Here's a sure-fire way of losing votes for your political party: employ people in those governmental departments deemed "Helpful to the public" who don't have the brain capacity to read words, letters and numbers accurately, and who type at 10WPM.
I'll do some background, just in case there are some non-UK readers of this little corner of cyberspace.
The UK Government has a service for just about anything related to living. This is a good concept. All of them tend to be found on www.direct.gov.uk. One of those services is designed to help the unemployed find work. It goes under a variety of names: JobcentrePlus is the formal title, though it's also 'Jobseekers'' or any derivation thereof. It provides a fair deal of useful and not-so-useful job listings on its website. (Though the website is pretty unnavigable until you've gotten used to the terrible way it works. If there's one thing I have to curse Blizzard for, it's that they give false hope to the idea that good design is easy to do or to find. Or maybe it's just that the Government doesn't want to spend money on a good web designer.)
The other type of support that the Department for Work and Pensions supplies to people looking for work, apart from job listings and the like, is a baseline amount of financial support. They claim it's enough to live off of, but it really isn't (£53 a week, unless you qualify for further benefits).
Now, here's the problem; or, rather, here's the way the system works, and then how I got dicked over by one number or letter in one wrong column. To qualify for the Jobseekers' Allowance ('the dole', it's also colloquially called) you need to prove that you're actively seeking work. You're given a little booklet in which you can log your various job applications and any other speculative queries or steps taken to find work or improve your employability. Every two weeks, you're supposed to go to the local office and 'sign declarations': these declarations basically say, 'The information I am supplying is accurate as far as I'm aware. I am also aware that any deliberate attempts to supply false information can lead to prosecution.' At the signing, this aforementioned booklet is checked and, by the looks of things, you talk through it with the chap or chapess sitting at the desk.
The time at which you sign is denoted by your National Insurance number (I believe the equivalent to the NI number in America is the "Social Security" number). It determines the day on which you sign and the "Rotation" that you're on -- e.g. in my case, it would be whether I were signing on Tuesday 22nd September or Tuesday 29th September, and then the following signing would be either Tuesday 6th or 13th October, respectively.
So now we come to my problem. I was written down as signing Tuesday 22nd, then October 6th, and fortnightly every Tuesday thereafter, at 2.28 pm. I turned up ten minutes early, as I had been advised to do. I waited. My name wasn't called. I waited until 3.00pm, at which time the guys at the desk at which I was due to sign buggered off somewhere else. I went up to the person on the desk adjacent to that one to ask her why I hadn't been called. She informed me that I had been written down on the wrong rotation, and that I was actually due to sign next week -- the 29th. She edited my booklet (which has on it a little section for 'Turn up at this time'), and so I thought that I'd just need to come up next week.
Today, Saturday, I receive a letter telling me that I no longer qualify for Jobseekers' because I 'didn't turn up to sign my declarations'.
So. I turned up to when I thought I was supposed to sign, and I didn't get called. I was then informed that I actually would be signing the following week: i.e. I wasn't supposed to be there this week. If that were the case, how did it either a) get programmed into the system that I was supposed to be there and yet no one called me up, or b) display on the screen that I was supposed to be the following week, and yet still send a message through to the relevant 'Jobseeker cancellation system' or whatever to tell them I hadn't turned up to something I wasn't supposed to attend?
The guy who originally put me into this system suffers from the issues I opened this blog post declaring to be a sure-fire way of losing voted. He couldn't spell accurately, and he hunted-and-pecked. Hunting-and-pecking isn't necessarily a problem -- not everyone can touch-type, I get that -- but it's fairly obvious that he put me on the wrong schedule and cocked all this up. If I could remember his full name I'd get him fired. People like him are employed, and yet someone with a degree, a perfect command of English and A-level Maths, and an IQ of above 90, gets rejection letters for interview opportunities, let alone from the results of interviews themselves.
In an ideal world, this kind of thing would be simple to fix as well as being simple to happen. Except, it's not. From what I understand it, I have to go through a full 'independent tribunal' process because one incompetent drone fails at taking his job seriously enough to input the stuff that actually matters and can cause this kind of time- and money-consuming bullshit to occur. It asks me to send in a form, within a month of having received the letter which details an erroneous decision. Within a month?! Does this mean I'm going to be waiting two months or more before I actually sort this thing out? I'm hoping to be set up in Devon by that time, for God's sake!
Roll on self-employment. Except, since I'm not on Jobseekers', I can't get free help from a government affiliate by way of asking what I need to do to be self-employed, in terms of things like Tax Returns. I refuse to hire an accountant to do that shit for me, that's for sure. Hiring an accountant would admit laziness, and laziness alone. I'm perfectly capable of doing sums, I just don't know what the sums are that I'm supposed to do.
I'll do some background, just in case there are some non-UK readers of this little corner of cyberspace.
The UK Government has a service for just about anything related to living. This is a good concept. All of them tend to be found on www.direct.gov.uk. One of those services is designed to help the unemployed find work. It goes under a variety of names: JobcentrePlus is the formal title, though it's also 'Jobseekers'' or any derivation thereof. It provides a fair deal of useful and not-so-useful job listings on its website. (Though the website is pretty unnavigable until you've gotten used to the terrible way it works. If there's one thing I have to curse Blizzard for, it's that they give false hope to the idea that good design is easy to do or to find. Or maybe it's just that the Government doesn't want to spend money on a good web designer.)
The other type of support that the Department for Work and Pensions supplies to people looking for work, apart from job listings and the like, is a baseline amount of financial support. They claim it's enough to live off of, but it really isn't (£53 a week, unless you qualify for further benefits).
Now, here's the problem; or, rather, here's the way the system works, and then how I got dicked over by one number or letter in one wrong column. To qualify for the Jobseekers' Allowance ('the dole', it's also colloquially called) you need to prove that you're actively seeking work. You're given a little booklet in which you can log your various job applications and any other speculative queries or steps taken to find work or improve your employability. Every two weeks, you're supposed to go to the local office and 'sign declarations': these declarations basically say, 'The information I am supplying is accurate as far as I'm aware. I am also aware that any deliberate attempts to supply false information can lead to prosecution.' At the signing, this aforementioned booklet is checked and, by the looks of things, you talk through it with the chap or chapess sitting at the desk.
The time at which you sign is denoted by your National Insurance number (I believe the equivalent to the NI number in America is the "Social Security" number). It determines the day on which you sign and the "Rotation" that you're on -- e.g. in my case, it would be whether I were signing on Tuesday 22nd September or Tuesday 29th September, and then the following signing would be either Tuesday 6th or 13th October, respectively.
So now we come to my problem. I was written down as signing Tuesday 22nd, then October 6th, and fortnightly every Tuesday thereafter, at 2.28 pm. I turned up ten minutes early, as I had been advised to do. I waited. My name wasn't called. I waited until 3.00pm, at which time the guys at the desk at which I was due to sign buggered off somewhere else. I went up to the person on the desk adjacent to that one to ask her why I hadn't been called. She informed me that I had been written down on the wrong rotation, and that I was actually due to sign next week -- the 29th. She edited my booklet (which has on it a little section for 'Turn up at this time'), and so I thought that I'd just need to come up next week.
Today, Saturday, I receive a letter telling me that I no longer qualify for Jobseekers' because I 'didn't turn up to sign my declarations'.
So. I turned up to when I thought I was supposed to sign, and I didn't get called. I was then informed that I actually would be signing the following week: i.e. I wasn't supposed to be there this week. If that were the case, how did it either a) get programmed into the system that I was supposed to be there and yet no one called me up, or b) display on the screen that I was supposed to be the following week, and yet still send a message through to the relevant 'Jobseeker cancellation system' or whatever to tell them I hadn't turned up to something I wasn't supposed to attend?
The guy who originally put me into this system suffers from the issues I opened this blog post declaring to be a sure-fire way of losing voted. He couldn't spell accurately, and he hunted-and-pecked. Hunting-and-pecking isn't necessarily a problem -- not everyone can touch-type, I get that -- but it's fairly obvious that he put me on the wrong schedule and cocked all this up. If I could remember his full name I'd get him fired. People like him are employed, and yet someone with a degree, a perfect command of English and A-level Maths, and an IQ of above 90, gets rejection letters for interview opportunities, let alone from the results of interviews themselves.
In an ideal world, this kind of thing would be simple to fix as well as being simple to happen. Except, it's not. From what I understand it, I have to go through a full 'independent tribunal' process because one incompetent drone fails at taking his job seriously enough to input the stuff that actually matters and can cause this kind of time- and money-consuming bullshit to occur. It asks me to send in a form, within a month of having received the letter which details an erroneous decision. Within a month?! Does this mean I'm going to be waiting two months or more before I actually sort this thing out? I'm hoping to be set up in Devon by that time, for God's sake!
Roll on self-employment. Except, since I'm not on Jobseekers', I can't get free help from a government affiliate by way of asking what I need to do to be self-employed, in terms of things like Tax Returns. I refuse to hire an accountant to do that shit for me, that's for sure. Hiring an accountant would admit laziness, and laziness alone. I'm perfectly capable of doing sums, I just don't know what the sums are that I'm supposed to do.
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