When I bought a new camera (Olympos C-1 Zoom) in Edinburgh, I went a bit mad with it. With the excuse of testing the shutter speed and how many pictures fit on the memory card, I pointed it at me and went wild. Seven years later, I finally managed to paste all these pictures together - ending up with a comic strip almost. I hope you like the end result. And err.. I'm not a narcissist, honestly.

The difference between a job and a career is obvious. A job pays the bills and numbs your self worth. A career pays the bills and gives you the delusion you're really going somewhere too. As a person with ambitions in editing and writing I've had a job in IT for several years now, while I can spend evenings and weekends working on my career. Well, recuperating from a long commute, having dinner and sleeping is the more usual pursuit. Of course though, I'm always on the lookout for the elusive career - and one thing in particular is pissing me off: the application forms.

When I moved to the UK in 2001, I got a job through an agency. They had considered my CV for a call centre vacancy. My interview at the agency was good, at the call centre I fluffed it up. On the basis of the same CV, the agency sent me for another interview elsewhere and I was successful. Quite the normal process for getting a job. I became an administrator with the main duty of processing other people's CV's. Aye, to distil all the necessary information from whatever language or format the applicant had used. The resulting database made life much easier for the recruiters.

I look back on this job with irony now, as I'm applying for new ones. Unless I take the common route and apply to same old same old jobs via agencies or recruitment websites, an application form always seems mandatory. Fancy an IT job at the local university? How about a similarly dull post at an equally interesting environment, the local theatre? Or hey, a customer service opportunity at the NHS. Hang on, that post at the council seems quite interesting too. But every job has a different closing date for applications, and each and every one requires a different application form at a different date. It's quite easy for recruiters I suppose when all applications look the exact same; but the amount of admin required for each applicant is staggering. As I don't have a printer at home, and their Adobe PDF format of course can't be edited - I need to risk printing their forms at work, I need to buy stamps and envelopes and hope for a postal worker to deliver it on time. What could possibly go wrong? Online advertising certainly made job searching easier, but recruitment is otherwise very much stuck in a rut.