Suits & Sweets

This weekend I went to two job fairs in London - one for the charity and not-for-profit sector and the other one for graduates. Neither of them were particularly useful - the charity one had a bunch of organisations that I’d love to work for but who wouldn’t have me for my lack of experience and the grad one had a bunch of companies that would have tried to lure me into their offices with a trail of free sweets if they could have done so but all of whom there’s no way in hell I’d ever dream of pledging my services (and probably my soul) to. It struck me as a pretty sorry state of affairs that as a graduate you have to fight hard against the current not to just be channelled into dedicating yourself to the forces of evil for the indefinite future. Which likely means being unemployed. Surely certain organisations are kicking themselves in the foot by letting all the smartest/most skilled of the new generations go to work for the corporations that they are constantly pitting themselves against? For example, I attended the London demo in solidarity with the Burmese protests last weekend. Probably about half of the placards being waved about had Amnesty’s sign on them, a lot of them were protesting the continued presence of foreign business in Burma, especially Total Oil. Jobs with Amnesty are nigh on impossible for anyone of my lowly unworldly graduate stature. There were several global oil companies at the grad fair. It took several minutes of listening to one grey-faced, grey-suited twenty-something rep whose stall was declaring amazing travel opportunities before I managed to ascertain what it was that the company actually did - working with the governments (or dictatorships) of politically and economically unstable countries to promote them as attractive investment opportunities to foreign business. I politely expressed my disinterest and went to find some free humbugs to quell my rage. Something’s very skewed here. And I still have no job.