Day Three: My Palpably Downbeat Mood

So after a fruitless day one and a fruitless and emotional day two, day three crashed into being at the same time as new unemployment statistics came out. My 'zero hour' week was turning out to be quite a rollercoaster. I wrote a blog post a while ago about an increase in unemployment to the tune of 118,000. This time the stats aren't as drastic, but 48,000 more people are out of work.

What I found more interesting when I discovered this unhappy news was a feature on the BBC News website about two woeful unemployed people:
Their downbeat mood is palpable: a smile is rare, and their softly spoken voices convey a lack of confidence and hope after years of sitting on the subs' bench.
Woh. Serious stuff. I have several problems with this as an opening sentence:
1. It is overly emotive.
2. It panders to the whims of the unemployed.
3. The football metaphor makes my skin crawl.
After the journalist introduces the protagonist lighting his 'roll up cigarette' they proceed to write this:
The window is ajar and a crisp cool breeze forces its way through, blowing the curtain into the side table.
Woh. WOH.
This is not poor detective fiction. You expect to see the sentence carry on thus:
The smoke from the private detective's [aforementioned] roll-up cigarette curls through the air, disappearing into the atmosphere like his long-lost optimism. He carefully opens the dusty case file...
At this moment in time some kids that are down with the other kids would say 'lol'.

Lol.

It seems that whatever the unemployed gentleman was smoking, the journalist has given it a couple of puffs as well and created what it an incredibly conceited piece of writing. Unfortunately the result of it all, in trying to make it more emotive than, well it is, means that I do not sympathise or even empathise with the unemployed roll-ups man. He's played his games several times, he's watched all his DVDs three or four times, and he still doesn't have a job.

I am unemployed like him; I keep myself busy by, I dunno, blogging; I'm also a handy soul and have a number of low-earning business enterprises that keep me active: it's not difficult to do. Though games and DVDs are a nice option, I think that looking for jobs and opportunities has to take priority.

Anyway after reading about my fellow-unemployed bums, I checked my emails. Just the four. None of them were interesting.

Wednesdays are busy days for me as I have 'domestic duties' to occupy myself with. To be honest it helps me take my mind off the waiting. So as I embark upon my domestic duties part II, I hope that there will be an interesting email waiting in my inbox when I return.

My optimism hasn't quite evaporated just yet...