be calling from the same building, and interrupt before you get half way through the indecently long name of your workplace, and far before you’ve said your name. And in commercial enterprises it appears one is supposed to say something trite like:

“A wonderful good day to you, you’ve reached BS International’s Berlin Office, my name is Employee Nr. 371, how may I help you?”

I have had such difficulty even considering myself or introducing myself in person as Frau M___, that the whole telephone answering threw me, and continues to throw me for a loop.

In my own strange non-country specific hashed-together way, I now answer the telephone:

“Anna, Hallo?”

Thinking I should probably take a more relaxed approach to contacting these people, I started with the greeting where I got hopelessly stuck. ‘To whom it may concern’ just looked wrong. I googled it and found that others had the same idea. Unfortunately they also had no clear idea what to put in its place.

Several suggested digging for the person most likely to read your application and addressing the greeting to them. Others (clearly Americans) recommended ‘Dear Hiring Manager’. Some pleaded that ‘to whom it may concern’ was not that fuddy-duddy after all, while others maintained that it was hopelessly outdated. Another suggested ‘Dear Sir/Madam’. Eventually as with all threads, someone went completely off topic and protested against ‘Dear Sir/Madam’ on the grounds that some people are neither Sirs nor Madams.

The idea that this nameless faceless person could also be a hermaphrodite had me wondering whether they possessed any other mysterious powers besides deciding my fate – shapeshifting perhaps?

There was no doubt that the formality of ‘to whom it may concern’ just didn’t suit the tone of my letter, but how to address this dynamic ‘live-wire’, without kindling them to combustion on the other end of the line, or without delivering the graveside chill that accompanies the solicitors letter…?

I realised I was striving for the communication equivalent of ‘smart-casual’.

Just as dressing smart casual actually requires more effort in the morning than throwing on a uniform, so smart casual job applications take longer than formal ones. We have always been told to tailor our cover letters, but never did we imagine that we would have to sand-blast them, fray them and ‘pre-wear’ them as with a pair of designer jeans.

It’s at times like these that the internationally unemployed comes up against the heart of darkness, or rather the core of complete BS that exists in the etiquette of hiring and firing. It’s hard to go plodding on with applications when you realise that you are constantly advertising yourself as ‘head bullshitter’, the ultimate toady, apprentice to a shapeshifting intersex superstar administrator, on your way to become an intangible ‘yes-sir, no-sir, three bagsful sir’. A uniform implies that one has a role, a job to do. Smart casual is the equivalent of saying ‘I can be absolutely anything you want me to be, whenever, wherever, I’m EASY’.

This is the message every unemployed person is trying to send out, and believe me, I won’t be ceasing to butter up potential employers the land over. In many ways, this requirement is the only formality left to the written application, and that’s fine with me.

But what remains is the inconvenience of the whole smart casual endeavour. It takes time. What to do, as Carrie Bradshaw might wonder vacantly, when potential employers have you at hello, when a simple greeting takes as much time as the letter itself?

There was no position being advertised, but I’d heard that speculative applications were a good idea. Hopes high, I set down all the reasons why I actually thought I could fit in well in the institution, despite my relevantly short ‘professional’ experience and, in a country of over-achieving twenty-somethings with doctorates a-plenty, incomplete higher education. (I have a mere BA.)

So it went a little something like: I like your institution, I think I have a lot to offer, bla bla bla – please consider me in the future.

Within a day (because of course a day is enough time to properly ‘consider’ an application) I got a response which I will translate for you:

[cue pointing and laughing]

“Ho ho ho ho! You silly thing you: we would NEVER consider you for a real paid job, who are you kidding?

You are in GERMANY kiddo, you will be doing internships until you DIE.

You will never be paid.

We have a whole queue of over-qualified people lining up to do this work for free!

It doesn’t matter how much experience you have, you will NEVER be paid for this work.

Join the back of the Queue of Native-speakers wishing to sell their souls for free!”

Actually they said:

“Thanks for applying for an internship position. Sorry they’re all full this time round. We’ll consider you again for an internship position next year.”

But it all adds up to the same thing. Argh.
Do you think if I reapplied with a glitter-glue decorated CV and offered to pay them for giving me a job I might get somewhere?

We also thought we should stop spending quite so much time trying to find jobs, and instead recount our hilarious experiences of trying to find jobs (or even a job to share between the three of us) in the current global economic climate. Or, if you will, recession.

Like the rest of the world, we are young, educated and under- or unemployed, (‘yeus’) we’re also trying to have a sense of humour. We might just rant a little bit though. It’s a blog after all.

So that’s our pitch.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

etc.