My Life As A Dole Bludger MY LIFE AS A DOLE BLUDGER BY IAN KIDD Introduction - To Recap By the end of my first year as an official Dole Bludger of Australia, it was becoming apparent that I was getting rather good at this unexpected career development, and was in no rush for it to come to an end. Not that that seemed to be a choice I actually even had, however. My friend Michael kept popping around, every few weeks or sometimes months, and we'd go for a walk on the beach. Being a monstrous sixteen stone at this point, I'd accuse him of trying to kill me by walking too far, while we reminisced over old times at Mawson, how we'd worked together in Media Studies, how neither of us had got jobs yet (though Michael seemed to be getting a fair amount of interviews, which was more than I could say) etc. I viewed his visits with a mixture of irritation, despair (most of the time he'd barge in uninvited while I was watching "Doctor Who"), yet also pleasure. At least someone liked me, though why I couldn't tell. I soon found out that when you are on the dole, small, menial tasks just appear to fill up the day. Soon, you're so busy doing these small, menial, irrelevant tasks that you wonder how you ever had time to do anything when you had school to go to as well as these tasks to do. This was because when I was at school, I never did any of these tasks. Because they were small, menial and irrelevant. So I left them for my mum to do. Anyhow, the year dragged on, the fun started to wane, and so did the chances of getting a job in the media. Then it happened. I got my first "DIOD" letter from the CES, with instructions that had to be obeyed. DIOD. Do It Or Die. CHAPTER 1 - I ATTEND A JOB SEMINAR Or rather, obey or we stop your money. With no option, I obeyed and attended a "Job Seminar" at the local YAC (yuck, more like) - Youth Access Centre. This essentially consisted of a lecture: "You're all good kids, don't let those ignorant people who call you dole bludgers ruin your self-esteem", followed by the remarkably helpful job-seeking exercise of deciding what was important in a selection of items if our plane had crashed and we were in the desert or something (it was like "Lost" 12 years early or something), followed by another lecture: "There ARE jobs out there, so show some effort and you'll get them, you lazy dole-bludging bastards!" Thankfully, it was over with within a couple of hours. The year reached it's climax. Christmas. It was TERRIBLY exciting. 1994 began, and went on it's way as years invariably tend to do. I had a new Case Manager, the ubiquitous Sue Stewart, whose many valid and valuable contributions have been lost in the mists of time, her immortalised in my memory - and now in print, no less! - by one incredibly vacuous comment. Suggesting that I should explore other avenues than video production and the media (which, by this stage, even I was beginning to realise was a bit of a dead duck), she suggested I become a dustbin man, as, apparently, if I ever DID get a job in the media, and I had to report on waste disposal, then perhaps my experience in being a dustbin man would come in handy, so perhaps I SHOULD explore that avenue of employment... To this day, my brother refuses to believe that above conversation ever took place, but I swear it did. May God have mercy on Sue Stewart's soul... It was around this time that Michael and his family moved from Christie Downs ("a cess-pit", Michael called it) to Gawler, to open up a Butcher shop, which Michael, in a revolutionary concept known as "work", was going to be manager of. At the time I thought, as Gawler was so far away, that that was going to be the last I saw of Michael. I didn't really know how I felt about that. He'd kind of irritated me at first, just turning up like that whenever he felt like it, but then, after a year or so of this, I'd kind of gotten used to having him around. But regardless, I was wrong. My friendship with Michael, having previously consisted of, as I have stated, him turning up while I'm watching "Doctor Who" and us going for long walks on the beach while we talked, bitched and whined about our parents, CES and life in general, was now entering what we shall call "The Air Hockey Phase". This would consist of Michael ringing me and arranging for us to meet in Adelaide, at the train station, for a day of fun, frivolity, milkshakes and...air hockey. To be fair, we did also play "Zone 3" on occasion, although this gradually tapered off, due to the exorbitant prices and the fact Michael always 100% thrashed me. This however didn't matter. At last our friendship was on firm ground. For the first time, I found myself really enjoying his company, looking forward to his phone calls (unheard of!) etc. It was the sheer joy of actually being able to go out and have fun with a friend. Anyway, to labour the point, Michael and I become somewhat notorious in the "Downtown" amusement centre. We were demons on that air hockey table. We didn't just play air hockey, we FOUGHT at air hockey. Never had the hockey pad gone so fast. Never had customers and staff ducked so much as the pad (and sometimes the paddle) went flying violently out of control. Who'd have thought such a boring-looking game could turn out to be so...violent, so...FUN? This was also, unlike Zone 3, a game that Michael and I were equally matched in. Sometimes he thrashed me, sometimes I thrashed him, sometimes the game would be a hard-won battle where one point was all the difference between us. Young children would gather round in wondrous awe, only to be told by Michael to "Piss off before you get hurt". Despite my weight problem, despite my job problem, my girlfriend problem (I didn't have one), and my family problem (I DID have one), those fun days with Michael kept me going. Hell, for a while there, I was almost happy. Almost. But it couldn't last. CHAPTER 2 - I TRY TO GET VARIOUS JOBS AND ANNOY LOTS OF PEOPLE One Saturday morning, I was, as usual, looking through the Advertiser and saw an advert - "Actors Wanted. $12 for an audition". The word "con" sprang to mind and, if it had been up to me, I wouldn't have bothered. Once my mother got hold of the paper, however, there was no stopping us. "You want to be in showbiz," she squawked, "so you're going. You just don't WANT a job, do you?" After a couple of hours of this, I succumbed - on one proviso: She pay the $12. Mum, knowing a neatly-laid trap when she fell into one, agreed. So we were off to Adelaide on a Saturday afternoon to go into some dodgy little photographic studio, to sit in front of a camera, have a photo taken, and be filmed - laughing. "What?" I said. "It's a film about different types of laughter," the conman - I mean director, sorry - told me. "We want to see you laugh." Methinks I wasn't the only one laughing that day, as hundreds of hopefuls forked out their $12 for their non-existent chance at fame. The word "suckers" sprang to my mind. Mind you, at least it wasn't MY $!2. Next up - the real fun. I received my usual JobSearch Fortnightly Allowance, with an ominous note on the back - "Interview Required". Filled with foreboding, I handed in my form that Friday, only to be given a ticket with a number on it and sent to be called. Almost an hour later, my number was finally called, and I was allowed to see the "interviewer". My, was it worth the wait. I was informed by my blank-faced, blank-voiced persecutor (sorry, interviewer, why do I keep doing that?!) that the CES was "concerned" (shorthand for "out to get you") that on my form, when I wrote down the 2 jobs that I had applied for that fortnight, I was always writing "Video production", and they were "concerned" (shorthand for "bored and wanting to pick on someone") that that was the only job that I was applying for. I told them this was because that was the only job I was interested in getting. An eminently sensible reply, I thought, but the apparently long-since brain-dead interviewer clearly didn't think so. I was promptly handed six green cards, told to go out and ask for jobs from employers IN PERSON, and get them to sign the cards to show I had been there, and have ALL the jobs be something OTHER than video production. Wanting to see if I understood the situation correctly, I asked if what I was supposed to do was burst in on employers busy working, ask them about jobs that didn't exist, they wouldn't have given me if they did, and that I wasn't particularly interested in anyway, and then annoy and waste these people's time even more by getting them to sign a stupid, meaningless piece of green card? The CES man told me I had an excellent grasp of the situation. So I did it. I didn't like it, and neither did my parents, who had to ferry me around Adelaide all day (the words "Don't those twats at the CES have anything better to do" were clearly heard uttered in our car, and not just by me), but I did it. I can't remember much about the six unfortunate employers I bothered that day - one was self-employed who couldn't afford to hire anyone, and was was a job as a Storeman in a book shop. Hmm. It was around this time that I gave up the idea of being an author. A life-long dream since childhood, my novel "Ian's Gang" had been going around the publishing traps since early 93 - from when I left school - but now, nearly eighteen months and fourteen disinterested publishers later, I had come to the conclusion it wasn't going to happen. If only because I had run out of publishers to send it to. Anyway, I gave up the idea. Rejection is never an uplifting, life-affirming experience at the best of times, and certainly not when all you ever get is rejection. I canned the idea. Just another nail in the coffin of Ian Kidd's Potential Happiness. Anyway... We had a photo taken of the whole family, for some obscure reason or other. When it was developed, I was mortified. I knew I was overweight. I knew I was fat. I knew I was obese - sixteen stone and growing all the time. My brother had even begun referring to me as "the monster", and I had half-heartedly tried to diet before, always giving up - but it was this photo that changed everything. I was huge. I was enormous. I dwarfed the photo - I was twice the size of everyone in it. I realised just how awful I looked. If I carried on like that, I would be dead by the time I was thirty - and there was no way in Hell (no matter how freezing) I would get a girlfriend looking like that. I'd had enough. This was the end. From now on, I was on a diet. But no ordinary diet. This was going to be the "get fit" diet to end them all. If I wasn't slim and fit by the end of it - I'd be slim and dead. CHAPTER 3 - THE GREAT DIET OF '94 The Great Diet of '94, as we shall refer to it from this point onwards, lasted June - December (with a couple of weeks off in June - more on this later), and it was a killer. Unlike most diets, this wasn't about "a little bit of this" and "a little bit of that" or "everything in moderation" nonsense. I had tried those diets before, and they didn't work. Eating a little only made you even hungrier, and the slowness of results soon wore off even the most determined will. I was having none of it - this was to be the ultimate "crash diet" - and I doubt it would be recommended by either dieticians or Doctors. Unhealthy and even dangerous, they might say. To which I'd say "tough". Because it worked for me. The plan was simple. A long walk at first twice, then stepped up to three times a day and (and this was the kicker), only one meal per week (not counting breakfast cornflakes). One meal. The rest of the time I survived on noodles, or (most often) crackers, sometimes with (but mostly without) butter. It's a regime to make even the most fit, fanatical health freaks flinch, and my mother went so far as to describe it as insane. The rest of the family offered similar supportive comments, like "He won't last a week." To be fair, being at that time a person who could spend $20 on crisps and chocolates and scoff the lot in one day, one could almost see their point. But I was steadfast. This was it. If I didn't do this now, I'd never do it. As Patrick Stewart might declare, so did I: "The line must be drawn HERE!" Within a week of this torture (the family being no help, continuously waving pizzas and beefburgers under my nose at meal times, teasing "You sure you don't want some?" with gleeful maliciousness), I got on the scales. I had not lost one pound. Any other person would have no doubt thrown in the towel at this point, but I was made of sterner stuff. I stuck at it - and after another week, it paid off. After two weeks, I had lost half a stone, going down from sixteen-and-a-quarter, to 15-and-3-quarters. There was still a long way to go, of course, but it was a start - and a good one. Then, however, the diet was "put off" for two weeks, in which time I put back on the half a stone I had lost. Why? No, it wasn't just simple slacking off, or giving up. It was two weeks off I had given myself for good reason. We were going on holiday. The last holiday we'd attempted in Oz was three days in the York Peninsula, a disastrous time in late 93, where on the first day the dog collapsed of suspected dehydration and for a time we thought she was going to die. She survived (she had but three months to live from a stomach tumour, little did we know) but the fright put a severe dampener on the holiday from the start. I could have packed up and gone home there and then, but we persevered. However, the flies in that place were horrendous - in your face ALL the time, and as for trying to have a picnic...it was a joke, and a miserable one, and eventually we said "Fuck it" (well, I did anyway) and went home. Anyhow, this time (with no dog of course, alas) we were going for a two week holiday in Sydney, the first time we had been to that city. It was half holiday, half expedition to see whether my brother could get a better job over there, and whether I might have more chance of getting any job there - which is how we explained away my holiday to the CES. In both cases, the answer was negative. For starters, we couldn't have afforded to even buy a house there. Crappy flats that sell for around $80,000 in Adelaide were going for around $250,000 in Sydney, and as for the chances of getting a house as good as we had in Adelaide for therabouts the same price in Sydney...laughable. Anyway, I hadn't wanted to be on a diet while the rest of the family had ice creams, fish 'n' chips and other holiday fare, so when we returned I was back to square one. But that did not deter me. The moment I set foot back on home turf, The Great Diet of '94 began again - and this time, in earnest, non-stop for the next six months. Within ONE week this time, I lost the regained half a stone, and the REAL work began. By mid-December 1994, when I finally brought The Great Diet of '94 to a triumphant end just one week before Christmas, I had a lost a total of FOUR stone, bringing my weight down to a most satisfactory 12 and a quarter (it literally wouldn't go any lower without literal starvation!), a weight I have (more or less) maintained to this very day. When Ian Kidd decides he's doing something, he DOES it. CHAPTER 4 - FRIENDS, GIRLFRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN... Time to get back to Michael and his amazing Technicolor Butcher Shop, I think. Mid 94, during The Great Diet of '94, as it happens, and less than six months after Michael opened the shop with great optimism, it all came crashing down. There are a number of reasons, I'm sure, but ALLEGEDLY (so I don't get sued) the main one was that the entrepeneur who'd started off with one shop and then started a franchise, was stretching himself just a mite too thin. With the result that (ALLEGEDLY) Michael's shop would be empty of the food and meat that MADE IT a Butchers Shop, that sometimes the deliveries would be around to quarter to five in an afternoon, when Michael was about to shut up shop (ALLEGEDLY). The whole thing came to a spectacular climax in October that year, as Michael's family cut their losses and closed up the business. The Great Butcher Debacle was, however, far from over...for, with all the money they'd invested in the business, Michael's family were ticked...and were taking the entrepeneur to court, sueing him for what could be, as Michael gleefully informed me, "an absolutely bloody fortune". Back to the present - post-Great Diet of '94, early December, just before Christmas. Michael and I went off to town, I indulged in my traditional "Maybe next year will be better" speech, we shared our "See you next year" excrutiating joke, and with Michael and family having fled Gawler and now living in Morphett Vale, Michael was now sharing the train ride back from town with me. Michael glumly asked me what I thought his chances were of getting a job before Christmas. "Bleak," I told him. Four days later, three days before Christmas, I received a phone call from Michael. "What did you say my chances were of getting a job before Christmas?" were the first words out of his mouth. I remembered. "Bleak," I said again. "Well...guess what?" he replied. He had a job. An on-the-job-3-days-a-week, TAFE-the-other-two clerical traineeship, starting first thing in the New Year. Exactly what I was looking for, and wasn't getting. Turned out to be a clerical traineeship he'd taken a test for back in June. Which I COULD have taken...if I hadn't been in Sydney at the time. This didn't affect our friendship too much. All it meant was our town visits had to be on a weekend instead of a weekday, and he had more money than me. But I honestly didn't really care about that. Christmas, New Year came and went. It was 1995. Life in the Kidd household was even more depressing than normal, with my Uncle Mike in the UK (my dad's sister's husband) being diagnosed with leukemia. Oh, happy days...not. CHAPTER 5 - Debacles and Fiasco's - and That's Just The Job Interviews! Here, for the first time in a while, I will mention my attempts at getting a job. Not that I hadn't been trying, but none of it was very interesting or even remotely worth writing about. But now, for the first time in two and half years of trying, I had gotten my very first...JOB INTERVIEW! It was an interview for a job I had applied for as receptionist at a carpet cleaning firm. They rang up one afternoon when Mum and Dad were out and asked me down for an interview. I nearly died of shock on the spot. I said yes, of course, but it was the timing that blew me - and my parents - away. The interview was the next day...at 7am in the morning. So, it was 5:45 am the next morning that I was dragged kicking and screaming out of bed by my parents ("What are you doing? Leave me alone. PISS OFF!" to be chauffeured down in my best suit for a 7 o'clock interview. Which consisted of filling out a ridiculous questionnaire ("Where do you see yourself in ten years?" I wrote "Being older.") alongside half a dozen other shell-shocked applicants, for the actual interview to last approximately ten seconds, consisting of one question ("Tell me about yourself"; "Well...I think I'm pretty great, actually"), delivered by an apparently recovering lobotomy patient. I didn't get the job, or even hear from them ever again. Nor can I say I was terribly devastated by the fact. Then, only a couple of weeks later, I was stunned when I got ANOTHER job interview. This was even more prestigious than the last one. Shoe Salesman at Betts & Betts, no less. Working alongside Al Bundy, presumably. I have to be honest, the (female) interviewer for this job was much nicer and friendlier and seemed less like a mental home escapee, but she still came out with some classic ridiculous questions. "Why do you want to be a shoe salesman at Betts & Betts?" "Well, gee...I dunno...I think there's just something about the smell of a ladies' sweaty foot when you take her shoe off that really turns me on." I didn't get THAT job, either. I don't know, some people just have no sense of humour. Coda - In Conclusion So, after two and a half years as a career dole bludger, did I have any advice to pass on, impart to any prospective dole bludgers of the future? No, not really. However, if I had learned one thing from my experiences, it was this: Always make notes of whatever trivial things happen to you. It could come in handy ten to twelve years in the future when you want to post your story on the internet in the vain hope of giving a couple of people a bit of a chuckle.
Copyright © 1996 Ian Kidd |