So my interview of the week...

was rather a shocker...by Johannesburg standards.

I was telephoned by a young lady. I'm still not sure if she got my CV off an employment website because I'm positive I would never have applied for a job such as this (unless I was under the influence of the dreaded wine!)

Telesales and office admin for a security company. The one plus is that its only a few kilometres away from where I'm staying but get this - the salary R6,000 a month - the hours 7am until 5pm minus tea breaks and lunch break (which I generally don't take anyway plus its an industrial area!). So 10 hours a day at work minus breaks at the offered salary is about R30 an hour.

And I was considering taking the position just to get some funds rolling in. The more I thought about it though, the more depressed about it I was getting, no matter how much I tried to justify why I should accept the position.

My last position in Durban which was also only 5 minutes from home (and no traffic!) was only half day i.e. 8am until 1pm plus alternate Saturdays from 8am until 12pm and for that I was making R5,500 per month and still not coming out financially.

So now I'm in Johannesburg with further distances to travel and everything costing a bit more and that's the salary they're offering for a full day job. My goodness.

I went for the first interview and the young HR lady was lamenting the 'terrible' applicants she had seen so far who didn't seem to want to work for that kind of money, young people who didn't seem to have any kind of work ethic but were wanting R15,000 with no experience.

My first job at age 19 paid R500 a month but different time, different place. I made the shortlist and was supposed to go for a second interview today but when I discussed it with Robynne, laying out a possible reason to accept the position if offered it as at least having some form of an income as opposed to being at home with no income, she pointed out that I would be stuck in a low income job all day and unable to go for any more promising interviews should they come about.

With that reinforcement, I dropped an email to the young HR lady, thanking her for the opportunity but declining the second interview. I think I owe more to myself after more than twenty years of hard slog behind a hot computer than to set myself back so far in a junior position with no benefits.

Come on Jhb! Show me the money...!