Most of my fans know that i have spent part of the last three years of my life in London. London can be either a very exciting city or a very shitty place to live in (it all depends on which area you reside). It is a great place for people who have full time jobs,  living on doleouts from daddy dearest (students from foreign countries), or if you are the property of some cougar (older woman with a toy boy).
The point is that one needs to be earning to enjoy the good life in London. There was a time when i wanted to make a good amount of money so i could live a good life while studying. That was one reason why I applied for a job as a charity fund raiser. It was a beautiful rainy day in August 2005 when I decided to go out for a walk in Wimbledon (not Wimbledon Village). I met this sweet anxious little fund raiser who wanted me to give my direct debit details so that she could reach her target for the day. My curiousity got the better of me and i asked her for the name of her company so i could also apply for a job. Little did i know that i would get a call back from them soon after i registered. They invited me over for an interview which required a bit of roleplay and a final interview. I was chuffed when i found out that i had made the cut. The company invited me for a training session at Oxford. I am sure i must have mentioned this bit in my blog earlier. Anyway the training session went well as the trainers were a lot of fun. They were all gung ho about fund raising and how easy it was for them to raise money. I guess they were quite charming coz we actually believed everything they said. I wanted to believe them and yet my gut instinct was that it was not as easy as it sounded. They taught us a lot of techniques on how to get people to donate. I thought it would be a piece of cake and decided to go to work two days after my training session. That was the start of my nightmare job which i wish i had never taken. I should have listened to my friend when he told me that i was not gonna find it easy. The locations were at random places around London and not all of them were a pretty sight. we got to go to Brixton, carnaby street, QM Uni and some other place i cant remember. That was when i stopped smelling the roses and realised that it wasn’t that easy. I am not a groaner/moaner (well i can be at times if the going gets tough) but then it was too much for me to handle. My “kind handlers” suddenly turned into these greedy vultures who wanted us to break our backs to reach our target for the day. I wanted to cry out in pain because my feet hurt like hell and I couldn’t stand. It is not an easy task asking people to fork over their direct debit details. i tried every trick in the book to get some potential victims and yet I failed every time. I did manage to get some kind people to donate but I guess it was only because they felt sorry for me. I had to pretend to be all cheery and at the same time i used to wish that the earth would open up and swallow me. It was a lot of fun having people avoid me, curse me, call me names, etc and yet i stayed brave and endured it. The funny thing was that my handlers were critical and not at all supportive as they pushed us to be more ruthless in our pursuit of victims. Well let’s just say that I finally lost the job or let’s just say i quit the job after they started reprimanding me for no reason. I was gonna be fired anyway coz i hadn’t met my targets and turned up 2 minutes late once. Anyway i am glad i quit coz my second term had just started and i was able to achieve my academic goals.
My fund raiser experience was horrifying and scarred me for a very long time. It made me avoid them with a vengeance. The only problem is that it’s tough to avoid them as they are everywhere. I see them like nearly every other day and it’s quite tough to avoid them. I do feel sorry for them as they don’t know what they are in for. I do stop for the ones i feel sorry for and share some words of wisdom “run for the hills and don’t look back. this job will ruin your life”. They always tend to look at me in a funny way whenever i give them advice.The funny thing is that the fund raisers use the same tried and tested methods which they taught us at chugger school.
I nearly got sucked into a job which would have required me to go door to door trying to persuade people into buying Sky subscriptions. I had no idea what i had gotten into when i was randomly posting cvs on jobsites looking for a job. I got this call from a company in slough for an interview. They told me it was a marketing job but then i had no idea what it entailed as there was no job description. I made it through the first interview and was summoned for the second day after that. I don’t know why i kept getting the feeling that there was something wrong. Everything looked all right on the surface but then i could still feel that there was something wrong. Anyway they told me that the second interview was all about observing them at work and that was when i realised i had been duped as it was not a marketing job but a sales job. They took me out on the field to test me and that was when i smelled the roses (using the phrase yet again) and realised that i was gonna be wasting my time. I was supposed to report back to the office for the qa session after my field training was over. The sucky bit was that my ride had already left without me and there was no way for me to go back. I had to walk all the way to the station so i could go back to Slough. I realised there and then that there was no way i was gonna go back and i used my return ticket to go back to London.
I am glad I learned from my charity fundraiser lesson and did not go for that crappy job. So when i spotted some Npower reps at the station i ran for my life. So whenever you see some commission greedy sales rep just run for the hills and dont look back. 
