For Our Family This Horrible Year Can Finish Now

The First Mrs Izzard and I cannot wait for 31st December. Not because we’ve something fabulous planned for the evening entertainment, although we have, but as we cannot wait to see the back of this most awful of years.

There have been positives, and we must never forget them, nor to count our blessings which are abundant. After all, we still live in the Black Country, we have our boy William, our parents continue to be in excellent health and we have fantastic family and mates. So it’s not all completely dreadful, but these are the things that are permanently unmoving and not what one may consider to be ‘events’. Other than the jettisoning of Gordon Brown from Downing Street – now THAT was a wondrous occurrence!

Other things are not and here, things take a turn for the darker side. To start with, in January, I began the year out of work which was bad enough, I had anticipated being back in work fairly rapidly, but it was not to be. Then, in March my final remaining grandparent died, a wonderful lady of enormous dignity. And then in April, just after her birthday the proper bombshell, Mrs Izzard was diagnosed with breast cancer and procedures were set in train to deal with it with surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It was approximately the same time that I was informed by the DWP that I would not be getting unemployment benefit since I’d been paying the wrong kind of National Insurance, and so on top of everything else I had no income.

But then things seemed to perk up. The 1st Mrs Izzard was searching the Directgov website for job vacancies for me and found an advert promising work doing SEO. I had already done a spot of work for local companies, doing IT support and although I didn’t know what SEO actually was, I contacted the website given in the Directgov piece and in time had a call from one of the managers of the business advertising. He explained how SEO worked and explained about the job and what the company needed from me and what they would do for me. We decided to meet at a Jobcentre on the outskirts of Birmingham. I found him a charming, thoroughly nice man and we had a detailed talk about work, life, career, business and many other topics and I ended up really wanting to work alongside him. I said that although I did a bit of IT support I was not able to pay for the training myself although I really wanted to do it. He said that he would look into funding for me to cover the training because alas the company wouldn’t be able to provide it for free and it appeared reasonable.

We met again a few of weeks after that and having been informed that I was not eligible for funding I passed over a cheque for 3k that I had managed to secure from my olds in lieu of the money that my grandmother had apparently left me as an inheritance. And what a legacy! The chance to train to work from home for decent money for the long term! I began the training and it took something like 6 weeks. While the business sorted out a prospective client for me, they provided me a website they told me they had built for a business that had gone out of business, but as they owned the website they were trying to sell it and it was a good plan to have it optimised when they did. You can view it at www.2bbq.co.uk and I wrote 50 articles using various keywords to punt it up the results table.

A number of weeks passed by and as my resources drained I contacted the owners asking when I was finally going to get a a paying customer, until in early November I came across a group of people on a forum who had all gone down the self same path and it became horribly clear that there were no customers and the whole thing had been a fraud to extort training money from out of work people from all over the place, not just the Black Country like me.

So, now my own resources are almost spent as I’ve been using them to support myself and the family while waiting for the clients to come and now I know that they never will. So, being a better human than the foul scumbags who have conned me, I will find customers and do SEO myself, as well as IT support which I still offer to companies in the Black Country and we will come out of this in one piece, stronger and the inheritance cash from my nan’s legacy will be paid back and spent on something worthwhile and valuable as she wanted.

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categories: SEO,Black Country