The training I was offered was as follows - a long list of things a few of which I said "I'll be happy to try that" only to be told that all but one of the options offered had in fact been cut from the scheme due to budget contraints. The option left was training to be an IT help desk person. "What's wrong with that?" you might ask. Well I had actually pointed that the last time I did anything like that I ended up on anti-depressants and in counselling for 2 1/2 years and so I didn't really think it was a good idea.

So I ended up in what I called the stink room*. This basically meant that the new deal training consisted of spending all day in a room with people, some of whom had serious mental problems, some of whom stole stuff off each other and some of whom would happily turn a crossword puzzle problem into a physical confrontation. The bulk of the day required you to be in a room scanning the job pages or doing word puzzles. Very self-improving - one sense of worth came on in leaps and bounds. Very occasionally a representatibe of "A4E" (Action for Employment!) would offer someone a 6 -week stint of unpaid work "experience". On the first day of the 'course" we were told that we were here because "The system had failed.." us. In a way it had. My tenure in the stink room actively prevented me from getting out and about and selling myself and looking for the opportunities I was seeking. To be honest this felt less like help and encouragement and more like a punitive and pointless situation

Problems I have frequently encountered in seeking work is that the system that stands has no place for me. Whenever I get any photo work I declare it as you're supposed to do and the forms I fill in have hardly anything applicable to my situation.

*called thus because for some reason the main room stank and they refused to open any windows.

The woman at the dole asked me how it had gone, and when I told her she said it had baffled her too, saying she wanted to be an air traffic controller. The training company were laughing all the way to the bank.

I was then sent to get NVQ Level 2 in Information Technology. (Level 1 is where they teach you to turn a computer on, open a Word file, close it down, don't spill coffee on the computer; Level 2 is the same but doing something in the Word file). They gave us three months to learn how to do this.

They gave us a load of guff about how this was a 'nationally recognised qualification'. Yeah, recognised as being a shitty waste of paper. Then the trainers were teaching people on Lotus cos it's cheaper than having Word.

The training with this and all the other courses is outsourced. It is not geared to training people, but to doing the minimum they have to in order to get the wads of money off the government.

Personally, I was happy to sit there getting on with writing things I would've been doing at home any way. But there were people there who genuinely wanted to learn how to use IT and they were being cruelly cheated.

In the end I never got my certificate. The government decided to have a crackdown on youth unemployment, which meant the training companies got more money for handling under-25s, so us older folks were just turfed out before we'd done the exam.

Again, personally I didn't care cos it didn't hurt me, but I really felt for the older people who'd already felt like they'd been scrapheaped before they started the course.

None of them would've been made any better by the Conservatives Wisconsin plan that would've shoved them into any McJob or made them scrub graffiti.