This Dreadful Year Cannot End Quickly Enough
The First Mrs Izzard and I cannot wait for New Year’s Eve. Not because we’ve something marvellous planned for the evening fun and games, although we have, but because we cannot wait to see the back of this most cursed of years.
There have been positives, and we must never forget them, nor to count our blessings which are munificent. After all, we continue to in the Black Country, we have our son William, our parents continue to be in good health and we have marvellous family and mates. So not everything is completely dreadful, but these are the things that are generally static and not what one may refer to as ‘events’. Other than the expulsion of Gordon Brown from Downing Street – now THAT was a superb happening!
Other things are not and this is the stage, things take a turn for the darker side. To start with, in January, I was out of work which was appalling enough, I had anticipated being back in work quite rapidly, but it wasn’t to be. Then, in March my one remaining grandparent passed away, a wonderful lady of endless grace. Later in April, just after her birthday the gigantic bombshell, Mrs Izzard was diagnosed with breast cancer and motions were set in train to deal with it using surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It was about the same time that I was informed by the DWP that I did not qualify for unemployment benefit because I’d been paying the wrong kind of National Insurance, and so on top of it all I had no income.
And then things appeared to pep up. Mrs Izzard was looking through the Directgov website for job vacancies for me and discovered an advert promising work doing SEO. I had already done a little work for local companies, doing IT support and even though I was clueless about what SEO really was, I contacted the website linked in the Directgov piece and eventually had a call from one of the owners of the business involved. He told me how SEO worked and told me about the job and what the company needed from me and what they would do for me. We agreed to meet at a Jobcentre on the edge of Birmingham. I found him a decent, extremely nice man and we had a long chat about work, life, career, business and loads of other things and I finished up really wanting to work alongside him. I explained that although I did a bit of IT support I wasn’t able to pay for the training myself but I really wanted to do it. He said that he would find out about funding for me to cover the training since alas the company would not be able to provide it for free and it appeared fair enough.
We met again a few of weeks after that and having been told that I was not eligible for funding I handed over a cheque for 3,000 that I had managed to beg from my folks in advance of the money that my nan had seemingly left me as a legacy. And what a legacy! The possibility to train to work from home for proper money for the long term! I started the training and it took something like 6 weeks. While the firm sorted out a suitable client for me, they gave me a website they said they had constructed for a company that had gone bust, but because they owned it they were going to sell it and it was a good plan to have it optimised when they did. You can find it at www.2bbq.co.uk and I wrote fifty articles using various keywords to send it up the results table.
A number of weeks went by and as my money drained I emailed the directors asking when I was finally going to get a client, until in early November I discovered a group of folks on the internet who had all been down the identical path and it became terribly clear that there were no clients and the whole exercise had been a scam to swindle training money from out of work people from all over the country, not just the Black Country like me.
So, now my own cash is almost spent as I’ve been using them to support myself and the family while waiting for the clients to come and now I realise that they never will. So, being a better man than the disgusting scumbags who have had me, I will find clients and do SEO myself, as well as IT support which I continue to offer to firms in the Black Country and we will survive this whole, stronger and the inheritance cash from my grandmother’s estate will be paid back and used for something worthwhile and valuable as she intended.
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