Tales from Suburban Bohemia: Unemployed in Prague
This post originally appeared on Stumpy Moose on 3 July, 2001, and was migrated to PraguePig.com on 18 November, 2018.
I’ve been unemployed in Prague for over three months now.
I’m still enjoying my free time and I have some freelance work, but I’m starting to run out of money. Some days I can’t get the Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush song “Don’t Give Up” out of my head.
Because I don’t understand Czech in any useful way the right job opportunities are few and far between. My CV is also a problem.
After four-and-a-half years here, I’ve become a fairly big fish in a fairly small English-language-speaking pool.
A lot of impressive job titles with a lot of very short-lived projects can worry potential employers, who either think I’m overqualified or that I’m some sort of Jonah figure bringing doom upon the companies I work for.
This isn’t paranoia. In the past two years I’ve worked for three companies or projects that are no longer with us:
- Central European Business Weekly, a small, thoroughly doomed weekly newspaper
- Globopolis.com, an ambitious but under-appreciated internet city guide
- Bizzango.com, a business portal dreamed up by the the world’s largest financial services group
That last one was such a disaster that it was never even officially announced, let alone launched.
These days my sights are set a little lower. I’ve decided that I’m a terrible manager and I want to stick to what I’m good at: churning out copy, fiddling about with HTML and coming up with grand schemes that I have no intention of completing myself.
All offers gratefully received.
sb
