THE Whacker is always prepared to do his bit to lend a hand.
Trust me. I know a lot of people who need one, from the PM to the bloke next door.
But of late I have decided to help out a bloke who has been out of work for two years.
He’d lost count of the number of applications he’d sent in and interviews he’d gone to and come up empty handed. He gets more rejection letters than interviews.
His potential did rise after I gave him a red-hot tip – stop putting your age on your CV. However, as he has told me over and over, the second he walked through the door he sees the eyes glaze over and knows he is about to waste another 30 minutes of his life as the interviewer, or panel, goes through a courtesy chat before dismissing him.
You see, my mate is 58. One of those guys who in the old days would have been on the cusp of retirement but now is condemned to working way beyond that by successive governments that realise there is not enough cash in the kitty to foot the pension bill.
Problem is, as I suspect most of us old coots are finding out, telling people they must work is one thing, telling people they must employ them is something else altogether.
My mate is a stockie made redundant by a company that was rationalising (aren’t they all?)
He didn’t want to go, and has been a stockie most of his working life. And while he was comfortably off, he wasn’t exactly flush with funds.
He’d applied for everything from stockie roles to garbologist with a local council. No one wanted him. And that can be pretty belittling. It was certainly getting to my mate.
Both he and I know a couple of guys in similar boats who have found themselves in a pretty bad place. Their loss of self-esteem was staggering. Their depression at being left on the social scrapheap was more than they could take.
They had loving families but they obviously needed more. Needed to feel they were pulling their weight. And the society they so desperately wanted to be part of simply turned its back and moved on.
So I’ve arranged a job for my mate. Not with me – I always reckoned he was useless as a stockie. No, I’ve fixed him up – with a guy I know but he doesn’t – to work as a farmhand, driver and general dogsbody. I didn’t want to employ him because I didn’t need anyone – and he would have known that straight off.
He didn’t want charity; he wanted a fair go.
Mind you, my other mate, the one with the job, didn’t really have a full-time slot either. But we got together a few mates and all kicked in to cover half his pay packet.
The ex-stockie doesn’t know, and never will. And I am here to tell you the change in him has been nothing short of miraculous. There’s a spring in his step, he has already kicked some goals in the job with his agency contacts, which has saved his new boss some fair dinkum money.
Which is another thing. I would always employ a “mature age” person because they’re more stable, probably aren’t going anywhere, have a lifetime of knowledge and understand about turning up on time for a job. And kicking in without complaint if there is a bit extra to do at the end of the day.
But, most of all, the thing that brought the biggest smile to my mate’s face the other day was when he dropped in to catch up at the pub and almost shouted with a new confidence: “My round, boys.”
Even got my eyes a little misty, that.
