It's never a good idea to sniff my socks. You can be passed out for hours.


But when I'm not filling my flat with the fragrance of feet, I'm busy being turned down for the same job twice. Back in January I applied for the position of Entertainment Writer on The Argus, only to be rejected four weeks later on the grounds that... well actually I don't know - they wouldn't tell me. At the end of August, however, they advertised the position again, so being a glutton for punishment, I decided to apply for a second time. I thought the fact that in the intervening months I'd had eleven entertainment articles published in The Kemptown Rag and another fourteen on The Argus website, might give me a better chance of success.

Sadly I was wrong. I received a letter this morning which states "We have had a huge number of applications for this vacancy and I am afraid to say you have not been selected for interview". The closing date was last Friday, and this letter's dated Monday, so it's nice to know that even having received a huge number of applications, each comprising a CV and three examples of work, they were ready to type up my rejection letter on the next working day.

If they were hoping to claim the record for my fastest rejection though, they'll have to do a lot better than that. That particular title still belongs to the SeaLife Centre, who managed to turn me down on the same day they got my application form.

Interestingly though, back in March, just a few weeks after both of those valiant job-seeking efforts, I applied to be a Rotational Pharmacy Assistant (chemist in a spin) at the hospital. Well ok, that's not very interesting. But what is interesting is that much like the Entertainment Writer job, that position's now being readvertised too. Clearly no one stays in a job for more than six months any more.

Since then, I've actually applied for a total of three jobs at the hospital, in three different departments, none of which have ever bothered to get back to me. It's obviously not easy to hide a mental illness when you're dealing with doctors. They can probably tell I'm a fruit loop from the way I type my CV. But after the roaring success of my second Argus application, I might give the hospital a fourth chance to respond to me. The way things are going, I could just keep applying for the same jobs every six months. Then I can repeat the same blog posts when they turn me down.