Careers, jobs, income…life

Whether I am seen as a seething  materialist or not doesn’t really worry me, but I have a burning desire to earn my own living once more. Thoughts along these lines assail me frequently during the day and I need to get myself well-distracted before trying to sleep at night. It bothers me far more than others realize, I think. I’ve had my GP and shrink say in a fairly offhand way, “You’ll be OK when you find a job again”, but I can’t seem to get any real help in solving the problem.

Sure, I can go down to the local grocer’s and get a part-time job on the cash register- they even said they’d teach me how to use it, as I’ve never worked one! However, I’d have to be in a very happy mood to find this sort of work worthwhile after working in knowledge-based industries all my working life. I find it hard to accept working in a very routine job like this as I haven’t “filled in” the household income in sundry jobs while bringing up a family, perhaps; or I’m an intellectual snob!

Now, if I was living alone and needed an income to stay alive, I would probably be much more willing to work at the grocer’s, but I am somewhat protected from that by having Spotrick pay my share at the moment. However, having my share of living expenses paid makes me extremely uncomfortable, due to my upbringing and lack of practice of being financially dependent since I was a child. You might think I could have adapted by now and be quite happy to accept being subsidized, as young women do when they choose to be mothers and housekeepers for their partners. But I haven’t been able to adapt and have quite a lot of anxiety about it as you can tell by my preoccupation with finding a job. From my background in psychology I can tell that my concerns are pretty pathological but my attempts to shed them have been fruitless!

I came into contact with the charitable employment agency DOME [Don't Overlook Mature Expertise] several years ago where I spoke to counselors and attended meetings and seminars. They agreed that I and several people there made redundant from senior positions were unusual in their experience and that professionals usually obtained jobs through other channels. Granted the unavailability of professional positions, they found a few that I might have been able to take on, but they weren’t really viable for me. One was to purchase a franchise in selling small machine parts, screws, nuts, bolts etc from a mobile van to various manufacturing sites that need supplies fast. However, I had no capital base with which to purchase a franchise, even if I decided the job was attractive. Another position was as a Person Friday for a someone who was a part-time inventor & evaluator [of what was never revealed!]. They wanted someone to keep their computers working, maintain the accounts, write about the inventions & evaluations, be a bit of a small-scale handyperson, fetch lunches & general roustabouting! It sounded vaguely interesting, but too unpredictable for me.

I’ve been through the normal process of applying for jobs advertised in various places, asking around my social networks and approaching possible workplaces, but haven’t had a single encouraging word. When I first started applying for suitable positions I got plenty of interviews, but obviously didn’t land a job from any of them. I got the impression from feedback [which was always vague & minimal, even in person] and discovering who was successful, that my age and history of always working in knowledge-based fields were negative factors. I found that young people between 25 and 35 always obtained the positions and that former nurses usually landed all the health-research positions (a growing trend). It was almost as though employers thought I had “had my turn” in employment, as evident from my CV, and thought I was less deserving of a current job in comparison to the younger applicants. I can’t have been mistaken about my suitability for some positions, can I, having been very successful at obtaining jobs via interviews in the past? Anyway the hackneyed phrase “the successful applicant performed better than you on the day” was starting to make me feel quite murderous!

Spotrick has probably hit the nail on the head by saying yesterday “you’re already retired- why keep looking for a job?”. This just won’t work for me as retired people have either superannuation or a pension to live on. I’d love to get stuck into my hobbies and travel somewhere twice a year, but it’s impossible. The guy who wrote this article is quite comfortably off, so finding it was not very gratifying!

Recently I’ve looked again at job advertisements in my preferred field (health research & policy) and found plenty of positions available- but all in other Australian states. At this stage of my life I really can’t move house as Spotrick has a good job and couldn’t land a similar job elsewhere at his age either. It’s very irritating that many of these jobs could be performed quite well from Adelaide as they require little interaction with real live humans! However, the centres of population and government administration are in the eastern states and I’m not.

I’ve been looking on the internet today for information on jobs for older women and found a few ideas. This site:
http://www.career-tests-guide.com/careers-for-older-women.html

says “There are careers for older women where the age factor is not relevant…” and goes on to suggest:

“Writers. Writing novels, plays or children’s books are one of those professions whose only requirement is good writing skills. Also, you can do the job at the comfort of your own home, a plus factor if you’re in your advanced years.

Lectures or speaking engagements. Speakers that are invited to discuss certain topics do not really have an age requirement. Qualification focuses more on firsthand knowledge and experience of a specific field.

Specialized professional work. For applicants in the medical field, for example, experience is the basic determinant of being hired.

As we can see from the examples, it’s clear that knowledge-based careers are the natural careers for older women.”

Therefore, having been a knowledge-based worker, I should find some of these easy. I can certainly write, but haven’t found a way to make it pay, although I have earned some good pocket-money doing editing [thanks to connections I have discovered via Social Media ]. The medical professional jobs don’t apply to me- I’m a researcher, not a provider of medical services. I’ve tried for lecturing, tutoring and speaking engagements but had none since I was actually employed somewhere else in 2007.

Then again, Bill Bennett writes from New Zealand and seems to reinforce my perception that knowledge workers don’t have an icecube’s chance in hell of finding a new job these days!

Has anyone got any more ideas for me? I’ve been a successful university lecturer,project-managed research in various settings, led small health interventions with high school students, spoken at conferences [on 3 continents] on psychological and  mental health topics esp. eating disorders, and talked to community groups like Rotary & Arthritis Foundation about general public health topics. I’m generally perceived as a quiet person except when I’m speaking about one of my passions, I work well in a team but can also work entirely on my own without need for constant checking, I often think outside the square, have a very broad general knowledge and a huge working vocabulary [apparently]. My scientific writing has been published in international peer-reviewed journals and I can write short or lengthy technical reports or reviews without much trouble. Obviously I can also rave on successfully in blogs as I have two! [The other is “Health for Humans” at: http://healthforhumans.blogspot.com%5D

 

 

 

Let’s start domestic

Over the last 6 months I’ve been trying to concentrate on finishing that Masters dissertation that keeps getting mentioned. I figured that if I didn’t write much in my blogs, I would be more focused on the Masters. It was OK up to a point, but when I hit a low patch mid-April, I wasn’t producing much anywhere in my life, let alone “on paper”. Now I’ve decided to stop pressuring myself to finish the dissertation and just let my efforts at writing come as they will, although there have been so many possible topics, choosing just one for the plunge has been hard enough.

So here’s a short dream; quite mundane; probably no meaning – but it’s a start.

Last night I had a number of dreams, including an unfortunate one involving someone donging me lightly on the head with a heavy saucepan! The dream forced me into wakefulness because I lunged out with a left jab and punched poor Spotrick in the head!! I awoke as my knuckles met their unintended target! Thank goodness he was a reasonable distance away and I have short arms! [Sorry Spotrick xx]

Apparent house interior

That wasn’t the dream with the most detail- here’s that one:

I was at a friend’s place helping her with a big casual lunch for a group of about 15. She is a real friend, involved in a social media job, but she’s never had me help her IRL [in real life]. We put piles of crockery and cutlery on an outside table, then brought large platters of food out for everyone to share. Everyone chatted on cheerfully until all the food had been consumed and most people had drifted off home. A few people stayed to clear up and we loaded the dishwasher.

So many dishes

Then disaster struck. The dishwasher filled with water, started to wash, then made some alarming pop-clunk sounds and stopped, dead. Nothing we tried worked, so we had to take everything out and make piles of dishes all over the kitchen table and benches. It looked ominously like about 3 or 4 sink-loads of manual washing up. Blerrgghh

Anyway, we sorted ourselves out to work in pairs, doing a wash and rinse for each pair. I was sitting on the sofa doing some red knitting when the sounds of breaking dishes came from the kitchen- uh-oh, more trouble. I ditched the knitting and went out to help. What a mess! One person started crying and another one hugged her and decided to take her home, leaving S, C and I with the debris. Yuck!

Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”, there was a knock at the door and who should appear but my friend J, wondering if he could help! Goodness knows why he was there as we were in a suburb miles away from ours [and the house more resembled an old maisonette I used to rent than the actual house owned by S!; but it's a dream...].

Maisonette

Apparently he had been walking past and heard our dish-clunking noises, deciding to investigate, as knights in shining armour tend to do.

In came J and attacked the dishwasher. He thought he could fix it. However, when he took a closer look, it seemed to have turned into something like an old-fashioned wash-copper! It appeared as a cylindrical appliance on short metal legs, with a round lid!

Old wash copper

Definitely NOT a conventional dishwasher. J quickly admitted defeat and shooed us out of the kitchen. He proceeded to wash, dry and put away every single load of dishes, and what’s more, he apparently vacuumed the whole house as well!

Goodness knows where I was (or the others), as I seemed to have fallen asleep with my knitting on the sofa, completely oblivious to the washing up and vacuum-cleaner racket! I was awoken by sounds of two loud female voices coming into the house (god knows who they were – probably 2 characters out of “The Bottle Factory Outing” which I had been skimming IRL before I fell asleep on the sofa!) Anyway, the chief complaint of these two (who claimed to be the owners – poor S had suddenly been evicted and dispossessed, LOL!) was that J had put all their shoes on the beds when he was vacuuming! They thought this was dreadful and wanted to give J a good talking to! Meanwhile, he had vanished without being thanked or scolded by these crazy women.

Red knitting

PS. J had trodden on my knitting in the dream and made it all brown and yucky looking and I was NOT pleased! Where did this stuff come from??

Brain too full to post!

Trying to finish this Masters degree means I have to work hard on restricted topics for long periods of time. So why can’t I write a bit about one of those? Well- I feel guilty devoting any words to anything other than an essay or dissertation! My other blog has also died, even though I could write exactly the same thing in that blog as an essay (http://healthforhumans.blogspot.com).

My dissertation could have been finished by the end of first semester if I had been able to get ethical clearance and worked on the data then, but life ain’t like that in the Land of Research! I had written the background to the project, a “skeleton” article to pop the results into when I got them, plus an ethics committee submission for the university in the first 4 weeks of Semester 1. Now it is nearly Week 9 of Semester 2, with that plus weeks 10, 11 and 12 before uni breaks up for Christmas/summer! I still haven’t been granted access to the de-identified/anonymised data from the state health department- it takes forever until each little level of bureaucracy is satisfied I don’t want to publish the names of the patients and hospitals who have problems on Facebork or whatever! My supervisor and Head of Department have signed so many pieces of paper, they are getting RSI. And I have a wonderful task for them on Tuesday (Monday is a public holiday here)- ANOTHER bit of tree to sign! Must be patient…

I even had a little lecture on how to address an envelope suitably for the health department when I ended up trying to deliver a report to the exec officer for the ethics committee- the security guy said I should put my stuff in their internal mail to make sure it got to the top of her desk when she returned. So I got a security pass from him and toddled up to the first floor. There, an autistic person objected to the name I had put on the front of the reports with “To: X on 10th Floor” or whatever. I had to listen while she told me that my boss at the university should find out how the health department likes addresses to be formal, formatted in a certain way and on a WHITE label, ON an opaque envelope. I had a set of reports in a transparent plastic folder so they didn’t get separated! I could have clobbered her, but figured she really was autistic and had to go through her spiel no matter what anyone said. So I stood and took it.

Now I’m fiddling with the data I managed to get for free and without password from the Australian Medicare database containing info about how many prescriptions are dispensed for every medication in the system, in which state and whether paid for by Medicare itself (Public), Privately or by the Veteran’s Affairs Dept. I was able to download all my necessary numbers from here in January- now I have an extra 6 month’s worth to play with, thanks to everyone stringing me out!

I was so distracted when I was writing my first essay this semester for my last course-work subject, that I almost wrote a whole dissertation on it! The topic was in Indigenous Health (mainly pertaining to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) and we had to choose a disease or illness that was a public health problem in this group. I chose Trachoma (an infectious eye disease, familiar in poor, developing countries like the Sudan and Afghanistan). There was masses of material to digest, especially from the World Health Organisation and UN. In addition, Australia has had decades of government policies about providing various health services which would have fixed the problem in no time flat, but they never implement them fully… You might have heard of a bloke named Fred Hollows- he set up a Foundation to care for vision problems, firstly in Australia and then internationally. His wife Gaby now administers the Fred Hollows Foundation and they mainly work in war-ravaged nations such as Democratic Republic (sic) of Congo, East Timor and Uzbekistan etc. Anyway, fred’s team charged out into the bush and fixed trachoma and other eye problems using surgery and antibiotics in the mid to late 1970s, ie. last century. However, the pussyfooting governments since haven’t followed up and the trachoma and blindness is coming back. Hopefully a new campaign, organised by a doctor who was just a young whippersnapper on Fred’s first expedition, Hugh Taylor, will get in there and hopefully eliminate the disgusting scourge over the next year or two.

The head lecturer even lent me a beautiful book by Hugh Taylor (and signed!) to help with the essay, but I’m afraid I just got even deeper into the subject and ended up having to cut what I’d written by two thirds at the last minute!! Oh dear- what a hash. Hopefully I’ll at least score a pass!

Anyway, I’ve learnt my lesson and I’m not consulting nearly as many references for the second (and last ever) essay which I have chosen to write on “Indigenous Mental Health, ‘Country’, and Land Rights”. It sounds like social studies rather than public health, eh?! ABC TV has some programs which help explain indigenous peoples’ attachment to ‘country’- which I certainly needed explaining to me 2 months ago, but now have a good understanding for a white person.

Now I guess I have made a bit of a post, so I can stop. I might be able to write something about analysing my data on possible connections between several drugs and adverse events in South Australia, once I get the de-identified information from the health department. It’s pretty weird stuff, but I think I could explain the essence of it simply!

SO, there you are- pretty boring, huh!