Don't mind me, I'm tired and cranky.

Jobhunting is totally brutal. I don't care how intelligent you are, or if you have a degree, no one wants to know unless you have 25 thousand years experience in a similar position. Even in the best case scenario they take three weeks to interview you, then a week to decide they want you, and by then you've spent a month sitting on your butt, and your bank account is wailing.

At least today at the Department of Social and Family Affairs things went kind of smoothly. No one demanded paperwork I hadn't brought, just for the fun of it, as beaurocrats are wont to do on occasion. They just glared at my forms, glared at me, and said, "You'll get your PPS number in seven days". (PPSN is like a Tax File Number).

Is it a prerequisite for government staff to be bad-tempered? They must put out job ads like, "Are you bitter and twisted? Is your life so terrible you have to pick on other people to make yourself feel better? Become a government employee! You'll get the chance to make hundreds of people's lives hell on a daily basis, just by throwing unnecessary red tape at them! And service with a smile? Forget it!"

Either that or the job is so mindlessly boring it turns them into lunatics that want to kill you for having the cheek to ask for a form you need to get employed in their country. That said, everything went smoothly, for me anyway, not so much for the non-English speakers.

Tonight I'm going to check out a flat. I'm not expecting much since the last one I saw was the size of a postage stamp. But what can you expect when your criteria is "dirt cheapest thing I can find"? In fact, I was going to take that place, but another girl beat me to it. Yes, we're fighting over every square centimetre here. There's a housing crisis in Dublin, haven't you heard? I like living in the city though, especially after having lived in Eltham for so long. I'll probably want to move back to the suburbs eventually, but for now I'd like to try city living. I'll be glad to get out of this dorm anyway. It was fun at first, with all the cool people I was meeting. But when you've got an interview early in the morning, and you're awake till 2 am because there's people drinking on the steps of the hostel, and then at 4 am a group of six boisterous Yorkshire lads comes home from a night of boozing and wakes you again, you get over it. But it's only temporary, a little glitch on the cassette tape that is my life.