Tales from the Arbeitsamt II

Posted on December 22nd, 2009 by Mel in Job | No Comments |

So, I’m unemployed. I think we’ve established that earlier already. Well, I had to call the Arbeitsamt (job agency) again today because I would like to spend the holidays with my family. That’s nothing unusual, but when you’re unemployed, the Arbeitsamt basically owns you. You are at their beck and call – which, admittedly, is rather normal since they are the people providing you with money while you’re jobless. One could say that they are your employer until  you find a company you can work for in exchange for your salary.

Now, as an unemployed person, you are supposed to be ready to jump to a job whenever they have one for you. In fancy speak, that means “being available to the job market”. Therefore, you have to tell them when you are sick or want to take a vacation because during that time you are not available to the job market. That makes sense, of course, though “vacation” is rather a euphemism. When I had my first meeting with a counsellor, they told me that I had the right to take 15 days of vacation which sounded ok. After all, it’s not as if you should go on a four-week trip to the Carribean while you’re unemployed and tax payers are supporting you. I learned a few weeks ago from my friend who is also jobless that in fact it’s 21 days per year and not just 15. So far so good. It wasn’t the first time we received different kinds of information, after all.

Imagine my surprise when I called, told the nice lady (no sarcasm!) in the call center that I wanted to take the 23rd to the 27th off, but that surely, only the 23rd and 24th were counting and she told me that no, all five days are discounted from my total. Having only taken a few days for my sister’s wedding in October, that wasn’t a problem, but still. The 25th is a public holiday and so is the 26th in addition to being a Saturday and the 27th is – of course – a Sunday. For me, these three days were non work days, but she told me that they’re paying the unemployment benefits for these days as well, so they are discounted. Oh and in January, I’ll have 21 days again to use as vacation.

…

Yes, that was my reaction after putting down the phone. On the one hand, I was thinking “Great, why did noone tell me that during my first meeting? Or why don’t they hand out a piece of paper with the basic facts stated in an easily understandable manner (you know, the same idea I already mentioned here)?” While on the other hand, I was realising that even my weekends and public holidays don’t belong to me but to the Arbeitsamt and that therefore, the weekend I spent at a friend’s home in Düsseldorf three weeks ago should have been declared as vacation.

Seriously, what’s so difficult at compiling some basic “You’re unemployed – now what?” leaflet? And I am not talking about the one they gave me. That’s written in the language of bureaucrats and hardly usable.

Maybe I should talk to the Arbeitsamt about them giving me a job as process and customer communications manager. They would need my help.

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It's still winter!

Posted on December 20th, 2009 by Mel in Misc | No Comments |

Indeed, it’s still winter and it’s snowing again. The weather forecast is crushing my dreams of a white Christmas, but for now, I’m quite enjoying looking outside, watching the snow fall – as opposed to actually being outside, because it’s cold. 0°C, which, admittedly, is a lot warmer than the -14°C yesterday evening. Anyway, as you can see in this picture, the snow level has increased a bit, most noticeably on the street:

To get into more of a Christmas mood, here’s a German Christmas song we used to sing before and during Christmas called “Leise rieselt der Schnee” (roughly: “The snow is falling silently”) sung by Sarah Connor – no, not the one from Terminator. :)

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It’s winter!

Posted on December 18th, 2009 by Mel in Misc | No Comments |

Winter has finally arrived! After a week of quite cold temperatures (not far from 0°C), it’s finally snowing:

Here’s a song I grew up with, by Rolf Zuckowski, and that conveys quite well that snow is great. :)

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I’m hoping for a white Christmas, but don’t think that’ll happen. Though given that we’ll be in the south during the holidays, there may be an honest chance. It’s generally colder and a lot less rainy there than here. So I’m crossing my fingers. :)

Here’s a picture from the Dortmunder Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market for you non-German speakers) we went to a few days ago. There wasn’t any snow there yet though it was nicely cold. You just can’t enjoy mulled wine when it’s not around the freezing point and you have to cradle the (generally sticky) cup to keep your fingers warm, sipping the hot beverage before it gets cold. The Dortmunder Weihnachtsmarkt is also an exception here in that it actually has more than just food stands. For me, a Weihnachtsmarkt needs to have stands to sell just about anything Christmas-related. Candles, decoration, nativity scenes, ideas for presents of all kinds etc. Of course, it wouldn’t be perfect without mulled wine stands and food stands (you just have to get sugar coated almonds and eat grilled sausage there), but if there’s only food… well, I’m sorry, but that’s just a Christmas market. Yes, I’m looking at you, Bielefeld. You just don’t get it. There’s hardly anything not-food on that Weihnachtsmarkt. Of course, that doesn’t keep people from going there and it’s actually always crowded, but I think these poor people just don’t know better. ;) Anyway, now for the picture:

This is the Christmas tree, the biggest in Europe they say. Of course it’s not one single tree but it’s built using normal sized trees stacked upon each other, but it’s still pretty impressive as well as nicely decorated.

In any case, if you haven’t done so already, you definitely should go to a Weihnachtsmarkt near you – if you happen to live in a country where they do this. It’s definitely a great tradition and institution and for me, it’s very much part of Christmas.

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No, I will not fix your computer I

Posted on December 14th, 2009 by Mel in Computers | No Comments |

One should think it’s fiction or prejudice, but it’s not: whenever computer-savvy people get home to friends and family, they will be required to fix their relatives’ computers. And without wanting to sound pretentious, I’m one of the computer-savvy people (at least more savvy than the people who ask for my help) and I’ve already received a call a couple of weeks ago that went like “Help! My external hard drive isn’t detected by my system. It worked last time!” After a few “Did you try x, y and z?” the final answer was “Oh well, I’ll just wait till you come home on Christmas then you can have a look at it.”

But the fun started already this weekend with my in-laws. As usual this time of the year, they spend the weekend at our place and they had already called ahead to tell us that my brother-in-law’s computer wasn’t working anymore and whether my offer to give him my old computer was still valid. Well, said computer has been collecting dust for two years now and I really want to get rid of it, so of course my offer was still standing. However, I had recently properly deleted all data on that computer and installed the Windows XP version that came with it – in German, of course. Now, my brother-in-law does not speak German which meant that the hours spent setting up the computer were basically wasted. Thankfully, the in-laws brought a copy with a French version of Windows 7 and I spent some time on Friday evening and night setting up my old computer. Apparently, the brand is not really used anymore and 7 couldn’t find a driver for the ethernet card – which is kind of a problem since that made it impossible to connect to the Internet to look for and find the correct driver. That was the moment when it was time to download Ubuntu, burn it to a DVD and use the Live CD feature to find out what the system is actually made of. Another nice surprise? Ubuntu had no trouble at all connecting to the Internet.

Anyway, thanks to lspci, I found the information necessary to go driver hunting and after a little while even found the correct one. It only existed as an XP version, but thanks to 7′s compatibility mode, that wasn’t a problem. Eventually, the Internet connection worked out and I even found the correct sound drivers. After a quick install of some basic software (Google Chrome, because Firefox is unfortunately too much of a RAM hog for that computer, Pidgin and Avast, mainly), the computer was set up and I could finally go to bed.

My father-in-law then had the great idea to install 7 on his Dell Inspiron laptop. He’d been running XP since the last installation session at our place where I tried to install Vista from the DVD his laptop shipped with but which didn’t work out for some obscure reason. So, after he had saved his important data on an external hard drive, we began the 7 install, i.e. I did all the work and he sat next to me, asking questions. 7 installed without any problem (we only had to run through the installation twice because he hit a key during the boot sequence after the first installation where you’re supposed to not touch anything) and we could now go over to installing some drivers. Thankfully, Windows 7 is pretty good with that, so the only one we really needed was the graphics card driver.

I could now tell the tale in detail, but I’ll make it short: Ubuntu came to the rescue once again, showed me that he did not, as he claimed, have an ATI graphics card but indeed an Nvidia one which explained why none of his ATI driver setup files were working. I downloaded the correct one, installed it and oh surprise! Nice Aero interface!

After two hours of installation and a quick “that’s how you import bookmarks, here you can change interface settings in 7, the taskbar is very different from what you’re used to”, he’s got a working system again. Yay me. ;) Now I can look forward to pulling some IT duty with my part of the family during Christmas.

Also, I have to say that Windows 7 does have a nice user interface and seems a bit sleeker than Vista. Unlike most people, I like Vista. Never really had a problem with it, the interface is nice and dark and so much better than XP. I know that 7 very, very likely will not do everything I require it to do (I’m terrible in that I want stuff normal people don’t) unless some things changed since I tried out the RC version, but despite that, I’m tempted to get a copy of it once I can afford it again. Next year.

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Tales from the Arbeitsamt I

Posted on December 8th, 2009 by Mel in Job | No Comments |

Well, it’s been a while that I’ve been out of a job and even though I’m not bored being at home at all, working again would be nice. Now that we’ve also begun to open to job opportunities outside of Paris (“shocking”, some might say ;)), I’ve started to look around a bit more in Germany. Surprise. There are jobs. Jobs that fit my profile quite a bit better than most jobs in Paris. Or maybe it’s the other way round: my profile fit jobs in Germany better than those in Paris.

I received a call from the “Agentur für Arbeit”, colloquially still called “Arbeitsamt” (job agency in English) last Friday. Being unemployed, they require us to show up once every two or three months to report on our general job seeking progress. My last meeting with one of them was in July so I was definitely overdue and was surprised that I hadn’t received a summons yet. Apparently, and according to the person at the phone, they’re so full, they don’t have any time for an appointment for me till the end of the year. Whether we could do it by phone. Right now. Sure, I said, not having anything better to do.

I think I’ve had four contacts with the Arbeitsamt now, one of which was with someone from the benefits section while the three other contacts were with my “job counsellor”. Three different ones. One could think that the Arbeitsamt operates like a basic call center: you call and never ever get the same agent twice. Of course, the information you get is also not generally the same. The guy on the phone last Friday told me, for example, that I was expected to do one or two applications per week, a number I hadn’t heard before – in 6 months of unemployment. One would think it’s a basic thing to tell newly unemployed people and one has to wonder why they don’t create a little “cheat sheet” telling people what exactly they have to do. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There is a little brochure they gave me, but it’s written in such a general language that you have to guess what they want. Besides, it’s not as if I had a habit of being unemployed. Creating a little checklist would help quite a bit. Something like

  • You have to make an active effort in finding a job, meaning you have to write x applications per <timeframe> and keep a logbook of your efforts.
  • We help with expenses in the amount as follows:
    • x EUR for applications
    • y EUR travel expenses
    • z EUR for <other>
  • Things to keep in mind: [...]

You get the picture. Instead, they choose to give you a bit of information every time you report to them and the information varies from counsellor to counsellor. It’s frustrating, to say the least. On the other hand, they haven’t interfered with my looking for a job in Paris, haven’t sent me tons of job offers in Germany which I’d have had to decline. Really, I very much appreciate that since they could have said that I have to concentrate on Germany since the German Arbeitsamt – and thus taxpayers – are paying for my unemployment benefits and not the French. But they haven’t until now, though I guess my counsellor wasn’t unhappy when I told him that I’d be starting to look at finding a job in Germany.

He did a quick search run to see the offers in Germany corresponding to my profile but didn’t find any. Therefore, I was rather surprised when I received an e-mail on Saturday via the Arbeitsamt’s interface. Apparently, a small company about two hundred kilometres from here is looking for a webdesigner and they found my profile. It’s a bit of a strange process, because even though they are interested in me (at least in the part of me they could see via the profile), I now have to send an application.

To my even bigger surprise, I got a call this evening from a person of the “Arbeitgeberservice” of the Arbeitsamt which is the part of the job agency that is helping companies find new employees. A company in Hamburg is looking for a webdesigner and according to the nice person from the Arbeitsamt, I was the only one within two hundred kilometres whose profile fit (some of) the requirements. Fun, really. :) He was also really helpful concerning my online profile, telling me that it was missing some essential things like “Internet proficiency” and “MS Office” – things I didn’t know I could add to my profile. Another thing my normal counsellors haven’t told me. But thanks to this person now, I now have a more complete profile and hope that it picks up some more offers.

Anyway, after a short discussion of whether I would be interested in the position, he sent me job description which means that I’ve now got two applications to send and even though Germany is still not my dream location, the jobs do sound interesting and challenging.

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