I am still doing what I am supposed to be doing while on Unemployment Insurance. Each and every day, the first thing I do when I get up is get online and start picking my way through the various job websites I frequent.
This was my third week of being unemployed. When I first lost my job, I saw the job sites as a field of possibilities. Now, after three weeks of trying to sift through them, attempting to separate the wheat from the mountains of chaff, I find myself becoming annoyed by these job sites. They aren’t offering me much for my efforts.
In a previous blog post, I wrote about an ad where someone wanted a “Substitute/ Associate Teacher”. I was trying to decide if it was a good idea to apply for that one, or not. I was concerned that this was basically asking for a Substitute Teacher, and wasn’t actually offering a full time position.
Someone on Twitter (I don’t know if this person wants to be named in this blog), had words of wisdom about this. “Apply for the substitute teaching job, because since it is not full time, you can collect partial bennies and they last longer.” The person went on to say “It also keeps your brain in the game so to speak.”
I decided this was sound advice, and intended to apply for this job. Now, one of the things I may be asked to prove to the powers that be from the EDD is that I “made contact” with employers. So, instead of applying immediately for the job, I waited a few days, so this “contact with an employer” would count for this week (October 11th – October 17th). I’d already had proof of contact for the week I actually found the want ad in.
I bookmarked the ad so I could easily find it again. A few days later, I was ready to send an email and apply for the “Substitute / Associate Teacher” job, whatever it turned out to be.
This proved impossible, however. I found this job on Craigslist, and now, instead of the ad I bookmarked, I was staring at a page that said that the job had been flagged. It had been removed by Craigslist, because too many people marked it as Spam. If the employer who wrote the original ad had filled the position that fast, it would say something to the effect that the ad had been removed by the poster, not that it was removed because it was flagged too many times.
So, overall, I suppose it was a good thing that I didn’t immediately apply when I first saw that ad. If I did, I might have ended up giving out a bunch of personal information to a Spammer. It’s still disappointing, however, that the ad wanting a “Substitute / Associate Teacher” wasn’t actually for a job. I never thought I’d see the day when finding work as a teacher was so impossible that the Spam Artists would start using offers of potential teaching jobs as bait!
Tags: Craigslist