Must have strong customer service skills

Having worked for myself for so long - 15 years - it was a shock to have to rediscover the job market. I had memories of looking through the major newspapers on a Friday and Saturday. There was no Internet when I last looked for work.
As my small retail shop bled money for the last year of its life, I looked around for something else which I could do to earn some dollars. The Internet was an obvious and easy option. You just log on and start going through the dozens of job categories until you find something which looks interesting.
Having worked in retail/customer service, I thought that it would be pretty easy for me to be the manager at someone else's shop. After all, I had started my own store from scratch and its history, I thought, did sound pretty impressive: selling high-ticket items, not seen before in Australia, during a recession, at one of the major retail centres in Australia. I had no previous retail experience at all, had never even worked in a shop, and used my own money with no help from the banks. A business advisor would look at this scenario and shake their head, but that's what I did - largely an emotional, gut reaction which seemed right at the time.
I remember being stunned at the variety of jobs shown in the online sites, and especially some of the job descriptions. What was a BDM? Took me a while to find out it was a Business Development Manager, which led to the question, what does that person do? Took me a longer while to work out that that means a salesman. I was naive to all the acronyms which had popped up. What was a recruiter? A recruitment company? I had never heard of these things before.
So began my education in the methodology of the modern workplace. I had to cobble together a CV (I knew what that was) and write cover letters.
In my own mind, I felt confident that I could run another owner's business without much fuss. Typically for a small business owner, I had worn all the hats during my shop's existence. I had done all the financials, marketing, found suppliers, learnt desktop publishing so that I could produce my own newsletters, maintained a web site, made overseas trips to find new contacts, trained staff etc. To do all this requires some willingness to take risks, to go outside your comfort zone, to be entrepreneurial. It was all new to me, a challenge, selling items which I personally liked and cared about. It was - most of the time - fun.
I didn't have to love someone else's products or services to manage their shop well for them. My professionalism would ensure that the business was well run, the staff engaged, and plans made for the future. For someone who takes pride in doing a job well, I had no doubt that I would add a lot of value to anyone's business.
So began my experience of sending out job applications to recruitment companies. For those of you who don't know what they are, recruitment companies are engaged by employers to find future employees on their behalf. The RCs get a brief from the employer and then send out an ad looking for suitable candidates. Various methods are then used to shortlist a few people who then come in for a face-to-face interview. It can take a few months to go from the initial enquiry to landing the job, although this does depend on the industry, the required timeframe, and the seniority of the position.
I started to send off my CV and cover letter to future employers (or more commonly, to the recruitment firms they employed). I got no answers. Occasionally I would get a phone call and chat to the recruiter looking after that position, but very rarely did I get to meet someone in person. This was confusing and disappointing. I knew I had the skills to run a DVD shop, for Christ's sake, but I didn't get the job. Sometimes I found out exactly where the store was located and would go there to have a look. It's a blow to the ego to find out that the manager is a pimply youngster who seems to spend all his time looking at the TV monitor.
In my early days of unemployment, I took this rather to heart and got angry about it. If only these stupid bastards would give me an interview, I would blow them away with my life skills and business knowledge. My poor, fragile ego was undergoing a reality check.