This Cursed Year Will Not Finish Fast Enough As Far As We’re Concerned

Mrs Izzard and I can’t wait for 31st December. Not because we have something fabulous arranged for the evening entertainment, though of course we have, but because we can’t wait to see the back of this most vile of years.

There have been pluses, and we shouldn’t forget them, nor to count our blessings which are abundant. After all, we still live in the Black Country, we have our little lad William, our parents remain in good health and we have fantastic family and mates. So not everything is completely revolting, but these are the things that are fairly static and not what one may consider to be ‘events’. Other than the expulsion of Gordon Brown from Downing Street – now THERE was a superb occurrence!

Other things are not and this is the stage, things take a turn for the worse. To start with, in January, I began the year out of contract which was appalling enough, I had anticipated being back in work pretty fast, but it wasn’t to be. Then, in March my final remaining grandparent passed on, a wonderful lady of infinite dignity. Then in April, just after her birthday the gigantic bombshell, the wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and motions were set in train to deal with it through surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It was about the same time that I was told by the DWP that I wouldn’t be getting unemployment benefit since I’d been paying the wrong kind of National Insurance, and so on top of it all I had no income.

And then things seemed to pep up. The 1st Mrs Izzard was looking through the Directgov website for job vacancies for me and came across an advert offering work doing SEO. I had already done a bit of work for local companies, offering IT support and although I had no idea what SEO really was, I contacted the website mentioned in the Directgov piece and later had a call from one of the managers of the firm involved. He went through how SEO worked and told me about the job and what the company was after from me and what they would do for me. We decided to meet at a Jobcentre in the outskirts of Birmingham. I found him a friendly, very pleasant man and we had an extensive talk about work, life, career, business and loads of other topics and I ended up really wanting to work for him. I explained that although I did a bit of IT support I wouldn’t be able to fund the training myself although I really wanted to do it. He said that he would look into funding for me to cover the training since alas the company wouldn’t be able to provide it for free and it sounded reasonable.

We met again a few of weeks later and having been informed that I was not qualified for funding I handed over a cheque for 3 grand that I’d managed to secure from my parents in lieu of the money that my nana had seemingly left me as an inheritance. And what a legacy! The opportunity to train to work from home for proper salary for the long term! I began the training and it took something like 6 weeks. While the company arranged out a suitable client for me, they provided me a website they said they had built for a firm that had gone out of business, but since they owned the website they were looking to sell it and it was a good plan to have it optimised when they did. You can see it at www.2bbq.co.uk and I came up with fifty articles using all the keywords to biff it up the results table.

A few weeks came and went and as my resources ebbed away I emailed the directors asking when I was finally going to get a customer, until in early November I came across a group of folks on the internet who had all gone down the same path and it became perfectly obvious that there were no customers and the whole enterprise had been a rip-off to wring training money from jobless people from all over England, not just the Black Country like me.

So, now my own cash is almost extinguished as I’ve been using them to support us while waiting for the clients to come and now I realise that they never will. So, being a finer human than the rotten scumbags who have swindled me, I will find clients and do SEO myself, as well as IT support which I still offer to businesses in the Black Country and we will emerge from this in one piece, stronger and the legacy money from my grandma’s legacy will be replaced and spent on something worthwhile and valuable as she planned.

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