A dieu CT Commerce! *sniff*

Anybody who knows me will know that I work as a computer technician. What I do is build, repair, and sell computers in a small computer shop that my Dad owns. The shop is called CT Commerce, and we actually live above it in the middle of the town, which is quite convenient, as it means we don’t have to travel every day to work, we’re already here, lol! It’s also very well placed for the internet here, being roughly 300m from the telephone exchange it’s perfect for getting the best connection speed on ADSL, hurrah! I’ve been working in this shop for over 4 and a half years now, and even though it does have the odd bad point, I do enjoy my job. It’s quite satisfing being able to fix difficult problems, or upgrading things, or building new computers with the latest new parts and technologies. Computers are what I’ve always wanted to do, I even went to study them at college, but I quit college to come and work here after a while, for quite a few reasons, but I won’t go into that now. Here are some photos of the shop where I work anyway …

Or should I say, worked … a couple of months ago my Dad decided that enough was enough, and started the process of closing the shop down. The fact of the matter is, the shop just wasn’t making enough net profit to make is viable any more. Put simply, it was limping along, if you will, paying it’s bills, but not actually getting anywhere. The shop has been in that situation for a while now. At the start of the year Dad tried putting me and my brother Martyn (who does the same job as me) on part time for 2 months as a trial, but in the end that didn’t make much of a difference. Then Martyn developed some health problems a few months ago and had to be hospitalized, and subsequently had to be off work from then right up until now, as he’s still recovering …

The fact that Martyn was now off work actually helped a little, as he was getting sick pay from the government so we didn’t have to pay his wages. But again, it wasn’t enough to save the situation, and with Martyn being off it gave the rest of us a higher work load. Basically, I think that in the end my parents just got sick of the whole situation, and decided that enough was enough, it was time to close the shop. So, cutting a long and complicated story short, CT Commerce closed it’s doors on Monday, the 20th of October, 2008, and will not be opening again …

This of course puts us all out of a job, which totally sucks. My parents still have what stock was left in the shop to sell off on ebay and the likes, so they’re ok for the moment, my brother is still sick, so for one he can’t work anyway, and he gets benifits for being sick and for all his kids, so he’s not going to be starving soon. Me on the other hand, I’m just left being unemployed, quite simple. The other day I signed up with Assedic, who are the unemployment benifit people, so I’ve now got a rendez-vous to go and see them and the job center on the 6th of November …

So from December I shout be getting some money from the government, but until then, I gotta live on what I’ve got. At least I did get a small amount of redundancy money, some of which I’ve now saved, so that helps. I don’t know what will happen about getting another job, as to where, when, how and what, and I’m not even sure what I want to do now, if I want to stay in computers or try something different. I’ll just have to wait and see what they say on the 6th I guess. I suppose I’ll have to knock up a CV and stuff as well, eugh, what a pain in the arse, lol …

Apart from the odd argument here and there, with both my parents and various customers, it was quite fun working at CT Commerce. As I said above, it’s quite enjoyable being able to build new high-spec computers, getting to try out the latest stuff, or upgrading and fixing old computers. And that’s not to mention the other little perks that the job had, like being able to be connected to MSN all day long, listen to what music I wanted, getting hardware at cost price, being able to connect to my home computer over the local network, and of course, not ever being too far from the fridge at home, haha!

A while back we even used to organised LAN parties in the shop every Saturday night after closing time. The LAN parties would usually start about 8pm in the evening, and could go on to anything upto 7am the next morning, lol. The people taking part were always either friends or family, so it was always fun. We used to play almost any type of game, but the favourites were usually FPS or Racing games. The games we probably played the most were BattleField 2, Serious Sam 2, Raven Shield, LFS, TrackMania Nations, amongst others. The LAN parties even turned into overclocking sessions sometimes, lol, with people tweaking their computers trying to get the most out of them. And then there was the endless pizzas, pringles, bottles of drink and god knows what else. Great fun! It’s just a shame that all that came to an end …

So there you go, that’s the basic version. To sum things up, I’m now unemployed and looking for a new job, after having worked as a computer technician for over 4 and a half years. The shop where I worked is now closed, and will never open again. So, lets see what the future brings, I just hope that I will enjoy doing whatever job I end up with as much as I did the last one, so wish me luck …

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