For the love of (My) money

Last week, I received a donation request from an employment agency. It is affiliated with a cultural community and I used their services for about a year and a half. I attended employment workshops, courses and seminars and used their website to find jobs. I had more than sufficient experience and qualifications, but during that year and a half, the jobs I found were:
1) writing a help file for a man who, with his nephew, had an idea for software and was hoping to develop and promote it. However, he was lacking in some essential social graces: personal and communications skills. For example, the ability to inform and provide instructions with complete, comprehensible sentences. I suspected he had ADD. When he didn't like my work and I suggested that I could revise it, he became rude and insulting and attempted to get out of paying me. It didn't work. He paid me and I informed the agency of his rude, abusive behaviour.

2) A part time secretarial job at a family run car dealership. I was hired at the interview and then fired three weeks later. It sucked and I was not very good at it because it required mathematics. I took it because I was desperate, not a good motivating factor. Look what happens when you date out of desperation.
3) A three hour stint updating content for the website of a menswear boutique. It was an 'audition' to see if I would work out. They wanted someone who would work for them for the next 20 years. If that is their goal, they should consider paying more than 10 dollars an hour. But they paid me.
4) A minimum wage job as a receptionist at a health club, which was actually the best job. I liked the people I worked with. Unfortunately, the management was on another plane. They were known for firing people, some who had worked there for years, with no advance warning. I was one of them, alas, terminated after six months.

The agency's website was full of testimonials and photos from beaming clients who had found great jobs and gone on to be productive members of society. For me it was one frustrating, fruforay after another, or employers who seem to be unaware of the existence of the Normes de Travail, or that it is now 2010, not 1910. I did apply for a number of jobs that matched my experience, education and qualifications and went on interview but alas, I was never one of the success stores.

I was only able to find that on my own, by starting my own home business, not long after the health club unceremoniously booted me out on my rear with no advance notice. Since I no longer require their services, this agency assumes I'm in the position to give them my money.

Well I am. I am also in the position of tipping my Gazette carrier, who left me a Christmas card last week. He's relatively new. How do I know this? I only get the paper on weekends. For the past 8 weeks or so, my paper has been left at the door in front of my upstairs neighbour, which means that I have had to get dressed and go up the front stairs to get it- as it has gotten increasingly colder and snowier. I have called customer service nearly every week to request that they remind the carrier of my address. Twice in two months he's managed to remember that my front door is on the side of the building.
Now he wants a tip. I can either give him one and hope that spurs him to remember my address. Or I can say what I would say to the employment agency who brought me some of the most depressing, humiliating and demeaning work experiences and who are now soliciting my donations: BLOW ME.