There is also a ridiculous requirement that those two be contacted on different days. Of course, all the new job listings come out on Monday, and by Tuesday they've already gotten as many resumes as they're going to look at. So I just sent all my resumes ASAP, and if I didn't happen to have two different days for the week, I fudged it.

Sounds like the UK really then... I was made redundant in Jan '00 from a prominent Y2K software company (what the hell, Greenwich Mean Time aka Check 2000 PC).

I went to sign on and was introduced to the wonderful world of Job Seeker's Allowance, where you must fill in a diary fo what you are doing to find a job, what the response was etc... I won't go into detail - just speak to anyone who has done it, everyone else I have spoken to who has been there has a better story.

I said I was looking for programming jobs, having only been employed for 3 months I was pretty open to anything. I said I hadn't looked at the job boards in the office because I knew they don't have any IT posts. She searching on her system and said "I've got one here - what about Project Manager, European Space Agency". When I stopped laughing I gathered up my Job Seekers Pack and stumbled out.

Gareth