Here’s the whole thing. I hope you like it and pass it on.

The Pogey Manifesto

By Graham Wilson

Introduction

Hello.  My name is Graham Wilson.  I am not an expert at anything.  This book consists of my non-expert opinions.  If you like what you read, and it makes sense to you- GREAT!  Also, don’t try to sue me if your life goes down the crapper.  That’s YOUR fault, not mine.  If your life goes great after reading this book, I’ll gladly be your hero.  I’ve never been a hero before.  I like the idea of being a hero.  Maybe I should invest in a cape, or a mask.  I already own some black polypropylene long johns that look like tights, though I’ve never seen a super-hero with a hole in the front of his tights so he could whip it out and take a whiz.  That could be a bad chink in the armor.  I mean, some evil villain could zap my super package through the access hole or something.  OK.  Maybe I should invest in some zap-proof tights too.  Maybe when I get a job.

People always think the same things when they meet other people.  What’s this dude’s name?  What does she do for a job?  What does he do for a hobby?  What kind of car does he drive?  What education level does she have?   How old is this guy?  Once you have all of that information, you can pretty much sum up whom you’re dealing with.

According to this, to let you know with whom you are dealing, you should know my educational background.  I went to grade school, then high school.  I failed out of Carleton University and the University of Windsor.  Why?  That’s not important.  I took courses at St. Clair College towards a General Machinist Certificate, which I actually got.  I graduated from Sault College with a diploma in Aviation Technology-Flight.  Which means I know how to fly little airplanes.  Now I am in my last year at Laurentian University (part-time) finishing up a general Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.  There you go.  My educational background.  Does this make me smart?  I don’t know.  I think going to school does make you smarter, I mean you learn some stuff there so it probably does.  I do know that the student lifestyle agrees with me as long as it’s not too hard.  You get to watch a lot of TV, but you’re really poor.

I am a life-long learner.  Because if you don’t learn your whole life, you will be thrown in jail for breaking new laws you have never heard about.  So actually,  everyone is a life long learner.  Everyone is a self-starter.  You get out of bed in the morning, right?  I’m not judging you if you can’t or don’t.  But if you get out of bed in the morning, you’re starting the day all by yourself.  Self… Starter!  I am disgusted by catch phrases these days.  By the time this book is published I will have graduated, or will have gotten kicked out of Laurentian University for sexual harassment because the chicks in university are hot, and I can’t help looking at them.  I think looking is considered sexual harassment these days.  I’m not sure.  I’m not some uneducated 19-year-old punk who knows everything.  I’m a 39 year old semi-educated punk that doesn’t know anything!  I just pop in an out of school every few years because I get bored, or hate my life, or would like to try something different, or would like to make more money so I don’t get bored, or hate my life, and I can try something different.  So far I owe $21,000 in student loans, but I is semi-edumacated.

This book is kind of a self-help book.  For me.  It’s kind of a blueprint that I’m going to refer to for the rest of my life, so I don’t forget what I’m doing.  If you want to do that too, fine.  So let’s be clear.  I am NOT an expert, and this book is for ME, not you.  Call off the lawyers.  That’s my disclaimer.   I have been unemployed a few times in my life, and I’ve made mistakes, so you and I both will learn from my mistakes.  I must also mention that this book is NOT for people who like to work.  There are a million publications out there that will tell you how to find a job, retrain, soul-search, become your true self, bake cookies and become a millionaire.  Those books are written by people that like to work.  YES!  There are people out there that like to work.  There are two kinds of people in the world.  Those that LOVE to work, and those that HATE to work.  Both are necessary in this world, and if you keep on reading, you will find out more about that.

What else should you know about me?  This gets into some heavy stuff about how I was beaten as a child, and forced to eat pomegranates until I threw up.  That’s not true, but I could probably get on Dr. Bill to plug this book if it were true.  Who is Dr. Bill, you ask?  Well there’s another thing I should tell you.  To make my life easier, I’m not going to mention any real names or brand names in this book.  That way I don’t have to ask permission.  Dr. Bill is a psychologist that has a TV show.  He’s on right after Omra Wimpley.  Get it?  Would you like a nice, sugar laden Joke-a-Cola?  Get it?  Sure you do.  I will assume you have half a brain because you are reading this.  Lots of smart people don’t read, but almost no really, really dumb people do read.  I consider myself to have exactly one half of a brain.  I forget which hemisphere.  Pretty bad for a Psychology student, eh?  If I really need to look something up, I just Schmoogle it on my computer.  That is also what you should do if you need any more information about  anything in the world, or in this book.  Schmoogle is a great website because it contains all of the information in the world.  This is a fact.

To introduce myself more, I will say that I was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario.  So I am Canadian.  I currently live in Sudbury, Ontario.  Nice place.  They have a great big nickel here and a great big smokestack.  I highly recommend it.  This book has an extremely Canadian slant.  Did you know that the word “pogey” doesn’t even exist in the U.S.A., or the United Kingdom, or Australia, or New Zealand?  According to the dictionary, pogey is money you get from the government when you’re unemployed.  It is a Canadian slang term.  I can’t seem to find any origin of how this word came to be in our Canadian English language.  I will assume it comes from the East Coast, where they have unemployment skills so refined, they don’t even need this book.  There exists some fish called the menhaden which is also called the pogy fish.  Apparently it’s really oily, and inedible.  They hang out on the east coast and eat plankton.  They are caught with nets and used for bait.   I can only guess that if you are on pogey, it means you are so poor you have to eat the bad fish, or the amount of money given to you by the government is so little that you can’t eat because of it.  Something like that.  Do I sound like an expert or what!?  Let me say again: I am not an expert at anything.

I drive a 1981 Cadillac Deville that runs way too rich, gets eight miles per gallon in the city, and has some rust on it.  It should be better on gas, but I’m too lazy and stupid to fix it myself, and I don’t have the money to pay a mechanic to fix the engine properly.  That’s another thing I’ll get into later- how cars are crap for the unemployed.  They’re crap even if you are employed, but our corporate masters have designed our society so that we need them.  Did I just sound like a socialist/conspiracy theory freak/hippie/environmentalist/dope smoking communist?  Yes I did.  That’s another thing you will have to get used to.  Sometimes I get preachy about this stuff.  Take it with a grain of salt.  And when I wrote the book I had a few beers and/or a margarita in me for a few pages.  Oh, and I don’t smoke dope.  I just sound like I do.  Dope smoking is actually great if you like it, from what I hear, and logically it is way better than booze or cigarettes.  How many people crash their cars all boozed up and kill people?  Lots.  How many people get stoned and do it?  Not much.  How many people get stoned and eat way too many potato chips and play video games?  Lots.  Life is all about trade-off and balance.

I have no real hobbies.

Enjoy the book!

-Graham Wilson

Chapter 1- Preparing for Pogey

When will you be joining the ranks of the unemployed?  Sometimes it is hard to know, but generally at the beginning of any decade or end of one, there will be a recession.  The people with lots of money plan it this way so they know when to move their play money around to become richer.  There is always some kind of an excuse that is different than the time before.  “Oh, this is a new economy with computers and all that jazz.”  “We’re seeing the effects of bank deregulation.”  “Inflation is too high, and we have to rein it in.”  The excuse does not matter.  The main thing YOU must know as the quasi-lazy underachiever that you are is that it will happen.  And YOU will be the first person laid off.  Why you?  Because you have half a brain, which threatens your boss’ job, and you are not the best performer at work- for volume.  Sure you are smart enough to have great quality, but what employers admire and value is volume.  People that LOVE work love volume.  “I got so much done today!” People that HATE work like quality and think it’s more important than volume.  “I’m glad I made that masterpiece!”  That’s just the way I see it.  You HATE work, so you will be unemployed.  Often employers will lay people off instead of firing them because as long as the employer says, “Due to a shortage of work, Joe Blow is laid off effective immediately,” you can not take him to the labour board.  Well you might be able to, but who would want to work for that jerk anyway?

Now that we have established that you will be laid off, you might as well be prepared for it.  Preparing for unemployment is best done when you are employed and rolling in the cash, because when you are unemployed, you don’t have any money.  Lots of time, but minimal dough.  So around 2016 or 2017, no later than 2018, make your moves, hoard some stuff, and get ready to be unemployed in the next couple of years.  If you are unemployed now and reading this, well, too late.  You didn’t prepare.  No biggy.  Just learn for the next time, because if you’re anything like me, there WILL be a next time.  As I write this, I am awaiting my first pogey cheque.  So I am broke.  But because I knew my layoff was coming, I was pretty prepared.  I have a couple of months of food and lots of toilet paper, so I’m fine for a while.  Hopefully, I can scrape together some beer money.  I’ll probably borrow some cash from a friend to get me through this weekend.  C’mon pogey cheque!  Hurry up!

What you really need to survive anywhere in the world if you are a human being is:

1.  Food

2.  Clothing

3.  Shelter

4.  Other stuff (goods and services)

I think I covered all of the bases to exist there, and I will now give you some helpful advice (I hope) to prepare for your eventual unemployment.  I suggest you make a list of the stuff you need to prepare for your six month vacation of unemployment enjoyment, and put it on your fridge with a magnet.  Every time you go grocery shopping no later than 2018, you can grab a thing or two, and you won’t even notice the money you spend on it.  Sorry to rush you.  I know going shopping some time in the next eight or nine years is a daunting task.  But I never said unemployment would be easy.

1.  Food

You can be stark naked living on a street corner, and you won’t live long without food.  Luckily in Canada, we have a good social safety net that will protect you if you are in this situation.  If you are stark naked on a street corner screaming that you need the necessities of life, a policeman will come by and give you food, clothing and shelter.  If you dent his or her police car by kicking it, you will get more food, clothing and shelter for a longer period of time.  If you punch the officer in the face, you will get a LOT of food, clothing and shelter, but the officer and friends will probably cause you a lot of pain if you do that.  So if you are stark naked on a street corner, I do not recommend you do anything violent.  It isn’t really necessary- and you won’t like the shelter you get, or how long you will be there.

If it takes a long time for the police officer to show up, you won’t live that long without food.  I have heard you can live a month with only water and no food, but I’ll bet after a couple of weeks, you’d be in so much pain and not thinking straight that you would probably rob a grocery store or something.  I think I have successfully argued that people need food now, so I’ll get into the grocery list.

This will be emergency food which you will be stockpiling in good times, so keep that in mind.  The major thing to think about when making your emergency pogey food shopping list is that the food must taste like crap.  Well, not crap, but it must be edible but not that edible.  What?  You ask.  Graham!  You’re crazy!  Why would I buy food that I won’t eat?  To which I reply, “Because you already do!”  And it stays around!  Just check out your cupboards.  I would wager you have food which you purchased over a year ago.  Some of you will have food that is five years old.  I just checked my own cupboards.  My food that I have had for over a year (and I am a bachelor, so my cupboards are not as full as a married guy’s or any girl’s cupboards) are: oatmeal, flour, cinnamon, some Greek seasoning, pepper, salt and vinegar.  If I was really starving, I could add some water to that, and have something edible.  Barely.  I just cooked up a muffin mix last week that was sitting around for at least four years.  The muffins were a bit dry, but edible with lots of butter.  I bought all of my emergency food about six months ago when the stock market crashed, and the banks collapsed.  I wish I would have bought that stuff sooner, but I wasn’t as much of an unemployment expert as I am now.  Oh well.  I still bought my food at a relatively good time.

Food is a personal taste.  For me, I have eaten so much macaroni and cheese in my life that I don’t really like it.  Given the choice between fish sticks and macaroni and cheese, I’d take the fish sticks.  I don’t hate macaroni and cheese, I just don’t prefer it.  So that’s a good emergency unemployment food for me.  It doesn’t go bad, either.  I have eaten macaroni and cheese that was easily three years old, and it was fine.  Another good pogey stockpile food for me is spaghetti.  At Sault College, I ate spaghetti every day for two years.  It is probably the best amount of calories and nutrition bang for your buck.  You get yourself a case of noodles and a case of crushed tomatoes or cheap canned sauce and you have emergency food for a month!  Once I graduated from Sault College and started making some money again, I didn’t eat spaghetti for two  years, and the only reason I did have spaghetti was because my mom made some and you can’t turn down mom’s food.  This is a fact of life.  My mom’s spaghetti was way better than my spaghetti, so I didn’t mind that much.  I still had a few flashbacks, though.  Actually I’m having flashbacks as I write this.  Man, I think I do hate spaghetti.  That’s why I have some as emergency food!  Get it?

Saltine crackers or soda crackers are good too.  I don’t mean they taste good.  They are a good emergency food. If you love saltines, they are not good emergency food.  I think you must get what I mean by now.  You do have half or more of a brain.

There are also other things that you use all of the time.  Salt, pepper, ketchup.  Stuff like that.  The only way to have these things as emergency food is to stockpile a LOT of it.  I don’t eat an incredible amount of that stuff, so I always just keep one of each extra.  Backup ketchup, backup pepper, backup salt, oil and vinegar.  I really hate ramen noodles, so I don’t stockpile them.  But to each his own.  If you barely like ramen noodles, they would make excellent emergency food.  They last a long time.  Keep an extra case lying around.

A little secret I rediscovered is powdered milk.  It’s great for coffee when you are camping, and tastes like garbage if you make it just to drink on its own.  Powdered milk is essential to have, in my opinion, because when you want your macaroni and cheese and you don’t have money for milk because you blew it on renting that porno flick your friend Tommy recommended, you can have good tasting macaroni and cheese.   It is my advice to not socialize with Tommy that much when you are unemployed.  Any adult named “Tommy” will usually smoke weed, make you spend too much money on booze and will always ask you to drive him somewhere.  Tommy is fun to party with, but when you are unemployed, you won’t have the money to hang out with Tommy like you used to.

Cheap parmesan cheese is a great thing to spice up any crappy meal you make while riding the pogey bus.  Just buy one of those industrial-size containers and it usually will last you a long time.

And finally, coffee.  You can never have too much of this stuff around.  When you are unemployed you might find yourself drinking a lot of this.  Before my current round of unemployment, I had four big tins of coffee lying around.  I’m glad I did this.  Just buy the cheapest garbage coffee you can find.  It’s all the same, and It doesn’t go bad.  If you are a coffee snob and like to grind your own beans and stuff like that,   forget it.  You are now unemployed- ergo, you are broke.  You will need that expensive coffee money for more important stuff like your rent, phone bill, internet bill and booze.  So make that list of semi-edible food, put it on the fridge, and stock up!

2.  Clothing

You live in Canada.  I don’t care where you are, it gets cold here.  In some places, it gets hot as Hades.  Some places it will rain cats and dogs for weeks.  Clothing is important from a functional standpoint.  Clothing is also important to look cool.  Yes, I think being cool is very important.  Not temperature cool, but Fonzie cool.  If you don’t know who Fonzie was, or The Fonz, Schmoogle Image search it.  You will find pictures of the coolest man there ever was.

The summers in Saskatchewan can be brutally hot.  Southern Ontario can get really toasty too.  Even in the Northwest Territories with global warming, it can be over 30 degrees Celsius.  So invest in some shorts, sandals, decent T-shirts or wife-beaters that look good.  If you look okay, you will feel better about yourself, even though you are an unemployed bum.  The clothes don’t have to be expensive.  Just make sure you wear clothes that don’t have any logos on them.  That’s a fashion tip that always works.  Do you see super hunky-boy actors or hot babes on TV or in movies with big, tacky logos on their clothes?  No.  That’s why they look good.  Also, it is my opinion that if a company wants me to advertise for them, they had better pay ME to wear the clothes.  I’m unemployed.  I need the cash.  For the summer, make sure you have a decent bathing suit too.  An unemployed person has lots of time to waste, so a trip to the beach might pop up more than usual.  Guys, ditch the Speedo.  Girls, always wear a bikini, no matter how fat you are.  I like bikinis.  Looking at a girl in a bikini is almost like looking at a naked chick.  Very cool.

More importantly, in the winter.  Admit that it is cold.  Some people don’t do this.  These are the weirdoes that wear a spring jacket in minus 30 weather.  Why in God’s name are you wearing a spring jacket?!?!  YOU ARE CANADIAN!  IT IS FRIGGIN’ COLD HERE!  Say to yourself, “I live in Canada, one of the coldest places in the world.  We have a decent social safety net, but it is COLD here.”  Repeat this ten times to make it sink in if you have to.

So if you are standing at a bus stop, riding your bicycle, or walking around in a Canadian winter, you might as well enjoy it.  Good cold weather gear will let you do this, and make your unemployment WAY better.  I’ll start from the outer clothing and work my way in.

What did you do when you were a kid and played outside all day in the snow?  You bundled up, and had a blast!  You had mittens.  Buy some mittens or warm gloves.  The more clumsy and pouffy the better.  Clumsy and pouffy keeps you warm- if you’re dry.

Wear a toque.  You are Canadian!  You are one of the lucky few in the world that can wear a toque.  Americans wear hats.  Russians wear hats.  Norwegians wear hats.  You get to wear the same thing and call it a toque.  That is definitely Fonzie cool!  And it keeps your head warm.  Make sure you get one that can go all the way over your ears.  The standard five dollar Crappy Tire navy blue toque has really good bang for your buck in this regard.

Because you are preparing for unemployment, and you are now rolling in the dough, I also recommend a fur hat.  This is almost necessary anywhere north of Parry Sound, west of Halifax, and East of Vancouver.  Ottawa and Montreal are also fur hat regions.  OK, now the animal rights people will have my nuts in a sling.   Hey, the Natives in this country know, and have known, that fur is the warmest thing to wear.  Period.  They knew this thousands of years ago.  That’s why Canada is their land, well it was until western “society” stole it from them and started some genocide.   As long as you don’t use disposable fur hats, I think it’s pretty sustainable development.  But what you must do when wearing fur is thank the animal on your head for giving its life so that you could be warm.  Sounds corny, eh?  BULL!  One time I was walking downtown in Sudbury, and this Native guy said to me as I was passing him, “Hey buddy!”  I stopped, expecting to be asked for change, because anyone that you don’t know in Downtown Anywhere that says, “Hey buddy!” usually wants spare change.  He said, “You know you have a person on your head.”  I kind of chuckled and said, “Yeah.”  That’s what I do when I’m confused.  Then I kept walking.  I think I was on my way to the liquor store.  Then I remembered a book by Farley Mowat called “Owls in the Family”.  In the book, a young Farley Mowat was talking to a Native guy, and the Native guy more or less said that there is no difference between animals and people.  This is something I believe, as people are more or less genetically the same as chimpanzees but with less hair.  We make better TV shows than they do too.  Well, we used to, before all of this reality TV and Tasmanian Idol garbage that is on TV now.  So if some guy laid down his life for me to live better, like too many soldiers have and still do, I would be thankful.  It is no different for an animal for my fur hat.

Have a nice, warm winter coat that is kind of long.  It keeps out the wind better.  If you are really rolling in the dough, and live in a fur hat region, I highly recommend a Canada Goose parka.  They are REALLY expensive, but the best around.  The coldest weather I’ve worn mine in is minus 35 walking to school one day in Sault Ste. Marie.  No problem.  But as I said, they are REALLY expensive- like 500 bucks expensive or more.  But they are the best.  Make your decision on this wisely, because you could also double up on some sweaters for almost the same effect.  That’s the Cadillac of coats, so it’s not really that great for bang for the buck.    Otherwise, just get a decent winter coat.  As I said before about  mittens and gloves, same goes for winter coats- the clumsier and pouffier the better.

I’ll say it again, and you will get sick of it.  YOU LIVE IN CANADA!  You must own long johns.  I don’t care if you’re a guy, a girl, a grandmother or gay.  YOU MUST OWN LONG JOHNS!  The cheap and easy long johns to get are the 50/50 cotton/polyester ones.  Those are the standard ones you can get at Wal-Fart or Smellers.  They do an OK job, but now that you are rolling in the money as you prepare for your job’s ultimate demise, you might as well go down to your local ski shop/hunting/outdoors store and pick up some snazzy black polypropylene long johns.  They are great, and they don’t look all waffley like the cheap ones.  They look like dancers’ tights actually.  I like to imagine myself as a heterosexual ballet dancer when I wear them.  Sure, my package isn’t as big as those guys, but I can still wait for a bus with grace in my poly-pro long johns while, most importantly, not freezing my package off.

3.  Shelter

This is where you live.  The best places to live while subsisting on unemployment insurance, or pogey, or the dole is somewhere with cheap rent, and walking access to everywhere you need to go.  I have only been unemployed in medium-size cities, and this works out nicely, because rent isn’t too bad and there probably will be a job waiting for you when the pogey runs out.  Large cities have lots of jobs, but high rent.  Small towns have no jobs and low rent.  Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are probably the WORST cities in which to live if you want to enjoy some unemployment.  The rent is WAY too high.  Never live in these cities, unless you want to work.  Ottawa is also a bad city in which to be unemployed, not just because the rent is a little high, but the people there are smug civil servants that think everyone in the world should just get a government job, and make decent money and suck the public teat from cradle to grave.  People in Ottawa will look down on you for being unemployed and getting a cheque from the government while doing nothing, yet, that’s exactly what they do as civil servants!  They don’t do anything and get WAY more money than someone on EI benefits.  OK, that’s a generalization.  Ten percent of civil servants actually work.  This is a fact.

So now that you have picked your medium-size city to live in, you must now live downtown, or in some little bedroom community close by.  These places will give you walking access to the places you need.  Why do you need to be able to walk around to get your stuff?  Because you will be unemployed, and you will have no money for gas in your car, repairs for your car or maybe even insurance for your car.  Of course, if you don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t gamble or don’t take little mini-vacations, you will be able to afford a car just fine on the poge.  BUT if you don’t do any of that bad expensive stuff, you are probably a person that LIKES to work, so you won’t be unemployed.  Or if you are one of those aforementioned work likers, you will probably get a job within a week.  If you have none of the aforementioned vices or inclinations, this book is not for you.  You’re doing fine.  Just keep doing what you’re doing.  Someone’s gotta pay for my 6 month, government sponsored vacation.  Actually, I’m kind of surprised you’ve made it through the book this far!  On second thought, maybe not.  People who like to work will finish what they start even if it kills them.

Walking is and absolutely ESSENTIAL part of successful unemployment.  It will keep your weight down, it will keep your spirits up, it’s cheap, and it is more legal to walk, when you are half in the bag, than drive.  So when you have a job, move into a place that is at least walking distance to the grocery store and the beer store.  If you don’t drink beer, and you drink rum or wine, make sure you live stumbling distance to the liquor store.  Some of you will now be thinking, “Jumpin’ Jeebus!  This guy is promoting alcoholism!  He has problems, and he’s enabling others!”  No.  This is not the case.  I am encouraging people to be realistic about their needs.  If you like having some wobbly pops on the weekend, that habit isn’t going to change when you are unemployed.   There is nothing wrong with doing anything, as far as I am concerned, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.  I believe people have the right to do anything to their bodies that they want.  Don’t force your ideas on me, and I won’t force my ideas on you, and we will be good friends.  That’s the way the world works.  Or should work.

You should also live walking distance to your local library, pogey office, and maybe a cheap restaurant or fast food joint.  Living downtown in Sudbury, I lucked out when I found my cheap rent apartment.  It is walking distance to EVERYTHING I need.  Sudbury is an awesome place to be unemployed (if you live downtown).  Downtown Windsor, London and Hamilton aren’t bad either.  I haven’t been to any other medium-size cities in Canada.  Oh wait!  Saskatoon was awesome.  I think it would be a good place to be unemployed- if you live downtown and own long johns.  Are you getting the jist of what I am telling you with regards to shelter?  Cheap rent.  Walking distance.  Cheap rent.  Walking distance.  OK, you might think of having a room mate to cut costs.  You’re on the right track, but I really hate the idea of having a room mate, because this leads to more socialization, which costs more money.  Ideally to be happy on your unemployment adventure, you will have to become a quasi-hermit, because hermits don’t need much money.  It’s impossible to be a total hermit, or I don’t know, maybe it’s not.  In any case, with limited income, you will have to spend days and days and hours and hours of watching TV and pirated movies.  Are you man enough for this job?  I know you can do it- unless you like to work, in which case I ask, “why the hell are you still reading this book?”  It is not for you!  But thanks for buying it.

So set yourself up in the cheapest, nicest bachelor or one bedroom apartment you can find.  Oh, but you can afford a nicer one?  Yeah.  Now you can, because you have a job.  But one should ALWAYS be preparing for unemployment, because if you are in the slightest way lazy or under educated, you will be unemployed at some point in this economy of transition from manufacturing to information based wealth.  And if you are making soooo much money that you can afford a “nicer” apartment, go for it!  But don’t complain to me when you have to get a job after only three months on pogey and I am still cruising fine on pogey after six months.  Maybe my torrent of seasons 1-7 of MacGyver will have come in by then too.  That’s one I’m downloading now.  Man it’s taking a long time.  But when I have seasons 1-7 of MacGyver, I will be able to successfully lie on my couch for at least three days.  Ahh.  I love unemployment.

Cheap rent.  Walking distance.  Always.

4.  Other Stuff (Goods and Services)

I’ll start off this little section with the 6-6-6 Rule.  That is an arbitrary number group.  Some pilots might have heard about the 6-6-6 Rule.  That’s a different rule that has to do with being legal to carry passengers on board when flying in really bad weather.  My 6-6-6 rule is not evil or anything.  It’s just easy to remember because it sounds evil.

When you are in the grocery store buying stuff to prepare for the end of your job which might not happen, but probably will, when thinking how much you need to stock up on stuff, the 6,6,6 Rule will pop into your head.  For example: razor blades.  You are buying a package of razor blades.  Don’t buy one, buy six!  When you are buying deodorant, don’t buy one, buy six!  Shampoo?  Don’t buy one bottle.  Buy six!  Anything else that you think you should stock up on, buy six.  That seems to be a good rule.

I hate rules, so feel free to ignore that one.  In fact, I’m going to start using real names and brand names in this book now.  I already broke my anonymity/fake name rule a couple of times by mentioning Fonzie and Canada Goose.  Maybe modify the 6-6-6 rule to your favourite number- 4, or 3.  But always have that stuff in stock, because they are necessities, and when you have blown all of your unemployment money on a stereo for your car, you will still be able to be clean shaven and not smell, even if you are broke.  Eventually, when you go for a job interview, you will have to be clean shaven and not smell.  Ladies, all of this goes for you too.  You might need hair spray, or face paint, or girly things eventually.  It is handy for a girl to stock up on girly things.

Remember this:  YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH TOILET PAPER OR PAPER TOWELS!  If you are in the grocery store, and you think you have enough TP and paper towels at home, you are lying to yourself!  ALWAYS have enough paper towels and toilet paper at home that your friends think you are crazy.  As soon as they think you are crazy, buy one more jumbo-pack.

Laundry soap is like this too.  Always buy the biggest, baddest box of laundry soap you can buy.  If kids in the neighbourhood can make a fort out of the empty laundry box, you know it is big enough.   For those dryer sheets, just always have a spare lying around.  They usually last a year or so, or more if you are single.  If you are married and unemployed, you can not enjoy your unemployment.  Sorry.  That’s life.  Your spouse will be so jealous of you, he or she will get bitchy and you will have to get a job to leave the house for nine hours a day to keep your sanity.  If you have kids, get a job, you bum.  Be a good role model for cripes sakes and feed your kids.  This book is for single people.  BUT if you are unemployed with kids, make sure you do really cool things with them every day.  You won’t have time or energy to do it when you are working again.

Vitamins are a great thing to have around the house.  Whenever I am going on a bender, or eating garbage, I always chow down on some vitamins to counteract my poor dietary habits.  Check with your doctor first, to see if you can take vitamins, even though no one ever does.  Personally, I have a stash of multivitamins, vitamins B, C, and E tablets, and a calcium supplement with some D in it.  I figure the multivitamin can’t hurt, B helps your body break down booze molecules, C and E keep you young (I heard that somewhere, but it’s probably crap.) and the calcium keeps my bones strong.  I don’t take a lot of the calcium, because I’ve heard if you eat a pile of calcium, it can give you kidney stones, which are extremely painful when they pass.  I don’t like the idea of a rock coming out of my wiener.  OUCH!  But in moderation, everything is good, I figure.

Health wise, make sure you have the usual cough and cold dope that you use.  Funny how whenever you’re sick, you need that stuff and never have it, then you feel like junk walking down to the corner store to get ripped off on some overpriced acetaminophen.  That’s a good word that makes me sound smart. Acetaminophen.  Has a nice ring to it too, eh?  Acetaminophen.  The next time you’re at the pharmacy, get some backup cough syrup and all of that other stuff you use when you’re sick.  I don’t recommend anything there, because everyone has their own wives tales and scientific methods to deal with a cold.  If you have your stash of cold goodies, it will make your life much nicer when you are unemployed.

Ask the pharmacist what to get.  Pharmacists can be boring to talk to sometimes, but they’re good at what they do.  Pharmacists like to work.  I could never be a pharmacist.

Also on a healthy note, because you are now employed and preparing for your job to be outsourced to India, see the non-free medical services like the dentist and optometrist.  I have heard the excuses at work a million times by guys that have cavities and are whining like little babies.  “I can’t go to the dentist.  I don’t have the money.”  “I don’t have the time.”  Well, I can tell you right now, if you don’t take care of your teeth while you have a job and possibly benefits, Murphy’s Law is going to bite you in the ass when you’re unemployed.  You will be unemployed, be in excruciating pain, go to the dentist, and he or she will say, “Sorry Mr. Blow.  You need a root canal.”  To which you will reply, “But I’m unemployed and have no benefits!”  The dentist will tell you the tooth can be pulled for twenty bucks.  So you do that, and now you are walking around with one less tooth, and 20 less unemployment bucks that you could have used to buy beer.  If you don’t take care of your teeth, and nip the small problems in the bud, you will be that grumpy old guy complaining about your dentures.  You will probably smell like mothballs too, because grumpy old men smell like mothballs.  This is a fact.  Get to the dentist now- before you board the pogey train.

If you wear glasses, while you’re working and rolling in the dough, get to the optometrist.  A regular eye exam costs about a hundred bucks.  If you want to be driving safely or keeping up your pilot medical, this is necessary.  So get this done when you are working, and you have a hundred bucks to spare.  The big secret here is to make sure the optometrist tells you your pupil distance.  Usually this is done by the guy that sells you your glasses at the glasses store.  It’s a little scam so they can make money off of you.  You see… (oh, a pun! How witty!)  when you want to buy your dirt cheap spectacles online- which is VERY possible, you need to know your pupil distance to order the lenses.  If you can only get your pupil distance measured at the guy that sells the glasses’ store, then he makes a pile of cash, because frames are super expensive there.  You need to know your pupil distance to order glasses from child labourers in Malaysia.  Just do a Google search on $10 glasses or $8 glasses and websites will pop up all over the place to save you big bucks.  The frames don’t look too bad.  Really.  Try it.  Glasses don’t have to be really expensive.  You should have some back up glasses when you go unemployed camping or on any road trip.  What happens if you get all boozed up and lose your glasses?  You’re in deep doo-doo if you don’t have a back up pair.  And when you go for a job interview when your pogey runs out, you want to look half decent.  So always have an OK looking pair of spare glasses.  For all of you that buy the dollar store reading glasses, get over yourself.  You are getting old.  You need reading glasses.  Swallow some vanity and get your eyes checked out properly.  Optometrists take a really good look at your eyes and can tell if you have optic nerve cancer or cataracts or other yucky eye problems.  They’re good people to visit.  Be careful though, they are very perceptive.  I had a couple of beers before going to the optometrist once, and he could tell!  They don’t go to school for that many years to come out dummies, I tell ya.

Almost finally, when you prepare for unemployment in this century, a computer is essential.  You must buy one when you are a rich working person.  You don’t need anything really expensive or crazy, computer wise, but hey, computer literacy is important these days.  It makes your life a lot easier in some ways.  I applied for my Employment Insurance this round at home, sitting at my computer wearing my boxers.  If I had done that at the Service Canada office, I would have probably been kicked out, and I would have frozen walking home in my boxers.  I think it was minus 10 or so when I got laid off.  You can file your bi-weekly pogey reports online too nowadays, though I’m old school and use a touch tone phone.   In the old days, you used to have to fill out these pieces of paper and walk down to drop them off at the pogey office.   Having a computer at home makes your life easier too, because you can look for jobs online.  I do not recommend looking for too many jobs online, because you might get one, and that would drastically cut down the amount of free money you can get from the Government.  If you are one of those people that really need money because you are insecure and have to define yourself by a job or material possessions, or you just like to work, well, again I’m surprised you have read this far, and also, possessions are nice, but you don’t need a lot of them to live well.  What’s the difference between a $1500 TV and a $50 TV?  You’re still watching all of the crappy shows the networks cram down our throats to try to make us stupid little drones.  Except for House MD.  That is one of only two good shows on TV nowadays.  If you live in Ontario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin is the best show in the world.  If you don’t live in Ontario, you can see The Agenda streamed online every day.  See.  With a computer, you can do this.

A computer can burn up hours and hours of your time.  And if you ever have troubles with it, just get a kid to look at it.  Kids are natural computer technicians.  I’m serious.  I think baby food is made with nanotechnology now so kids are cyborgs.   When they work on computers, they’re really just playing catch with a distant cousin or something, because children are robots designed to suck the will to live out of humans.  When they grow up they’re not too bad.

So get on down to the Box store and grab a computer.  You will be playing lots of video games and downloading illegal movies and TV series by the truckload too while you are unemployed.  So you will need lots of storage space on your hard drive.  I underestimated this fact a little while ago when my unemployment was coming up, and thought I would have enough storage space on my hard drive.  Within a week of being laid off, I was forced to buy an external hard drive and USB hub, thereby maxing out my credit card, because I have incredibly bad spending habits.  Oh, if you don’t know what any of this is, just go to the next chapter, and ask someone what all of this stuff is later.  You can only become computer literate by knowing someone who knows something about computers.  Usually these hardcore computer people like to use lots of computer jargon and are really bad at explaining what these things do.  REALLY bad at explaining computer junk.  But they are helpful if you can take their passive aggressive abuse.  This is where a kid is good.  A kid will just show you what to click, and won’t pump up his cyber-ego by rolling his eyes when you mix up the usage of “memory” and “storage space”.  Apparently there’s a difference.

No matter what, even if it isn’t even plugged in, have a computer when you are unemployed with a decent video card for games and lots of RAM and lots of hard drive space.  If you’re not into computer gaming, you don’t need a kick-ass video card or lots of RAM.  But I have heard many a computer guy say “You can NEVER have too much RAM.”

Now, if you are going to download a pile of movies and music illegally, this will take up serious amounts of bandwidth.  You might not know what bandwidth is.  I don’t even know the ins and outs of it, but basically, the more chunks of information you have going over your internet connection, the more of this bandwidth stuff is used up.  I think.  In any case.  I like to think of downloading stuff like a gas bill or a water bill.  Some internet plans let you use as much water or gas that you want.  So you could theoretically download one bazillion movies, and the monthly cost is the same as if you only download ten movies.  Other internet plans let you take a bunch of water or gas up to a certain limit, then after that, they hit you with extra usage fees.  So you could download one bazillion movies, and it will cost you an extra thousand dollars for that month.  Not cool.  Most people who are computer illiterate or semi-literate probably signed up for an internet package like that.  So ask around at work if anyone knows about a “good high-speed internet service provider with unlimited downloads” because you will be unemployed soon enough and you will become a master of downloading!

DISCLAIMER:  Downloading pirated movies is only sort of illegal in Canada, and definitely illegal in the United States, but everyone does it, so just know that.  I do recommend breaking laws if they are unjust, but be prepared for some smug jerk to pump up his fragile ego by busting you.  Apartheid used to be a law in South Africa.  Women in Ontario used to be fined for showing their boobs in public.  Both of those thing are done with now, and I’m glad Blacks and Coloureds in South Africa have some new rights, and I’m glad women can show their boobs in public now.  I just wish the women would exercise their rights more.  It would be much cheaper for an unemployed guy to just walk outside to see some tit, rather than spend seven bucks a beer in some sleazy bar to see some.  As they say in cyber-space.  End rant.

Finally, your car.  Do NOT buy a new car.  EVER!  Do not make payments on a car.  EVER!  Do not lease a car.  EVER!  When you are “rolling in the Benjamins” as the Americans like to say, just get something that runs.  Cars are the worst investment a person can make, but our corporate masters design our cities so we need them.  Evil capitalist pigs.  If you are making payments on a car, and you suddenly get laid off, all of that money you must spend to maintain your credit rating will seriously shorten the duration of your unemployment.  You should be working in order to have a good life, not to put profit into some auto-exec’s pocket or shareholder’s bank account.  A lot of my financial ideas come from watching what other people do, because I have minimal self control and I’m crap with money.  Yes, do as I say, not as I do.  Learn from MY mistakes not your own.  I know a couple of millionaires who were not born rich, so they had to get their money by working crazily hard, getting lucky, being smart, and being cheap.  These two millionaires have always done the same thing with their cars, and they don’t know each other, so it’s not like they conspired to do the same great idea.  When they were poor newlyweds and having kids and stuff, they bought tiny, used, cheap cars.  Then they got a little bit older and they bought their first brand new cars.  They paid cash for their brand new cars, then they drove the new cars for a minimum of ten years, doing the required maintenance along the way that the manufacturer recommended in the manuals.  This is the only way to buy a new car, I think.  I mean, these guys are millionaires!  And they became millionaires from being pretty poor.  Trust me, they know what they are doing when it comes to buying cars.  I, on the other hand, do not.  So don’t be like me and buy a 25 year old car because it looks cool, but gets eight miles per gallon, and needs a thousand bucks worth of repairs every time you go to the mechanic.

Now that you have read this stuff, make a list of all of the preparations you need to do, and stuff you have to buy that will help you with your Successful Unemployment.  Get a great big magnet, and stick the list on your fridge.  Pick away at it little by little, and you’ll be ready for pogey in no time.  Maybe you could just add one thing a week to your grocery shopping list.  You could put a list on the dashboard of your car.  Be creative, about it if you want.  Just make sure you prepare for your pogey.  Even if you only get half of what is on your list, you will still be better off than if you never prepared at all.

All right!  Now let’s get LAID OFF!

Chapter 2- You Are Now Laid Off

Day 1- First thing to do is get RIP SNORTING DRUNK.  Unless you’re an alcoholic.  Don’t do that.  Pig out on chocolate, or smoke an extra pack of butts and get zinged on coffee.  Do this IMMEDIATELY after receiving your pink slip, but don’t drive.  You’re unemployed now and can’t afford to lose your license.  It’s expensive.  Have some barley pops, then when you’re hung over tomorrow, get a lot of water in you and keep reading this.  Cheers!  You’re UNEMPLOYED!  You lucky bastard.  I’m jealous.

Day 2- APPLY FOR POGEY.  NOW!  THE SOONER, THE BETTER! I’M SERIOUS!!  DO THIS NOW!! Then please keep reading.

Now you have to do some quickie psychology on yourself to start to like your new lot in life and realize how lucky you are to be unemployed.  I’ve been laid off enough to accept the fact that I am very layoffable, so I’ll probably always be taking a ride on the pogey train until I retire, if I retire for good.  I can’t imagine it happening because I’ll probably never have enough money to retire.  I kind of consider myself semi-retired at 39 years old though- meaning some times I work, sometimes I don’t.  Sounds like semi-retirement to me.  It’s usually not my choice when I don’t work, but the pattern is there.

The first time I was laid off was a real shocker.  I had gotten used to a certain amount of cash coming in working a crappy job with a temp agency.  Something I don’t recommend.  Working for a temp agency sucks, but if you have no skills, hey, what can you do?  I also think temp agencies are a huge waste of money for employers, even though they use them more and more these days.  I can’t figure out how paying a bazillion dollars an hour for an employee who only receives a portion of this can be good for a company.  The only thing I can think of is that the stupid managers and HR drones can’t deal with people and can’t hire the right ones.  The people they hire are most often more skilled than the managers and HR dinks, so if an employee comes in for an interview and wants to demonstrate some kind of competence, the managers and HR freaks don’t have the skills to adequately see through BS during the interview.  This can work to an employee’s advantage- knowing that the person you are being interviewed by is there because he or she is unskilled.   Rather than work in a fast-food joint, they go into management.  Now for some quickie psychology.

You have probably heard of the five stages of grief.  This is known as the Kübler-Ross model.  It’s from her book “On Death and Dying”.  It works for all kinds of grief though.  Loss of a person, favourite car after an accident, limbs, and jobs.  All are really stressful stuff.  So if you’re a guy who has been socialized to suppress feelings like myself, this works pretty well.  Here are the stages.  You have half a brain, so you have seen these before somewhere.  I’ll just jog your memory:

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance

Now this is where you roll your eyes and say, “Oh man!  This idiot is using some mumbo-jumbo pop psychology on me.  He hasn’t even finished his BA yet and he thinks he’s Sigmund friggin’ Freud!  I reject this information, because Graham is a quack!”  Well, sure I’m not a clinical psychologist.  Would a clinical psychologist recommend getting blottoed after you lose your job?  You DO have half a brain!  You know that.  These are just suggestions.  Blast them out the window if you want.  I don’t care.  I know it works for me.  That’s it.

The second time I got laid off was because I was more or less fired.  I was missing a lot of work because I was attending a bunch of School Board meetings as a Trustee, and they needed someone on the afternoon shift that could actually make some widgets.  I understand that now.  What I will never understand is why they couldn’t be the slightest bit flexible with my schedule.  Probably because the managers were stupid, lazy, or just didn’t give a flying fu…oops!  I almost swore there.  My parents might read this.

OK, so I was just evicted from a job with no real explanation.  This REALLY upset me.  Most of the time managers won’t give you an honest explanation why they canned you because they feel guilty about jerking your life around.  Or, they just don’t care about you.  You are a production number.  That’s capitalism for ya.  That’s life in Western society.  So Number one of the five on the list hit me as I was driving home.

1.  Denial.  What?  They canned me/laid me off? No way.  I was a decent employee.  (You might, in actual fact be a crappy employee like me, but everyone thinks they are a decent employee just like everyone thinks they are a decent driver.  It takes a lot of soul-searching to admit your weaknesses, and once you do, it’s no big deal.  The stress comes from lying to yourself.) I’m laid off?  Noooo!

Well, YES!  You are sacked!  You are now a few cases of beer and a few rent payments away from being exactly the same as that bum on the street you think you’re so much better than.  So you say to yourself, “Self, they won’t let you in there any more, so the fact remains- you are unemployed!”  Now I see this as a great thing.  I didn’t see it at the time.  So I got pissed off.

2.  Anger.  “Those jerks!  They are stupid!  I want to get a gun like all the rest of those guys in the Midwestern United States and go POSTAL on these bastards!”  Or if you’re a woman, I don’t know what you do.  You generally have lower testosterone levels than a man, so I guess, uh, what, you want to slit your wrists or sue somebody to get back your crappy job?  I don’t know.  Maybe an ice cream binge?  I have absolutely no understanding of the female mind.  I just know women are nice and squishy in all the right places. Back to anger.  You get mad.  Either at them or yourself.  If you know in your heart of hearts that you hate working, and are a mediocre to sub-par employee and are at grips with that, then you don’t have to get angry- you can skip that step.  If you are going to be angry, you can choose to be angry at yourself, the bosses, the economy, or whatever you want.  You will be most successful if you are NOT mad at yourself.  Pick someone or some situation to be mad at.  Being mad at yourself is pointless.  You did not lay yourself off, did you?  No.  So someone else did.  Get mad at them.  Don’t be violent, or you could get a job in jail as someone’s maid.  And you won’t like how you get paid- in cigarettes and unwanted raping.  Men are raped in prison because you and your neighbours want them to be anally raped.  No?  Then why do you keep electing crappy politicians that allow this?  Don’t get me started.  Suffice to say, get mad right away, get drunk, get stoned, whatever.  Stay out of jail.  You can not get pogey in jail.   No one can stay angry for too long.  If you hide your anger inside of you like I do, this makes you drink for a LONG time.  Take a lesson from women.  They know all about emotions and stuff.  Your girlfriend dumped you, then she moved onto another guy in three days.  She could do this, because she had a good cry, let out all of the emotions, cleared her head and moved on.  Think of yelling and crying as an emotional jerking off.  It’s quick and easy to do, then you are thinking straight afterwards.  I recommend when you are alone, bawl your eyes out if you are sad, scream your head off if you are really angry.  Call your former boss every swear in the book.  Get creative with who he is a son of, and what he has sex with.  “You son of a goat!  You gas tank f’er!”   It won’t get your crappy job back, but it will make you feel better afterwards.  I don’t recommend hitting a punching bag or jogging or anything physical to release aggression, well, because I’m lazy, and that’s too much like work.

3. Bargaining.  “Oh man, I’m in deep crap!  I’ll do anything to get a job, because I am nothing without a job.  Oh man, I’d better get a job right away so no one finds out I’m unemployed.  Working for minimum wage is better than not working, even if it pays less.”  HOGWASH!  This stage of loss is a real mind messer.  Are you kidding me?  You just won the LOTTERY!  Would you take a minimum wage job if you hit the 6/49?  NO!  Well some would.  This book isn’t for those workaholics.  They are for YOU, the lazy man.  And to a lesser extent, lazy woman of the 21^st century.

Society is so goofy.  Lots of people out there define themselves by their job.  This is nuts!  So you are an electrician.  Fine.  If you all of a sudden become a computer programmer, you are now a different person?  NO!  You are still you. You just have a different job.  You worked on an oil rig, now you do construction?  You are still you.  You just have a different job.  Your job as a pogey winner is to watch lots of TV, drink beer every once in a while, enjoy your free time, and surf the web or play video games.  All of this takes at least eight hours a day, and you get paid.  Sounds like a job to me.  Sure, it still is a little embarrassing to admit to the people that ask at parties, “and what do YOU do?” that you’re unemployed, but usually the people that come out and say that garbage are unimaginative, hard working snobs that like to think they are better than you.  The fact is that anyone who asks “and what do YOU do?”  is 99 percent of the time a dick that you wouldn’t want to hang out with anyways, and no matter what you answer to that question, they think they are better than you.  Unless you are massively rich, then they will start to kiss your ass, because though they have high self esteem, they are scared of someone that has more money and/or power than them, so they will ingratiate themselves.  I learned that word last semester at school.  It makes me sound smarter than I am.

Ingratiate- to gain favour by deliberate efforts

Last week I went to an artsy-fartsy art opening (some unemployed people do this) with free wine and AWESOME cheese.  There’s a place in Sudbury called La Fromagerie Elgin which sells great cheese.  A little expensive, but good.  I was asked by someone, much to my chagrin “and what do YOU do?”  I just answered honestly, knowing this guy would probably hate me after my answer.  It’s almost fun to watch these snobs squirm when you are honest with them.  They’re not used to anything unusual.  Feel free to memorize this and use or modify this response as much as you want.

“Well, I’m unemployed.  I’ve been unemployed for a little over a month.  It’s not so bad, though, because I just got my first pogey cheque last week.  It’s a little less than when I was working, but it’s FREE MONEY, and I love sleeping in every day.  When the weather gets a bit better, I’m thinking of working on my golf game.  It’s going to be a GREAT summer!”

I hate golf, and it’s too expensive to be a viable pogey sport, if you want to consider it a sport.  But any wiener that asks “and what do YOU do”  probably likes golf, and it will really burn him to think he is at work, and you are at the driving range- becoming a better golf player than him.  SICK BURN!  (that’s what the kids say these days)  This person will now not like you, so try to get away from him.  He is no fun, and a real bummer to hang out with.  If, by chance, the guy is cool with your unemployment, you might get a free drink out of it or something.

One summer on unemployment, I ran across a multi-millionaire who was cool with me collecting pogey.  I was treating myself to a cigar and a nice Taylor Fladgate port at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa.  (If you set yourself up with cheap rent, you can treat yourself like this every once in a while.) He was a sociable Australian guy that had just sold his computer business for about a quarter of a billion dollars, and had flown his own private jet into town to watch his daughter try out for the Olympic equestrian team.   He said that it was a good idea for me to enjoy my time off when I could get it, because as you get older, you don’t have that time.  So when you reply that you are unemployed, not all people will hate you.  And, incidentally, I’m pretty sure this multi-millionaire guy didn’t say “and what do YOU do?”  It was more of a relaxed, “So what brings you to the Chateau Laurier on this nice afternoon.”  He was a classy guy.  I’m glad I ran into him and his wife.  They really made me happy to be unemployed.  This helped me stave off some… are you ready for this nice transition?

4.  Depression.  “I just want to die.”  “I’m worthless.” “I’ll never get over this.”  BULLSHI…OOPS!  My parents still might be reading.  This is a good point.  Your parents, friends, grandparents- they can all help you out if you talk to them.  Now here’s a tip to fight any depression you might get.  I heard in a lecture from a crazy professor who said that talking about anything beats depression.  According to him, depression is just a slowing down of the activity in the brain.  That’s why you feel blah.  That is a psychological term- blah.  Apparently, according to him, and he’s a hot shot neuroscientist, when you start talking, it fires up the speech part of your brain, and as a result, this fires up activity all over the brain.  Memory, logic, imagination, speech of course, and other parts.  If you’re telling a rip-roaring funny story, you can even laugh and that shoots out all kinds of hormones and good stuff into your brain.  This is a contributing factor, possibly, to why introverts are more prone to depression than extroverts.  What’s an introvert?  That’s a person that hates talking- especially in front of a crowd.  An extrovert will talk a lot, and when it comes to public speaking, he or she doesn’t mind it.  I’m an introvert, in case you were wondering.  So I had some serious depression one time I got laid off.  I treated it absolutely wrong.  I was drunk for days and days.  I should have paid attention to what I’m writing now, but I learned from my mistakes and now you can learn from me.

Boozing it up A LOT is bad when you’re bummed out.  Chemically, alcohol is a depressant- meaning it slows down your brain function.  That’s why some people refer to it as “stupid juice”.  So if you are depressed, lots of booze will make you feel even more depressed.  As an experiment, you can sit in a room by yourself doing nothing but slamming a bottle of Vodka.  The next day you will wake up feeling depressed and guilty about something.  You didn’t even DO ANYTHING except sit in a room and pound hard liquor, but you’re guilty and depressed?  For no reason?  That’s right.  A depressant will do that to ya.

Boozing it up in just a little more than moderation is fun though, I think.  But that’s me.  Maybe your vice is smoking weed.  I could see how being stoned all of the time could happen if you are bummed out about losing your job.  Try to keep it on weekends, or at least wait  till noon before sparking up.  I have an unemployment rule for myself- no booze till noon.  Unless I’m camping, then breakfast beers are OK.  Mimosa is a classy morning drink for the quasi-alcoholic.  (That’s champagne and orange juice- a good source of vitamin C.)   Any other drug like cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, speed, crystal meth, and even mushrooms are VERY dangerous if you are unemployed.  They use up a lot of time (which you have so it’s not as much of a problem as when you were working) and money (which you do not have now).  And they are pretty incapacitating.  Stay away from the hard stuff.  Moderation is the key to happiness.  Also, I’ve heard with those drugs, the hangover is REALLY depressing.  I know a guy that was coming down off a coke bender and hung himself.  Not cool.  It’s hard to party and have fun when you are dead.  I don’t recommend suicide as a way to beat depression.  It works, but it bums out all of the people that love you.

If you are depressed, the pharmaceutical companies see you coming.  CHA-CHING!!  Here’s another sucker.  Look, life is full of ups and downs.  The greedy bastards that run pill companies are smart.  They know this.  So they make legal happy pills.  Like rotten lawyers, they are parasites that make millions off of the misery of others, and they have convinced themselves that they are “helping”.  What a pile of crap!  Except if you’re schizophrenic, then you need some pills to be more normal, and even that can be disputed.  But schizophrenia is different than plain Jane depression.  I know of two guys that went on the happy pills.  In both cases they were bummed out, so they got some happy pills.  They said they helped a bit, then they got girlfriends and started getting laid on a regular basis, and like magic- POOF!  They didn’t need their happy pills.  WOW!   IT’S A MIRACLE!!  No it isn’t.  Now they had someone to talk to, and when you orgasm, all kinds of neat hormones are released making your brain feel cool.  Lots of brain activity.  No depression.

I do know one guy where happy pills were very helpful to him.  He was up to his eyeballs in debt, had a wife that didn’t work, two kids, volunteered here and there keeping really busy, and his business burned to the ground.  That’s a LOT of stress- more than just a single guy losing a crappy job stress.  He said the happy pills helped him “feel normal” for a while.  Then, as he rebuilt his business and things got back to normal, he didn’t need the happy pills.  Sure you lost your job, but a pogey cheque is coming, because you applied for EI right?  You didn’t?  DO IT NOW, you lazy bum!  IT’S FREE MONEY!  You have all the time in the world to enjoy life on the cheap.  You don’t have to sit in the daily commute any more.  What the hell are you worried and depressed about?  You won the LOTTERY!  Don’t even think about happy pills.  Cavemen didn’t need happy pills, and they had big scary animals around them!   With big fangs!

Why didn’t cavemen need happy pills with all of the scary animals around?  They walked everywhere.  Walking beats depression too.  After about 10 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, your brain releases some natural dope that relaxes you.  That’s why when I walk to the liquor store and walk home, I feel so much better than driving there.

So talk to someone- have a good conversation, and go for at LEAST a 10 minute walk.  BAM!  Graham’s guide to beating depression.  I guarantee if you do this you will feel better than before you did it.  Will I give you your money back for this book if my plan doesn’t work?  Not on your life!  I’m unemployed.  I could use the cash.  Don’t be too quick to go on the happy pills.  Try some walks and talk to a friend and if that doesn’t work, see a couple of doctors.  You live in Canada.  It’s free!

5. Acceptance.  “I can’t change the fact that I got laid off.”  “Looks like I’ll have to make the best of this.” “All right!  No more punching that damn time clock!”

Take a guess.  Yes, you are correct.  This is the fun part where you accept the fact that you are going to be on the poge.  You have dealt with all of the bummer stuff that bums you out in a bummy way.  But you are not a bum!  You are YOU!  The same person you were when you had a job, except you have a lot more time on your hands, and you have free money coming your way!  Mind you, not as much as you used to have coming in, so you have to accept that you are now broke, but FREE from the tyranny of the MAN!  You are no longer a slave to the system.  You will be a slave again in a few months, so for now, enjoy your emancipation!

Story time.  Gather round, unemployment students, and I will tell you the story of how I wasted a lot of money that I didn’t need to.

It was spring of 1999.  I was extremely bummed out that I had gotten canned.  My life was really in the toilet, and I was sleeping on the floor at my brother’s place.  One day, under the influence of alcohol, I took the advice of an unemployment advisor.  Let’s just call him Tommy.  You might have heard me talk about Tommy before.  He brilliantly recommended that I immediately book a flight to Cuba to hang out on the beach and get drunk for a week.  I was in no position to argue with this sage reasoning, so in a couple of days, and an emergency passport application later, I was checking into my resort room in Varadero, Cuba.  I hit the free bar, and didn’t leave it for a week.  Sure I rented a scooter for a couple of hours, and walked on the beach once to take three pictures to prove I was in Cuba, but the moral of the story is that I did not accept my position in life.  I could have done all of that stuff at home, and not racked up $2500 on my credit card and not gotten my forehead so sunburned that I looked like a moron for three weeks.  I guess the other moral of the story, and it is INCREDIBLY cliché, but disgustingly true, is that you can’t run away from yourself.  If you haven’t accepted who you are and what you’re doing, you can go to paradise and still feel like crap.  Mind you, Cuba is far from paradise, what with all of the poverty and suppression of freedom of speech and all, and it stinks like diesel fumes.   There’s no snow to shovel though.   Some would consider that paradise.  And the third moral of the story is:  When you are unemployed, take Tommy’s advice with at grain of salt.  Hmm.  Those are a lot of morals to the story.  I tend to get off topic.  I’ll list them again.

1.  Accept your position in life.

2.  You can’t run away from yourself.

3.  Tommy’s advice is sometimes, probably mostly, garbage.

The more you get laid off as you go through life, the easier all of these processes become.  After about four times, you can go straight to acceptance of the fact that you are laid off, and start having fun and feeling great right away.  It’s pretty cool when this happens.  Two layoffs ago, the boss handed me some letter saying I was “terminated”.  I read it, and said, “OH.  OK.  Could you do me a favour, and say that I was laid off on my Record of Employment?”  He was actually a good boss, stuck in a bad political position, so he said, “Sure.  We could do that.  I’ll talk to the HR bitch.”  He didn’t say bitch, but most HR chicks are bitches.  Not all, but most in my experience.  And before anyone could shake my hand to clear their conscience, I was out of the office, throwing my toolbox into the back seat of my car with a big smile on my face, and on my way to the beer store.  It can be that easy, but it takes practice.  How do you practice getting laid off?  Oh you’ll find out if you’re semi-lazy like me.  Trust me.

“Due to a shortage of work, Graham Wilson has been indefinitely laid off.”

I’ve gotten that letter a half dozen or so times in my life.  I forget.  The timing of it was usually totally unexpected, but the fact that it would happen was not.  Like I have said before, if you don’t like working (like me), you will be one of the first to go.  The company may be experiencing tough times because of bad management, so they need a fall guy.  That’s you, or me, in this case.  One thing you should know is that by being laid off, even if you were a lazy bastard, it is NOT your fault that you lost your job.  This is very important for your self esteem.  What is self esteem?  According to my current psychology textbook, it’s how much you value yourself.  Your self worth.  I find this to be a really stupid concept, because no one is “worth” anything.  We are monkeys.  Are there some monkeys that have a higher intrinsic value when you look at them?  All monkeys look the same to me.  They have eyeballs, fur; some have those weird pink butts.  I don’t care one whit about monkeys, other than I believe they should be able to live their monkey lives without us stupid human monkeys ripping down their habitat and stealing all of their bananas.  So we as monkeys should have a decent habitat and some bananas to eat.  People with really high self esteem are not “worth” anything more than any other monkey, but they think they are.  And they’re usually dicks.  This is a psychological fact, but I’m pretty sure the psychological term “dicks” is not wide spread in academia.  My proof for this statement is that when people think they are better than you, they are dicks.  If you think you are better than someone else, you are a dick.  Flawless logic, eh?  But my point is: the company is going down the tubes, because the managers made ALL of the wrong decisions.  Not you the worker, because who made the decision to hire the bad worker that would single-handedly destroy the bottom line of the company?  The MANAGER hired the crappy worker.  It is HIS/HER fault.  Not yours.  If you are a really useless monkey, they have programs for you like welfare, where you are paid to be alive, and given enough money that your lazy ass doesn’t steal too many stereos out of cars to survive.  Welfare is really just a theft deterrent in my opinion.

Now maybe you work at some unionized shop that lays off based on seniority.  I highly recommend never working at a place like this.  The reason they have unions, is because years ago,  employees that loved to be abused, decided to organize the shop so they could continue being abused by power-hungry, stupid management, but make a little extra money, and work in safer conditions.  If the workers wanted to make real change in the abusive workplace, they would have just left and found another job with a decent boss.  If you got laid off from a unionized shop, CONGRATULATIONS!  Your job was crap anyways.  Want proof?  You were a decent employee, and you were laid off.  There are still many jerks there working that produced less than you and pissed everyone off.  Sounds like a crappy place to work to me.  Your job was crap.  Get a better one.  Oh, and this is a bonus, unrelated labour observation.  Usually the guy that complains the most about how bad all of the rest of the employees in the shop are is usually the worst employee.  But he has high self esteem and probably has bad job skills.  He’s on the fast track to management.

Now that you are laid off, you got your wish!  You will be making free money and not doing any work.  This is the lazy guy’s goal in life.   It’s like winning the lottery.  You are laid off.  YOU ARE A WINNER!!!  One pogey recipient I knew was from Prince Edward Island.  Apparently out there, some people referred to Unemployment Insurance as “Lotto 10/42”.  Get it?  Work 10 weeks, get 42 weeks of FREE MONEY!  I love Islanders.

He inspired me to write a song about winning the EI lottery.  Ahem.

Happy Pogey to you,

Happy Pogey to you!

Happy Pogey dear (insert name),

Happy Pogey to you!

It’s not the most original song, but I was drunk when I wrote it, and it was funny at the time.

The only bummer about pogey is that you will be making less money than when you were working, but surprisingly not much less, in real terms. So that’s good.  Accept it.  You see, when you are driving to work every day, beating the snot out of your car, buying Timmies coffees way too much, buying lunch from the gut truck or fast food joint, buying new clothes or work boots, washing your clothes more, maybe dry cleaning them, drinking yourself stupid after work to forget the crappy place you work at, buying cocaine on the weekend to escape even more, paying the kid next door to cut your grass because you don’t have time, or paying a mechanic to work on your car because you don’t have time, this all costs money.  Now that you’re laid off, you have the time to do a lot of stuff that you used to pay for, you don’t wear out clothes as fast, and you don’t drive as much.  So getting laid off SAVES you money!  And as long as you adapt your life to the new reality that you are broke, you will indeed get by- without any rush hour traffic or idiot HR bitch making your life hell.  And you will be amazed at how great life is when you are enjoying a sunny day watching all of the pissed off people drive their cars to and fro in the rat race as you casually stroll to the liquor store for afternoon cocktail supplies.

That is all well and good.  Now I will tell you as a practical matter and to remind you AGAIN, no matter how bad you feel because you are laid off, hung over or anything, you must apply for your Employment Insurance AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.  Get that Record of Employment down to the Service Canada office.  If you don’t know how to apply for pogey, it is done online now.  I’m not going to give you a pile of websites to check out, addresses and phone numbers, or any of that stuff.   As with all necessary information in life, Google search it.  If you have any question pop into your head, Google will direct you to a website where you can find the answer.  If you haven’t figured that out yet, wow, no wonder you’re laid off.  Google raises your IQ.  That is why kids nowadays are smarter than kids in the old days.  Not to worry.  If done correctly, pogey makes you smarter.  This is a fact.  Well, a fact I just made up.  I tend to do that.

HAPPY POGEY TO YOU!

YOU LUCKY S.O.B.!

Chapter 3- The 10 Commandments of Pogey

Congratulations! You are on your way to accepting, or have accepted our Lord and Saviour Pogey into your life.  Now your life will change.  Flowers will smell sweeter.  TV will have fewer commercials.  Your couch will be more comfortable.  Pizza will be delivered sooner.  Everything changes when you take Pogey into your heart, and accept its divine beauty.  Can I get an AMEN?!

I will now give you the Ten Commandments of Pogey and describe the details of the Ten Commandments of Pogey a bit later.  They are all equally important.  And for my Muslim or Buddhist or Hindi or Jehovah’s Witness readers that haven’t heard about the Ten Commandments, I’ll explain, though it’s probably a waste of time because people that have those religions usually aren’t unemployed in Canada.  The Ten Commandments of Pogey is a rip off of a story in the Christian Bible.  I know very little of the story of the 10 Commandments in the Christian Bible, and I don’t feel like researching it too much.  But to put my 10 Commandments of Pogey in historical perspective, I’ll tell you my version of the story of the original 10 Commandments from what I can remember.  Ahem.

Once upon a time, there was an old guy named Moses.  He was hanging out in the desert with his posse and thought it was too hot.  So he went up to a mountain where it was cooler.  This is because of adiabatic cooling where the air temperature decreases at 1.98 degrees Celsius per 1000 feet of altitude gained.  Thus if Moses wanted to stop roasting his nuts in the 35 degree heat, he would have to climb about 5000 feet up for the temperature to be about 25,  so he could comfortably stroll around in a robe with a Jack Daniels wife beater underneath.   This is a good “around the house” look for the unemployed man.

At the top of the mountain was a burning bush, and he was delirious from the climb because Moses was pretty old, so he started talking to the bush, and the bush told him God wanted Moses to boss a bunch of people around.  So by the time Moses got back down off the mountain he said God made up Ten rules, and if the people don’t follow the rules, their all loving God would make them endure excruciating pain and suffering for all of eternity.  Something like that.  THE END.

If you follow my Ten Commandments of Pogey, cool.  If you don’t, I won’t punish you.  I don’t have the authority, and I’m a nice guy anyways.  I don’t beat women, and I’m very heterosexual, so I only touch a man to shake his hand.  So it’s not like I would inflict pain on you.  Any form of punching or grappling is borderline homosexual, I think.  Not that I’m anti-gay.  Far from it!  I had a gay boss once that was really cool.  He didn’t lay me off, and he taught me quite a bit about drywall installation. I personally don’t like to get face to face with a guy, or roll around on the floor with a scantily clad man and put my face in his crotch, or vice versa like those Ultimate Fighter guys.  If I’m a homophobe because I don’t like to put my face by a man’s wiener, then so be it, I guess.  Labeling someone a homophobe is so passé anyways.  Hitler used to label people, and I’ll bet he was a real jerk to work for.

The Ten Commandments of Pogey- By Graham Wilson

1.  Thou shalt apply for pogey at the soonest possible time.

2.  Thou shalt attend all required meetings on time as requested by the pogey office.

3  Thou shalt file thy pogey reports on time so you can get your rent and beer money promptly.

4.  Thou shalt maintain a list of all workplaces applied to.

5.  Thou shalt not lie about thy income to the pogey office.

6.  Thou shalt leave thy house every day.

7.  Thou shalt not drink booze before noon, unless fishing or camping.

8.  Thou shalt watch hours and hours of TV.

9.  Thou shalt not set an alarm clock, unless necessary to meet another commandment’s requirements.

10.  Thou shalt cherish thy time off work, and have fun on the cheap, and be thankful you don’t have to punch that damn time clock every GD day.

Amen, brother.  Amen.

OK, now I’ll explain why these Commandments are important.

1.  Thou shalt apply for pogey at the soonest possible time.

It will seem like an eternity before you get your first EI cheque, and you are dealing with civil servants here.  Civil servants will mess something up approximately 100 percent of the time, so the sooner you apply, the sooner you can deal with bureaucratic screw ups and the sooner you can make your landlord happy by paying the rent, and you can have your EI shots sooner.  I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but when you get your first EI cheque, you must celebrate by getting boozed up at home, then possibly later walking down to the local pub for an EI shot of something.  My EI shot, well I had two this time, was some whiskey with a beer chaser.  Then I went home.

2.  Thou shalt attend all required meetings on time as requested by the pogey office.

It may happen, it may not happen, but the pogey office will make you go to some meeting where they scare you straight about the reality of the poge.  There will be nervous people there because they haven’t been looking for a job.  There will be hard working single moms there with a portfolio of job contacts.  There will be the fat guy that doesn’t give a crap about life because his wife hates him now that he’s not making fifty grand a year.  YOU MUST GO TO THIS MEETING.  It is the most important meeting you will attend on pogey.  They will cut you off if you don’t go.  These civil servants are like your mom.  They want to help you, but won’t think twice about pulling out the wooden spoon if you mess up.  They are female, so don’t try to reason with them.  Go to the meetings you must attend.  Show up on time.  Bring a pencil.  Bend over and kiss their ass if it is required.   Pleasing these civil servants is important to getting your free money.  DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THEM.

They will also answer a lot of your questions about retraining, more free money, and other stuff.  It will be face to face contact with the powerless peons that can mess your life up if they want.  You can please them.  So it’s not all bad.  But the bottom line is:  Do what they ask.  It isn’t much.  Ignoring this commandment will be to your detriment.  Go to the boring meeting, and get the hell out of there.

3.  Thou shalt file thy pogey reports on time so you can get your rent and beer money promptly.

Put a calendar on your fridge, in front of your toilet, on your microwave door, anywhere you always go and look.  Attach a pen on a string nearby.  Buy approximately 20 pens and leave them all over your apartment so wherever you are, you have a pen you can grab.  This way, your calendar pen will always be on the string.  Mark all of your important dates on the calendar- like when your bills are due, rent is due, and when you have to file your EI report.  If you get really lazy because of EI Do-Nothing Syndrome, it will be easy to forget which day it is.  This happens to retired people, and now that you are semi-retired, it can happen to you.  You must get your money on time; otherwise you will be short on funds at the beer store.  You do NOT want to be without that six-pack for the big game on Thursday night.  You will NEED pizza at some point, and with no money because you were too lazy to file your pogey report on time, you will feel bad about yourself.  And I’m not sure, but if you file your reports really late, you may get flagged by the computer system.  I’m sure that’s just my paranoia talking, but it definitely can’t hurt to stay under the EI radar.  You do NOT want to get audited or investigated or whatever they do.  I have been lucky, and this has not happened to me, but I do know of two cases where people decided to take a vacation out of the province, lied to pogey and said they were at home looking for work, got busted, and they had to pay back ALL of their pogey benefits that they had received up to that point.  Air Canada has a deal with the government, which is pretty Orwellian, where their computers cross-reference this stuff, and you will get busted.  Maybe your buddy Tommy says you can get away with going to Florida for a paid vacation.  BULL!  I’ve already said not to listen to Tommy, and it applies here too.  It’s not like the old days where people would have their moms filling out their pogey reports as they were lying on the beach in Florida back in the 70’s.  We have evolved from the 70’s.  Moustaches are no longer a great way to get chicks.  Computers don’t use punch cards anymore.  Big Brother is watching you even closer because you could be a terrorist.  And what’s more embarrassing for a useless senior civil servant than a terrorist?  A terrorist on the poge.  So they keep an eye out for that stuff.  Not to protect the taxpayer from fraud or terrorism really, but to protect their jobs.  Senior Civil Servants only know one thing- how to suck the big government teat, and they will do anything to keep on sucking.  If it means spying on you and bending civil rights, they will do that.  Now I’m really paranoid.  Or am I?  I don’t know.  I have had two pots of coffee this morning, and I am freaking out as I write this.  You can do this when you are unemployed.  YAAAY!!!!

So get your money on time by filing your reports on time.  Very important.

4.  Thou shalt maintain a list of all workplaces applied to.

Here’s another thing you must do to not get busted by the pogey Nazis.  It is one of the rules you agree to when you apply for EI.  Keep a job list.  Now this is the biggest pain in the butt when you are unemployed.  All of the other books say that you should treat unemployment like a job.  Look for work from 9 to 5 every day.  Maintain a list of contacts.  Do follow up calls when sending résumés out.  Find the President of the company and send crap to him.  Become a pain in the ass for the prospective employer.  Harass them with calls.  Blah. Blah. Blah.  Yeah.  If you actually want to work.  But if you don’t want to work.  What then?  Well, the government says you must apply for work.  True.  And you must apply.  But there is no requirement that you be smart.  Imagine if you fried your brain on LSD when you were 17 years old.  And this is easy to do, I hear.  One bad hit of acid can mess you up for life.  I know one guy that said he did some mushrooms laced with acid, and he felt like he was high on acid ever since, so he had to smoke weed daily to chill out an maintain a job where he could steal booze and bootleg it for money for pot.  No this isn’t Tommy, but good guess.  It was just some freak I met once and last I heard, he broke up with his girlfriend and got evicted from his apartment after running down the hall naked, smashing all of the hallway’s lights.  So when you DON’T want to work, imagine you are this guy- an idiot.  Send out résumés to places where you do NOT want to work, or you know you will have zero chance of being hired.  This will satisfy the EI office that you are looking for work.  So far on my current unemployment vacation I have been lazy about this, but there are so many people getting laid off in Sudbury right now, that they won’t be looking for my jobs applied to list- yet.  I know I must do it.  So, I’ll make up a résumé that barely makes sense.  Lots of spelling and grammatical errors.  I’ll leave out some skills and qualifications and experience.  Maybe if I’m bored, I’ll put a few different fonts with different sizes.  Nothing pisses off a manager in his 40’s more than really small font size.  That means the vain prick will have to use his reading glasses.  This will make him feel old and useless.  And if he’s an old manager, he probably is old and useless.  I said probably. I have worked with a few managers and foremen that were pretty good, even very good.  My estimation of the amount of good managers out there as a percentage is about 10-20 percent.   But you won’t be applying to those good managers.  You will apply to employers for whom you do not wish to work, or for positions you are not qualified to do.  For example:  I have a certificate as a General Machinist.  I will apply to an electrical company for the position of Master Electrician.  There will be no electrical experience on my resume, and I will mention something like “expected wage- $30/hour” if I want to be really sure not to get called back.  This keeps EI happy that you looked for a job.

A really big mistake pogey people make, and I have done this too, is to panic as soon as they are laid off, and start faxing out a million résumés on the second day of being unemployed.  This bit me in the ass once, and I got an interview lined up for the following Monday.  Over the weekend, I realized my mistake, and thought I should just not show up for the interview, BUT I was feeling pretty passive aggressive because I was mad at my former employer.  I thought I would take out my frustrations on this other guy that wanted to interview me.  The best way to mess up an employer who is way more “successful” than you will ever be is to hit him in the pocket book.  These “successful” cheap bastards get rich off of your labour, and they will always be richer and happier than you, so you have to get them back somehow.  I went to an interview, and decided to waste a rich guy’s time once.  He didn’t say he was the owner of the shop, but I suspected he was.  So I insulted the owner for being cheap and a stupid businessman, not directly, but I said the shop’s machines were cheap crap, then I kept asking lots of vague questions like, “So where do you see the Tool and Die industry going in the next ten years?”  “Will China affect your business?”  “What do you think about lowering corporate tax?  Would that actually help out your business?”  That last one is a great one to waste any business owner’s time because they always want to pay less taxes.   It’s good for at LEAST 15 minutes of wasted time if you keep saying, “Oh really?  I never thought of that, but you have a great idea there!”

It was a little mean of me to do this to the poor fella, but he was way richer and more satisfied with life than I was so I’m sure he wouldn’t lose sleep over it.  I guarantee this guy had jerked someone around in his lifetime, so I paid back some karma for someone else.  That’s how I live with myself for being a little passive aggressive.

So if you somehow get an interview, prepare to blow it when you go in.  Do not shower, do not shave, drink a beer before you go in and don’t brush your teeth, wear gross looking clothes, ask lots of stupid questions, and ask for an outrageous amount of money.  Oh, and if it’s a woman, just stare at her boobs for the whole interview.  You’ll be toast!

But put these people on your job list.  The pogey people like to see at least one job per day applied to.  That’s what I’ve heard.  There is a rule that says you must apply, but there is no rule that says you can’t be a moron.  Most people do this without even trying, so with a little effort, it is possible for you to NOT get a job!  Bad luck!

5.  Thou shalt not lie about thy income whilst on the poge.

One of the neat things about pogey is that the government allows you to work part-time and make some dough, and they won’t cut you off.  There’s all of these rules about percentages of pogey you can earn before they start clawing back your hard earned poge.  And these rules tend to change every time there is a new Government elected to Ottawa.  They slash pogey, they change pogey, they change the amount you can make before they tax it back.  Just bomb around the Service Canada website, or talk to the chicks down at the pogey office.  This should let you know exactly how much you can make, then you can do some math and see if it is worth it.  If you are REALLY poor, this can help out a lot.  Maybe you’re not making maximum poge.  But remember, these part-time little jobs can turn into full time jobs sometimes, and that is dangerous.  You don’t want to get a full-time job, as that will destroy your possibility of remaining on EI.

The only time it is OK to lie about how much you make is if you’re working under the table cutting the old lady next door’s grass, or shoveling her driveway, or helping out your landlord for a rent cut.  Or if you play in a band and have cash gigs.  Don’t bother helping out Tommy on one of his under the table drywall jobs.  You’ll just end up drinking away all of your money anyways, and a lot of the time, the guy doesn’t pay Tommy or you, because the guy you’re doing work for blew all of his money on weed.  There’s another Unemployment fact:  all drywallers smoke dope.  Stay away.  That’s illegal, and I will remind you that you can not receive pogey in jail.  But hey if you want to risk it, what do I care?  I don’t even know you.  But thanks for buying my book.  I guess you could read it in jail.

Cash jobs are OK, but don’t do it too much.  You wouldn’t want to start cutting the old lady’s lawn, then end up with a successful landscaping business.  That’s a lot of work, and if you are self employed, you can not get EI when your company goes belly up.  If you are self employed at some point, and you think it’s going to fail, just start sucking money out of the company and putting it under your mattress.  Then stop paying back all of the people you owe.  Corporations do this all of the time, and CEOs make a lot of money doing it.  Even small business owners do it.  And it’s LEGAL!  You see, the people on the dole, and CEOs are similar in this respect.  EI is a program to help you get by, and Corporate Welfare and Bankruptcy Protection is also a program to help the CEOs get by.  Everyone gets money from the government.  Those dividend tax breaks?  That’s an EI savings program for people that make too much money to get real EI.  Maybe that’s an off-the-wall theory.  I don’t know, but the bottom line of this commandment is to always be truthful to the government when reporting income and days worked and stuff, UNLESS you can DEFINITELY get away with lying to them.  Just remember, there is an EI snitch line that people can use, and if you get busted at the end of your pogey term, you have to pay it all back, plus a hefty fine.  Do you have a few thousand dollars lying around?  No you do not.  Pogey is free money, don’t be stupid.  I never lie to the government because they will spend ten thousand dollars to collect five hundred from me.  Government bureaucrats are hateful and dangerous.  Play by the pogey rules or they will crucify you to make themselves look good.

6.  Thou shalt leave thy house every day.

This really is the MOST IMPORTANT RULE of EI collection.  It is the best way of staving off depression and feelings of uselessness.  Which are crap anyways.  The only reason you feel “useless” on the poge is because we, the working class, have been bred and brainwashed to feel the need to work.  To make our Feudal Landlord rich.  To make the Haves have more.  To transfer more wealth to the wealthy.  One friend of mine has the theory that we are bred to fight their wars and work their land.  I tend to agree.  How many extremely wealthy kids were in the trenches during the First One?  NONE!  This is a fact.  I prove my point. You have every right to get free money by sitting on your ass.  The elite sit on their asses and get free money.  What makes them so much better than you?  They were born rich?  They were born into privilege like the Royal Family.  Outdated garbage in my opinion.

Leaving your house every day clears your head and satisfies the genetic BS working class requirement to “feel useful”.

7.  Thou shalt not drink booze before noon, unless fishing or camping.

When you are unemployed, you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want.  If you treat your pogey time as an extended long weekend, this can have disastrous results.  Trust me.  I know.  I’ve done that.  You get totally polluted one day, recover the next, then repeat the cycle until your credit cards are maxed and you feel like garbage.  Unemployment is not a long weekend.  It is a fundamental lifestyle shift.  It’s like retirement on a small scale.  People have gone nuts when they retire, treated it like an extended long weekend, then wondered why they got fat, went diabetic and died at age 64.  They didn’t realize that it was a lifestyle shift.  Luckily your pogey will run out before that happens to you, but it is my theory that pogey life is a warm up for full-time retirement.  You can make all of your mistakes when you are young, then you’ll know what to do when you are older and your body can’t bounce back as fast.  OR you can develop good habits when you are young that will come back to you when you retire.  If only some of these drunk old farts held off until noon before drinking, I’ll bet they could have lived another couple of years.

Though my theory could be crap too, because there are exceptions to every rule.  There was an old guy that lived on Peter Street by the Gaol and church cemetery in Windsor who I used to deliver prescriptions and cigarettes to. (I love how they spelled that on the front of the Brock Street Hilton.  Gaol- pronounced “jail”.)   This old guy was in his 80’s and would hang out in his kitchen by himself slamming cheap whiskey all day.  I’d get there at 10AM, and he’d be half stewed.  Mr. Lucas.  Nice guy.  Never tipped, but a nice guy.  He’d tell me stories about how Paul Martin Sr. had his head so far up St. Laurent’s ass he could see out his mouth, how he had never been to Detroit, because everything he needed was in Windsor, and how every time he ran into Paul Martin, he’d give him an earful.  All kinds of neat stuff.  He loved Paul Martin Sr., but hated his politics.    I really liked Mr. Lucas and I was amazed he could be so old and still have such bad habits.   Even still, I’d bet if he had held off drinking till noon, I’m almost positive he would have lived a few more years, and I could have enjoyed his company a bit more.  Oh well, that’s life, eh?

My exception to the commandment of not drinking till noon is when camping or fishing because, well, that’s reality, and it’s not everyday.  Plus, when you are camping or fishing, you are usually in such good spirits that the awesome feeling will negate the bad effects of polluting your body.  That’s another theory I have.  If you’ve boozing it up to have a good time, you live longer.  If you’re boozing it up and having a bad time, you live shorter.  I have no science to back this up, but to me it is a fact.

8.  Thou shalt watch hours and hours of TV.

Yep.  You’re going to be riding the couch, man.  It better be comfortable.  Watching TV is one of the cheapest time burners around.  If you have the super mondo deluxe cable package, you can waste hours and hours on Seinfeld and Simpson’s reruns.  I once watched a Star Trek the Next Generation for a week because there was a Star Trek marathon on the Space Channel.  I felt great afterwards!  A real unemployment accomplishment can be watching television from the time you wake up to the time you fall asleep for a week.  Try it!  It’s hard to do.  Mind you, you will feel a little depressed here and there if you don’t leave the house, and you will be breaking one of my commandments.  If attempting the “Seven Day Stretch”, I now allow myself to leave at noon and walk to the grocery store for supplies.   I don’t think I could ever do the “Seven Day Stretch” again, because I don’t have cable TV.  Maybe if I have enough torrents come in, I’ll have enough material to watch.  I don’t know.  But it’s something to think about.

I’ll say more about TV later on, but on pogey, you must watch a LOT of TV.  I think it’s a general rule or something.  Let’s make it my rule anyways.

9.  Thou shalt not set an alarm clock, unless necessary to meet another commandment’s requirements.

This goes without saying, really.  It’s common sense.  Oh.  If you have kids or a wife or a husband or something, you will have to set an alarm clock.  Why?  Because you have friggin’ responsibilities, pal!  GET A JOB, YOU BUM!  Be a good role model for your kids!  Put some damn food on the table!  Retrain, move, do what you have to do!   Or at least spend lots of time playing with the kids.

If you’re single like me, sleep in.  It is your responsibility to sleep in as late as possible.  The older I get, the less I can sleep in.  The sun wakes me up.  Pretty soon I’ll be going to bed at 7pm and getting up at 4am.  I’ll be changing my preparing for pogey rules to include buying lots of adult diapers and denture cream.  Ugh!  It’s not going to be pretty, but I’m almost 40, which means I’m half dead, so I’d better get used to the idea of having a hot little 20 year old chickie-pooh changing my diaper.  Hopefully, I’ll be so spaced out on old people pills and senility that I won’t be embarrassed.  I’m not going to think about that.  It’s a bummer.

10.  Thou shalt cherish thy time off work, and have fun on the cheap, and be thankful you don’t have to punch that damn time clock every GD day.

Now I will offend my parents or grandparents with foul language.  I wanted to keep this book clean, but I have to tell a story which sums up the working world.

I worked at one machine shop that employed an Italian guy by the name of Johnny Banana.  He was in his mid to late 30s at the time, and he wasn’t really Italian.  He was born and raised in Windsor, but sounded like he was right off the boat.  This was the result of growing up with no native English speaker influence.  His last name wasn’t really Banana either, but there was an older guy that was from France that always said in a thick Parisian accent, “Eh Johnny!  You fucking banana!”  So the moniker of Banana stuck.

We were sitting outside at the picnic table when everyone started to talk about how long they had worked for the company.  Five years, twenty years, five years till retirement if he could afford it, and Johnny Banana had been there for twelve years.  He was saying how difficult it is to work so much overtime, to be away from his family and Italian friends on Erie street.  Day after day.  Month after month.  Year after year.  The same working garbage which I know I can not do, but refused to admit it to myself at the time.  I asked him, “How do you work at a place for twelve years? I’ve never worked anywhere more than three.”

He replied, “You wanna know what it takes?  To punch that clock every fuckin’ day?  To get up and make it to fuckin’ work when you had too much wine or grappa the night before?  You just gotta do it.  Every fuckin’ day.  For me?  For twelve fuckin’ years?  That’s discifuckinpline.”

Sure it takes discifuckinpline to hold a job.  Some of us don’t have much discipline, or we have the capacity to hate our jobs so much that no amount of discipline could overtake the hatred.  We are the lucky ones.  We naturally will find what turns our crank.  Now here’s something you’ve heard before from every self-help book and motivational speaker in the world.  You CAN change your life.  We ALL have choices.  You have the choice to leave that bitchy wife.  Lots of people do it, and they are ALWAYS happier when they do.  Your family and friends just want you to be happy.  You can leave that crappy job.  You don’t HAVE to make the house payments.  Sell the damn thing.  Get a one bedroom apartment and never cut grass again.  Whatever is making you nuts, eliminate it from your life.  Maybe replace it with something else that you’d like to try.

This is where pogey time is a gift!  While net surfing for 12 hours straight on a Wednesday, you can expand your mind to contemplate all of the things you want to do or not do with your life.

I got this idea from a friend of mine when we were probably half into a bottle of The Famous Grouse, and he said, “When you are lying on your death bed, what are you going to say to yourself?  ‘I wish I worked more overtime?’”

That got me thinking.  Work sucks, for some people.  For me.  For others, they like work a lot.  This book isn’t for them.  When I lie on my deathbed, I want to have no regrets.  That means I will accomplish anything I want to accomplish, or avoid whatever I want to avoid, so when I’m on my death bed, I’ll be able to honestly say, “I had a great life!  Sure there were some ups and downs, but anything I REALLY wanted to do, I gave it a shot and liked it, or found out it really wasn’t for me.  But I gave it a shot.”

Yeah the idea of your ultimate demise can be a bummer, but it’s a fact.  Everyone dies.  There is no after life.  All you have is this life now.  Don’t waste your time doing garbage you hate.

Pogey is a great time when the Government gives you money to expand your horizons.  You are never too old to go back to school.  You can learn anything you want.  Within reason.  I mean, only about one percent of the world is capable of getting a doctorate in Physics, you have to be born a genius to really understand Quantum Mechanics and all that other junk.

I’ve always wanted to write the Great Canadian Novel.  I know I don’t have the talent or work ethic to do that, so I’ll settle on writing hopefully an OK novel one day.  This book is a warm up to it.  Pogey is currently allowing me to advance Canadian culture, and influence people, hopefully in a positive way.  I am currently cherishing my time off, having fun on the cheap and am extremely thankful I don’t have to punch that damn time clock every GD day. Thank you Pogey!

My cheque was just deposited again into my account today, so I’m off to the Indian Reserve for cheap smokes, and off to the LCBO for a bottle of ghetto Chilean wine.  Cheers, and Happy Wednesday!

Chapter 4- Life on Pogey

In the previous chapter, I gave you ten Golden Rules of being on unemployment.  This one will have a few extra tips that, like the rest of this book, you can use or say, “This Graham guy is an idiot.  He makes no sense.  I’m going to poge my way.”  Hey, I’m all for good unemployment, and everyone is different- so it would be only natural that you would live differently than I do, but here are more tips on certain aspects of life that aren’t hard and fast rules of unemployment like the Commandments were.  Take them for what they are.  Suggestions.  They are what I do, and I’m pretty happy on the poge.  Heck, I LOVE the poge!  There are also some tips coming up also that if I were to indulge in such things, I would imagine would be the way to do them pogey style.  I’ll make semi-educated guesses for that stuff.   Let’s roll!

1.  Health.

If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.  Corny but true.  If you have no health whatsoever, you are dead.  If you have crappy health, your life is not good.  It’s all you can think about.  When your back hurts, all you can think about is your bad back.  When you have a toothache, can you do calculus?  No.  Incidentally, calculus is what dental hygienists scrape off your teeth when you go to the dentist.  That is almost a pun, and almost a bad one.

So one day after a break up with a significant other, then getting laid off in a one-two punch of reality, I was lying on the floor at my brother’s place all depressed and hung over because I didn’t have a bed and didn’t have a job, and I had boozed it up hard the night before to temporarily escape reality.  I remember looking up at the ceiling and thinking, “Man, I am just some good will away from being homeless.  At least I still have my health, even though I really could use an Aspirin and some water.”  At the time, what little health I had became important to me.  Don’t get me wrong.  You will never see me in a gym or out jogging around to train for a marathon.  Are you kidding?  I’m lazy, but even a lazy person can be healthy.  Remember years ago when it was rare to see someone with a big belly?  Only a few kids had diabetes.  Old people died of old age.  Families only had one car.  Strange to imagine nowadays, but it was a much more natural way of living.  When it comes to health, I think we naturally know what is good and what is bad for us.  This isn’t a chapter on the Unemployment Diet, or Ten Pogey Exercises to Give You Rock Hard Abs.  Just do SOMETHING that is kind of healthy every once in a while.  That’s it.  And if you don’t, don’t sweat it.  Guilt is for chumps.  Now that you are on EI, you will most likely gain some weight.  Don’t sweat it.  You’re lazy.  It’s gonna happen.  Then you get a job, and it goes away.  To start, let’s talk about food.

We all must eat food.  (Do I sound smart or what!?!)  When on pogey, your activity level is most likely lower than when you were working.  So this is the way the body works.  Calories in, calories out.  No diet, no protein blah blah.  There are no miracles here.  For example.  You eat an avocado.  There are a bunch of vitamins, LOADS of fat (but good fat), sugars, carbs, blah, blah, blah in an avocado.  None of that crap matters.  If there are 300 calories in it, then you need to use up 300 calories, otherwise, your body says, “Hmm.  I have some extra calories here, and lard ass is playing Halo 3 today, so I’ll just store these extra calories in his fat cells.”  Then you get fatter.  Is there a genetic factor to all of this?  Maybe.  But I defy you to show me an obese marathon runner.  They use up so much calories that I don’t care how genetically predisposed they are, they will be thin.  But even if you are a little overweight, who cares?  I have a bit of a beer gut and have put on a couple of pounds since becoming unemployed.  As long as I don’t have to buy new pants, I figure I’m cool.

Do a push up or two when you feel like it.   That’s decent exercise.

When it comes to food, eat whatever you want, and if you have a choice, use a little less butter, eat more fibre- it helps you crap and scrapes your innards to reduce the chances of butt cancer.  (I learned that because I walked through a giant colon at the mall.  Did I mention Sudbury was a cool place?)   Get the one percent milk instead of the two percent milk.  All of these little calorie savings add up.  At the grocery store, before you throw anything in your cart, look at what is in the thing, look at the price, and compare it to similar items.  You might find something with less calories, less fat, more fibre and it’s cheaper.  It might even taste better.  How’s that for a nice rigid diet?  Google the hell out of food, health, dietary requirements, and as a rule, if you read somewhere, “Lose 10 pounds in 3 weeks!”  “Trim up them flabby abs with these exercises!”  Ignore that junk.  They all say eat less calories, do more exercise.  Simple.  That’s what I said.  They just make it fancier and give you rules that are hard to follow,  Maybe they sell you some food that they can get rich off of.

Move a bit more.  Now here’s a cool story about my left heel.  I was having pain in my left heel.  I looked on the internet, and it said it was probably due to old footwear.  I started wearing new work boots and some new running shoes, and slippers around the house and the pain went away after about a month.  A quick story, yes, and not too interesting, but I highly suggest Googling any problem you might have.  If you have a bad back, you are probably fat.  Lose the weight, get a good back.   Walking will do this.

Stretching is always good.  I touch my toes in the shower every morning when I rinse my hair.  No back or foot pain for me.  I recommend it.  The big thing about stretching is that it is boring as dirt, so I do it after a few beers when doing dishes or bumming around my apartment.  I quite often try to touch the ceiling after a six-pack.  There’s no one around, so I won’t be embarrassed as I do a stretching rock dog pose while playing air guitar.  As a general workout, I suggest imitating Kim Mitchell moves from any of his videos.  He is skinny as hell, so his rock dog workout must be effective.  Same with Mick Jagger.  Put out your lips and strut around like him for one song and you’ll really feel the cardio.   There is no coincidence that you don’t see any fat rock star, well not many.  They move.  Tina Turner is still hot as hell because she moves.  OH, and for any exercise, don’t arch your back or neck backwards.  Always try to keep your back straight.  Rock guitar players seldom slouch when rockin’ a pose.  You look cockier with a straight back and can really rock the kitchen or living room busting a killer air guitar pose with a straight back.  You laugh?  I do this and feel great!  So I don’t care.

People have written books and books on health alone, I don’t want to start repeating everything they have said.  I’ll just keep it simple.  Watch what you eat and move.  That’s it.  If you eat more, you have to move more.  If you move more than you eat, you will lose weight.  If you move less than you eat, you will gain weight.

If you have any questions about health, I know a bit, but I’m no expert, so get on Google- which contains all of humanities’ knowledge, and look it up from multiple sources.  Not just one crappy biased advertisement.

Oh, and one last thing.  You are now unemployed with all of this time on your hands, right?  So you have all of this time to go to the gym, right?  WRONG!  You never have gone to the gym, and you never will.  Get real.  Don’t waste any money on a gym membership, because it’s expensive, and when you stop going after three weeks, which statistically will happen, you will need that gym membership money to buy beer and smokes.   Unless you have been already hitting the gym religiously for six months before unemployment, DO NOT BUY A GYM MEMBERSHIP!

2.  Leisure and Entertainment.

You are now a man (or woman) of leisure.  That is your EI task- to chill out to the best of your ability.  The job is not easy.  Few people in the world have what it takes to poge well.  With lack of determination, and energy, you can accomplish this feat.  But you must be willing to do almost nothing.  This is where TV comes in.

Television was invented so the human being could shut off his or her mind and become susceptible to marketing and commercials.  It is a brainwashing and brain deadening device perfect for the unemployed person.  There are two types of TV.  Rabbit ear minimal station TV, and Cable/Satellite TV.  The more you pay, the more stations you get.

The computer and video games are good time wasters too.  You are unemployed.  You need to waste a LOT of time.  A combination of TV and internet will do you well.  If you do not know anything about computers, and you have one at home, and you have internet access, unemployment is the PERFECT time to learn how to use this infuriating, and wondrous box.  Just have your young nephew over for an afternoon, and he will have you pirating movies and songs like a champ.  No more Blockbuster late charges- no charges at all!  FREE ENTERTAINMENT, BABY!!

I had a friend that was unemployed once and he had no computer, so he had to go to the library to use one.  At home, he had all this time to kill, so he invested in the full blown monster digital cable package, and he was quite satisfied with that.  Spending your EI cheque on entertainment is important, and there seems to be a relationship to the balance between computer and internet.  The bottom line is, if you want serious entertainment on the cheap, it will cost you approximately $40-$75 a month.  This is a scientific fact I pulled out of my head.  It was there, so that makes it a fact.  What is also there is the fact that you NEED this stuff.  TV and internet are NECESSITIES for the successfully unemployed.  They are not frill items, so think wisely, and do the math on how much entertainment/time burn value these important things give you.   I was unemployed with no TV or internet before, and my booze expense went through the roof!  Be warned.

You are unemployed.  If you drink like I do, you have no money for golfing, skiing, baseball games, hockey games, or anything.  Cut down the booze/dope/smokes expense and you will be able to do more of that stuff.  I really don’t care about golfing, skiing, baseball games or anything else.  I have no life and am extremely boring.  But I’m happy with that.

3.  Relationships.

Here’s another topic that books and books have been written about, and there is lots of BS information on the net, so I’ll just touch on pogey-time relationships.  That hasn’t been written about too much.  There are family relationships with your folks, grandparents and siblings, buddy relationships, and sex relationships.

When you are unemployed, your parents, grandparents and siblings just want you to get a job and be happy.  Your grandparents or parents might have you over and slip you twenty bucks for cleaning their driveway or windows or something.  Do this even though you will not want to.  Some of my fondest memories of my grandfather are when I went over to his house to paint his soffits or rake some leaves while on the poge.  When you are working, your grandparents get the kid next door to do this stuff, and you are too busy getting drunk on the weekend to drown out the realities of your crappy life, so you can’t cut any grass.  Use the happiness time of unemployment to get a free lunch at your parents’ or grandparents’.  It is worth it.  Your siblings won’t give you any money. This is not good, nor bad.  It’s just a fact.

Your buddies can really make or break an unemployment stint.  If you party with them ALL of the time, you are going to be broke ALL of the time.  This will rack up your credit cards, destroy a good diet, and make you feel like garbage.  I know.  I have done this.  It is much better to say “no” to going to the bar.  You are unemployed.  You can not afford to go to the bar.  Get drunk at home or house parties, NO BARS!  GOT IT?  And if you want to get laid without caring about the chick, just get a hooker.  It is cheaper than going to the bar per sex session.   Hookers are also cheaper than wives too, but they don’t cook.  Wives, pay attention.  A husband will put up with a LOT of your crap if you cook.  If you don’t cook, get ready for the divorce.

All people are different, and that goes for significant others too.  Right now I have a chickie-pooh that doesn’t mind having a boyfriend that is laid off.  She’s cool, but also the exception to the rule.  Most chicks like money- or the potential to get money.  So if you’re a laid off doctor, you’re still in good shape to get a chick.  If you are a laid off roofer, you’re in big trouble- chick wise.  I have never had a chick leave me when I was unemployed, but I have been single and laid off, and women stay far away when they find you drunk in a bar and you are unemployed.  That being said, sex is available to any man if he lowers his standards enough.   Stay away from chicks with kids.  Single moms will never have an abortion if one of your swimmers makes it past the latex, then you’re in a heap of trouble.  I also think no one should get married unless they want to have kids.  It’s just not worth it, and no one takes marriage seriously nowadays anyways.  Typical white English speaking North American women of this generation are a pain in the butt.  I don’t get them because they are insane.  They get a bit better when they get older though.

If your old lady leaves you when you are unemployed, that is a good thing- if you don’t have kids.  If you do have kids, get a job ASAP.  You need to set a good example, and you have responsibilities.  Live up to them even if it almost kills you.  That is your job as a parent, and being a parent is a lot of work.  That’s why I will never have kids.  They would get in the way of my lifestyle too much.

I really don’t know much about relationships.  I’m a guy.

4. Transportation.

While riding the poge, you may need to get around.  Leave the car at home if possible.  You need the exercise, and cars are expensive.  Are you still making that car payment?  What a waste of money.  Now that you’re unemployed, you don’t need to go anywhere really.  Never, never, never buy a new car.  Oh, but you need something reliable?  Get a Toyota or a Honda that is ten years old.  This is your best bang for the buck for transportation.   I bought a Cadillac recently, and it sucks way too much gas.  So I am a hypocrite.  Hey, we all have our vices.  My next car will be Japanese though.  Maybe German if I can afford it.

While on pogey, always remember that you have lots of time, and no money.  Make your choices accordingly.  This is also a great time to shop around for car insurance.  You have lots of time to call insurance companies and do the math on how to save money.  Give it a try.

You also have lots of time to try car repairs.  Give that a try.

Get a bus map, and keep it at home, so you know where you can get to.  Riding the bus while intoxicated is OK.  Driving is not.

When you are unemployed, you will be tempted to drive drunk.  This is VERY expensive if you get caught, and your life will be drastically altered for the worse for a while.  In Canada this is also a criminal offence and it will stay on your record thus limiting the amount of jobs you can get when the pogey train stops a rollin’.  It is much cheaper to take a cab home from parties for ten years than get busted once for drunk driving.  When crossing into the United States, you could be turned back one day if the Nazi border guard is having a bad day and sees a criminal offence pop up on his Big Brother screen.  You don’t need this.

5.  Communication.

All of this time off is also a great time to shop around for long distance plans, get a cheaper internet connection maybe or set up some kind of voice over IP system on your computer.

Think cheap on this stuff too.  Probably the WORST trend nowadays is for people to have cell phones.  You are unemployed.  You do not NEED a cell phone.  Ditch the cell phone.  OH, but it’s only sixty-five bucks a month?  A regular land line with no long distance plan is twenty five bucks a month.  The money you save can be put towards a weekend camping trip or more booze, or more booze on a camping trip.  If you don’t need a cell phone for work, you do not need a cell phone.  They are one of the biggest wastes of money around.  They are great for organizing nights out at the bar, but that is the only thing they are good for if you are not using one for work, and those are both luxuries you can not afford now.  Stay out of the bar, ditch the cell phone.

Your internet connection is now very important.  As a man of leisure, you will be downloading a torrent of torrents to watch freebie movies and TV.  Make sure you have an unlimited amount of downloads.  Call up your internet service provider to ensure this is the case, or you could be on the hook for a whopper of a bill one day.  What the hell?  You have lots of time on your hands.  Make a few phone calls and do some Google searches.

There are some awesome VOIP thingies out there like Skype and the Magic Jack.  I have used both, and they are acceptable for those long distance conversations that always take two hours.  They are still not as good as a regular phone, but they’re acceptable.  If you are like me and babble like some old lady a lot on the phone, I highly recommend these two services.  My Skype has saved me hundreds of dollars.  Google search these things, and make a decision if it’s right for you.

6.  Finances.

Probably the most boring topic in the world.  I hate talking about money because I don’t have any.  People that talk about money all of the time generally have some, and they’re not very fun.  They also work all of the time, so this book is not for them.  You are unemployed.  You are BROKE!  You have no money.  What is there to discuss?  Well, this is yet another topic that has been written to death.  There are hundreds of books out there that discuss money.  If you want to use your unemployment time to read them, and get rich once you get a job, fine.  But I’ll tell you right now- unless you were born rich, chances are you will never be rich.  Sure it can happen through lottery, or EXTREME hard work over many, many years where you sacrifice a LOT of partying, but if you have read this book so far, you have not won the lottery, and you are not a hard worker, therefore, you will NEVER be rich.  Abandon that idea.  You will at best be middle class or so.  That’s the way our society is engineered.  The rules of the game are set up so the rich stay rich or get richer, and the middle class stays the same or slips down a bit.  Why?  Because the rich make the rules of the game, and they depend on the working class to support them.  It’s that simple.  The manager does not produce anything for the betterment of society, the worker does.  How does this relate to your personal finances?  I’m not sure, but thanks for letting me indulge in class warfare a bit.

The best financial advice I could give is to never get a credit card.  They are designed to enslave the working class.  OR if you do get a credit card, go whole hog and max out as much credit as you can, but keep it in cash under your mattress.  Let’s just say you have fifty thousand dollars cash in a box in your room, and you owe sixty thousand to creditors.  If you declare bankruptcy, you don’t have to pay this back.  MORE FREE MONEY!  Corporations do this all of the time and it is an acceptable practice.  Individuals can legally do it too, but our corporate masters have brainwashed us through Judeo-Christian values that we have to pay back our debts.  Sure, paying back debts is what a good Judeo-Christian does, but no one goes to church any more, and besides, wasn’t the notion of interest shot down in the Bible, or whatever other religious book you prefer?  Sure it was.  So if they changed the rule on the charging of interest, why didn’t we change our rules on paying them back?  Because the rich make the rules and enslave the worker.  I’m not saying it’s bad.  I’m just saying that’s the way it is.  Half of the reason I like being unemployed is because it makes me feel good to not pay for some shop owner jerk’s Ferrari.  I might have ranted about this before.

So I was watching TV the other day, and I learned something.  TV in conjunction with Google to research further expands your IQ by five to ten points.  I just made that up, but I always feel smarter after watching TV.  What I learned was on some infomercial for some chick’s financial advice book.  She always wears long jackets to camouflage her big hips.  If forget her name.  But she said if you rack up a pile of debt, it is because you are living a lie.  I thought that was good financial advice.  You are unemployed.  You are BROKE!  Admit it.  Know it.  Live it.  You have NO money to spend on anything except essentials.  Of course for me, beer is an essential.  Beer is essential to my happiness, so that is why my credit cards are through the roof.  Oh well, I’m lucky I am making maximum pogey.  I’ll survive.

Also, if you have RRSPs, try not to cash them in when you are on pogey.  I have amassed a whopping thousand dollars in an RRSP, that when I checked is now worth seven hundred and fifty dollars.  The next time I am unemployed in a few years, I might REALLY need that retirement investment.  At that time, it should be worth at least fifty bucks and I can get a case of overpriced, sin tax-laden beer.

In a nutshell, here’s my financial advice.  Don’t spend any money.   Is that unrealistic?  Yeah, but do your best.  Being true to yourself is the most important thing, if you are true to yourself, the money will come.  That’s what I hear.  I’m 39 and broke- but still hopeful!

7.  Spirituality.

I am an atheist.  So this doesn’t really apply to me in the organized religion sense.  I, like all human beings, have to come to grips with believing in something bigger than myself.  Our brains are wired that way, otherwise we’d go nuts when we can’t figure out life’s questions and stuff like that.  I personally believe that when a daddy and a mommy love each other very much, or at least a little bit and have some tequila, they get horny like all other animals and mate.  The female has a baby like all the rest of the animals.  The baby grows up like all the rest of the animals, falls in love and has tequila and has more babies, then the original baby that is now an adult dies.  To stop the spread of disease, the dead body is put in the ground where bugs and bacteria eat the corpse.  The bugs and bacteria poop out nitrogen which goes into plants which give oxygen for animals to breathe.  Stuff like that.  I believe in my belonging to an ecosystem which is bigger than me.  I am a part of nitrogen transfer.

Now if you believe in a God or Gods, cool!  I think all religions are great.  They generally have some books that tell you to be cool or kill people depending on what you read between the lines.  Religion is the opiate of the masses.  Did someone ever say that before?  I don’t know.  But I think when you have lots of time off, you can really get your head on straight with a lot of big issues.  So if you want to hit the church more to check out the hot church chicks while you’re on pogey, that’s a good idea.  If you wanna check out being a Muslim, give it a try.  I don’t really know any Muslims, but the ones that I have met that drive cabs and sell smokes in the corner store, or shawarmas to me when I’m drunk seem like nice enough fellas.  If you want to go Jewish, I don’t know much about that.  They say they’re a race, but I think you can join the race or something, which is confusing to me.  I can’t all of a sudden start calling myself an Oriental.  I don’t have black hair.  Maybe I could learn an Asian language and become half Oriental or something.   Are you even allowed to say Oriental anymore?  Am I racist because I say that most people in Asia have black hair?  I don’t know.  I’ll never be in the position to hire a minority, so I don’t think I’ll be able to not discriminate that way.  But then again, there are more Chinese people in the world than Canadians, so maybe I am a minority?  There are more employed people than unemployed people in Canada, so I’m a minority in that respect.  I think I will consider my pogey to be a minority cultural grant today.

The aspect of your personality that deals with some side of spirituality is a good one to reflect on while you’re on pogey.  Don’t get too radical with anything though.  If you do some kind of suicide bombing, it will interfere with your future ability to get pogey, play video games and drink beer, so don’t do it.  That’s what I believe.

8. Education/Self Improvement

One of the best things about our pogey social safety net is the free money you get for retraining.  There are all kinds of programs and courses you can take.  The best thing is that this will often extend your benefits if you start your training at the end of your benefit period.  MORE FREE MONEY!!  Always good.  I guess you will be able to get a different kind of job, too with some extra training.

One of the most fun things I did while on the poge a few years ago was get a freebie truck driver license.  They practically give them away!  The government thinks there is always a huge shortage of truck drivers.  This is sort of true.  But driving a truck is kind of a crappy job if you don’t like to drive a lot.  I mean, you have to LOVE driving to be a trucker.  I gave it a shot once and it wasn’t for me.  It was really cool blasting that big horn and listening to country music in my big 18 wheeler, but it was stressful too with all of the traffic and such.  There is also the fear that you will kill some family in a minivan that cuts you off.  They do this a lot.  They see their exit, cut in front of you and slam on their brakes.  All of you minivan drivers- STOP DOING THIS!!!  A big rig takes a half a kilometer to stop from highway speed.  Another neat thing I learned from my truck driving course is that it takes about three seconds from the time a truck driver sees a panic stop situation until the brakes actually apply.  The first two seconds is for the decision making process and moving the foot to the brake pedal, then the other second is a delay in the air braking system to actually apply the brakes.  Big trucks use compressed air instead of brake fluid to stop the wheels from moving.

There are lots of other pogey retraining programs you can get into.  If this is your bag, then at the first pogey meeting you attend, ask someone about it.  I found the pogey retraining ladies to be SUPER helpful when I did this.  I was really amazed that these civil servants actually did their jobs, and did them well.

Even if the retraining doesn’t get you a job after you do the course or courses, don’t sweat it.  Learning is cool.  It makes you smarter, and being smarter will really help you out in future unemployment periods, because you will have the mental capacity to enjoy the poge and see other opportunities.  Being smarter might not get you any more cash, but it doesn’t hurt.  If you are fearful about retraining, that’s natural.  The unexpected can be scary.  Maybe you did crappy in high school.  The reason you did crappy in high school is because you didn’t show up, or were lazy or drunk or stoned.  All educational programs are set up so that if you show up every day sober, you will squeak through.  You might have to read a book too.  That’s no big deal.  You’re unemployed!  You have lots of time to read!  I recommend doing any kind of homework in the morning.  I’m writing this book in the mornings, because that’s when I am most mentally alert.

Have a coffee before a test, and chew gum during the test.  This has been shown to boost marks just a little bit.

Never study more than an hour without taking a break.  Your average attention span is an hour, that’s why your average Joe Blow movie is an hour and a half long.  When you’re becoming mentally fatigued after watching the movie for an hour, the BIG THING happens!  Someone gets killed, the boy kisses the girl, they find out what they were looking for was a fake!  This wakes up your brain, and then you coast for the rest of the movie- not worrying about the story wrapping up in the next half-hour.  Generally speaking, attention span decreases.  The first hour, you’re cool, take a ten minute break, then you’re good for fifty minutes, take a ten minute  break, then you’re good for forty minutes- and so on until after about five hours, your brain is mush, and you might as well grab a beer.

Keep in mind that the pogey office wants to get you a JOB, so if you are thinking about getting pogey money to work on your Master’s Degree in Ancient Greek Literature, uh, you’ll have to hit the student loan system, unless you can get an Ancient Greek Literature job lined up and get a letter from the prospective employer saying he or she will hire you.

But life is not about work.  Work sucks.  I’m still waiting for my ship to come in and get my dream job of being paid to drink beer, fly planes, ride motorcycles and do nothing.  Of course I’ll have to keep the beer on ice until I’m done riding and flying, but that’s the dream.  What the hell, dreaming is free.  And I’m on the poge, so dreaming is a good pastime.

One last thing about grabbing a new job after some pogey retraining- the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side, BUT if you give something a try, you will be able to lie on your death bed without the regret of never trying something.  I’m not sure, but I think regret when you are old is responsible for ten percent of all deaths.  The other ninety percent of deaths are caused by lack of oxygen to brain cells.  This is a scientific fact.

9.  Housework

If you are highly unemployable, chances are you detest housework.  You derive no great satisfaction in keeping an impeccable house.  That’s the way I am.  It is moderately nice to have a clean apartment only because when people show up, there is less chance of them seeing the effects of you being the bummy guy that you are.  The way I keep a moderately clean apartment is through a nice combination of booze and music.  I call this the “Clean Up Party”.  Quite often I have a “Dishes Party” or a “Floor Cleaning Party”.  Housework is much more enjoyable under the influence of a three beer buzz and some great tunes on the stereo.  If weed is your thing, then maybe you’d like to listen to some Grateful Dead while stoned and mopping a floor.  I’m not sure how that works, because most extreme potheads I’ve ever met just want to play video games or stare at a candle and discuss quantum physics.  They don’t seem too jazzed up to dust a shelf.  But I could be wrong.  Maybe moderate dope smoking will be OK, but I’m just guessing here.

The three beer buzz is probably the optimum buzz, as you are still highly functional, happy, mobile, (don’t drive with a three beer buzz) and you don’t slur your words yet.

These various parties are best done alone, so you don’t get into drinking contests with other people around you.  When you have a solo “Clean Up Party”, it’s pretty simple.  Have a few drinkie-poohs, turn up some energetic music, and start cleaning.  Take as many breaks as you feel necessary, and remember that the cleaning is NOT the most important thing.  The most important thing is to enjoy yourself and the cleaning is a side benefit.  Even if you don’t finish cleaning anything up, at least you made a dent in the dirt and it will be easier the next time you clean up.  Like next week or something.

Those of you who think drinking alone is a bad thing, or drinking to excess every once in a while is a bad thing, well, OK.  I’m glad you are buying into the propaganda and enjoying it.  Now if you slam a forty of vodka when you get up in the morning, yes, you have a problem.  Get help.  Or just stop doing that.  Also, slamming a forty of vodka before noon is breaking one of my Commandments, so you can’t do that while unemployed.  Unless you are camping, of course, and even still, I think you might have a problem.  But as long as you are happy, and you haven’t damaged your liver yet, hey, fill your boots I guess.

I made up a joke while being preached to by the local health authority in Sault Ste. Marie.  Apparently some aviation students were experimenting with some drugs, and the whole class needed to be reminded that shooting heroin is a bad thing.  Anyways, they were saying that if you drink over four beers in a “drinking session” you could have a problem.  Here’s the joke:

What do you call a Canadian who drinks five beers in “a session” then goes to bed?

-  A problem drinker.

What do you call a Scotsman who drinks five beers in “a session” then goes to bed?

-          A lightweight.

You see, booze is a cultural thing too.  Every society in the world has it, almost.  So that leads me to believe that it is an escape that humans need.  The societies that don’t have booze in them don’t function very well, in my opinion.  Ironic, eh?

Oh well, I don’t want this book to be an instruction manual on how to become an alcoholic, but booze is a big part of many people’s lives, and as such it should be mentioned as it pertains to pogey.  All things in moderation, blah, blah, blah.  Done.  This includes housework too.  If you spend all day cleaning your house, you are a cleanaholic.  Get help.  It’s not normal.  If you spend all day golfing, and it’s ruining your job, home life and finances, you are a golfaholic.  Get help.  It’s not normal.

Other little housework tips are to watch how you spend your money when cleaning stuff.  You are unemployed.  You are broke.  Don’t go out and buy the latest cleaning craze stuff.  Just use what you have, unless you run out- then you’ll have to buy some more.  When shopping for some cleaning product, just look for the active ingredient in the name brand product and make sure the cheap generic brand has the same amount of active ingredient.  This works for glass cleaner and stuff.  Another thing I can recommend is buying Cascade or Palmolive for dishes.  These are the best- and with Palmolive, once the bottle is half full, just top it up with water.  The stuff is so concentrated, you can do this and stretch out the life of the dish soap with minimal consequences.  So you’re really not ahead by buying cheap dish soap.

When it comes to Cascade stretching, I have never been able to do this.  I tried putting laundry soap in a dishwasher once.  This does not work.  Trust me.  There were soap bubbles leaking all over the floor in the kitchen and it made a big mess.  It was pretty funny though.

I don’t really clean up that much, and am not a neat freak, so I can’t comment too much on the housework aspect of unemployment.  Besides, if you’re a guy, who cares?  We only clean the toilet when girls are coming over anyways.  Man I hate cleaning the toilet.

10.  DANGERS OF UNEMPLOYMENT

I saved this for last in this chapter, because you always keep the best for last, right?  Well, I do usually.  Need I remind you, this book is for me?  OK.  I just did.

I have already touched on a few of these things, and I’ll do it again because though unemployment can be the best time of your life, it can also go sour on you if you don’t pay attention to your own personal dangers.  I’ll talk about mine, and you might get something from it.

VICES- We have virtues and vices.  Good things about us and bad things about us.  So a vice could be booze, dope, golf, washing the car, excessive laziness, whatever you think it is for you.

Watch the booze and dope.  Yes, here he goes again talking about this stuff.  Preach, preach, blah, blah- but it’s TRUE!  I have gone off the Richter scale with booze consumption because of depression in the past.  It doesn’t help you’re bummed-out state.  (This is the clinical psychology term for depression- bummed-out state.)  Well, it can help temporarily, but then when you’re hung over the next day you will probably feel even worse about your life.  Remember that good three beer buzz and try to maintain it.  A tip I have is mix in some non-alcoholic beers.  You’ll be surprised how this works, but there is only one good non-alcoholic beer on the market.  President’s Choice Red Brew.  If you’re into the booze hard- like maybe you’re up at a six to ten beer buzz, switch over to one of these babies, and I defy you to tell the difference in taste.  And at that point, you’re pretty sloshed anyways, so you really don’t need another beer anyhow.  That’s what I do.

Dope is another vice I’ve seen the unemployed get into a little too much.  Anything other than weed, I just say get off the stuff.  It’s not regulated, it’s not natural, and it’s scary.  Some hard drugs are physically and mentally addictive, and some are VERY addictive in those ways.  Besides, before you spark up that rock, or shoot that junk, just imagine yourself prostituting yourself to get more of it, or stealing your grandmother’s money out of her purse.  Not cool.  Get hooked on the hard stuff, and this very well could happen.  It sounds stupid, but just say “NO”.

Now weed, on the other hand, is not physically addictive like booze or heroin, but it can be mentally addictive like anything, and the Chronic lifestyle can make you so lazy you won’t enjoy your pogey.  I guess you could grow your own patch of weed to save money, but remember, it is still technically illegal in Canada.  Cops don’t care much if you are carrying one joint, but if you are growing a crop of weed, they assume you will sell it,  and if you are on pogey, you are short on cash, so you probably will sell some.  This gets into a bad illegal thing where if you’re busted, you will bankrupt yourself on lawyer fees, court costs and fines and stuff.   I have seen this happen to people.  Your friend Tommy definitely knows people that have been in this situation.  Are you still hanging around Tommy?  Ugh!  What am I going to do with you?!?

Besides, lawyers gladly take the poor pothead’s money for this stuff.  They laugh at their clients behind their backs as they drive their big cars.  Don’t be the butt of their jokes.

If you do grow your own weed, don’t tell ANYONE- especially not Tommy.  I really mean this.  If you can’t keep a secret, don’t grow dope.  Don’t grow it on your property, and keep the number of plants to a minimum.  The more plants you have the bigger the fine, and if you don’t have the money, the more jail time you get.

If weed were legal, I don’t know if I would grow it.  I’d probably stick to tomatoes.   There’s nothing better than a toasted tomato sandwich made with a garden-ripened tomato.  This is a fact.

Smoking cigarettes is definitely a vice.  Everyone knows every “fact” about tobacco, so I’m not even going to talk about it, except to say if you are going to buy smokes, go to the local Indian Reserve and buy them there.  They’re cheap, and it is 100 percent legal to buy them there and take them home for personal consumption.  You do not need Indian Status or anything.  Anyone can do it.  The only thing illegal about it is if you start selling them.  From a health standpoint, stay away from the “Bag O’ Smokes”.  They are the cheapest, but I know a guy who has a friend that works at the local health unit and they dissected these smokes and found dirt, string, fingernails and a bunch of other gross stuff.  It’s basically what the big tobacco companies sweep off of the floor, and because the Native are ripe for genocide, they give them to the Natives.  Genocide?!?!?!  Pretty inflammatory, but how else do you explain how they have been and still are treated by Whitey?  You don’t know about it?  Yes you do.  You just don’t care.  That’s why you vote Liberal and Conservative all of the time.  I’m not judging you, but why would you vote for them?  The Liberals and Conservatives are bad for people on pogey.  You shouldn’t vote for them.  Just about every other party is pogey friendly.  Vote for those guys.  If you don’t vote, well, don’t be surprised if your pogey benefits are cut.

DEPRESSION is a major danger of pogey.  I’ll say again- it is not your fault that you are unemployed.  The elite rulers of the economy shrink it every once in a while to get richer.  You are just a “victim” of that.  Though, really, I don’t see how getting a nine month paid vacation is bad thing.  Or your wiener of a boss didn’t like your face so he wanted you gone.  That’s not bad either.  He was a jerk anyways.

But still, until you wrap your head around these concepts, it can be depressing losing your job.  Stick to the Ten Commandments of Pogey, and this will alleviate a lot of depression.

I’m not Dr. Phil.  I can’t wave a magic wand and get rid of your depression.  I’ll just say “Don’t worry, be happy!”  just like all of the other self help books.  They all end up saying that, anyways, so I’ll cut to the chase and say “ditto”.

Be mindful that depression can bum you out, but try not to dwell on it.  Easier said than done, but if you try, maybe next time you’re unemployed it will go easier.  Life always has a way of working itself out.

RELATIONSHIPS on the dole are a handful sometimes, and I can’t comment on it too much, but basically if you are with a greedy, selfish bitch, you’re in trouble whether you are unemployed or not.  Unless your wife or girlfriend is an exception to the rule, you’re in deep doo-doo.  Keep wearing the condom until she dumps your unemployed ass.  KEEP WEARING THE CONDOM, unless you want some kids to make your relationship even worse.  I’ll say again, KEEP WEARING THE CONDOM.  Do not leave it up to her, because when women are single they remember to take the birth control pill.  When they are in a relationship, they become forgetful.  The pill is still not one hundred percent effective, so the dome on the willy is the only thing you can do to stay out of trouble with some certainty.  That, or oral or anal sex all of the time, and I haven’t ever heard of a woman that only does that.

MONEY or lack thereof is a danger.  Because of all of this time on your hands, you will be tempted to blow lots of cash to while away the time or kill some boredom or buy some happiness.  I got a credit card once when I was unemployed.  I was drunk in the afternoon, and a nice telemarketer called me up, asked a few questions and sent me a card.  With the loan shark interest rates that credit card companies charge, extending yourself more with credit is VERY dangerous on the poge.  It didn’t take long for me to max out that little baby once I got it, and I had nothing to show for it.  So be realistic.  You are unemployed.  You are broke.  This is reality.  Stay at home and spend no money.

Yeah, that advice is totally unrealistic, but if you say that to yourself enough, it will affect your purchases, and that will hopefully give you less debt to pay off when you get a job again.  Yes, you will get a job again.  This is a fact.  An unfortunate fact, so it’s time to deal with it.  Now THAT’s depressing!  But as the French speakers say- c’est la vie!  Literally translated it means “it is the life”, but us dirty Anglos say “that’s life”- just like everything on a box in a grocery store is not literally translated.  Teddy Graham’s are literally translated as “Little Bears”.  You must have to be really creative to be an English to French translator.  Are you bilingual?  Are you creative?  Maybe being a translator would be a decent job for you.  Probably a crappy job, like most of them, but it will pay the bills until you can get on EI again.  Sigh.  Let’s start job hunting.  The party is almost over.

Chapter 5- The Party’s Over- Time to Get a Job

This is the time in a person’s life where reality sets in.  It has been a good ride so far!  You have a nice little routine built up consisting of adequate amounts of social time, couch time, video game time, and you have gotten used to being relatively broke.  Maybe your beard is full grown, maybe your hair is long enough to require a baseball cap to hide the afro.  That’s gonna change, unfortunately.

About four to six weeks before your pogey runs out, you will have to start looking for a job.  Check this date on your unemployment calendar.  What?  You didn’t mark it on there?  You should have.  Do that now.  This is a really important date.  You must know when you will have zero cash coming in.  Welfare is not an option.  Don’t even consider it at this point.  The people in the welfare office are not as nice as the people in the pogey office.  Quite often they are hidden behind bullet proof glass and security doors, which means they can be as bitchy as they want with no consequences.  And they are bitchy.  You don’t want to deal with such heartless scum.  The rules of welfare state that you must bankrupt yourself before you get a dime.  And that’s all they pay, pretty much.  Welfare pays just enough to live in a crappy room above the divey hotel bar with all of the junkies and prostitutes and smelly old guys where you can heat up soup on a hot plate.  You don’t want to share the bathroom down the hall from these people.

At four to six weeks remaining pogey, you have these two options.  Be a bum for the rest of your life, or get a job again and start re-stocking for the next round of pogey.

This will be my shortest chapter, because I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.  Do a Google search on “finding a job” or “how do I find a better job” you will literally find millions of hits on this stuff.  Everyone and their uncle is a job hunting expert- and they write books on that crap.  I’ll tell you what I do, and you can see if it makes sense.

I’m a lazy guy, so I don’t like to leave the house to look for a job.  This is where my fax machine comes in.  Fax a bunch of resumes.  That’s it.  The end.

I’m serious, that’s all you have to do.  If you fax out a thousand resumes, you will get a job.  Start this four to six weeks before the end of your pogey vacation.

Sure, there is the whole trendy “networking” and “calling to confirm that they got your fax”.   I’m way too lazy for that.  The only calling I do is to call up the place because I could only get their phone number in the phone book, and I ask the secretary for the fax number.  Just do a fax blast, and you will get a job.  It might be a crappy job.  In all probability, it WILL be a crappy job, but they’re pretty much all crappy.  It’s called “life”, and you just have to deal with it.

The only exception to fax blast rule is if you are trying to get a job in a new line of work that you have never done before.  Let’s say you were working as a drywall helper.  You have no skills.  No, drywall is not a skill.  Anything you can do while stoned or drunk is not a skill.  If you are a master-super-king of drywall, yeah, that’s a skill, but those guys don’t smoke up on the job.  Average Joe Blow drywalling in the basement or attic of a house is no big deal.  Let’s say you want to apply for the position of Office Grunt.   Usually the Office Grunt requires a Bachelor of Arts degree, or a college diploma in Office Management, or big hair and big tits.  Those are the requirements.  If you have all three, you will be working for the head of the company in a year, most likely.  Actually, if you have all three of those requirements, you will probably never be unemployed.  Ladies, keep the looks, don’t get fat, and you will most likely never be out of work.

OK, now that I think of it, maybe I won’t use the Office Grunt as an example.  I have never applied for that job.  I think you need to read one of the million office job books out there.  They mention “contacts”.  You have to get them, I’m pretty sure.

I can tell you how I got into a General Machinist apprenticeship starting from no experience.  I never took machine shop in high school or college.  I just knew that if you do an apprenticeship, you can start off at basically minimum wage, and go to a living wage in about five or six years with minimal schooling and school debt.

First, I made up a standard, one page resume.  No spelling mistakes, simple white paper, you know, all of the basics you can get online, or in any employment book.

Second, I drove around to every tool and die, mold and machine shop in Windsor.  At any place where I knew someone that worked there, I dropped the name to the secretary.  “Bob told me to pop by and drop off a resume.”  Then they would say, “Oh Bob?  Thanks!”  Then they would go back to managing the office- which basically means answering the phone and putting payroll numbers into a computer program.

After about forty shops, and no results, I came across a little shop called Omni Tool.   The secretary said, “Hang on a minute.  The owner always likes to talk to everyone who drops off a resume.”  I thought, “Cool!”

The guy came out and looked over my resume, and asked, “Did you take shop in high school?”  I said, “No, but I really want to learn tool and die, or anything, really.  I’ll push a broom to prove myself.”

He looked at the resume again, “You are probably pretty smart.  I mean it says here you took some calculus, so you can definitely handle the math we do.  But you don’t know ANYTHING when it comes to drilling a hole.  If you had ANYTHING at all related to machining, I’d hire you on the spot, but you don’t, so I just can’t.  We’re so busy, we can’t train anyone from scratch right now.  Sorry.  But don’t lose hope.  Try applying at the shop next door and at the other one across the road.  I know they’re looking for someone, but they’re in the same situation as me.  Take a course or two at the college, then come back to me.  We’ll see.”

I was a bit bummed out, but that was still pretty good feedback, so not too bummed.  This led me to taking an introductory CNC programming course at St. Clair College through the Continuing Education program.  CNC is a fancy acronym which means a computer controls a machine.  One little crappy course in programming, and I still didn’t know how to drill a hole, but it was something, so I figured I could get a job at Omni Tool.

Just as I was finishing the course, I ran into a guy at a bar who worked in the office at a different machine shop.  His name was Craig.  I was hammered out of my gourd, and mentioned that I was almost done an introductory CNC programming course.  I didn’t think much of it, then I got the news a couple of weeks later that Craig came into the bar looking for me, and told the bartender to tell me the next time she saw me to apply at his company.

I did, and the rest was history.  I now have my papers as a General Machinist, lots of work experience, so I’m relatively employable.

The owner at Omni Tool also gave me a call just after I started at this other company asking if I had finished a machining course, and if I could work for him.  I had to tell him I had already started at another company, but I thanked him profusely for his advice early on, and he wished me luck.

About a year into working at my first machine shop, I also heard a funny story.  It turns out there was a mix up of sorts.  Because I dropped Craig’s name, the foreman assumed I was a good friend of his, and hired me- it wasn’t until later that he found out I had only met the guy once in a bar!

Life has a funny way of turning out.

When it comes to applying for a job in a new field, it can be helpful to show up in person here and there.  Education can be very helpful too.  Pogey can give you some training, and I highly recommend you give it a shot.  Don’t believe a damn thing that society tells you.  An old dog CAN learn new tricks.  Take it from an almost middle aged dog.

Oh yeah, and get a nice Born Again Christian haircut, and shave the beard.  People DO judge you on first impressions.  This has been proven time and time again by lots of PhDs who study psychology and all of that stuff.  Don’t believe me?  Google it.

To summarize this last little chapter- get a job.

In Conclusion…

I hope you enjoyed this book.  I enjoyed writing it.  It helped me make my ideas about unemployment a bit more formalized in my head- so this book will definitely help me the next time I’m unemployed.  I hope it will help you a bit.

Unemployment is like any other thing in life.  You can let it bum you out, or you can be determined to see the bright side of it.  If you choose, you can make a blend of negative and positive to your own tastes.  Oh man, I just sounded like when I was a busboy at that Mexican restaurant when they made me say the same stupid spiel to all of their customers when I handed out the “warm corn tortilla chips”  with the hot (put hot salsa on table) and mild (put mild salsa on table) salsas for them to “enjoy”.  Ugh.  I can feel my blood pressure rising as I relive that horror in my head.  Man, am I glad I don’t work as a busboy anymore.

Dr. Phil writes about your “authentic self” and in his book Self Matters he talks about it more with a bunch of fancy questionnaires and stuff.  Psychologists love questionnaires.  I took it out of the library just for kicks about a month ago when I left the house… like I do every unemployed day.  I started reading it, and couldn’t get too far, because I didn’t really have any dissonance in my life, and the book was for people with dissonance, mostly.  That’s a funky psychological term.  Dissonance: when you feel out of whack because you are doing something you know you shouldn’t, or you’re not living up to your potential. (That’s not from a dictionary.  I just said what I could remember.).  I like being unemployed, and I like getting free money for lying on the couch watching Star Trek the Next Generation re-runs.  I really do!  So my life on the poge is in harmony with the universe.  I will play within the rules of the pogey game to the best of my ability.  So yeah, I’ll still look for a job here and there to meet the bureaucracy’s minimum requirements.  Then I’ll go back to work and pay some more taxes to contribute to society and make the rich richer- just like our corporate masters demand us to.  Pogey is a nice little break from the insanity of the real world, which is a good thing, I think.  When I return to work after every pogey session, I feel pretty well rested and positive about life for about a month.  Then I find out my boss is a jerk, and I find out who the co-worker is that I can’t trust, then it’s back to the same old crap; but for that month, it really is nice to go to work every day.

Pogey is a nice ride if you poge well- your way, not society’s way, not your parents’ way, not anyone else’s way, maybe not even my way.  Allow yourself the freedom to be you.  Consider EI a peace of mind grant.  Do whatever you feel like doing.  I don’t know.  Like I said, I’m not an expert at anything.  Life will go on, regardless of what I say or anyone else says.  There is no single way to ride the pogey train.  This is a fact.

Enjoy the ride!

The Pogey Manifesto is now in cyberspace!

The Pogey Manifesto is a book I started writing last year.  I’ve decided to put it into cyberspace and see what happens.

It’s not like any other unemployment book you’ve ever read!

Here is a small, small taste of it:

Chapter 2- You Are Now Laid Off

Day 1- First thing to do is get RIP SNORTING DRUNK.  Unless you’re an alcoholic.  Don’t do that.  Pig out on chocolate, or smoke an extra pack of butts and get zinged on coffee.  Do this IMMEDIATELY after receiving your pink slip, but don’t drive.  You’re unemployed now and can’t afford to lose your license.  It’s expensive.  Have some barley pops, then when you’re hung over tomorrow, get a lot of water in you and keep reading this.  Cheers!  You’re UNEMPLOYED!  You lucky bastard.  I’m jealous.

Day 2- APPLY FOR POGEY.  NOW!  THE SOONER, THE BETTER! I’M SERIOUS!!  DO THIS NOW!! Then please keep reading…

That’s what it reads like.

It is available in torrent form at isohunt.

http://isohunt.com/release/446929

It is free to share with all, so the FBI will not be kicking in your door.

ENJOY!