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cimoreneSo the course all the rest of this week and next Mon-Tues: I approve of their arrangements to accommodate the pandemic; it seems basically safe and well done, and the bus commute also seems okay as long as I don't take the slow/long-route one that I took this morning (the express is less crowded and it arrives around the same time).
Being in the big city itself... there are plenty of people being responsible and wearing masks in public and trying their best but there are a stunning number of people who take the masks off as soon as they get outside, which most of the time makes sense but not so much if you're walking through a more crowded part of the city and potentially close to people. There are people riding the buses without masks against the request (it's not required and I'm going to assume that's probably against the Finnish constitution too) and I think eight people in the course I'm taking of which two aren't wearing masks (it's shocking they're allowed to endanger the rest of us but as long as you assume that the fact they're a public service prevents them from requiring it, everything else the organization is doing is reasonable and intelligent).
I'm not paralyzed with panic about it anymore, but it was a bit of a blow learning they expect us to be there nine to three seven workdays in a row. I expected from my previous knowledge that there was less meaningful content than that, and indeed there is, and most of the time so far has been filled with a lot of personality pop psych and what a CV is for people who've literally never seen one before. This is scheduled around meetings with personal counselor people and so far it appears none of the non-counselor content is going to be of any use to me, which is unfortunate ("forced to sit silently and watch an incredibly sad power point presentation by someone who isn't that great at power point and takes 5x as long to verbally explain the content as it would take to just read their substandard powerpoint content in the first place" is its own special form of torture).
To give you an idea of the content quality here, in addition to learning what a CV is, which I admit was legit for some people there who didn't have one, we spent nearly an hour hearing a summary of the THEORIES, not findings, of a guy calling himself a "future researcher" who apparently wrote an idiotic op-ed somewhere about how everyone's going to be entrepreneurs and independent contractors in the future and nobody is going to have job titles or "careers" anymore but actually that's good because it will be like a utopia where everyone does exactly what they are most good at and makes a perfectly fine living at it, which he apparently proposed is going to happen in Finland by the year 2035. Normally I am inclined to suspect an adult native speaker of Finnish would have better Finnish reading comprehension than me, but this sounds like a confused misreading of the work of one of those useless op-ed writing neocon economists... surely nowhere IN FINLAND would employ someone like this in all seriousness? I mean, Finland's not generally full of journalistic hellholes of eroded institutional legitimacy that are now just a thin front for capitalist propaganda like the New York Times. ... At least not to my knowledge.
Anyway, that's the brilliant unmissable content that is so worth Finnish social security forcing disabled people to commute around and experience face-to-face in the middle of a pandemic: worthless power points and one-on-one meetings with various advisers, so literally NOTHING that could not happen over video chat. However, I do hold out hope that later there will be some content that's more relevant: there was something mentioned about practice job interviews, that might be good.
This is all worth it, by the way, because the actual one-on-one counseling is actually useful. Although as it turns out I think if I didn't have so much executive dysfunction it wouldn't be providing me with anything I don't get from our local small town social workers, but that's just because I've learned since applying for this course and moving to Pargas that small town social workers pay 100x more attention to you and give you 100x more personalized help here than they do in Turku. It's just still help that assumes you're a responsible and more-or-less neurotypical adult who can organize yourself through the process of hunting down paying work experience positions on your own with no further guidance and without being paralyzed by anxiety or depression.
Being in the big city itself... there are plenty of people being responsible and wearing masks in public and trying their best but there are a stunning number of people who take the masks off as soon as they get outside, which most of the time makes sense but not so much if you're walking through a more crowded part of the city and potentially close to people. There are people riding the buses without masks against the request (it's not required and I'm going to assume that's probably against the Finnish constitution too) and I think eight people in the course I'm taking of which two aren't wearing masks (it's shocking they're allowed to endanger the rest of us but as long as you assume that the fact they're a public service prevents them from requiring it, everything else the organization is doing is reasonable and intelligent).
I'm not paralyzed with panic about it anymore, but it was a bit of a blow learning they expect us to be there nine to three seven workdays in a row. I expected from my previous knowledge that there was less meaningful content than that, and indeed there is, and most of the time so far has been filled with a lot of personality pop psych and what a CV is for people who've literally never seen one before. This is scheduled around meetings with personal counselor people and so far it appears none of the non-counselor content is going to be of any use to me, which is unfortunate ("forced to sit silently and watch an incredibly sad power point presentation by someone who isn't that great at power point and takes 5x as long to verbally explain the content as it would take to just read their substandard powerpoint content in the first place" is its own special form of torture).
To give you an idea of the content quality here, in addition to learning what a CV is, which I admit was legit for some people there who didn't have one, we spent nearly an hour hearing a summary of the THEORIES, not findings, of a guy calling himself a "future researcher" who apparently wrote an idiotic op-ed somewhere about how everyone's going to be entrepreneurs and independent contractors in the future and nobody is going to have job titles or "careers" anymore but actually that's good because it will be like a utopia where everyone does exactly what they are most good at and makes a perfectly fine living at it, which he apparently proposed is going to happen in Finland by the year 2035. Normally I am inclined to suspect an adult native speaker of Finnish would have better Finnish reading comprehension than me, but this sounds like a confused misreading of the work of one of those useless op-ed writing neocon economists... surely nowhere IN FINLAND would employ someone like this in all seriousness? I mean, Finland's not generally full of journalistic hellholes of eroded institutional legitimacy that are now just a thin front for capitalist propaganda like the New York Times. ... At least not to my knowledge.
Anyway, that's the brilliant unmissable content that is so worth Finnish social security forcing disabled people to commute around and experience face-to-face in the middle of a pandemic: worthless power points and one-on-one meetings with various advisers, so literally NOTHING that could not happen over video chat. However, I do hold out hope that later there will be some content that's more relevant: there was something mentioned about practice job interviews, that might be good.
This is all worth it, by the way, because the actual one-on-one counseling is actually useful. Although as it turns out I think if I didn't have so much executive dysfunction it wouldn't be providing me with anything I don't get from our local small town social workers, but that's just because I've learned since applying for this course and moving to Pargas that small town social workers pay 100x more attention to you and give you 100x more personalized help here than they do in Turku. It's just still help that assumes you're a responsible and more-or-less neurotypical adult who can organize yourself through the process of hunting down paying work experience positions on your own with no further guidance and without being paralyzed by anxiety or depression.
(no subject)
Date: 2 Dec 2020 10:46 am (UTC)Perpetual gigworkerdom is what a lot of people in the employment services wish on people, tbh. Local labour rental companies have a big foothold in the school system, as well, and it's advantageous that workers are as atomised as possible.
(Which kinda sucks for me because low-commitment and fully independent gigwork... works for me really well, lol. Took me a long time to figure out there was something wrong with the way I was being shuffled around when there was clearly a permanent position that was necessary to fill that I would have been a good fit for.)
(no subject)
Date: 4 Dec 2020 08:51 pm (UTC)Plus the idea of the Finnish law in fifteen years somehow arranging it so everybody was doing only gig work but it somehow managed to be ONLY that which they were most uniquely talented at and fulfilled by, but everybody was still getting paid well!? Is this person completely unacquainted with how slow policy and law changes in Finland or is he just so far away from reality he thinks capitalism is going to bend over backwards to arrange itself that way out of kindness?!
(no subject)
Date: 6 Dec 2020 05:39 pm (UTC)Finnish capitalists tend to be extremely naive over how nobody would wilfully treat their workers badly and that employers will just naturally trend towards maximising the wellbeing of their workforce b/c??? that's good for the company??? Like, a lot of times talking to Finnish capitalists specifically, I suddenly get the sense that what they're discussing isn't a company so much as they're discussing a co-op from the perspective of the coalition speaker, or alternatively some enlightened idea of a boss who's so good at anticipating their worker's needs they don't need unions. A Walt Disney attitude to leadership, basically.
And it's just absurd considering how often collective labour action happens in this country xD
(no subject)
Date: 7 Dec 2020 07:03 pm (UTC)Yeah sometimes I forget about those people because I've had so little contact with like, rich people, or you know, urban rich people not just upper middle class svenskatalandebättrefolk. One of the segments of Finnish society that.
(no subject)
Date: 4 Dec 2020 06:19 pm (UTC)This has been a bureaucratic nightmare for you along with all the personal and remodeling stuff!
HUGS
(no subject)
Date: 4 Dec 2020 08:53 pm (UTC)