Productiveness can be a very subjective state.

These days, in my super ultra mega unmotivated work situation, I now assess my productivity on how many job applications I’ve sent off.

This week I’ve sent off two, which is an almost Stakhanovite display of productiveness compared to my normal output.

Thing is, I’m getting desperate.

So desperate, that I’m prepared to work for nothing.

The market for assistant psychologists is intensely competitive, not helped by the bottleneck in the system for clinical psychology training. As a consequence, many fledgling clinical psychs fail to fly the nest, meaning there’s less worms on offer for the baby birds.

Add to this the apparent general lack of NHS funding (although psychological methods of treatment are increasingly the indicated treatment for many mental health conditions) and you have conditions ripe for exploitation.

Hence I’m applying for an unpaid job for a minimum of one day a week. Maybe if I’m prepared to work five days a week unpaid then it’ll enhance my prospects...

So seeing as this all being done for the goodness of psychology, you’d think they might enhance the job to make it worthwhile.

Wrong.

Check out this little doozy in the job description:

To assist the Administrator in administrative tasks including filing, photocopying, sorting questionnaires, moving files to storage, purchasing items, information gathering and data entry.

So leaving admin land for the sunny shores of psychology still means no escape from the three Fs (filing, faxing, photocopying).

But then I am sitting next to someone who wore a dog vomit and blancmange combination outfit (picture to follow) to work yesterday. Someone who has spent the morning whining that she can’t wear flowery wellies because they draw attention to her big feet.

Maybe being broke and destitute, but being occupationally fulfilled at the same time, isn’t such a bad alternative.