Managing the other blog

As you can see, I've not posted for a while and that's largely in part due to the fact that the other blog takes up a lot of time. Although I was fully aware of the fact that blog posts can take a lot of time to produce, I didn't think it would be the same if I was just writing 2 short paragraphs about a particular artist. It's true to say that the writing doesn't take up that much time but the research takes a long time because I often have to go through quite a few artists, before I can find a suitable one to do a blog post on and it's not unusual for this to take two hours.

In a way the work is very rewarding because it means that I'm discovering lots of good world music, which I'd never heard of before and it means that I learn about the culture of other countries. The blog is also very popular, I so far have 100 followers on Twitter, I've been put on 5 different lists on Twitter and the blog gets quite a few views per day, it's also been recommended by a world music website, so it's nice to know that it provides people with enjoyment. It also gives me something to do when I'm not working in Oxfam, so that I'm not so bored because of the lack of things to do.

Nevertheless I have my doubts as to whether I can keep it going when I get to university because although I like the task, I've not achieved my objective of making money out of it since they only pay you if someone is referred to the website by your blog. I've tried to advertise in the right way by advertising Amazon's mp3 store and trying to sell Amazon's world music of the particular artist featured in my blog but this hasn't led to anyone buying the music. This surprises me given that the blog is quite popular but I half wonder if this is because people illegally download the artist's music or people just listen to the artist's music through YouTube because they can't afford to buy it. Perhaps I'll have to wait for the blog to become more popular, before I can hope to make money out of it. But I don't think I can wait for a very long time to try and make money out of it because law degrees take up 35 hours of your week and I'm thinking of doing a language course aswell, so I'll almost certainly have a lot of things to do without having a daily blog post to do and I will of course want free time. At the moment I'm thinking of updating the blog on a weekly basis, when I get to university, because I think that would be a suitable compromise. Nevertheless, one of my friends at Oxford manages to do lots of extra curricular activities aswell as a physics degree and she managed to get a first in this year's exams. She says this is because she's incredibly organised, so it makes me think that there could be hope for my blog if I'm organised, although that's often not the case!

Another blog

Yesterday I decided to start another blog but that doesn't mean that I'm going to stop updating this one, although naturally I will stop updating it in late September/ early October, when I go to university, and make another blog.

My reason for starting a new blog is that I'm still having no success in finding a job and so currently my only way of making money is to do surveys, so I decided that another way of making money would be to advertise on my blog, and you might ask the question: why don't I just advertise on this one? But I'd rather not advertise on this one because it's more personal, and so I don't want to find myself being unable to publish posts because they make the company I advertise look bad and also because it's personal, I don't get many visitors, so advertisers would be highly unlikely to use this blog to advertise their products.

I thought of many different blogs I could set up, a political blog, a blog of daily photos or a daily blog about music. In the end I decided to do a blog about music because although I take a great interest in politics, I probably won't have so much time to blog about it when I go to university and although I love taking photographs, I just wouldn't have the time to find lots of good things to photograph when I'm doing a law degree but music is an easier thing to blog about because you can find everything you need for the blog on the internet.

I've had a passion for many different sorts of music for a long time, and one of my favourite categories of music is world music, so I've decided to do one about world music, in which I upload one song from the category each day, and therefore decided to call it World Music Daily. So if you like world music, please follow my new blog: http://worldmusicdaily1.blogspot.com/

End of exams

Now that exams are over, I probably won't be posting so much about issues relating specifically to gap years but I'll certainly be telling you about my summer adventures/activities. 

So far I'm not having much success with finding a job, even though my exams are over and I have all the time in the world, in fact there seem to be even less jobs than usual. So at the moment I'm just answering surveys, selling books on Amazon and working two days a week in Oxfam but at the moment I'm not too bothered because I'm not actually that bored. 

I'm currently reading E. M. Forster's novel, A Passage To India and I'm really enjoying it because it gives me a lot of insight into the way in which many Britons acted while India was subject to British colonial rule (obviously I was aware that there was a lot of prejudice towards Indians during this time but I wasn't entirely sure how bad it was) and it helps me to understand why Britons can be treated so unfairly when they go to developing countries.

I've also been rediscovering my love of Klezmer music (Jewish music originating from Eastern Europe) because I lost many songs by the band, Kroke, when my last computer broke down. I started to realise how much I missed them yesterday, so I spent a few hours listening to my favourite songs by the band and found out about more of their songs, which I'd never heard of and it also led me to discover another  Klezmer band called Les Yeux Noirs, admittedly this band isn't as good because they incorporate a range of styles but there are some of their songs which I really like, so I'll share some of their songs with you.

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Self-motivation

This year one of things I've struggled most with is self-motivation, I never appreciated quite how hard it was to teach yourself until I started teaching myself Latin and having to do Maths by myself.

I basically learn Latin at A2 by seeing a tutor for one hour a week and doing the rest of the work by myself but because I've had not had any jobs (except voluntary jobs) and because I've not been at school and therefore had no timetable to keep me in place, I've been losing my sense of time. I've also found that because I don't have any friends who are doing A2 Latin, it's hard to remember everything I learn because I have no one to discuss it with and I don't have teachers there to constantly remind me of the topics, that I'm covering for A2 Latin.

Maths, however is the topic I struggle with even more, when it comes to self-motivation because I've only had 3 Maths lessons since leaving school, and so I have to set myself work, I only started to realise that this was a problem when I got my results for my January resits. My German went up to an A but my Maths only went up by one mark, I realised that the reason for this must be that I was seeing a german assistant every week, to practice oral cards for my oral exam, whereas I did as many maths papers as I could psyche myself up to doing. I think the other problem with Maths was that I was doing papers that I'd done before, and so the whole idea of doing them again seemed tedious. I know you could say that I should see a tutor more often for maths but the problem is that it's only really useful if you have enough problems to go over with them, and I don't have enough problems to go over with them so it would be pointless and a waste of my time and money.

One of the solutions I've found to my problem of self-motivation is going to the library because I don't bring my laptop to the library so I can't be distracted by websites like Facebook and Twitter or paid surveys and there are no home comforts there to distract you either. The only problem with going to the library is that there are no desks in the libraries of my nearest towns (which are small/rural towns) because they've all been taken over by computers so I have to go to the big towns.

Another solution I've found to self-motivation for Latin is podcasts because they make you feel more like  you're in a lesson because you're listening to someone tell you things you didn't know before and it really helps me to understand the more of the historical contexts of the topics I'm covering, and I've also found one to help me with regard to the Latin language.

I think if Latin was a more popular course that was offered at a college, I probably would have done it at a college so that I could have had more people to discuss it with and turn to for help and so that I could have had more opportunities to develop my ideas and be reminded of the details of the topic. Nevertheless I think this is good experience for university because most of the time you have to do work by yourself and teach yourself since you only have a few hours or lectures/seminars each week so it might make it easier to adapt to university life but I tend to think it's easier to cope with this change of circumstances at university because you have your friends there and there are people there, who are studying your course, so there are people you can go to to help you with your problems.

Living in Dorset

As someone, who has lived in Dorset since I was 3 years old, I've always been very attached to Dorset because it is a very pretty place surrounded by lovely countryside and it is a quiet place, so I never understood why so many people were keen to get away from it when they became adults, unless they were tired of the quiet life and wanted more excitement.

However, since taking a gap year I have started to see the distinct disadvantages of living in Dorset, because although Dorset is a pretty place to live in, it is very hard to get a job. I've been looking for a job since late August and the only jobs I've managed to find are very temporary jobs and voluntary positions. Admittedly one of my problems is that I don't have a lot of experience of the world of work but my friends who live in towns/cities have had much more success in finding jobs even if they haven't had jobs before starting their current jobs.

One of the problems you have if you live in a village surrounded by small towns is that the small towns don't have many jobs available, so it means that there are more applicants per job and so they are ultimately more likely to have an applicant with more experience (unlike me).

Another problem though is the public transport in Dorset because in my village, we only have buses that go to our two main small towns every hour between 7.00 and 17.00 and even then they only go in one direction per hour, so this means that if you are a village resident relying on the buses, you can't get a job in the big towns/cities because you couldn't get there on time and you can't get a job in a pub because you need to be able to stay there until midnight.

The other problem I have is that there are some employers who say that you have to go to the store in person to pick up applications for jobs, that have become available and so this also causes problems for me because I can't pay for a bus fare for the sheer purpose of picking up an application form as there is a high likelihood that it could be a waste of my money, given that they could very well select someone else.

Because there aren't enough jobs in Dorset, it is leading to more crime in Dorset because Job Seekers Allowance is often not enough to live on, so Dorset isn't quite as pleasant to live in as it used to be. Admittedly Dorset still has a relatively low crime rate, so it's not as such a dangerous or scary place to live in but I am starting to wonder if that will change given how few jobs there are for everyone in Dorset, especially as the redundancies from the budget cuts are starting to take effect and Dorset was until now a county, in which a third of the workers were government workers.

Although I plan on living in London for a few years because I need to get away from the quiet life, I still love Dorset and I would still love to bring up my children here (if I have any) but taking a gap year has made me see the issue of living in Dorset in a different light.

My new job

Not long after I got let go of by the CAB, I got a call from Oxfam who had finally responded to my application that I sent in a few weeks before I left the CAB. So I went in to talk to them about doing voluntary work in the shop and they accepted me, it probably wasn't that much of an achievement given that they're always happy to take more volunteers but it might be something to do with the fact that I'm quite enthusiastic about the work they do and therefore support what they do.

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.

Office politics

So this week was a sad week because I lost my job at the Citizens Advice Bureau. In a lot of cases, I wouldn't have minded quite so much but in this case I did mind because it was interesting and most of the people there were friendly.

It all started when I came back from the Christmas break because I'd been ill and that had broken my body clock, so that led to me making a few errors because I got out of be that day having had no sleep. But then they started saying that I'd made other errors. So they got the person who supervised all the gateway assessors (who'd just come back after being treated for cancer) to assess me and because I did things differently to the way she did things, she criticised me far too much for some of the things I was doing, even though a lot of people were doing things I was doing.

One of the main things she criticised me for was for not being sympathetic enough when someone with a debt problem called. She said that I shouldn't have just said "I'll call you back", and that I should've given her more help before putting the phone down to see what could be done for her but the reason that I didn't do that was because I'd never dealt with or observed a call on debt before, and so I'd rather leave her with without any information before I called her back as opposed to giving information I wasn't sure of, and I think anyone else would've done the same. The worst part about it was that no one else had told me that that was a problem.

Then another person called with a issue regarding divorce/money, and I was going to use the same tactic I proposed using with the previous caller of finding out the relevant information and calling them back when I had the relevant information and she again criticised me for temporarily sending them away with no information. When we were discussing what to do, I made it perfectly clear that I knew what to do but she went around insisting that this was another person she was having to call back for me!

Part of the problem was that she was aggressive in the way that she criticised me and so it made me nervous and meant that I couldn't do the job properly.

So after my manager had talked to this person, he called me the next day and said that it's just not working out and that he's not comfortable having me on the phones. When I tried to say that this woman had caused some of the problems, he said that he felt that way even without her feedback but that can't have been true because he'd said 4 weeks ago, "I think you can do this", and in the last two times I'd been back in the four weeks after he said that the gateway assessor had been supervising me on both occasions, so it must have had something to do with her. And I can't help thinking that it seems rather contradictory to tell me that he had thought about it and then slept on it before deciding that he wasn't comfortable with me answering the phones. The worst thing about that phone call was that he didn't thank me for the time I'd given up to come in and help.

But I guess my father was right when he said that I'd "had [my] first taste of office politics" because really I lost my job because the gateway supervisor just didn't like me. I'm not going to deny that there weren't faults on my part that led to this but she made me sound worse than I was.

When I asked if I could do anything else in the office the manager said that there was nothing at present that he needed me to do but he said that he would call me if there were any other roles became available. If he'd given me something else there and then I probably would have taken the offer but if he rings me up in a few weeks/months and says that they need me to do something, I don't honestly know if I'd feel comfortable doing it after all that's happened even though it's good legal experience.