Sorry to hear that Zarf - I hope that your new job turns out better than some of the previous ones. At least it's kind of in the right ballpark of what you wanted to be doing with IT support type stuff? Whereabouts are you based nowadays?
Working in Exeter, living at my parents place near Taunton. It's much better than that previous job because I'm on a day rate now, timesheets and expenses are all done online which is quick and easy. The work is pretty good, big change for me since the organisation is much larger than anywhere i've worked before, but it's an easy going place - no managerial nitpicking or clockwatching, they trust you to do your job. I'm in a much more specialised position pretty much dealing entirely with troubleshooting issues with the windows 7 rollout that slipped through testing. It's interesting enough and I'm learning a decent amount of diagnosis techniques and tools, but long term I want to get back to networking and servers with a proper direct employed position so I can risk renting or buying somewhere.
Has jobseekers gotten worse? It took 18 months but I escaped the worst to the abusive changes. I don't know if its still possible to hold out as long as I did until you get a relevant job instead of being forced into something.
Wasn't too bad for me, was only there about 9 months or so. I was getting interviews and meeting the agreed number of applications with jobs I was interested in so they didn't nag me too much to set my sights lower, glad I didn't as I'm on about three times minimum wage now. I wish they had better training support schemes though to help me do a few IT qualifications courses and exams, but they don't really support paying for anything beyond basic typing skills. They wouldn't even help pay for books.