If there is one way to make a job search more annoying, I would imagine it would be the job centre/unemployment office not believing you are diligently looking to find a new job.

OP was out of work and required to tell the job centre weekly what she had done to look for a new job.

Around 2019 I was made redundant (I did some MC at that job too) and I was on benefits.

I would log what jobs I have applied for once a week usually it was “applied for 10 jobs, worked on my CV” etc.

Then, they told her they needed more detail.

But at the routine meeting at the job centre:

Adviser “sigh… I’ve been told to tell you, your activity tracker needs to be more detailed, I know you are already doing this, but it needs to be more detailed otherwise you’re getting sanctioned. Sorry”

So I said “ok how detailed do you want it?” Adviser: “as detailed as you can”

At this point I figured out how to do MC on this and said: “ok I’ll make it as detailed as I can!!”

She went hilariously overboard so they told her only one entry per day.

Cue getting home and doing my usual stuff, every 10 mins I was on the portal writing about what I was doing in the previous 10 mins to look for a job as detailed as I can 😀

A week later and possibly many many many entries later. My adviser wrote to me on the portal.

“….please can you stop spamming the portal with updates”

So I replied: “I was only following what you instructed me to do to give you all as much detail as I can about how I was looking for a job”.

So I kept doing the entires every 10 minutes, at this point I was basically lying because doing an update every 10 mins was taking up most of my job search time lol

She gave them one essay per day.

10 entries later the adviser replied with: “you just need to do one entry” Me: “ok!”

So for the next week once a day I was writing a 3 thousand word essay about what I was doing to look for a job, I know this was stupid but I was having too much fun annoying the job centre.

After them receiving 7x 3 thousand word essays they called me in and said I just need to tell them how many jobs I’ve applied for and a few words on what else I’ve done. Which was what I was doing before hand!!

Finally, they wanted her to go back to what she was doing in the first place.

So I went back to how I was already operating and they never told me to do anything else or extra again lol.

Tldr: job centre told me to be detailed on my job search reports so I was sending a report every 10 mjns, after they told me to stop and just do a singular entry I started to write a 3 thousand word essay a day, after a week of that they told me to go back to how I was operating lol.

Sometimes it’s worth the time.

It really is a shame.

What a hot mess, honestly.

Who puts these people in charge?

That would be too much work.

But apparently some people are up for it.

They should learn not to mess with people who have time on their hands.

But they probably won’t.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.