I applied to do voluntary work in their shop because I'm still unemployed and I've done my January exams, so now is the ideal time to get more work experience to make myself more employable. I certainly am getting more useful experience because I've so far learnt to operate the till and use a price labelling gun, and after a certain amount of time, they might give me the opportunity to start deciding what prices the books should sell for (just to make this clear: the Oxfam shop I'm working for only sells books), so that could be another good thing to say about this work on my CV. On my first session there, they also gave me all the leftovers from Christmas which didn't sell very well so that's another advantage of working there.
The other good thing is that by working there I get to see how literature has evolved over time because we get some books that are from the 18th century. When you look inside these books it's odd because you don't just see a change in the form of English they use, you also see a different attitude, you often see quite racist statements, for example: I picked up this book about learning Greek and because it was printed in 1907 it gave you sentences like "The Indians are liars", "The Ethiopians are barbarians", etc. to translate, and it's just so odd because you would never see such things printed in books that are published now.
Nevertheless, although this is good experience, it doesn't make up for the value of the experience I'm missing out on at the CAB. I'm trying not to look back too much on it because you can't dwell on the past but when I think about the reasons that led to me being let go of, one of the factors that played a part was that I had to spend a lot of time revising for the January resits and so I couldn't spend so much time each week at the CAB between October and December and I couldn't spend so much time reading the information they gave out, so that meant that I didn't look like I was at the level I was supposed to be at when they decided to let me go.
