Diary Entries 2nd To 8th April 2015

April 10, 2015 | Posted in AUTHOR BLOGS, CONVENTIONS, FANDOM, NON-FICTION | By Arthur Chappell

Diary – Thursday 2^nd April 2015

A basic signing on for Welfare day, which went smoothly as they are happy with my current employment search progress (though it isn’t leading to work).

Had I been anything less than flat broke I would have been on route to London today for the Dysprosium Eastercon Convention which starts tomorrow. It’s the first convention I have missed for some years now. I’m monitoring Twitter messages from fans arriving in London from here in Manchester.

Diary – Good Friday 3^rd April 2015. This is covered in my blog entry ….. Additional detail – I got a lovely Happy Easter card off my Mum, which is the first Easter Card I ever got. I don’t send Easter cards out with not being remotely religious. Xmas Cards I can handle as Yuletide predates Christianity but Easter really has no excuses.

Diary – Saturday 4^th April 2015 – (Covered on my blogs)

Diary – Easter Sunday 5^th April 2015 – No Easter eggs this year, and in fact no real sense of an Easter celebration in progress at all. My Mum was invited to my sister’s for the day, which left me free to watch TV and movies all day – some of which I have reviewed here.

Diary – Easter Monday 6^th April 2015 – The main Easter Bank Holiday though being unemployed left it feeling like just another Monday for me. My Mum did us a special Easter lunch which was almost a Christmas Dinner and very nice.

In the evening I was participating in a Film Night spoof event called ‘Flim Night’ where poems, stories and sketches are themed around chosen movies, with all work at this show being inspired by scenes from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. It was great fun, and my own contribution was well received. My thanks to everyone at Manchester’s Three Minute Theatre.

A joyful Twitter message told me that the next Eastercon (2016) is being run in Manchester by the Manunicon Committee so I should be free to make it to that one. Whoo!

Diary – Tuesday 7^th April 2015 – Normal day and normally when I would receive my dole payments, but they were sent a few days early due to the Easter holidays. Otherwise it was just a day to catch up on notes for my writings and further job search.

Diary – Wednesday 8^th April 2015 – I had a Customer care role job interview today, which involved registering with an agency who kept me waiting almost two hours beyond my interview appointment time. They had expected four candidates to deal with and to have us all involved in a role playing scenario, but two candidates never turned up and that was scrapped in favour of a straight fifteen minute interview and a lot of application forms to complete. I hated how the receptionist kept asking if I’d finished them yet even though it would have been impossible to do them correctly in such a short space of time as she seemed to imagine.

The interviewer seemed confused between sales experience and customer care – I kept pointing out how sales involves customer care and more besides, but he felt the role might be too directly customer care related for me, which left me wondering why he even called me to the interview as that should have been obvious to him from my CV resume.

In the evening I attended a CAMRA real ale society presentation for best cider pub of the year in North Manchester to a favourite bar of mine, Bar Fringe on Swan Street in Manchester, where I had a lovely night out with real ale fans and other friends in the bar.

Arthur Chappell