This Dreadful Year Won’t Conclude Fast Enough As Far As This Family Is Concerned

The 1st Mrs Izzard and I cannot wait for New Year’s Eve. Not because we have something fabulous arranged for the evening fun and games, 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 must never forget them, nor to count our blessings which are bountiful. After all, we still live in the Black Country, we have our son William, our parents are still in good health and we have marvellous family and mates. So not everything is completely dreadful, but these are the things that are generally unmoving and not what one may regard as ‘events’. Other than the expulsion of Gordon Brown from Downing Street – now THAT was a wondrous event!

Other things are not and here, things take a turn for the unpleasant. To start with, in January, I began the year out of contract which was bad enough, I had reckoned to be back in work fairly quickly, but it was not to be. Then, in March my final remaining grandparent passed away, a marvellous lady of endless grace. And then in April, just after her birthday the real bombshell, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and processes were set in train to deal with it with surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It was roughly the same time that I was told by the DWP that I would not get unemployment benefit as I’d been paying the wrong kind of National Insurance, and so on top of all the rest I had no income.

And then things appeared to pick up. Mrs Izzard was searching the Directgov website for job vacancies for me and found an advert offering work doing SEO. I had already done a spot of work for local businesses, offering IT support and though I didn’t know what SEO actually was, I contacted the website mentioned in the Directgov advert and in time had a call from one of the owners of the firm advertising. He went through how SEO worked and went through about the job and what the company needed from me and what they would do for me. We agreed to meet at a Jobcentre on the outskirts of Birmingham. I found him a friendly, extremely nice man and we had a long conversation about work, life, career, business and loads of other things and I ended up really wanting to work with him. I explained that although I did a bit of IT support I was not able to pay for the training myself although I really wanted to do it. He said that he would examine funding for me to cover the training since alas the company was not able to provide it for free and it seemed fair.

We met again a couple of weeks later and having been told that I was not qualified for funding I gave over a cheque for 3,000 that I had managed to borrow from my parents in lieu of the money that my nana had seemingly left me as a legacy. And what a legacy! The possibility to train to work from home for good money for the long term! I go on with the course and it took something like 6 weeks. While the firm sorted out an ideal client for me, they gave me a website they explained they’d designed for a firm that had gone bust, but since they owned the website they were going to sell it and it was a good plan to have it optimised when they did. You can find it at www.2bbq.co.uk and I wrote 50 articles using different keywords to bunt it up the results table.

A number of weeks came and went and as my money eroded I wrote to the company asking when I was finally going to get a customer, until in early November I discovered a group of folks online who had all gone down the same path and it became horribly transparent that there were no customers and the whole thing had been a scam to swindle training money from jobless people from all over the country, not just the Black Country like me.

So, now my own resources are almost evaporated as I’ve been using them to support myself and the family while waiting for the clients to come and now I accept that they never will. So, being a finer human than the vile scumbags who have conned me, I will find clients and do SEO myself, as well as IT support which I will still offer to companies in the Black Country and we will emerge from this complete, stronger and the inheritance money from my grandmother’s will will be paid back and used for something worthwhile and valuable as she planned.

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