Policies often sound simple until someone follows them exactly as written.

So when a job seeker was told by his adviser that his job search tracker needed far more detail or he’d face sanctions, he asked how detailed they wanted it.

The answer set off a flood of constant updates no one was prepared for.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

Job center wants me to log all my activity for looking for a job? No problem!!

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 had applied for once a week.

Usually it was “applied for 10 jobs, worked on my CV,” etc.

The unemployment office wasn’t too happy with this job seeker’s progress.

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.”

So this job seeker decided to comply as maliciously as possible.

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

Cue getting home and doing my usual stuff.

Every 10 minutes I was on the portal writing about what I was doing in the previous 10 minutes to look for a job, as detailed as I could 😀

It didn’t take long for the adviser to grow annoyed.

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”

The job seeker is quick to fire back and continues spamming the portal.

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 entries every 10 minutes.

At this point I was basically lying because doing an update every 10 minutes was taking up most of my job search time lol.

Finally, the adviser decided to relax their initial instructions.

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 3,000-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.

Finally, the adviser reversed course altogether.

After them receiving 7 x 3,000-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 beforehand!!

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

That job hunter made annoying the job center a full time job!

What did Reddit think?

Documentation should never come before actual work.

Turns out, job centers don’t always have their priorities in order.

This commenter also doesn’t think highly of job centers like this.

These places can actually be quite dysfunctional.

Sometimes less really is more!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.