Stuff that makes you disproportionately cross

a cheeky half a sugar
In what way is a small amount of sugar “cheeky”. What in the wide, wide world o’ sports does that actually mean ??

If you know you know…

“you’ll have to come into the job center at XX..”

I find the whole process so dehumanising. It was the same when I was first job hunting in the 1990s and little has changed. It’s like they think you have nothing better to do.

Gawd.. I had the same thing quite a few years ago… I was on jobseekers allowance after a lay off and had found a new job.

I call them to cancel my benefits.. “you’ll have to come into the job center at XX..”

Errm I can’t… I’ll erm, be at work?

“if you don’t attend your benefits could be cancelled”

OK.. Sounds like it will work itself out then?

I signed on when I lost my job and got another job a couple of days later. I got in touch to get it all cancelled and all I could get from them was the armageddon they would release if I fraudulently took any of their money, but nothing about how I stop the process. In the end I popped into Abergavenny JC+ and spoke to a human who said bank the cheque, and the next one if it arrives, because there was actually no way of intervening in that workflow in the first month! My not turning up to sign stopped it for month#2.

I have an amazon kindle, I really like it. But I also have paper books. I just finished reading a paper book, switched back to the kindle and suddenly I got a notification “Congratulations on your 3 day streak! Keep it up!” ***** there has literally not been a day since I was a teenager when I didn’t read a book, go **** yourself.

Also everything about the Universal Credit system is designed by psychopaths. Had all the stuff above, now in the middle of “we think we’ve overpaid you by about £20 so you have to give us statements for every bank account, credit card, savings account, investment, also your paypal, plus proof of how you pay your rent and council tax and electricity and gas, back to the start of your claim, and provide on demand details of any transaction on any of those accounts for all of that period.”. All on a system that’s specifically supposed to handle people who are unwell. Like, I can pretty much handle it but obviously a lot of people just couldn’t.

(A few years back while I was between jobs they made me go to a group meeting thing, in which some poor tired out manager dude sat in front of about 15 people and tried to help/convince/force/inspire people back into work. And it was just kafkaesque, there was a dude there who could barely speak because of anxiety, a guy who’d worked in one job for 40 years til his entire industry ended and now had no useful skills at 60, a bunch of feckless kids just playing the system (one in pyjamas of course), a couple of single parents just doing their best, and me just to cap it off going “yeah I have a degree and useful experience so I’m pretty sure I’ll get a job as soon as I really put any effort in but also I have a redundancy settlement to live off”. Like it was built to destroy people.)

The last time I had to sign on was in 1986 when the Job Centre was a hideous place, decorated in that government cream and green with a thick coating of tar from the fog of tobacco smoke that was a permanent feature. The staff were behind glass to protect them from attack.

I had to go back with our Ukrainian guest a couple of years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much more civilised the place appeared to be. I soon discovered that despite those appearances, it was a place of shattered dreams (that was the staff) and Kafkaesque nightmares for the clients. And no jobs to be seen. The utter waste the whole thing represented made me cross, but I suspect not disproportionately.

Yeah, that’s an extra level of sadness for the whole thing, pretty sure everyone I’ve ever dealt with at the job centre is a good person doing their best who has empathy and wants to help people and then one day they woke up and realised they work in the sorting office of hell. And tbf I used to do some hiring in a previous job and I don’t think I’d hire anyone that had spent any time working in that system. And it’s completely adjacent and equivalent to the job we did, in theory, so the exact same people could just as easily have stepped into my job by some quirk of fate instead of the soul crushing machine.

Previously I had to go to one that was in a fairly shitty area and it was the whole deal, armoured glass and security on the door and people getting frisked and all the seats bolted down so that you couldn’t throw them and you couldn’t get in til the exact moment of your appointment because of course you were a threat that would destroy things but if you were 10 seconds late you couldn’t even get in the door and got written up. It wasn’t far off the experience of visiting someone in jail. Now I’m in a fairly nice area and it’s just a completely normal office, still has a security dude but it’s a big fat bloke who looks like he’d die if he ever had to deal with any stress. And that itself is just completely ****ed, the difference in experience that people have on day 1, you get postcode lotteried into being treated like a person or an enemy

But I really mean it about the kindle.

pretty sure everyone I’ve ever dealt with at the job centre is a good person doing their best who has empathy and wants to help people and then one day they woke up and realised they work in the sorting office of hell.

Our local job centre wasn’t too bad – being a quaint market town it wasn’t too bad.

The staff ended up feeling sorry for a good mate of mine though. They just couldn’t figure out what to do with him, so he got given the keys to the place and they paid him to come in every morning and clean before they opened!