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Hello, journal!
This is a bit of a catch-up post and a bit of a “present” post, so hopefully I can start posting about what’s going on in the present in future entries without the need for any more catch-up posts.
First of all, work situation! After being unemployed since last January (special thanks to my mother, who, by forcing me to stay in Italy for three months more than I expected last year, had shafted any chance of me getting a summer job and as a result my CV suffered immensely because of it and I think that’s the main reason I didn’t get any jobs), I finally found a job at the end of March!
I work as a Digital Marketing Intern in a small company in Perth. The job is pretty standard — it’s an office job, 9 to 5 and my work consists into scheduling posts on Facebook, retweeting stuff on Twitter, finding promotions and events to put into the company’s CMS… so yeah, nothing too exciting. BUT it pays living wage (£7.85 per hour)! I was super happy when I got it. It really helped me pull through the debt that I had with the university.
I got into debt with the university around December. My dad, like the idiot that he is, made me get a room at the university accommodation. I told my dad repeatedly that SAAS (the agency responsible for student loans in Scotland) wouldn’t be funding me during the year and that I might not be able to afford the room there. His reply basically was: “Get it anyway, we’ll see if we can pay it later.” And that was truly a dumbass thing to do.
But it got even worse: I was in a double room with a French girl. I thought it was okay, I could make a friend and have help me with French. Well, not only was she the most unfriendly person I’ve ever met in my entire life (seriously, when I was in the room, she would take her laptop and go into the kitchen for hours; she never talked to me, spent all of her time on the phone with either her parents or her friends and she just wouldn’t talk to me. Like, I get that maybe you don’t want to be in a double room, but can you at least make an effort to be nice to your roommate? Geez), but she. Freaking. SNORED.
Seriously, the first night I slept in the room and she snored, I knew I was fucked. The first night she woke me up at 2 in the morning and she just wouldn’t stop snoring. That night I had to go and sleep in another campus room, because I was so sleep-deprived that I was picking fights with everybody and I was seriously pissed off.
The campus staff was, if I have to be honest, completely and totally unhelpful. When I told them that my roommate was keeping me up at night, their suggestions were:
a) Try to make friends with her and tell her about her snoring problem. Wow, guys, great idea. I’ll just tell this big French girl who doesn’t want to spend time with me and who I do not know at all and am in no comfortable relationship with to tell her something as personal as the fact that she snores. I’ll just bring it up while I’m trying to make awkward small talk, I’m sure it won’t make either of us incredibly uncomfortable. Top advice, guys.
b) Sleep on the couch in the kitchen. So, let me get this straight: I am paying around £400 a month for a room just so I can sleep on the fucking couch? Again, amazing help.
(I bought earplugs by the way, tried listening to music while she snored and all that jazz, but nothing helped.)
They were not sympathetic and they would not help me at all. I told them many, many times about the fact that I was being deprived of sleep, but they did nothing — they din’t talk to my roommate, they didn’t care if I was getting enough sleep, just nothing at all. I got really fed up with them. And, of course, I was locked by contract to pay for the room. They wouldn’t help me find a solution for my roommate, but they were more than happy to request payments for a room that I was effectively not using.
So I relocated to Auchterarder again, which wasn’t ideal, but it was necessity — if I didn’t sleep, I was going to completely fail my course. And, you know, I’m studying Computing, I kinda need my brain for that and I need some good rest to understand code. (My roommate was studying Music, by the way. She was almost never in class. She had lectures like two days a week, then nothing for the rest of the week. And she would sleep, a lot. Once she didn’t get up until 2-3pm and another time, when I had been out since 9am because of lectures, I came into the room at 5 in the afternoon and she was STILL SLEEPING — the curtains were still shut and everything. How the hell can a human being sleep so much?? She was my age as well (23), it’s not like she was a teenager or anything… She was weird.)
So I lived in Auchterarder until the end of February and during that time I was basically paying for the room and the travelling costs. It was ridiculous. To be honest, I am very tempted to file in a formal complain to the college. You can’t have double rooms on your campus and then offer NO HELP at all when someone has trouble with their roommate!
But I guess some of my bad luck must have rubbed off my roommate, because she was forced to go back to France after the Christmas holidays… and THANK GOD that happened. So I moved back into my room, this time with Kirsty, Andrew’s sister, who I have become pretty close to this year.
But see, even if I didn’t have my roommate, I still would have had the problem that after November I had no money to pay for the room. My dad had no money, he was sending me very little every month, just about enough to scrape by and I became indebted with the university. They even threatened to not let me go on to do my HND if I didn’t pay off my debt to them, even though I was one of the best students in class. So yeah, I went through an incredibly stressful period, thanks to the university staff. For a while it looked like I had to go to the citizen advice bureau for some help. This all thanks to my dad, who was a complete twat.
Thankfully, Andrew’s parents came to my rescue. They paid off most of the debt and I managed to pay off about half on my own, thanks to the living wage job that I had found. I’m obviously going to repay them, but at least for now I can go onto my HND and I don’t have to deal with university accommodation ever again. It did mean though that I couldn’t save any money from my job as 90% of it went to the debt every month.
So this is my last month of internship — it was a 3 months contract and I’m contracted to work until the 28th of June. After that, I’ll be starting another job — I’ll be Vice President of the Students’ Association of my college! I got elected in May, there was another girl running for it as well, but I won! I will be working 10 hours a week and I will be paid living wage too, so hopefully I can save up a nice sum. Right now I’m working 3 days a week (22.5 hours), one more day than what I’m contracted to do and they have to pay me holiday pay as well, so I’ll be saving a nice sum from this job as well. :D
In addition to this, I have applied for a web design job at a small company in Perth and the people there said they’d be happy to take me on as their web designer! They need a site made and they said they’d like to start part-time and it could lead up to a full-time position! So now I’m just waiting for an email from them saying when they want to meet up and have a chant about the job. They even said they could be me a PC! It wouldn’t be my own PC, just a company PC that I would use for the job, but still! That’s pretty promising! :D The pay is minimum wage, which kind of sucks, but it’s good experience and if they like me and want to keep me on, I will definitely try to negotiate a better pay!
Also, Peter, Kirsty and I want to get a flat together. We saw a gorgeous flat on Gumtree and we went to see it on Wednesday. And guys, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s one of the most beautiful flats I’ve ever seen, it looked even better in real life than it did in the photos! Just in case you’re curious, this is the flat: http://www.gumtree.com/p/3-bedrooms-rent/gorgeous-3-bedroom-open-plan-flat-to-rent/1118664070. The current tenant is moving out at the end of August, which is perfect for us, because we really needed one for the start of September. The landlord seems like a good guy as well — he’s not in it to make money and he seems like he cares about the tenants and wants to make the flat affordable — and the price is really cheap for us! And he said he’d be okay with pets, so we could even have a cat or a couple of rats in the flat! :D
So yeah, it’s the perfect flat and we really, really want it. I emailed the landlord the next day saying we want it and that we’d be happy to discuss with him if there’s anything we can do to secure the flat (he was showing it to other people as well). But we’re the first ones who saw it and the first ones to say we want it. So I’m really crossing my fingers and hoping he lets us have it!
What else… oh, I passed my HNC, obviously! And I was really pleased to get an A on my Graded Unit exam! 87%, not a bad mark. :D And this should help my application for a £1000 scholarship I applied for in May, which will be given to the best students at my university. So I’m crossing my fingers for that one too!
Oh, and I’m planning on starting my societies this year — the Sci-fi & Fantasy society and the Japanese Culture society — and a university newspaper! I’m just waiting for emails from the university Students’ Association, hopefully they’ll reply to me soon.
So yeah, this is pretty much what has happened in the past few months in a nutshell and what is happening right now. I will reply to your comments soon, it’s just that I haven’t had time yet! I hope everything is going well for you guys and I will hopefully be posting more often in the future and keeping you updated on all these things that are happening in my life right now! Until next time! :D
P.S. I was very sad when I found out Christopher Lee died yesterday. May he rest in peace now that he’s with Tolkien and his friends in a better place.
This is a bit of a catch-up post and a bit of a “present” post, so hopefully I can start posting about what’s going on in the present in future entries without the need for any more catch-up posts.
First of all, work situation! After being unemployed since last January (special thanks to my mother, who, by forcing me to stay in Italy for three months more than I expected last year, had shafted any chance of me getting a summer job and as a result my CV suffered immensely because of it and I think that’s the main reason I didn’t get any jobs), I finally found a job at the end of March!
I work as a Digital Marketing Intern in a small company in Perth. The job is pretty standard — it’s an office job, 9 to 5 and my work consists into scheduling posts on Facebook, retweeting stuff on Twitter, finding promotions and events to put into the company’s CMS… so yeah, nothing too exciting. BUT it pays living wage (£7.85 per hour)! I was super happy when I got it. It really helped me pull through the debt that I had with the university.
I got into debt with the university around December. My dad, like the idiot that he is, made me get a room at the university accommodation. I told my dad repeatedly that SAAS (the agency responsible for student loans in Scotland) wouldn’t be funding me during the year and that I might not be able to afford the room there. His reply basically was: “Get it anyway, we’ll see if we can pay it later.” And that was truly a dumbass thing to do.
But it got even worse: I was in a double room with a French girl. I thought it was okay, I could make a friend and have help me with French. Well, not only was she the most unfriendly person I’ve ever met in my entire life (seriously, when I was in the room, she would take her laptop and go into the kitchen for hours; she never talked to me, spent all of her time on the phone with either her parents or her friends and she just wouldn’t talk to me. Like, I get that maybe you don’t want to be in a double room, but can you at least make an effort to be nice to your roommate? Geez), but she. Freaking. SNORED.
Seriously, the first night I slept in the room and she snored, I knew I was fucked. The first night she woke me up at 2 in the morning and she just wouldn’t stop snoring. That night I had to go and sleep in another campus room, because I was so sleep-deprived that I was picking fights with everybody and I was seriously pissed off.
The campus staff was, if I have to be honest, completely and totally unhelpful. When I told them that my roommate was keeping me up at night, their suggestions were:
a) Try to make friends with her and tell her about her snoring problem. Wow, guys, great idea. I’ll just tell this big French girl who doesn’t want to spend time with me and who I do not know at all and am in no comfortable relationship with to tell her something as personal as the fact that she snores. I’ll just bring it up while I’m trying to make awkward small talk, I’m sure it won’t make either of us incredibly uncomfortable. Top advice, guys.
b) Sleep on the couch in the kitchen. So, let me get this straight: I am paying around £400 a month for a room just so I can sleep on the fucking couch? Again, amazing help.
(I bought earplugs by the way, tried listening to music while she snored and all that jazz, but nothing helped.)
They were not sympathetic and they would not help me at all. I told them many, many times about the fact that I was being deprived of sleep, but they did nothing — they din’t talk to my roommate, they didn’t care if I was getting enough sleep, just nothing at all. I got really fed up with them. And, of course, I was locked by contract to pay for the room. They wouldn’t help me find a solution for my roommate, but they were more than happy to request payments for a room that I was effectively not using.
So I relocated to Auchterarder again, which wasn’t ideal, but it was necessity — if I didn’t sleep, I was going to completely fail my course. And, you know, I’m studying Computing, I kinda need my brain for that and I need some good rest to understand code. (My roommate was studying Music, by the way. She was almost never in class. She had lectures like two days a week, then nothing for the rest of the week. And she would sleep, a lot. Once she didn’t get up until 2-3pm and another time, when I had been out since 9am because of lectures, I came into the room at 5 in the afternoon and she was STILL SLEEPING — the curtains were still shut and everything. How the hell can a human being sleep so much?? She was my age as well (23), it’s not like she was a teenager or anything… She was weird.)
So I lived in Auchterarder until the end of February and during that time I was basically paying for the room and the travelling costs. It was ridiculous. To be honest, I am very tempted to file in a formal complain to the college. You can’t have double rooms on your campus and then offer NO HELP at all when someone has trouble with their roommate!
But I guess some of my bad luck must have rubbed off my roommate, because she was forced to go back to France after the Christmas holidays… and THANK GOD that happened. So I moved back into my room, this time with Kirsty, Andrew’s sister, who I have become pretty close to this year.
But see, even if I didn’t have my roommate, I still would have had the problem that after November I had no money to pay for the room. My dad had no money, he was sending me very little every month, just about enough to scrape by and I became indebted with the university. They even threatened to not let me go on to do my HND if I didn’t pay off my debt to them, even though I was one of the best students in class. So yeah, I went through an incredibly stressful period, thanks to the university staff. For a while it looked like I had to go to the citizen advice bureau for some help. This all thanks to my dad, who was a complete twat.
Thankfully, Andrew’s parents came to my rescue. They paid off most of the debt and I managed to pay off about half on my own, thanks to the living wage job that I had found. I’m obviously going to repay them, but at least for now I can go onto my HND and I don’t have to deal with university accommodation ever again. It did mean though that I couldn’t save any money from my job as 90% of it went to the debt every month.
So this is my last month of internship — it was a 3 months contract and I’m contracted to work until the 28th of June. After that, I’ll be starting another job — I’ll be Vice President of the Students’ Association of my college! I got elected in May, there was another girl running for it as well, but I won! I will be working 10 hours a week and I will be paid living wage too, so hopefully I can save up a nice sum. Right now I’m working 3 days a week (22.5 hours), one more day than what I’m contracted to do and they have to pay me holiday pay as well, so I’ll be saving a nice sum from this job as well. :D
In addition to this, I have applied for a web design job at a small company in Perth and the people there said they’d be happy to take me on as their web designer! They need a site made and they said they’d like to start part-time and it could lead up to a full-time position! So now I’m just waiting for an email from them saying when they want to meet up and have a chant about the job. They even said they could be me a PC! It wouldn’t be my own PC, just a company PC that I would use for the job, but still! That’s pretty promising! :D The pay is minimum wage, which kind of sucks, but it’s good experience and if they like me and want to keep me on, I will definitely try to negotiate a better pay!
Also, Peter, Kirsty and I want to get a flat together. We saw a gorgeous flat on Gumtree and we went to see it on Wednesday. And guys, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s one of the most beautiful flats I’ve ever seen, it looked even better in real life than it did in the photos! Just in case you’re curious, this is the flat: http://www.gumtree.com/p/3-bedrooms-rent/gorgeous-3-bedroom-open-plan-flat-to-rent/1118664070. The current tenant is moving out at the end of August, which is perfect for us, because we really needed one for the start of September. The landlord seems like a good guy as well — he’s not in it to make money and he seems like he cares about the tenants and wants to make the flat affordable — and the price is really cheap for us! And he said he’d be okay with pets, so we could even have a cat or a couple of rats in the flat! :D
So yeah, it’s the perfect flat and we really, really want it. I emailed the landlord the next day saying we want it and that we’d be happy to discuss with him if there’s anything we can do to secure the flat (he was showing it to other people as well). But we’re the first ones who saw it and the first ones to say we want it. So I’m really crossing my fingers and hoping he lets us have it!
What else… oh, I passed my HNC, obviously! And I was really pleased to get an A on my Graded Unit exam! 87%, not a bad mark. :D And this should help my application for a £1000 scholarship I applied for in May, which will be given to the best students at my university. So I’m crossing my fingers for that one too!
Oh, and I’m planning on starting my societies this year — the Sci-fi & Fantasy society and the Japanese Culture society — and a university newspaper! I’m just waiting for emails from the university Students’ Association, hopefully they’ll reply to me soon.
So yeah, this is pretty much what has happened in the past few months in a nutshell and what is happening right now. I will reply to your comments soon, it’s just that I haven’t had time yet! I hope everything is going well for you guys and I will hopefully be posting more often in the future and keeping you updated on all these things that are happening in my life right now! Until next time! :D
P.S. I was very sad when I found out Christopher Lee died yesterday. May he rest in peace now that he’s with Tolkien and his friends in a better place.
