Unemployed? Go and Work for Jobcentreplus

Jobseekers have been describing their frustrations in Smegmadale-on-Sea, the most deprived part of the country with the highest percentage of people looking for work in the UK, as the government finally admitted unemployment figures were far higher that their perjuriously-stated two million.

It’s just after dawn in the town centre. On one side of the canal a couple of bankers, a bailiff, and an assortment of traffic wardens and community support officers hang by their thumbs from a bridge, screaming in agony as the magpies and pigeons peck at their eyes and shit all over them.

On the other side, a group of homeless people are propped up against a wall watching their agonised plight and enjoying a good laugh.
They’re all waiting for the job centre to open and collectively look ravenously hungry, absolutely fed up and ready for the revolution to kick off.

"I've lost me home, I've lost me job an’ the bailiff’s just nicked me portable telly last night too," said 25-year-old former hedge fund manager Rupert, injecting rhubarb juice into a vein in his forearm, joining the despondent ranks of Smegmadale’s chronic rhubarb addict population.

19-year-old Biff Bogbrush and his younger brother Snotty have been living in a cardboard box since their parents were evicted from the family's one-bedroom garden shed after redundancies left them unable to pay their mortgage.

Biff, who’s at the Jobcentre to look for work, has no previous experience or trade skills to boost his position and told the careers correspondent from the Tortoise Polishers Gazette “I’ve never ‘ad an effin’ job like cos I got expelled from school when I woz 12 an’ I’ve got no GCSE’s or shit like that, apart from a couple of ASBO’s.”

Frank, a former wheelbarrow mechanic, was laid off after the M827 motorway was completed in 1992 and hasn’t worked since. He told reporters “This country’s fucked wiv a capital ‘F’ – even Sherlock bleedin’ Holmes couldn’t find a job round ‘ere.”

Most of the people going through the Jobcentre’s doors are 'men' in their teens and twenties. This statistic results from the unemployed female youth contingent of Smegmadale’s sink estate society sodding off to Dubai to flog their gollies in the Gulf region’s fastest-growing social service industry : whoring. Cash in hand for lying down on the job.

But for the male youth at the Jobcentre they say the only jobs on offer are "high profile", in other words professional jobs they are not qualified for, so a few enrolled on an Information Technology (IT) course and turned to office burglaries, stealing computer equipments to sell on at the region’s proliferating car boot sales.
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While some will return the following day, hoping that a job at Poundland or with the council’s recycling team (binmen) will finally be on offer, other men here in Smegmadale have taken a different route.

In an outbuilding two miles away at the Numpty Dumpty Skills Academy (NDSA), a group of people are building wooden sheds out of dumped Euro pallets salvaged from a local landfill site (the town’s High Street).
These one-bedroom / outside toilet units are marketed by the local housing authority as ‘affordable and desirable residences’ and can be erected in any field of your choice.

The only employer posting vacancies is the Jobcentreplus : who are hard-pressed to field staff to deal with the burgeoning numbers of the UK’s unemployed population flocking to their doors at an increasing geometric rate each passing day.