Say hello to one of this forums' wierdest posts:


If anyone here happens to be familiar with my work and happens to be in a position to offer employment in the UK then I would be very interested to talk more about your company and positions I might fill within it.

Today I was the only employee not to be made redundant, but they followed that news up with, 'but we cant afford to pay you for another 3 months'.

I'm now really very broke indeed.

What a bitch (no,no..not you :razz

Hope you find a new job soon Becky. Good luck

Unfortunately I'm unable to help, but I sincerely hope you'll find a decent job soon.

Hope you find a new Job soon..

wow, that really sucks. i know you are working on it, but definately get out as quick as possible.

a few years ago a friend was working for a publishing (magazine) company that was having "hard financial times". several times during her employment there, her pay would be postponed for a month or two, then when they did pay her, it wasn't the full amount that they owed, and would promise to get her the rest in a few weeks.

this continued on for 6-7 months. it got so bad that she and a few other employees ended up suing the guy to get their owed back wages. poor guy had to sell his new 7-series bimmer and some of his other recent personal purchases to pay everyone.

it seemed the guy was putting buying nice new toys for himself over paying his employees, who needed their paychecks to pay their bills and rent.

after getting all her back pay, my friend quit that job, and found one that actually paid her.

sorry for the tangent story. its all i had to offer seeing as i'm not in a position to offer employment (i'm just a grunt), nor am i in the UK.

Thats a shame, IT is such a large industry but sadly so many want in! I am very happy as I got a new IT role up london way a month ago and loving it . Pay is great and the role is fab... Sorry for rubing that in Becky

If a role ever came up there, I might tell them . I work at www.areti.net as an IT server/network boffin thingy person

Might help if you listed your skills. People might at least have freelance work they could bung you in the mean time.

Should anyone be offering jobs, I finish Uni in a few weeks and will also be job hunting for work in IT.

I don't think my situation is quite as desperate as Becky's though.

What sort of location are you looking for Becky? Immediately around Cambs, or would you be willing to travel a bit? Also as Kev says, any chance of a CV or something similar? The company I work for have a small (one off, but potentially leading too more) job in the London-ish area (well outside of our patch) which we might need to hire / recommend someone for.. Feel free to bung it over in pm and I'll pass it on to $boss

Same goes for you Ben

I've no time to take freelance work unfortunately because they wouldn't make me redundant, which means i'm now working 8-8 every day and 10-4 on weekends to cover the hours. If they made me redundant I could claim the doll, if I do the hours I get some money in drips and drabs - which hopefully will cover rent and petrol until the MOT runs out soon. After that, I really dont know. I just know if I walk out and sue i'll be out of a home a lot sooner.

I know i'm being exploited, because i've two operations coming up which makes it hard for me to find other work. It only ads up to a few weeks off, provided there are no complications.

I have a lot of experience in hardware from design through manufacture, installation to post sales support on laptops, desktops, small system servers - pretty much anything and everything short of mini computers and mainframes, covering Mac, PC, and some dead formats nobody cares about anymore.

On the software side i'm quite competent in all areas but with a week knowledge base on current mainstream development tools, not that it takes me very long to learn new tools. Again covering all aspects from R&D, design including some OO, development, and support.

I've got exceptional networking knowledge, with a good understanding of pretty much everything from an RJ-45 plug right down to network packet structure. I understand routing, dataflow optimisation, ports, firewalls, even tunnelling.

My server experience is mostly Mac, with a spattering of Unix knowledge. I've a little experience with PC servers too - they work pretty much the same anyway except the Exchange stuff.

In all i'm what you might call a small systems all rounder with significant experience in customer service, hardware & software on PC & Mac, and capable of filling a multitude of roles.

I have industry experience in multiedia, television and film, print and repro, gaming, and a few things i've long since forgotten... I'm what you might call middle aged .

EDIT: @Angry - London is a fair way from me, and I hate driving there (i'm not really aggressive / confident enough on London roads after all these years in the wilderness!). If it was North London, or outisde of the M25 then I would definately be interested - but if I had to drive around London I dont think I could stomach the job for long.

Just to make the situation i'm in a little clearer for anyone who cares, basically what's happened is the firm has been issued a closure notice and all the staff except me where made redundant. we've all had issues with getting our pay for about a year, and i'm several months behind already but the rent and food has been getting covered, and ocassionally i'd get a little extra money.

I've been banking on the backlog getting cleared, but with todays situation it's now clear the firm isn't going to recover. I was called in for a meeting where I was told that for the next 3 months the company will be in the worst dire straights it's ever been in, and that I should not count on getting any wages (because they have to pay off the debt before the closure hearing or the firm gets shut down).

I then had the speach about being essential and how their [the management] incomes would fall apart if the company collapsed and if I left etc etc etc.

I just wish they'd made me redundant and be done with it, then at least I could get the government to pay the rent whilst I look for work instead of having to try and fit interviews around a 72 hour week

Hi. I'm sorry about your predicament. That really sucks.
I don't know what it's like in the U.K., but the IT profession here is pretty much saturated. And it seems like that's going to be the case for quite some time. I know of a few people that decided to just form their own companies. they offer networking solutions to small businesses and because of their low overhead, can compete pretty good against the "bigger guys". Have you thought about doing that? The work will be a little shaky at first, but if you find a target market of potential customers you should be able to do pretty good. I know a guy that makes between 4 to 6 hundred dollars a week doing nothing but going to peoples homes and getting rid of spyware. and that's not even really trying very hard. I don't know how it's done over there, but you can go to a grocery store here and usually by the entrance there's a cork board wall where various contractors (tradesmen?) stick their business cards for others to see. Like plumbers, painters, landscapers and now IT guys. You'd be amazed at the amount of people that own computers and don't know how to install a new mouse much less know how to dump their temp files.
I mean, how many clients have you done things for that could've been accomplished by a drunken 5 year old, yet they were too ignorant to do it
or have anyone on their staff that could do it? Remember, these same "rocket scientists" have home computers too. And most likely they have a big bunch of minor crap on them.
And alot of small businesses really want their stuff on the web that don't know the first thing about web sites except that web masters are just too expensive for them.


I dunno, I've been an artist in the sign business for almost 15 years. I've come to the realization that I'm not going to get where I want to be in life punching somebody else's time clock. I see a decent potential market for the services I can provide so I'm fixing to take the plunge.



I dunno anything about you personally, but the way you seem to be able to deal with the STCC stuff, you should do pretty good for yourself

Becky: If I were you I'd call in sick every day from now until whenever they get the message; why continue to turn up every day to a sinking ship? At least if your time is your own you can look at other options. If you think it will be difficult to find another job in the short term then, like I said, I'm sure you could pick up enough freelance contracts to pay the bills. Probably better income than the "crisis pay" you're on now.

That's what I'd do anyway, FWIW.

Yeah.. but if she threw a sicky.. they might fire her. Heaven forbid they do that!

I've been cursing this company up one side and down the other, to Becky, for a few months now. Becky's worst enemy is her own loyalty to people who would sooner take a dump on her forehead than pay her the money she's ALREADY owed.

Karl - I spent the last year working in London, I really don't fancy it anymore. I'm staying in the NE, less smog.

Sorry for (nearly) stealing the thread, I think I need to be serious and look somewhere a bit more professional than the LFS forum for my employment anyway.

I can highly recommend monster. I've had mine up there a few weeks and had a significant number of interesting phone calls and offers, despite not actually actively looking for a new job.

It's regularly crawled by various agencies who act as brokers for potential employers. The trick seems to be keeping your CV up to date, as each time I've tweaked and changed it (even for spelling mistakes) I get a new barrage of phone calls saying something along the lines of "we notice you recently changed your cv.."

I did sign up a while ago, back when I was looking for work in my year out. Never heard a thing. TBH I can't think of many people who'd have been interested in a student with little work experience, no degree, and only available for a year. Soon all 3 of those issues will be gone so... bring on the phone calls.

I'm sorry to hear about that. I know what it's like to have barely enough cash to cover rent and bills.

I do understand that the new Friends Reunited job search function is damn good. My girlfriend knows a few people who have found work through that in the last couple of months. Jobsite.co.uk is one I used to use as well.

The company I work for usually needs network engineers, but we're in North London (this site is just a few mins off the North Circular) and Glasgow. I can forward you some links if you're interested (and don't mind a bit of a trek).

When I've been looking, I've used cwjobs.co.uk more than others.

I hope you get a good role soon.

Becky, sorry to hear your situation.

Well, you're experienced, you've got your skills, so don't worry..
you will be opening a topic soon moaning your new boss :P

Quote from SamH :

Yeah.. but if she threw a sicky.. they might fire her. Heaven forbid they do that!

I've been cursing this company up one side and down the other, to Becky, for a few months now. Becky's worst enemy is her own loyalty to people who would sooner take a dump on her forehead than pay her the money she's ALREADY owed.

Thats sadly what usualy ends up happening to the nice people =(

Sorry to hear it Becky Hope you can figure out something =)

Quote from Becky Rose :

I'm now working 8-8 every day and 10-4 on weekends

What amazes me is that you can still find time for your LFS activities. Or can you program in your sleep?

BTW, if you need some help to kill the typos in your resume... (0.5 )

At the moment I cant find time for it, there's a very real chance STCC wont be ready for Patch X - and what that means is the public servers will be stuck on the older version because unless I migrate to the new insim nothing is going to work.

Hmm, you could always try last.fm.

Is it even legal to not pay employees?

It's totally illegal, but unfortunately it's only a civil law and civil law is only for the rich. By the time I brought about a closure instruction they'd either have gone bust, or i'd be out of a home anyway.

The only real defence is to get a job elsewhere.