The wife and I can’t wait for 31st December. Not because we have something magnificent arranged for the evening fun and games, even though we have, but because we can’t wait to see the back of this most terrible of years.
There have been positives, and we shouldn’t forget them, nor to count our blessings which are munificent. After all, we remain in the Black Country, we have our little lad William, our parents remain in rude health and we have marvellous family and chums. So not everything is completely dreadful, but these are the things that are generally fixed and not what one may refer to as ‘events’. Other than the jettisoning of Gordon Brown from Downing Street – now THAT was a wondrous occurrence!
Other things are not and this is the stage, things take a turn for the unpleasant. To start with, in January, I found myself out of contract which was bad enough, I had expected to be back in work quite rapidly, but it was not to be. Then, in March my final remaining grandparent passed away, a glorious lady of infinite dignity. And then in April, just after her birthday the real bombshell, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and procedures were set in train to deal with it using surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It was approximately the same time that I was informed by the DWP that I would not get unemployment benefit since 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 looked as if they would perk up. Mrs Izzard was browsing the Directgov website for job vacancies for me and discovered an advert promising work doing SEO. I had already done a bit of work for local companies, doing IT support and though I was clueless about what SEO actually was, I contacted the website linked in the Directgov advert and in time had a call from one of the managers of the company involved. He told me how SEO worked and told me about the job and what the company wanted from me and what they would do for me. We arranged to meet at a Jobcentre on the North end of Birmingham. I found him a charming, thoroughly pleasant man and we had a detailed talk about work, life, career, business and loads of other things and I finished up really wanting to work with him. I told him that although I did a bit of IT support I was not able to fund the training myself although I really wanted to do it. He said that he would find out about funding for me to cover the training since alas the company wouldn’t be able to provide it for free and it seemed fair.
We met again 2 of weeks later and having been told that I was not eligible for funding I passed over a cheque for 3,000 that I’d managed to beg from my olds in anticipation of the money that my grandmother had seemingly left me as an inheritance. And what a legacy! The chance to train to work from home for proper income for the long term! I go on with the course and it took something like six weeks. While the company worked out an ideal client for me, they provided me a site they explained they had built for a firm that had gone bust, but since they owned the website they were trying to sell it and it was a good idea to have it optimised when they did. You can view it at www.2bbq.co.uk and I came up with 50 articles using different keywords to bunt it up the results table.
A few weeks came and went and as my finances ebbed away I emailed the directors asking when I was finally going to get a customer, until in early November I discovered a group of folks on a forum who had all gone down the self same path and it became completely clear that there were no clients and the whole experience had been a rip-off to wring training money from unemployed 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 realise that they never will. So, being a better person than the vile scumbags who have conned me, I will find customers and do SEO myself, as well as IT support which I will still offer to businesses in the Black Country and we will survive this in one piece, stronger and the legacy money from my grandma’s will will be reimbursed and spent on something worthwhile and valuable as she planned.
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categories: SEO,Black Country
