General Letter Part 1

15/11/05

General Letter Part 1

Dear all;

Sorry for the delay with general letters recently. I have found things very, very difficult with almost everything.

This has been caused mostly by work.

As most of you know that would know me would have known recently I have been working recently in a town called Congleton which is about thirty miles from the centre of Manchester for a small housing association called Dane Housing as a Supporting People Officer.

The job involved mostly technical data input of benefits every week and also monitoring rent accounts for temporary properties which we housed homeless people in on a temporary measure until they landed themselves somewhere more peremement to live in and supported housing for disabled people.

If I’m honest with myself, the job wasn’t really suited to my strengths as I found the input side bloody hard and as I had next to no training doubly hard but I did enjoy the rents side.

However, the job was only on a contract basis and was originally designed to run for at least the six months as the lad I was covering for had gone to another section to cover for a girl who had gone on maturnity leave.

Things changed however when a job became available in that section he was working in on a perm basis.

Fair play to the lad, he went for it and got it, so became apparent he was going to return. Eventually it became apparent that they were going to recruit that post on a perm basis, and if I wanted to satay there I would have to apply for it.

Truth be told, by this point I was having serious doubts. Like I said before, I was unhappy with a number of aspects of the job and the travelling was proving a nightmare.

Generally every day I was having to get up at 6AM and get the 6.30AM train into Manchester. I would usually arrive at Manchester Picadilly Train Station just turned 7am and would have to wait until 7.54am for the next train to Congleton.

I would then get that train to Congleton to arrive in Congleton around 8.25am and have a twenty minute walk to work.

Result = Travelling time of 2 ¼ hours.

Sadly on the way back, things were often little better. I would often leave work about 4.55pm to get the train back to Manchester at 5.23pm. If this thing bothered turning up on time, I would usually get back into Manchester just before 6.00pm and get the connecting train back home for about 6.20pm.

The problems frequently happened when this train got cancelled or arrived 20 to 30 minutes late. This would result in me sometimes not getting home until 7pm or if they cancelled it anything after 8pm.

Complete crap, I know.

But anyway, returning to the point………

I put my name forward for the post as I thought if the job went perm I would re-consider my options.

That was never to happen however.

I got offered a interview for the job – went for the interview and true to form with my luck – I came 2nd out of 6 people.

This was two and a half weeks ago.

Once this happened, I started looking for a new job and had a few interviews and got one of them much to my surprise working at Manchester Housing as a Housing Assistant.

Again this is only a temporary role, but the import thing it will get me past Christmas.

But we will see…