Reflections of a stormy petrel

Hard to tell, really. It must have existed in England once, or else the industrial revolution would never have happened. I can tell you, having experienced it for a while, that the English unemployment relief system is probably one of the main culprits. It is geared towards looking for "jobs", that is, towards being permanently employed by someone else. I can tell you that taking a single transaction-type job, such as one translation, is a nightmare: you have to sign off the whole unemployment thing and then sign on again one or two days later, which is a nuisance and means that your cheque is blocked for two weeks - even if you are lucky and some bureaucratic clown up the pole doesn't find some excuse to slow it down further. As for what happens when you tell them that you want to set up - or in my case, to set up again - an independent business, I ended up having a shouting match with a particularly incompetent employee who had no idea what a translator did.