Nothing to be done

I only came into the office yesterday because they wanted me to do some testing on the alpha release of Early English Bo(ll)o(c)ks Online, and when I got there, it turned out that the development server had crashed so nothing was available for testing. However, I was in then, and when I'm in the office people have a tendency to come sidling up to me with muttered requests for perl scripts, or "perlscript routines" as one girl calls them. (Perlscript routines are like routines except that they don't run on DOS, so you have to run them on telnet.)

Now the problem is not that these people ask for difficult things. Mostly what they want turns out to be fairly trivial, if you can ever work out what it is that they want. The problem is not even that they tend to be asking for scripts to do things that you just shouldn't want to do. That's manageable: ours not to reason why, ours just to look faintly puzzled and say "But that's what you asked for" when it does the wrong thing. No, the real problem is that these people don't just move the goalposts, they run around like headless chickens with the bloody goalposts strapped to their backs.

( what passes for a spec round here )

Back in again today, so that I can get that testing done; the dev server is now fixed, but Magic Geoff has to fix all the other stuff that needs fixing before anybody can test the alpha, which he couldn't do yesterday because the server was down... so I still have nothing officially to do, which means people still keep asking me for crap perl scripts.

This job is even more dead-end than it was before I "quit". It's not even adding anything to my CV any more, except time. ("Except my life. Except my life. Except my life.")

"What is there in the bag?"
"Sand."

Oops.

So I phoned the nice man about the Tech Writer job that I saw advertised, thinking he'd say "Yes, dear, now go away and get another three years' experience," and instead he said "Oooh, great, send me your CV and some samples of documentation you've written, could you? Preferably before the end of the day?"

Erk.

Added to this, I've got the assessment-type-thing (not an interview, that comes later, if I pass the test) for the Police Intelligence Officer job tomorrow -- it's something to do with report-writing but other than that I know nothing about it, & thus have no real way of preparing for it.

Still heard nothing from CUP, either. I'll be surprised if they don't even want to interview me (unless they decided when they interviewed me last time that I was just too hopeless) but it's looking increasingly likely that that's going to be the case.

I've realised that, deep down, I never really expect these people to even consider giving me jobs. The way the job-application process goes is that I send off applications, and that stops me feeling like a completely useless waste of space for another few days, at least until the rejection letters start pouring in. And then, to be honest, I'm secretly relieved; until I start feeling miserable again because I still have no money and no purpose to my life.