DAVID PIEPER

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Unemployed life can be great, for a while, but oh how you can end up missing those Friday nights celebrating the end of the working week...

I'd been HIV positive for six years when I was suddenly made redundant from my job. 'Yippee', I thought - three months pay with no work to do. I was sick of my job anyway and this was the perfect excuse I needed to do something different.
I have to admit that I also saw it as an opportunity to live the life of some of my HIV positive friends who didn't work. Since moving to London three years ago and having the opportunity to be much more open about my HIV status, I'd noticed that lots of HIV positive gay men had quite 'easy' lives on benefits. I guess I was a little jealous that I had to get home to bed on Sunday nights, while they were on their way out for even more clubbing.
At first, unemployed life was great. Plenty of cash, lots of time to spend cruising on the internet or going to the gym, no bosses to nag me. I didn't have to wear a suit, and I could stay out as long as I liked. However, I soon found myself distanced from my working friends with nothing in common. I began to feel as if I was not a real contributing member of society any more. Oddly, the thing I missed most was looking forward to the weekend on Friday afternoon and a drink after work to herald the start of my weekend. I had lost my Friday night!
Trying to get back to work was not so easy either. The employment market had frozen after the events of September 11. Despite having an Economics degree, 15 years work experience, and more common sense than most people, I couldn't even get an interview. I was either too experienced, or my experience was too specific. I was in my late 30s, still healthy but apparently unemployable: What was the future for me? I had defined myself so much in terms of my job and without it I became disillusioned and depressed.

I began meeting more gay men with HIV living on benefits, with lots of time on their hands, and gravitated to a life of dossing around, wasting time andbeing unproductive. The only