Thoughts On Recorded Interviews

They are SHIT.

I had to do a recorded interview today for House of Fraser, and please do not get me twisted here I love that damn shop and it is probably my favourite department store of the ones that I ever went in (John Lewis shot themselves in the foot with the crappy, unfinished abomination in Leeds and the accompanying unnecessarily persistent wine glass touter).

But honestly, apart from interviews where I have quite clearly been passed over for stupid reasons such as "Yes you want the part time hours we've billed but we want someone who doesn't want them as a second job" and also when internal candidates have been chosen despite being less qualified and experienced than me (here's looking at you Wakefield College) that was the worst interview experience of my life.

• You have less than 15 seconds to read and consider the question. 
• You have too long to answer (1m 30s is too long for all these questions). 
• You have no scope to actually reveal what you are like as a person or how you are an excellent provider of good customer service. 
• You CAN'T RE-RECORD THE QUESTIONS APART FROM THE ONE THAT ASKS DO YOU WANT PART TIME OR FULL TIME WHICH ALSO HAS NO LIMIT ON QUESTION READING TIME.

There is a chance that I was just particularly shit at this form of interview despite actually being very together in a face to face interview setting. There is also a chance that this format was concocted purely for the purpose of torturing the interviewee and amusing the sadistic recruitment personnel.

I'm so put out by this that House of Fraser has actually fallen a little in my estimation, not the customer service advisors - no - I think they are actual saintly angels from heaven for completing that bullshit; but the central services team? I simply cannot believe that they have that little time to look through applications and hold phone or Skype interviews.

In short, it's innovative but lacks engagement. Having a web app for interviews makes you seem flashy and like you're not after uniqueness and dedication to customer service after all, because you can't even supply it for your candidates.

I have yoghurt on my face

Not through an inability to eat without smearing food everywhere, but because I made a FACE MASK!

Okay, so it's been on almost 10 minutes and is drying and tightening slightly uncomfortably, and I kind of want to eat my own face but that's just the kind of thing girls do on Sundays right?? RIGHT???!?

That's me tasting my yoghurty face. Damn, I am delicious.

Apparently honey is hydrating and yoghurt is moisturising, now I would have thought that those were the same thing but who am I to thrust judgement upon peoples cheap and delectable skin treatments? My face does feel like it had yoghurt on for 20 minutes, I'm not sure how else to describe that one really.

Yesterday we went to The Collection in Lincoln, it was cool but I got severe 6 year deja vu - having been there once before in 2010 (with him no less) for a university field trip. Now, they're not the biggest museum, and Lincoln isn't the biggest town ever - but I think they've not updated it in 6 years. Which is a long time, even though you're looking at a 602,000 year timeline (thanks homo heidelbergensis) they're covering.

No plans for today, I might get dressed and go window shopping, doesn't hurt to earmark some of my Christmas presents now, even if I can't afford them yet.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed with the job search, I'm well over the 35 application mark now over the past few weeks and my mum, ethereal astral entity that she is may have got me something at Laura Ashley which would be an actual dream.

I forgot I had a blog until just now when I went on Ancestry.com because Twitter told me to to find out the etymology of my last name then remembered I already knew it and it was the link for my blog

Fast forward 3 years.

It is now the year 2016. My mum had cancer, again. I moved to London, I moved back from London. I fell in love, I'm still in love. I had depression, got fired, got a new job, and made myself better, eventually. I saw most of South East Asia. Prince, Alan Rickman, Pete Burns and Gene Wilder died. Britain decided to leave the EU (we've still not got there, not that postponing the inevitable is helping exactly.) Tomorrow either a misogynistic bozo or a deceitful, unpopular lesser of two evils will be elected president of the USA.

A lot has happened since I posted last. Some of it was okay, some good, some decidedly shit. But it's all behind us now, and (head's up blogger bio) I'm pursuing my dream of becoming a conservator. Sure I live in Lincoln, have less than £15 left of my massive overdraft and no job in spite of almost 30 applications, but I'm getting there.

I listened to a Nerdette podcast - the Caitlin Moran one - when I was in Guangzhou airport in August and her advice was to do something every day that got you closer to your dream. Her's was something odd about wearing velvet and schmoozing with Oscar Wilde (fair, I like velvet, and I like 19th century Aestheticism); but mine, blissfully, involved less hobnobbing with dead folks and more cleaning stuff, dissolving bad guys (glue, dirt, corrosion) and making my own cotton buds.

Something is still missing though. I mean I'm with the man of my dreams, I'm doing the course existent in my reveries and we have our own place. It's difficult to rejoice when you have no money and no discernible sign of funds any time soon so it's definitely the job thing dragging us down, but persistence is key I suppose.

Fingers crossed persistence pays off soon. Or I'll be quitting my course.

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Hair today, gone tomorrow...

I shaved my mum's hair off just now. She's gone in the shower & to decide if we need it on a shorter setting.
But I'm proud of her, and I'm proud of myself. Because do you know what, it is really, really hard to watch anyone going through cancer treatment, let alone your mother. Especially when she's your surviving parent. We might be going wig shopping tomorrow, but either way I think this is better. Cold cap be damned, maybe they work for some, but not this time.

She looks cute, and happier.

I love her so much.

Cancer is a major downer

As if we didn't know that already.

My mum had her second session of chemotherapy today, so she was out from 11am till 5pm. I cleaned the bathroom, had a nap because I knew the person I was meeting for drinks was gonna bail on me, and then went into Wakefield to make an appointment to get more pills & also to go buy more running tights and hit the gym.

Now I'm home, and mum is sad and feels very sick. She's brought home a host of pills, anti-emetics, pain-killers and laxatives, to combat the ills that the chemotherapy is doing. I'm sat on my own now watching The English Patient, she's gone to bed after eating quarter of a jacket potato and a sip of water. With a bucket, and a towel on the floor by her bed.

When I got back from the gym she was sat on the sofa, crying. "I couldn't keep the cold cap on, I was cold to my bones. I couldn't keep it on. I couldn't keep it on." Her hair is going... going... Who knows how much longer she'll have it, what an awful, terrifying ordeal. I suppose it's the last reserve of normality before people start to know categorically that something's amiss. A wig might look like hair, but hair it isn't. Poor mama.

I have a terrible feeling of dread in my chest, a headache that will not budge and a nasty case of the sads. I am entirely aware that the latter is probably the root cause of the former.

I've no desire to do anything.


And the T.V remote has gone missing. To top it off.

Please help..

I was searching for other bloggers going through the same thing and I stumbled onto all kinds of information about chemotherapy backfiring and boosting cancer growth & the amount oncologists are paid & chemotherapy resistance & the increase in survival rate only being an extra 3% in node-negative breast cancer.

Fuck.

This Wednesday is chemo-day...

If I'm honest, this has not been so bad. I probably mentioned in my last post that Momma hadn't been feeling too hot about the whole thing- insofar as she'd spent four days wanting and not-wanting to puke up her guts. I guess that's the thing about taking highly poisonous medicines; your body really doesn't want them in there.

Her piss was red for the first day, something she attributed to the dye in the drugs (which apparently were the most noxious vibrant red colour- just in case the whole experience wasn't awful enough already) and she was very tired. Don't get me wrong, we are a family of nappers. We loves a good ol' bit of shut eye. But I'm talking forty minutes of forty winks every other hour, and then a 8:30pm bedtime which is unheard of, because we like to sit up and watch trash T.V like Phil Spencer: Secret Agent and Gordon Ramsay's Hotel Hell. 

After four days of that she seemed largely okay again, certainly more perky. She told me just this week (well, she told my Great Grandma and I overheard) that she'd just felt like someone had sucked all the energy out of her and I can completely understand that because looking at it from the other side that's how she seemed. But we've been okay since then.

We've lunched out, we've brunched, we've spent 6 hours shopping. It's been pretty standard as our lives go actually, except she keeps making these awkward jokes about going bald & "Well, things can't be much worse." Of course, they could be; it just doesn't really seem that way sometimes. Some people really do get all the luck.

The bald jokes were kind of amusing up till Wednesday just gone; when, in spite of the cold cap she wore for four hours cooling her poor noodle to a chilly -30c, her hair started to come out. It hasn't come out in chunks, oh no. It's a slower, more tender death than that. Whenever she touches her hair a smattering of about 20 hairs come away. She's not tugging them out, and despite all my pleadings she goes on running her fingers through her thinning locks, teasing out the hair that had already formed before her follicles bit the dust, where the end of this last burst of growth reaches the other side of the scalp.

Tonight she says, all nonchalant, "After Callum's parents evening tomorrow, I want you to shave my hair off." 
I'm mortified, my mum has hair, she's always had hair. She'll always have hair, won't she?

The answer of course is no. If she's not moidered it into submission by Friday, the dose of chemo she gets in 2 days time will undoubtedly finish it off by the start of December. My poor beautiful mama, bald as an egg. I can't begin to fathom it, I mean obviously it's happening. The little piles of brown hair around the house tell me it's happening, but that doesn't mean it's any more real.

We keep joking about hats, but I don't want her to have to wear a hat. I want her to have her lovely, thick hair.

I think if I started crying properly, I wouldn't stop till I was desiccated and embalmed in my own tears; how ludicrous. It's not even my hair. I don't think I even want my hair any more, if I could cut & paste it onto her I would in a heartbeat. I've been researching having it made into a wig, and it'd cost all my savings but to help her it'd be so worth it. Who gives a shit about 2k, you can earn that back no problem. She can't earn her hair back, and it can't even try to grow back for another 5 months.

The lump in my oesophagus is back, it feels like I've swallowed my own fist. It's not something even the super-strength anti-indigestion tablets she's been prescribed can fix (yay more side effects of making her better, giving her rampant acid reflux and heartburn!)

But you know what, it could be worse and it isn't. And I've no right to be sitting around weeping when she's championing being poisoned for the sake of her wellbeing. So I've got to keep schtum, and be brave, no weeping children welcome here.

Poor mama.