Very Top Five... Things to do if you're unemployed

Damn, so you’re unemployed? You might well deserve it due to your lack of ability and ambition, or it could be the random stroke of a cruel recession, but I’m going to go ahead and assume the former. Everyone else will, after all.

Suddenly twenty four hours seems an absurdly over-generous amount of time to idly flicker past, every single day. Conversely, the weeks will melt into months and years before you can say “I’ve wasted my only life.”

Ever so insidiously, you’ll notice that your daily expectations get smaller and smaller. You’ll get dressed up to go to the library, and make ‘posting that letter’ your task for the day, and feel all proud when you succeed, in this pathetic simulacrum of meaningful existence.

So you’ll be after some sort of method of dealing with the crushing desperation of feckless unemployment, I assume? By the way, I’ve left suicide off the list, ‘cos, y’know, it’s a really big downer, but remember it’s always an option. Just saying; one less person on government financial support is one productive step towards financial prosperity for everyone else.

Anyway, here we go:

5. Apply for jobs

I just thought I’d get this option out of the way early on, so we can have a good laugh at its ludicrousness and move on with the article. Obviously when you’re initially unemployed you’ll be all keen to seek employment, and lay out all your job application things on your desk all ready to go, with your selection of coloured pens at right angles to your headed notepaper and selection of paperclips (A different colour for every day of the week, to liven things up a bit).

But soon you’ll find that the thump of rejection letters on the doormat is just about as effective a dampener on your enthusiasm as if the postman had come into your house and punched you in the stomach for having the audacity to make him deliver your application letter when it was so obviously a massive waste of his time.

4. Watch daytime television

Let the bright light flicker over your tired eyes. Soon you’ll start to care about what happens to the characters in tedious soaps. You’ll then add these soaps to your daily list of things to do. You’ll set your alarm clock to remind yourself to switch on (You don’t want to be distracted by any of the many, many other many pressing concerns on your time, after all.)

Then there are those programmes where they round up some morons and get them to have a go at each other in a conversational format, normally with a patronising host who can whip out DNA test certificates at any given comically-timed moment. An audience will chatter excitedly like a mob of vultures who’ve just realised that one of their own number is limping.

Vultures also urinate down their own legs to kill the bacteria picked up from wading over stinking, bloated corpses. I think that TV audiences do this as well, but only metaphorically.

3. Masturbate angrily

Why not combine your simmering anger and constant low level unshakeable frustrated arousal with some furious masturbation? Make it the highlight of your day.

Just a thought.

2. Forage

Maybe you’ve toyed with the idea of self employment but lack the skills, capital and inspiration to actually do so? Well here’s something everyone is always over qualified for; scavenging junk from bins.

Go out and liberate things from skips. Then use them to fashion new and fantastic items, like Macgyver. I don’t think MacGyver ever used some brown lettuce leaves and a half-eaten pie to make a square meal, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

And the brilliant thing about cigarette butts is that there is often still some tobacco in them. Collect five, stick ‘em back together and sell them to a tramp. They’re not fussy.

If people see you foraging they might chuck a few loose coins your direction too. Bonus!

1. Wither

Your personal range of skills is unacknowledged by a cruel society, so why not show your contempt for society right back by shuffling around the house, unshaven and wearing slippers even though it’s way past lunchtime.

Let tedium set in. Just relax, let the world speed up around you, and pass you by, and settle in for a long, long period of unemployment. Possibly for ever and ever.

And ever.

On the plus side, you’ll stop worrying. I’ve never seen a stressed person wearing slippers in the afternoon, after all.

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If the unusually callous vitriol of this article offends you, please find consolation in the knowledge that surely my contempt of unemployment can only be derived from insecurity. But still, I have a job and you don’t. Nyer nyer.