After university I couldn’t get any work. I had never been good at job interviews. Even after a Masters Degree I ended up working as a cashier in William Hill for a while because I was good numbers. I did a bit of MORI polling, knocking on doors and being shouted out [laughs]. And then the PGCE which was quite stressful and hard to get through and that was after my son was born and I was just determined somehow. I had to make all these qualifications work in a job way. And I did a good job on my work placement and I managed to get a job at an FE college where I worked for five years. 

 

In that time I think I was overloaded. I was paid the least in the department and probably had the biggest workload. And then I was made redundant, the summer of 2008 and I feel that was my department, I feel ganged up against me as a way of blaming poor figures on one of the courses to a higher manager and I was scapegoated, because I had the least power, personality wise in the department. And nobody understands what a sociologist does anyway in FE colleges. So although I fought an appeal and wrote almost a dissertation of reasons against it in two days, I was still made redundant. But… So generally my experience of work has been awful [laughs]. What more can I say really? I hate job interviews. Don’t like offices. I don’t like being in one place for too long. I tend to not get on with managers. Never given any flexibility in the role that I’ve got so it kind of deadens you, I find, work. Or you’re just misused by people and blamed for their mistakes. Things like that, so … I don’t like it very much either when it runs the way it does.

 

 

The kind of hierarchy and power within work places, how others treat me, not being valued. Yes, just… never really had a positive experience of a work place for any extended period of time. I mean I enjoyed doing the lecturing at first, but it kind of gradually went downhill. I had sort of four managers in five years or something. Each one was worst than the last, total chaos really. So … I think given the right environment and the right people I’d happily be a workaholic and was in that job. I took a lot of pride in it. 

 

It’s funny because I didn’t have problems with students, generally that other teachers did. It was occasionally colleagues and virtually always management. And I’ve always had a bit of a problem with authority I think and people telling me what to do. Especially when it’s irrational and ill thought through and they’re not listening to you. You end up in a bit of a stubborn stand off situation [laughs]. So I tend not to roll over very easily. I do understand things, you know, I mean there’s some, my mum’s says I’m a pushover on certain things and on other things I’m not at all. So … I think sometimes with teaching it was fine in the classroom, because I was leading it, and people were looking to me and my store of information to explain things and it was my structure. But in the office in the team meeting, in the other things around work I didn’t find that any where near as straightforward. And I taught adults. I don’t think I could have coped with thirty children in a class... [laughs] No. [laughs again]. One’s enough, just put it that way.